Gandhism

Not a systematic philosophy in the conventional sense. Humayun Kabir — Gandhi was a practical idealist, alive to mass psychology rather than a builder of abstract doctrine. Yet the ideas form a coherent whole: ethics, economics and politics are inseparable.

SATYA (truth · the end) ↔ AHIMSA (non-violence · the means) → SATYAGRAHA (truth-force / soul-force) → SWARAJ · SARVODAYA (SWADESHI · TRUSTEESHIP) → RAM RAJYA (moral self-rule). Means and ends are inseparable — the spine of Gandhian thought.

“Hate the sin and not the sinner.” — M.K. Gandhi — Satyagraha is active, disciplined resistance, not passive submission; the opponent is to be converted, not destroyed.

Core components

Dashrath Singh (Gandhism: A Quest for New Civilization) identifies the core five — Sarvodaya, Swaraj, Ahimsa, social harmony, Swadeshi.

• Swaraj — not mere transfer of British power, but self-rule plus self-restraint; moral autonomy of person and community.
• Sarvodaya — Gandhi’s rendering of John Ruskin’s Unto This Last; progress of all, not benefit of a few — a rejection of utilitarian arithmetic.
• Trusteeship — the wealthy are trustees, not absolute owners; property must serve the public good.
• Swadeshi — self-reliance and local rootedness against colonial markets and industrial homogenisation.

Critique of modern civilisation

• Utilitarianism reduces persons to animal appetite; materialism sacrifices spiritual fulfilment.
• Excessive mechanisation destroys human and ecological balance; wants must be minimised, not endlessly multiplied.
• Modern civilisation is “satanic” when it worships speed, consumption and power.

The “Other West” & the state

Gandhi did not reject the West wholesale; he drew on a dissenting “Other West” — Leo Tolstoy, John Ruskin, Henry David Thoreau, Edward Carpenter — letting him criticise empire without cultural isolation. Aditya Nigam and Vinay Lal stress this selective, dialogic engagement; Kishan Patnaik holds that the mode of industrialisation is itself a civilisational question. He distrusted the modern coercive state and preferred decentralised self-government; Ram Rajya meant moral self-rule and justice for all, not theocracy.

Gandhian View of the State

Basis. Mahatma Gandhi was deeply critical of the modern state — shaped by non-violence, a critique of Western civilization, the individual-community relationship, moral politics and self-rule. For him the state was not neutral but coercive and centralising — violence in concentrated form.

“The individual has a soul but the state is a soulless machine; the state can never be weaned away from violence to which it owes its existence.”

Mahatma Gandhi

“I look upon an increase in the power of the state with the greatest fear, because… it does the greatest harm to mankind by destroying individuality which is at the root of progress.”

Mahatma Gandhi

The modern state centralises power and destroys individuality; rooted in violence, it is incompatible with true non-violence. For the immediate period Gandhi accepted a state that governs the least — democratic and non-violent. Swaraj is self-rule and self-regulation, self-discipline at individual and community levels; Ramrajya is the ideal of a stateless society built on democratic decentralisation and self-governing communities. Leo Tolstoy‘s The Kingdom of God Within You shaped his defence of non-violence.

Bhikhu Parekh reads Gandhi’s politics as fundamentally moral — different from the Western centralised sovereign, replacing legal coercion with moral persuasion. Raghavan Iyer stresses swaraj beyond independence — self-discipline and self-governance, with the state’s role temporary and limited.

Assessment. A moral critique that exposes the violence and centralisation of modern politics and places individual moral growth at the centre; its limitation is that a stateless Ramrajya is hard to apply in large, complex, unequal societies, and even a non-violent democracy needs some institutional authority.