Many meanings of swaraj

Neera Chandhoke

Political Scientist

SEVENTY-FIVE years after Independence is a good time to assess our political vocabularies. Take the concept of swaraj. It has become an integral part of our political lexicon, we have a political party named Swaraj, the Chief Minister of Delhi has written a book titled Swaraj, and recently BJP leaders told us that swaraj means duties, not rights. We had always thought that the concept handed down by the freedom struggle meant the right to freedom! The appropriation of swaraj is another story.

When we manage to master our propensity to violence, we attain substantive freedom. This meaning of swaraj resonates as it applies to both private and public domains.

Let us explore the implications of the vocabularies, the imaginaries, and concepts of the freedom struggle, which were Brahmanical, Sanskritised, metaphysical and abstract. In 1921, Gandhi defined ‘purna swaraj’. He suggested that the word was sacred, a Vedic word which meant self-rule and self-restraint. It is different from mere independence. We know that Gandhi fought passionately against communalism, but he seemed to have uncritically adopted the same political language as other leaders: that of ‘Vedic’ Hinduism in a society racked by communal riots, and marked by the growth of majoritarianism.

In 1906, the leadership of the Indian National Congress, determined to avoid a split in the party, called upon the Grand Old Man of India, Dadabhai Naoroji, to chair the Calcutta session. His biographer Dinyar Patel writes that 81-year-old Naoroji gave the presidential address to a 20,000-strong crowd gathered at Russa Road, Tollygunj, on December 26. Naoroji, too frail to read out his speech publicly, established swaraj as a right accruing to Indians. In worlds of colonialism, the individual cannot be the holder of the right to freedom unless her political community is free of external domination. Individual freedom is dependent upon collective freedom. This is a minimalist reading of swaraj. For Gandhi, independence was incomplete unless future citizens of the state realise swaraj, i.e., become autonomous of irrational and excessive passions. This interpretation of swaraj puzzles; it confuses public with personal ethics. People can practice self-restraint in their personal life. Should this be imposed on others?

Gandhi’s idea of swaraj troubled the quintessentially modern Jawaharlal Nehru. Gandhi, wrote Nehru in his autobiography, ‘expressed the very spirit of [our] ancient and tortured land’. But he could be hopelessly wrong in many matters. Nehru loved Gandhi but he did not have much patience with Gandhi’s spiritualism. It did not sit well with democracy. In 1940, Gandhi admitted to Nehru that he had idealised rural India. ‘You will not be able to understand me if you think that I am talking about the villages of today. My ideal village still exists only in my imagination.’ Nehru’s observation was acerbic: ‘What is there in the ‘Man with the hoe’ to idealise over? Crushed and exploited for innumerable generations, he is only little removed from the animals who keep him company.’ Above all, the identification of personal ethics with political ethics troubled Nehru. ‘Gandhiji is always thinking in terms of personal salvation and of sin, while most of us have society’s welfare uppermost in our minds…His attitude is essentially that of the ascetic.’

Undoubtedly Gandhi’s belief that self-rule is central to swaraj raises problems. Is it the job of the democratic State to ensure that its people observe discipline in their personal lives? The ethics of the public sphere are distinctive, simply because they pertain to the common good. In this space we learn to conceptualise commonalities, forge solidarities, learn that our lives are interdependent, and that the common good can only be realised through social struggles because we inhabit a community of fate. We cannot ground our politics in personal beliefs of how we should live. Gandhi was a great political strategist, a man whose life is worth emulating, and a person who showed us the way. But there is nothing to be gained by uncritical acclamation of his philosophy, or exegetical writings on his thought. It is time to filter through his writings and interpret them for the here and now. This is what is done to great

political philosophers.

Swaraj becomes meaningful when we recollect the political context in which Hind Swaraj was written in 1909. Gandhi responded to the cult of violence that had overtaken young Indians in the aftermath of British policies of revenge post the 1857 revolt. When violence becomes the architect of history, Gandhi suggests, it can only replace one sort of oppression with another sort of oppression. Those who rise to power by murder, he said, will certainly not make the nation happy. ‘Those who believe that India has gained by Dhingra’s act and other similar acts in India make a serious mistake. Dhingra was a patriot, but his love was blind. He gave his body in a wrong way; its ultimate result can only be mischievous.’ If only we knew, Gandhi seemed to suggest, what violence is about, we would willingly forswear it.

The power of violence over human beings must not be underrated. It is not a weapon that we can pick up and discard at will. It can best be likened to a quagmire that relentlessly sucks people into its murky depths. When violence holds individuals and groups in thrall, moral disintegration follows. For we cannot control violence; violence controls us. When we manage to master our propensity to violence we attain substantive freedom. This is the one meaning of swaraj that resonates because it applies to both the private and the public domains.

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