1.

It is now just over twenty years since I started working on—thinking with—Gandhi. If even a year or two before that, say in 1999, you had asked me whether I would work on or think with Gandhi, I would have emphatically said no. In the leftist circles that I was a part of when I was a student in Vadodara and later Cambridge in the late eighties and early nineties, critiques of Gandhi were very commonplace—for his sexism, for his casteism, and for the way he was seen as having enabled the consolidation of a conservative Hinduism. Then as now, it was impossible to read Gandhi’s explicit arguments without a sense of profound disquiet, sometimes even outrage—for example, his repeated defence of “varnashramdharma” or the caste order, his claim that only he (and not Ambedkar) can speak for the “untouchables,” or that moment when he cuts the hair of two girls in his ashram because boys have cast an “evil eye” on them.

And the scholarship around me at the time confirmed this feeling. Indeed, in terms of characterizing Gandhi’s overall historical impact, the scholarship of Ranajit Guha (1998), Shahid Amin (1984), David Hardiman (1981) and Partha Chatterjee (1993) launched a very strong critique of Gandhi. As Chatterjee puts it, Gandhi’s ideology acquires “tremendous power,” because it enables the “political appropriation of the subaltern classes by a bourgeoisie aspiring for political hegemony in the new nation-state” (45). Guha says some things that are even sharper. Because I broadly agreed with this assessment, I thought the critique of Gandhi as of his religiosity was in the main complete, and that what remained was intellectually not interesting enough to work on or think with.

But increasingly I have come to sense that while many of these critiques are entirely correct and should even be sharpened, they can, if made too quickly, also obscure from us what is most radical about Gandhi—his questioning of a will-centered politics. Such a questioning remains indispensable for a left and democratic politics today, even it must necessarily proceed by relinquishing many of Gandhi’s specific formulations and positions.

To indicate why and how this questioning is essential, I would like start by drawing a contrast between two ways of rendering a famous slogan—liberty, equality, fraternity. By now, of course, we have come to recognize that it is misleading to think of that slogan of the French Revolution, or the ideas associated with it, as quintessentially European. The slogan itself only radicalizes some of the themes that were there already a decade earlier in the American revolution. And in that revolution, Blacks too demanded a place, even if it was denied to them.1 Then again, the slogan found a home in 1791, just around two years later, in the Haitian revolution. In other words, the slogan is best understood as part of a global moment—a moment that took off in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and was characterized by the attempt to imagine equality and freedom as a people.

So, liberty equality fraternity: condensed in this slogan is a question: how to be free and equal as a people? This question, how to be free and equal as a people, is the question that we have been in the grip of ever since the eighteenth century. It is this question, and our various attempts to quilt an answer to this question, which describes our political modernity.

I think we can distinguish between two broad ways of answering this question of how to be free and equal as a people—one, a way centered around the affirming the will, and second, the way centered around relinquishing the will, or at least a skeptical relation with it. The dominant answer, the almost ubiquitous answer, has been in terms of the way centered around the affirmation of the will. And the other one attempting to relinquish the will has been much more marginal, so much so that we do not usually even recognize it as another path. But it has never quite disappeared from view. From its concealment it is even very important; indeed, in our current times thematizing it explicitly may be more important than ever.

And the principal reason Gandhi matters so much today to political thought and action is that he is one of very few figures committed to relinquishing or constantly stepping back from the will. You can almost count on your fingers the prominent figures in active politics who were committed to the way of non-willing: Gandhi, Ambedkar, Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King; of course, there are many lesser known figures. And when you turn to political philosophers, again those who think of a politics outside the will are very few—most of all, Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt and Jacques Derrida, enormously different though the three are from each other. (Indeed, though in terms somewhat different from those I shall be offering here, Arendt [1961; 1963, 32ff] explicitly contrasts two ways of being free, and reserves the term liberty for the will-centered way, and the term freedom for the other way (see also, Skaria 2020.)

Of course, few of these political actors or philosophers explicitly lay out a liberty, equality and fraternity centered around relinquishing the will—not even Arendt. That is not surprising. It is always the fate of those who think really new thoughts to not be able to entirely discern the newness of what they do, to struggle to put it in words, or to articulate it in contradictory ways. It is only we latecomers who might be able to see patterns that were not discernible to these actors and philosophers themselves.

This contrast between two politics, one centered around the will and the other centered around relinquishing the will, is the often-obscured heart of Gandhi’s politics, obscured at times even from him. At his most intriguing, he counterposes two visions of swaraj—one that he calls parliamentary swaraj, and the other that he calls true swaraj. And what he calls parliamentary swaraj is what I am here calling the way centered around affirming the will; what he calls true swaraj is what I am here describing as the way centered around relinquishing the will.

So, in order to tease out how Gandhi matters today, I would like to do is briefly address four questions. First, what is a politics that affirms the will of the people? Second, what is distinctive about parliamentary swaraj or republican democracy as a form of will-centered politics? Third, what would be involved in a politics that relinquishes the will? Fourth, what is the relation between these two politics—between the politics that affirms the will and the one that relinquishes the will.

2.

How to describe a politics that affirms the will of the people? Which requires asking first, of course, what is the will? Simplifying massively, you can see that exercising a will involves three intertwined aspects. One, it involves acting to realize what I wish to do. If I have a wish but I do not act on the wish, then I cannot be said to exercising my will. I would be merely indulging in my daydreams. Two, to exercise the will involves mastering a situation. The object on which I exercise mastery may be natural forces (say, when I undertake to build something), it may be non-human animals (say, the process of domestication) or it may be other humans (say, a factory). But in every case, exercising the will involves exercising mastery over. Third, even if I simply exercise mastery over something, I am not necessarily exercising my will. I am exercising a will only if my wishes are not simply desires that have overcome me. If I have been overcome by my desires, then I am a slave to them, and I cannot be said to be exercising my will. These, you can say, are the three most rudimentary features of the will.

So far I have talked of the will as though we are dealing with individuals. But we are not talking here of individuals. We are talking of society. And when we talk of society, we have to add another concept to the mix—authority. The concept of authority describes the symbolic and generative locus of the political, the principle that governs a society because it is widely accepted. If you are exercising authority over me, you are not willing me to do something. What is distinctive about authority is that you and I both accept the legitimacy of the order where you command and I follow your command. It is from this order, which is distinct from you and me, that authority draws its force, not from your exercising your will over me. An almost textbook example of authority could be the premodern Brahmanical order of caste, and the way it functioned much of the time, though never all the time. Both in the premodern world and today, a tyrant would be one who exercises will or mastery without authority, who may not even care to claim authority.

Authority as a concept does quite different work from hegemony or interpellation. The latter is within the problematic of the will. To say that a force is hegemonic is to dispute the idea that people are acting under their own will, it is to suggest that will is to be located not in persons or individuals but in certain ideologies—materialized ideas, and that some of these of these materialized ideas have become commonsensical enough to appear to actors as the manifestation of their own will. As for interpellation, my late friend Qadri Ismail, in response to an email, describes it as “the subjection of agency, or the imposition and transformation of subjectivity. thus, for instance, a Mexican, from a country without Hispanics, becomes Hispanic upon arriving in the U.S.”2 In contrast to both these phenomena, authority names the moment when we freely though not necessarily intentionally split ourselves, accept that we are not acting of our own will, and when we conceive the other under whose aegis we act not, or not only, in terms of a will but in terms of what is proper.3

With modernity, one of the most striking things that happens is that the locus of authority shifts to the people. Now, when sovereigns exercise their will, they claim their authority from the people. Again, this is not only some European phenomenon that spread outwards. For example, quite independent of any European influence, you have the rhetoric in India of Maratha swarajya, or of Jat communities claiming rule. These are obviously not people in the modern sense; rather than nationalism, we have here something closer to what Christopher Bayly describes as patriotism or rational patriotism (Bayly 1998). But the idea that the sovereign claims authority not from some order that stands independent of both the ruler and the ruled, nor from some assent from or consonance with the ruled, but rather as representative of the ruled—in this idea, we already have the receptivity to what later becomes the modern concept of the people. And of course, in the centuries since then, this tendency to claim authority or sanction from the will of the people has only increased—even the most brutally repressive regimes of the twentieth and twenty-first century have claimed to rule in the name of the people.

So you can see what I mean when I say that a politics that claims authority from the people, and a state that claims that it only represents the will and sovereignty of the people, has become dominant with modernity. Indeed, every nationalist movement that seeks to establish itself in the form of the state is nothing but an assertion that it is the will of the people, and so should prevail. When Bal Gangadhar Tilak says that swaraj is his birthright, what he means is that the will of the Indian people should be sovereign, and the state should only represent that will. (His understanding of the people from whom he claims authority is, of course, notoriously tilted towards the dominant castes, but that is tangential to my purposes for now.)

What I wish to stress here is something broader: that this emphasis on the will of the people, and on claiming authority from it, is shared across the political spectrum. If you think of the Marxist tradition, including Marx himself most of the time, running through it is the argument that liberal democracies only obfuscate the will of the people, obscure it even from the people themselves, and that what is needed is the realization instead of a socialist will.4 This the sense in which I am saying that the claim to an authority derived from the will of the people is the hegemonic imaginary across the political spectrum (to put things in a way that might appear paradoxical), so much so that there is no easy exit from it. Indeed, the very possibility of an exit boggles the imagination, which is why the few thinkers and political actors who have attempted an exit have often gone down so many dead alleys or tied themselves up in knots.

3.

Now let us turn to the second question: what, as a way of articulating the will of the people, is distinctive about what Gandhi calls parliamentary swaraj (a broader phrase, including both parliamentary and presidential forms of sovereign power, both republican but liberal democracy, would be the one that Ambedkar prefers—“political democracy” [see, for instance, Ambedkar, 1943])? As you can see on even a moment’s reflection, the will of the people is a collective thing. That this hypostatized entity, the people, includes all the residents of a land or country is not at all necessary. For example, historically in the United States and in many ways even now, African Americans have been disenfranchised. And in every nation-state, only citizens constitute the people, not refugees and non-citizens. And even within citizens, there are hierarchies: it is much easier for whites in the United States, or Hindus in India, to claim to be part of the people. So the will of the people usually works in profoundly exclusionary ways.

It is in this context that the languages of liberal democracy and republican democracy are important. The two are not the same, though they are often practically indiscernible from each other, and each bears the potentiality of the other, and terms such as parliamentary swaraj or political democracy connote both. Liberal democracy is the coming together of two forms of the will—on the one side, democracy, with its emphasis on the will of a people, and on the other side liberalism, with its emphasis on primacy of the will of individuals, embodied in their rights. Hence it is that liberalism need not be democratic (for example, in a constitutional monarchy); that democracy need not liberal (for example, in a populist order); and indeed that liberal democracies can be founded on apartheid (South Africa historically, Israel today), colonialism (the British empire), or imperialism and racism (the United States today).

Minimally thus, liberal democracy inscribes negative rights for those deemed part of the people—my freedom from being coerced to act against my will, my freedom from the state. In other words, what negative rights says is that, save in the most exceptional circumstances, the will of the people as embodied in the state cannot and must not override my will as an individual, and that moreover other individuals or groups too must not have the power to override my will as an individual. Maximally, liberal democracy also inscribes positive rights—it tries to build up our ability to exercise our will. After all, the right to exercise the will means nothing if one is so disempowered that one does not actually have the power to do so. So unless citizens are socially and economically empowered, it does not mean much to say that they are free to exercise their will.

So, liberal democracy is one aspect of parliamentary swaraj or, more broadly, political democracy—it is the aspect concerned with how the will of the people is recognized as plural, and how this plurality of wills is protected, at least in principle, against domination by any one fraction of the will that claims to speak for the whole. To describe this division and pluralization of the will, the political philosopher Claude Lefort had a very nice phrase—the empty place of power. To draw on his terms, what is distinctive about liberal democracy is that it rests on the premise that “power belongs to no one; that those who exercise power do not possess it; that they do not, indeed, embody it; that the exercise of power requires a periodic and repeated contest; that the authority of those vested with power is created and re-created as a result of the manifestation of the will of the people” (Lefort, 225). And this will of the people is itself determined in ways that try to avoid the people acting in unison: we vote individually, and its only through millions of such solitary acts that the will of the people is supposed to be determined.

What Lefort does not explicitly thematize, though it is implicit in what he writes, is the other aspect of political democracy—republican democracy, which asserts both the separation of will from authority, and the necessity for will to be complemented by authority. The most visible way in which republican democracy manifests itself is in the division of powers into different branches of government. What we often do not heed enough in this is that this division is also a division between authority and will. For example, rather than the executive branch simply claiming authority from the periodic mandates of elections, republican democracy often institutionalizes will in the executive, and authority in the legislative and even more the judiciary and law. This institutionalized division of will from authority is what makes democracy republican. To anchor democracy in authority is not only to sanction and sanctify the will; it is also to significantly modulate the will, even on occasion suspend it. To be bound by the law, thus, is not only to will within the bounds of the law; it could also involve acting in the spirit of the law rather than our own will.

But republican democracy is not only a form of government, even if that is what it most evidently appears as. Like liberal democracy, it is also a form of society, and as such a personal and social comportment. And republican democracy is the manner of conducting ourselves in accordance with a distinctive form of authority—one that is not hierarchical but democratic. What would democratic authority mean? It would mean that I accord you respect, or even maybe submit to you in some specific circumstances, not because we both accept an order which decrees your superiority but because I, and maybe you, accept an order which decrees your political equality.

This political equality involves being free in a way very different from liberal democracy’s. The latter’s equality is most obviously centered around a distinctive kind of will–one conceived in Lockean spirit in terms of the equality that springs from self-ownership. By contrast, republican democracy involves radicalization of the equality involved in the Kantian categorical imperative. The categorical imperative too begins with individual will, and only subsequently goes on to impose limits on that will when it meets another will-bearing being or, in the modern reformulations of Kant that seek to make space also for non-human animals, another animate being (Korsgaard 2018).

The political equality involved in republican democracy radicalizes the categorical imperative by organizing citizenship around a theme also present in Kant’s political thought—conscience. Unlike will, conscience begins from the relationality with oneself which precedes the will, and which is itself coeval with a relationality with the world. What conscience introduces is the dimension of responsibility for self and the world, for a freedom exercised in keeping with that responsibility. As such, conscience is never only a private or individual matter; it always enjoins action directed at others. Relatedly, the authority of republican democracy comes from its claim to arise from the free relation between those who exercise their conscience.

Of course, republican democracy also involves a distinctive constriction of conscience. Here, conscience itself becomes an exclusionary criterion: the community of equals can only be amongst those deemed capable of having a conscience—and even more restrictively, with the citizens amongst them. To this constriction I shall return shortly.

But for now, note that the public in a republican democracy is very different from the public of liberal democracy. The latter begins by constituting the private sphere of the self-owning individual, and deriving the public sphere from this. By contrast, republican democracy radicalizes the categorical imperative by beginning with the primacy of the public (the etymology of republic, res publica, is suggestive), which is here a way of describing citizens in their plurality. To be clear, republican democracy cherishes the private too, but for it the private, rather than being constituted by self-ownership, is the space necessary for the solitude and conviviality necessary for the cultivation of conscience.

So the political equality of republican democracy could be described as the equality of conscience rather than that of either self-ownership or even autonomy. And liberal democracy is arguably often subtended by the authority conferred by republican democracy, folded into it. The latter does not do away with the primacy liberal democracy accords to the will, but it does modulate that will by insisting also on the work on conscience, on the responsibility that conscience introduces.

Now, I do not need to tell you that this thumbnail sketch I have provided is not how republican democracy has worked at any time anywhere—certainly not in either the United States or India, the two places that are home for me. But my point here is not to focus on the actual functioning of republican democracies but on their aspirational focus. It is this aspirational focus that makes Gandhi demand parliamentary swaraj; this aspirational focus is at the heart too of the Indian constitution whose writing Ambedkar leads.

Because this aspirational focus seems so desirable, especially at a time like this when it is grievously threatened by authoritarian populism, we may well be tempted to ask: why do we need to question republican democracy or political democracy (a phrase that, to my mind, covers both liberal and republican democracy)? Is not the problem really that we have not realized republican democracy?

Here it helps to recall a wry remark that Arendt makes—that there is something paradoxical about a freedom based on a faculty whose “essential activity consists in dictate and command” (Arendt 1961, 145). Born in self-mastery, the will works through a mastery of the means needed to achieve its ends. Will also strengthens a particular concept of reason and knowledge—not the substantial reason anguished by ethical questions about right and wrong means or ends, but the instrumental reason that simply determines the most effective means to an end.

And while republican democracy modulates the working of will by seeking to complement it with authority, it by no means displaces or destroys the will; it may even infuse with the will with a righteous energy. Indeed, to recall my earlier remark, republican democracy makes conscience itself into an exclusionary criterion—only those capable of having a conscience are potential citizens. This constricted conscience is very different from what Gandhi calls antaratman—the word he translates as “inner voice” and “conscience.” The antaratman allows for—for Gandhi, enjoins—a moral equality and “kinship” with any entity, even nonliving ones (Skaria 2010). All that is required for an entity to be my moral equal is that it appear to me as a “who,” a being with its own singularity. From the perspective of antaratman, it is this moral equality that has to be striven for, and that must provide the horizon even of political equality.

So though a republican democracy—a democracy simultaneously centered around the will-centered practice of liberty, equality and fraternity, and around the separation of will from authority—is certainly preferable to tyrannies where the will rides roughshod over individual wills, is certainly preferable also to the fusion of will and authority involved in authoritarian populism, it is nevertheless profoundly violent in ways that we know well: think only of how rule is here even in the best of circumstances usually in the name of an unmarked majority.

4.

Onto the third question, then: what would be involved in a politics that relinquishes the will? This politics Gandhi describes as true swaraj, and as he writes about it he is drawn to “religion.” He can think true swaraj only in terms of religion. Nor is he alone in this. The most intense thinkers of this politics that relinquishes the will have also been drawn to religion—for example, both Ambedkar and Martin Luther King. So the question is: what is the work that religion does, why is religion so important here?

Here we may take a cue from what he says in his Anasaktiyoga—that the Bhagavad Gita is not a “historical work.” By this he means that, as he puts it just a little while later, that “the persons therein described may be historical, but the author of the Mahabharata has used them merely to drive home his religious theme” (Gandhi 1999, vol 46, 167). The contrast between religion and history is also implicitly a contrast between two different kinds of time. In the sense that he is using it here, a historical work places something in an empirical and calendrical time, or tells a story that unfolds in such time.

For me as a professional historian, and perhaps for Gandhi too, this empirical time would not include the gods and goddesses. Still, it cannot be denied that both in Gandhi’s time and ours, people have found gods and goddesses in this empirical time—for example, when people make the claim that Ram was born in Ayodhya, and that therefore a temple be built there. For many believers, this particular version of empirical time, sometimes called mythical time, or time in which gods rub shoulders and perform miracles, is part of religion. It is of course different from historical time, but like historical time it is marked by empiricality. We professional historians are often troubled by this, because we anchor our truths in empirical time, and would not like to share this empirical time with the modality of myth.

Now, when Gandhi says that the Gita is religious, he means that it exists outside this empirical time, whether historical or mythical. There are many ways of being outside empirical time. Perhaps Gandhi is aware of this, which may be why he insists also in the Anasaktiyoga that “the Gita is not an aphoristic work; it is a great religious poem.” (Gandhi 1999, vol. 46, 174). So what then is this religious time that Gandhi is contrasting to both empirical and aphoristic time? To answer this question we could take a cue from a remark by Claude Lefort again:

What philosophy discovers in religion is a mode of portraying or dramatizing the relations that human beings establish with something that goes beyond empirical time and the space within which they establish relations with one another. (223)

Or a little while earlier:

Every religion states in its own way that human society can only open onto itself by being held in an opening it did not create. Philosophy says the same thing, but religion said it first, albeit in terms that philosophy cannot accept. (222)

To my mind, this is a rigorous first approximation both of religion as a concept, and of the affinity between philosophy and religion. It brings us to the sense in which Gandhi or Ambedkar or King or many others who are concerned with social justice find religion an unavoidable horizon.

It avoids also all those sloppy formulations which make a religion-secularism contrast by treating religion as transcendent and secularism as immanent. It sidesteps too those accurate but still misleading formulations which suggest that “late nineteenth-century anthropological and theological thought rendered a variety of overlapping social usages rooted in changing and heterogeneous forms of life into a single immutable essence, and claimed it to be the object of a universal human experience called ‘religious.” (Asad 2003, 31). Yes, of course, the concept of religion becomes modern when it is counterpointed to the secular, and identified as a separate domain. But its modern remaking into a domain—analogous to the domains of “culture,” “the state,” “economics,” and so on—should not obscure from us the sense that word, like analogous terms such as dharma, has arguably always carried: the insinuation of the experience of another time, a time outside the empirical which is nevertheless constitutive of our sociality, the experience of being held in an opening and time we do not create.5

But to recognize that philosophy and religion share something that sets them apart from the empiricality that marks history and myth, apart also from the non-empiricality of aphorism, is to arrive at another question: what distinguishes religion from philosophy? And of course we can all rattle off in our sleep the commonsensical answer that philosophy gives to this question: that it opens society onto itself through reason, while religion opens society onto itself through faith.

Like all commonsensical answers, or answers given in the sleep that mistakes itself for wakefulness, this one intimates something important in an obscured way. What is described here as faith is arguably more accurately described as the sacred: it is not so much through faith that religion opens society onto itself as through the sacred. Of course, it is no longer easy, at least in disciplinary circles, to associate religion with the sacred. Anthropologists and sociologists and historians have gone looking for the sacred and have found that they have to hedge its operation with so many caveats that they have become increasingly skeptical of it; the sacred, they have declared, is too crude a criterion of the religious. That they have arrived at this finding is not surprising, for the sacred does not lend itself to easily being winkled out by the methodologies of empirical time that suffuse these disciplines.

The best way to get a sense of the sacred is by turning to the word sacrifice. Sacrifice is not simply etymologically associated with the sacred. It is through sacrifice that the sacred is performed, brought into being. Indeed, there is no religion without sacrifice and the sacred. And what I want to draw attention to here, in the context of the will, is that sacrifice is not willed action. In fact, the moment we confront the sacred, we are no longer in the realm of the will. We have surrendered our will, we act without will. And yet we act freely: our relation with the sacred is a free one—something is sacred, after all, only if we freely make it so. So now we can get a glimmering of why religion is so important to Gandhi. It is in the action involved in religion that we arrive at the threshold of the relinquishment of the will.

To understand the religious in terms of the sacred is also to recalibrate the usual distinctions between religion and secularism, or for that matter between religion and philosophy. For if we understand the sacred properly, as that which calls forth sacrifice, then secularism and philosophy too have their sacralities—the primacy of the immanent for non-democratic secularisms, some version of the rights of man and citizen for democratic secularisms, and the primacy of reason for disciplinary philosophy. And religiosity courses too even through those of us, such as I, who are dispositionally atheist: we too, after all, sacralize—maybe some especially dear persons, maybe some principles. And to have a primarily religious disposition as a person or a group—this too must be understood differently: it means making our sacralities not only the meaning that embellishes our lives but also the food that sustains it.

5.

I have talked so far in broad brushstrokes of sacrifice and religion, but if we are to get to what is distinctive about Gandhi’s religion, we also have to distinguish between two kinds of religiosity, which may as a shorthand be called theological and mystical. Both insist that societies open onto themselves by being held into an opening they did not create—the sacred. But they do so in entirely incommensurable ways.

And to get at this incommensurability, it helps to revisit that old distinction between belief and faith.6 Belief is what we arrive at through knowledge, whether that knowledge is presumed to be objective, as in science, or subjective, as in the convictions that I can defend, or a divinity or God whose existence I can prove at least to my satisfaction. Central to belief is sovereignty (the installation of the will over ourselves as individuals or groups): the sovereignty of theology, the sovereignty of the divine, or the sovereignty of the rational individual, whether self-owning or autonomous. We use the adjective “theologico-political” to describe the modern nation-state because it has taken over the sovereignty that had been provided by the divine; strictly speaking, we should describe it as an onto-theologico-political institution, since the state strives to be not just the highest value but also the grounding value.

Theological religion calls for a profoundly and decidedly violent form of sacrifice. Sometimes it demands of its devotees the sacrifice of others, of those who have been deemed the enemy. Only through such sacrifice-murder can the devotees of theological religion prove their fidelity to their god. Sometimes it demands even more of its devotees—their own lives. What marks theological religion in all its forms is that it demands a surrender that is also a subordination: devotees must not only surrender to but also subordinate themselves to the divine. And here, even if devotees surrender their will, the sovereign does not; indeed, the will persists, but now as the prerogative primarily of the sovereign. And to the extent that devotees sublate themselves into or realize themselves in the sovereign, they too partake in this sovereign will. As such, theological religion is not at all a politics of non-willing; rather, it is merely the subordination of individual wills to a higher will, a will moreover which fuses authority into it.

Belief underwrites modern nation-states; this is why they are rightly described as organized around a political theology. This is also why Gandhi and Ambedkar have such a skeptical and agonistic relation with the nation-state, and with sovereignty itself. If they nevertheless embrace political democracy, this was likely in no small part because they felt that would provide at least some respite from the nation-state’s political theology. For even though political democracy can never abolish the sovereign exception, its two forms, so to speak, do attenuate that exception in sometimes complementary ways: liberal democracy pluralizes the sovereign by insisting on the empty place of power, while republican democracy separates spectralizes the sovereign by separating will from authority.

As things have turned out, the respite provided by the workings of political democracy has been too short. Both in India and elsewhere not only republican but even liberal democracy is increasingly being undone by authoritarian populism. Conceptually, authoritarian populism can be described as involving a double fusion. On the one side, it vehemently denies and represses any differences within the people (the ultimate source of authority for modern nation-states), insists that the people have one true will, and claims to represent this will in its unicity. On the other side, it repudiates the separation of will and authority, and fuses the two together, insisting that the will of the people is always already also their authority. In India, of course, this authoritarian populism has also taken a more specific form—that of a supremacist racism which tries to identify a true people by redefining Hinduism in racial terms, and using race as a criterion to identify the true people (Skaria 2021).

6.

Mystical religion is a different matter altogether (though mystical may be too positive a term; perhaps the phenomenon is better described negatively—as a withdrawal from theology, as negative theology). The mystical involves a moment of faith, a moment where a certain finitude and non-privative vulnerability is accepted not as a momentary risk before subsumption into the sovereign, but as a fact of life. Here there is a surrender of the will, and this surrender is not subordination to a higher will. It is rather a persistence in surrender that refuses to accept determination by any will. This is why it can be described as a surrender without subordination (Skaria 2016).

Surrender without subordination also involves an altogether different kind of sacrifice. To begin with, here sacrifice can only be self-sacrifice. To sacrifice the other—this would almost always be to act in a theological manner. If Gandhi is so fascinated by the Gita, this is because he reads in it (arguably very idiosyncratically, but that is not my concern here), as providing the protocols for such mystical sacrifice. And even self-sacrifice can easily turn theological, as Gandhi’s self-sacrifice does on occasion—for instance, in the fast against separate electorates that leads to the Poona Pact (Omvedt 2014). It is precisely in order to excavate this theologism that critiques of Gandhi must continue to be pursued. At the same time, he also articulates, with almost unparalleled insight, the stakes of mystical sacrifice.

The key to this mystical sacrifice is arguably contained in the word anasaktiyoga, the yoga of non-attachment. He opposes especially those theological readings of the Gita, such as that put forth by Tilak, which suggest that even violent action is justified as long as it is non-attached in the sense of not being driven by a selfish desire for fruits. In other words, for Tilak violence is justified if the fruit was to be reaped not by the individual by the theological figure of the nation-state. By contrast, what Gandhi stresses is swachh saadhan or “pure means”—not renunciation of fruit to a higher sovereign, but abandonment of the very logic of thinking in terms of fruit or end.7

To reject fruit or end in this way is to be left with sacrifice as simply pure means. To offer action as pure means is to try and make the sacrifice into a pure gift, something given and received aneconomically. This emphasis on pure means is also what justifies Gandhi’s politics of ahimsa or satyagraha. For a politics of faith, the end, which is another way of conceptualizing the sovereign, is constitutively unknowable. Faced with this constitutive unknowability, satyagrahis can only practice the pure means of satyagraha, which after 1915 become increasingly interchangeable words for Gandhi.

Amongst the striking moves that mark Gandhi’s politics is the way for him pure means is not a philosophical abstraction but part of the everyday life of ordinary people. As early as Hind Swaraj there is the implication that satyagraha (which in its limited sense means resistance to injustice, and in its broader sense means the practice of pure means) is already practiced in families, sometimes if not always, and that what the Editor is suggesting is that this practice be carried over to a wider field (Gandhi 1999, vol. 10:292).

How is pure means practiced in intimate relations? It is arguably in friendship we can discern its protocols. What sets friendship apart from all other intimate relations, after all, is that friends are equals. More than any other loving relation, one is free with friends, even where one is commanding them, not by being in a willed relation with them, not by insisting on one’s rights in relation to them, but by the enactment of a certain surrender. And there is no purpose or instrumentality here—we enjoy friends for themselves. Moreover, while this surrender leaves us vulnerable to friends and loved ones, here vulnerability is also a distinctive and non-privative power over our friends—distinctive because it is exercised through an authority that has nothing to do with the will or with will’s social sedimentation as hegemony.

One way of describing the historic revolution involved in satyagraha is that it transposes the spirit of friendship to non-intimate relations; it initiates political friendship. Political friendship goes beyond the limits that characterize both intimate and transactional friendships. Writing of the these phenomena, Gandhi remarks in 1908: “It is the law of this world—not a divine law—that there can be love or friendship only among equals. Princes befriend princes. In a king there can be nothing but condescension. towards his subjects. That is why some persons want republics. There is no love lost between master and servant. This is found to be true in every sphere. Wherever we find a relationship contrary to this rule that is, friendship even in the absence of equality—we know that the superior party is actuated by some self-interest, or that he is an exceptionally good person.”8

Implicit here is a distinction between social and moral equality. Social equality is at least roughly measured; moral equality can occur in the absence of social equality. By the time he writes this, he has already begun articulating satyagraha, the politicization of moral equality, its conversion into political friendship or democratic neighborliness. Political friendship goes beyond the “law of the world” or social norms, and strives for friendship with the entire world, beginning with neighbors (as Gandhi assumes we must, given our finitude), and especially the marginalized and the strange amongst them. In Gandhi’s writing and politics, such neighborliness rather displaces the universal human; this is why in Hind Swaraj the Editor attacks the impulse to “serve every individual in the universe” and insists on the primacy of “immediate neighbors” (Gandhi 1999, vol. 10, 269); this is why he defines swadeshi as the “spirit in us which restricts us to the use and services of our immediate, to the exclusion of the more remote.”9

Democratic neighborliness is itself a discipline, and its rigorous practice has a distinctive fruit—an authority that, like the authority involved in intimate friendship, has nothing to do with the will or hegemony. It is this authority that Gandhi sought to exercise in his fasts and marches—the fast against mill workers in Ahmedabad, the fast against separate electorates, the Salt March, the Noakhali marches, and so on.

One should add, as the memory of the fast against separate electorates should suffice to remind us: surrender without subordination or pure means does not by itself lead to a correct decision. This is so in two senses. One is that of misrecognition. Imperfect discipline can lead practitioners to not recognize that what they think of as their surrender without subordination is actually nothing of that sort. Then also, in every situation surrender without subordination can lead to divergent decisions. In Gandhijinu Gitashikshan, Gandhi himself discusses the many divergent right responses in the context of Harishchandra raising his sword on Taramati. He could raise his sword, in the first instance, because he loved her so greatly as to make the refusal to do so self-interested, as to make the act itself one of self-sacrifice. Gandhi notes that Harishchandra would have to preferred to sacrifice himself if this had been possible. But if “no self-interest had been involved, if she had not been his queen, if Harishchandra had been repelled by the deed itself, then his hand would have refused to obey him, and he could have resorted to satyagraha” (Gandhi, 1999, vol. 37:318) In other words, and whichever way Harishchandra acted, he would have been resorting to satyagraha in the broader sense of action as pure means or surrender without subordination.

So surrender without subordination does not describe the correct decision. This is as it should be. Save in very simple cases, if such exist, no morality can tell us what our decision should be in a singular situation; every morality can tell us only the broad contours of how to make a decision, leaving open an entire sheaf of actions quite compatible with these contours. Thus, Gandhi made innumerable decisions that we would and must disagree emphatically with. Most of all, in retrospect it is evident that in the exercise of the considerable authority his discipline had garnered for him, he was insufficiently sensitive to whether it would be experienced by those at its receiving end as dominating them; he was insensitive also on occasion to how his authority converged with dominant values, thus strengthening hegemony rather than its opposite, which pure means exemplifies—authority without will.

Nor even can one say that surrender without subordination is flatly non-violent. Rather, it is non-violent only in this sense—it strives for finitude rather than the infinitude and mastery involved in the will. But is finitude always more non-violent than infinitude? What is the violence inherent to the practice of finitude? What I have tried to suggest elsewhere is that while a will-centered democratic politics is certainly more likely to destroy the world (cue climate change), turn genocidal, or intensify structural violence, a politics of finitude or relinquishing the will is not “some already given template to be applied to existing situations”; it “poses its own challenges, and makes its own distinctive demands on thought” and, I should have added, action (Skaria, 2020).

7.

Now we can turn to the question: what is the relation between a will-centered politics and a politics that relinquishes the will? As a first pass, we could revisit will-centered politics by contrasting pure means or surrender without subordination with the Kantian categorical imperative or even Kantian conscience. In its classical incarnation, that imperative calls on us to treat all rational beings (for practical purposes, humans), our own selves included, as never merely a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end. Some quite persuasive reformulations have suggested that it can be extended without contradiction to treating not merely humans but animals too as ends. But these reformulations do not at all affect the abyssal difference between the Kantian and the Gandhian perspectives.

Briefly, the abyssal difference is this: the categorical imperative theologizes the individual, while surrender without subordination withdraws from theology. True, the individual theologized by the categorical imperative is a far more democratic than the one theologized by the Lockean tradition. Where the latter theologizes a self-owning and hence monadic individual, the former theologizes a conscience bearing and hence relational and self-questioning individual. As such, the categorical imperative is an especially intense democratization of will-centered politics, extending at its most radical to a questioning relation with the will itself. As such, it pluralizes the theological, in principle imbuing at least all humans and potentially all animate life with sacrality, so barring violence against life itself. And this powerfully democratic impulse can certainly be strengthened by layering and leavening the categorical imperative by insisting on the centrality of recognition, on egalitarianism, on the rights of the most oppressed and exploited. It is the autoimmune path down these vistas that could be described as the most radical form of political democracy.

But even as political democracy protects some particular lives against the violence of more undemocratic political theologies, all this potentially only inscribes that violence deeper, if at a structural and less immediately visible register. For it does not bar either instrumental relations with the world or even the sacrifice of others to “humanity,” the abstract end that we deem sacred; it does not bar our own self-sacrifice to this sovereign end. Abandoning the abstract end “humanity” for the even more abstract end “animate life” will not end the logic of sacrificing others—the earth and the world can still be sacrificed to the expanded world of ends. The logic of the categorical imperative, in other words, only quickens the conflagration of the world; this conflagration is what has led to the Anthropocene, and to the climate change that is now on us.

Contrast this to surrender without subordination, the politics of pure means. That relation withdraws from means-end relations. Friends will on occasion be means for an end, of course. But the more we make friends into means, even if they are not merely means, the more we take the pulp out of our friendships. To treat friends as means is to violate the very nature of friendship. Still, this is not to say that friends are ends in themselves—that would be to confuse citizens with friends. We take pleasure in the singularity of our friends; they are for us irreplaceable, unsubstitutable. The disengagement required in treating others as ends in themselves—this is not possible in friendship. Simone Weil [1973:205] writes of intimate friendship that it the “miracle by which a person consents to view from a certain distance, and without coming any nearer, the very being who is necessary to him as food.” Political friendship is a distinctive twist on this—recognizing and cultivating a non-privative vulnerability with neighbors.

Two other observations follow from this. First, where the categorical imperative begins with the individual (though a relational rather than monadic one), the politics of pure means begins with the neighbor. The categorical imperative seeks to establish the principles by which to rationally treat others as ends in themselves. This end may expand beyond individuals to include whole social groups (the citizenry of political democracy, social groups within a political democracy), but the emphasis on the end remains. By contrast, the politics of pure means begins with a recognition of its finitude, of being held in a world that surrounds it, that it did not create and that will outlast it. This acknowledgement of being thrown into the world requires neighborliness as a response—treating the world not as object to be mastered, save for those who like oneself are ends in themselves, but rather as companions to whom friendship is always already owed, even where they are as entities radically different from us.

Second, the categorical imperative is universalist, where the politics of pure means is neighborly. Put differently, while the categorical imperative must treat all rational beings or all animate life as equal, and moreover come up with some abstract and universal criteria by which this infinitude as equal. By contrast, the politics of pure means pleads inability to promulgate or enact any universal equality; to do so, it thinks, would be conceit on its part. It insists instead on practicing equality with its neighbors, especially the most marginal amongst the neighbors, (including those whom the categorical imperative would regard as inferior, or at least ends in themselves, because they lack a conscience); it tries moreover to practice this equality in a way that is not antagonistic to those who are not neighbors.

That will-centered politics, even in its most democratic form of the categorical imperative and republican democracy, and the politics that relinquishes the will are antithetical to each other—this, then, is undeniable. But how to describe this relation? Here the answer turns out to be tautological: relinquishment itself is the relation. We can take our hint from the fact that Gandhi both led the struggle for parliamentary swaraj or republican democracy and insisted that this was not the swaraj he sought. As this suggests, he was not rejecting parliamentary swaraj or political democracy. He could not. He was too acutely aware that most Indians around him desired it; arguably he desired it himself. To simply reject that desire for parliamentary swaraj would have been to exercise a willed relation over it. The point, really, is to not desire it. So he sought to cultivate a discipline amongst satyagrahis that would enable them to relinquish that desire itself and turn towards a democratic politics centered around non-willing. Only such relinquishment would be in keeping with the logic of the politics of non-willing, for to will relinquishment would be to violate the very character of relinquishment.

8.

But what is this—relinquishment? Let us not be misled by the passivity the term seems to imply. Relinquishment is an intense modality of action: it is the enactment of the equality involved in satyagraha or ahimsa—or, to resort to the conceptual names of the same phenomenon, of democratic neighborliness or political friendship. Only through the enactment of this other equality can the equality of citizenship be relinquished.

The enactment of this other equality must work through formidable challenges. To begin with, there is the inevitable tension between satyagrahis’ aspiration for the equality of all being on the one hand and the obdurate inequalities of the social relations they are thrown into on the other hand. Put differently, while satyagrahis may strive for the equality of vulnerability, they live in a world of profound social inequalities. These inequalities cut both ways: satyagrahis are dominated in some relations, but there are structural and institutional ways in which even the most committed satyagrahis will almost always find themselves involved in oppressing and exploiting. They can exit some of these latter relations, but they cannot exit all. This is why in Hind Swaraj the Editor says: “Going to the root of the matter, nobody is ahimsak because we do destroy life. But we wish to be free of that, hence ahimsak” (Gandhi, 1999: vol. 10:272, translation modified).

So satyagrahis necessarily have to work through the question: how to enact political friendship? Enacting this equality is especially challenging because there can be no institutionalizable protocols for navigating the tension between the injunction to equality and actual inequality. They cannot be like the practitioners of citizenly equality (who presume a gap between who navigate this tension by striving to realize fictional equality (which is the paradigmatic liberal form of equality: it is the form that allows political or citizenly equality to coexist with social and economic inequality), to infuse fictional equality with social and economic equality. Rather, they must relinquish fictional equality, and strive instead for an equality centered around a non-privative vulnerability, for it is through such vulnerability that political friendship is always enacted.

In the absence of institutionalizable protocols, doing so requires satyagrahis to fashion different comportments of political friendship for each cluster of relations they encounter. That is to say: they must constantly ask: what kind of relation of power is at work in this cluster of relations, and what comportment of offering non-privative vulnerability can transform it into a political friendship? With this question, Gandhi struggled memorably and instructively. It is possible to identify at least six different clusters that relations of power take, and corresponding comportments of non-privative vulnerability. Some of these comportments are quite troubling in their implications, while two, we can now clearly see, must push relinquishment in directions where it relinquishes itself and yields to another comportment—that of annihilation.

First, there is the question of what vulnerability the dominated can offer to the dominant so as to transform colonial rule into a political friendship. One comportment of such vulnerability is at work in his most celebrated conceptualization—that of civil disobedience. If we are to describe this engagement in the terms I have been offering, it was an encounter between the ideologies of citizenship and democratic neighborliness.

Amongst the most crucial aspects of modernity is that neighborly relations—relations which are organized around a privative or non-privative vulnerability to or of the other which cannot be redressed by sovereignty—come to be increasingly dominated by abstract ones, even though the latter never erase the former.10 Such abstract relations are at work not only in capitalist commodity relations, but also in citizenship; they come to be especially dominant with the consolidation of what Enrique Dussel (1998) calls the Anglo-Germanic modernity. This, even though Indians were by no means equal citizens, the ideology of citizenship governed colonial rule in myriad ways, not least in the rhetoric of rule of law, of equality also between colonizer and colonized in some distant future.

This does not at all mean that neighborly relations were erased. They never can be. But it does mean that they could be repressed, become increasingly recessive or optional for some—especially for the dominant in their relations with each other, or for the dominant in their relations with the dominated. The dominated do not have that luxury. If there were such a thing as a pure capitalism, then perhaps it would be possible to be dominated without experiencing a neighborly relation with the dominant. Since such a thing is absolutely impossible, the dominated always experience the dominant as neighbors, those who they are vulnerable to. As with myriad neighborly relations historically, this is a privative vulnerability, whether in a highly visible way, as with slavery, or in more quiet ways, as when the putative equality of citizenship is undercut in the everyday interactions between those from minority and majority communities. It is to acknowledge the neighborly—and phenomenological—dimension of domination that we often resort to the term “oppression.”

In this context, at the heart of civil disobedience was an audacious strategy: challenging the colonial ideology of citizenship by bringing out and democratizing the neighborliness that always undergirds it. The neighborliness is brought out in the very act of quietly breaking the laws without resorting to an alternative language of citizenship; in other words, by revealing to the colonizers that they too are vulnerable, are neighbors to those whom they dominate. Further, by accepting the punishment for breaking the laws, satyagrahis practice a surrender without subordination with the colonizers, accept a non-privative vulnerability; this is why I say it is a democratic neighborliness.

Second, there is the question of what vulnerability the dominant can offer to the dominated so as to transform their relation into a political friendship. As a member of the dominant castes, this question Gandhi encounters especially sharply in the context of the intimate oppression involved in caste. And what he conceives of in response as a non-privative vulnerability is especially troubling. He attempts a penance that sacralizes the “untouchable” castes—revering them as Harijan or “children of God.” More broadly, he insists that the Harijan, as the figure who offers service, exemplifies what is most central to Hinduism. This extended reinterpretation of Hinduism is what Lalit Batra insightfully calls the “bhangi-ization of Hinduism” in his ongoing dissertation at the University of Minnesota.

Unsurprisingly, this reworking of Hinduism found little purchase amongst dominant castes. When they took up the term “Harijan,’ they most often entirely drained it of the reverence with which Gandhi had sought to imbue it, it even became sometimes one more derogatory term in their arsenal of violence and discrimination. As for Gandhi himself, while he vigorously fought explicit forms of discrimination against oppressed castes, and continued to revere the idea of the “Harijan,” his own attitude towards them in social relations remained notoriously paternalistic. The entire process as it unfolded was, as D.R. Nagaraj famously pointed out, capable of having only one hero—the dominant caste penitent, Gandhi (Nagaraj, 44ff). For the oppressed castes, indeed, the entire process was effectively most often nothing but a reliving of the trauma of disprivilege and oppression. Arguably, this too is why Ambedkar repudiated—annihilated—the term “Harijan” with such ferocity.

So, there was something grievously inadequate, both in conceptualization and execution, about Gandhi’s answer to the question of how the dominant are to practice political friendship with those who have historically borne the brunt of their intimate oppression and continue to bear its aftereffects. But that inadequacy only throws the question itself into sharper relief. Since almost all of us are dominant in some context or the other, and since our dominance is most often experienced as neighborly, this is not a question that just the one percent or twenty percent need concern themselves with. All the same, it is not a question we have paid much attention to. We often take the answer to be straightforward—offer allyship as well as material and social reparation. That should be a bare minimum, of course, and amongst the problems with Gandhi’s responses was that he did not do this. But by itself this would only put in place a political democracy, not a political friendship.

Political friendship also requires something from the dominant: reparation for oppression: what Gandhi calls penitence or repentance, and what we who have come prefer more neutral language might wish to describe as moral reparation. How should the dominant offer this moral reparation of non-privative vulnerability to the historically dominated—for those seeking to nurture the traditions of political friendship, perhaps few questions are as urgent to think through as this one. It is also one of the questions that we still struggle to even formulate in concrete situations.

Third, there is how political friendship is to be cultivated with social intimates—those who do not necessarily know us in intimate personal relations, but who nevertheless find themselves bearing a love for us even if they do not agree with us. Through the refashioning from the 1900s onwards of ascetic traditions by imbuing them with an intense vulnerability, Gandhi had created an immense world of social intimates, and his effort was to make this also a world of political friendship. It is here that Gandhi emphasizes fasts, at least for himself (he emphatically opposed most others going on fasts, stressing that unless carried out properly, it could otherwise become “duragraha,” or the opposite of satyagraha):

Fasting in satyagraha has well-defined limits. You cannot fast against a tyrant, for it will be as a piece of violence done to him. You invite penalty from him for disobedience of his orders, but you cannot inflict on yourself penalties when he refuses to punish and renders it impossible for you to disobey his orders so as to compel infliction of penalty. Fasting can only be resorted to against a lover, not to extort rights but to reform him, as when a son fasts for a parent who drinks. My fast at Bombay, and then at Bardoli, was of that character. I fasted to reform those who loved me. But I will not fast to reform, say General Dyer who not only does not love me, but who regards himself as my enemy.11

Gandhi himself often fails notoriously to live up to this and other exacting injunctions around fasting. Of the twenty-seven major fasts he undertook, he retrospectively recognizes that in at least two cases he had fasted wrongly (Jordens, 1998). To these two we should surely add the 1932 fast against separate electorates. For however Gandhi might have conceived matters (he described it as directed against the dominant castes), there can be little doubt that Ambedkar, who led the demand for separate electorates, experienced the fast as violently coercive. But yet again, despite these occasions where fasting turned coercive, we can hardly dismiss it as a comportment of political friendship with social intimates: during what is described often as his finest hour, he went on fasts to stop the violence of partition, and his authority was enough to persuade tens of thousands to stop killing, thus saving innumerable lives.

And even if we are reluctant, in the dramatically changed circumstances of our world today, to countenance fasting as a way of practicing non-privative vulnerability with social intimates, the question does remain: how do we offer a non-privative vulnerability to them at moments of intense disagreement, how do we convert relations of social intimacy to those of political friendship.

Fourth, there is the question of what vulnerability can be offered to create and sustain political friendship to those who may regards us as their social enemies, or at least as opposed to them. Here it is instructive to recall Gandhi’s efforts, beginning from the time of the Khilafat movement, to offer “friendship” to the subcontinent’s Muslim communities:

I consider myself to be among the staunchest of Hindus. I am as eager to save the cow from the Mussulman’s knife as any Hindu. But on that very account I refuse to make my support of the Mussulman claim on the khilafat conditional upon his saving the cow. The Mussulman is my neighbor. He is in distress. His grievance is legitimate and it is my bounden duty to help him to secure redress by every legitimate means in my power even to the extent of losing my life and property. That is the way I can win permanent friendship with Mussulmans. . . . The nobility of the help will be rendered nugatory if it was rendered conditionally. That the result will be the saving of the cow is a certainty. But should it turn out to be otherwise, my view will not be affected in any manner whatsoever. The test of friendship is a spirit of love and sacrifice independent of expectation of any return.12

This passage demands a closer reading than I am able to offer in the limited space here. Sufice to note for now what is at stake here: the question of how to practice a non-private vulnerability with social intimates, or how, indeed, more broadly, to make sure that the world of social intimates we create is shot through with intimations of non-privative vulnerability—something that Gandhi did through his refashioning of ascetic practices, and that would likely be created today through very different practices.13

9.

Fifth, there is a question on which reading Gandhi offers less direct help, but on which his failure is itself revealing. Earlier, in addressing the question of how the dominated could offer political friendship to the dominant, I dwelt on the confrontation between two ways of claiming equality—the ideology of citizenship on the one hand, where the colonized were promised a future equality, and the ideology of democratic neighborliness on the other. But what where the confrontation is somewhat different? What where the practitioners of democratic neighborliness encounter those who refuse to countenance the very possibility of their equality? The most ready example of this would be Nazism, which refused to acknowledge the humanity of the Jews it massacred, often treated them not even as monsters but merely as objects. Another quite different example could be surely be the caste order, which is a particularly violent instantiation of neighborly relations—the dominant castes profess a ritual vulnerability to the dominated castes, and this very claim becomes the reason for inflicting a vicious violence on the dominated castes, a violence which is simultaneously economic, political, social and personal, which proceeds through a characteristically neighborly mechanism—humiliation (Guru, 2011).

So, could the dominated castes have offered civil disobedience to the dominant? The most famous satyagraha by Dalits, that in Mahad which Ambedkar led in 1927, failed, not least because of Gandhi’s refusal to support it. But it is also unlikely that Gandhi’s support for a civil disobedience movement by the oppressed castes would have swayed the dominant castes. Certainly, by the time of the Dandi salt march, as Tridip Suhrud argues, Gandhi himself was being treated by many dominant caste Gujaratis as an “untouchable”—no longer welcome to their homes even as they honored him publicly, and being relegated during the march itself to staying overnight either in public buildings such as schools, or being hosted in temporary grass huts which were later burnt so as avoid being polluted by him (Suhrud, 2020).

I do not wish to suggest that neighborly violence can never be redressed by the democratic neighborliness involved in civil disobedience. But certainly, given the immense difficulty of civil disobedience against caste as a quintessentially neighborly form of violence, perhaps relinquishment must here relinquish itself, yield to another comportment—annihilation. Certainly also, after 1927, Ambedkar himself came to be convinced that the satyagraha of civil disobedience would not work against the dominant castes; this is why he called for the annihilation of caste.

What is annihilation? As comportments, annihilation and relinquishment have a parallax relation.14 Clearly, Ambedkar does not assume that everything he is critical of is to be annihilated. For example, even though he is sharply critical of political democracy, he does not call for its annihilation. Annihilation is the proper response, rather, to a distinctive kind of phenomenon—that which does not countenance even the possibility of equality. Here we see also its difference from relinquishment. Where relinquishment is the relation with that which we cannot not want, annihilation is the relation with that which we absolutely cannot want. In both cases—‘cannot not want’ or ‘cannot want’—the wanting is a desire that has a moral dimension. One cannot not want justice; one cannot want injustice. Ambedkar cannot not want political democracy because it is driven by the desire for equality, albeit an abstract one; he absolutely cannot want caste because it is nothing but graded inequality.

True, unlike relinquishment, annihilation does involve sovereign acts—for example, the criminalization in the constitution of explicit forms of caste violence such as boycott. Still, caste violence is also a set of dispositions that are both social and inscribed in the individual bodies of the perpetrators and perpetrated. As such, this disposition cannot be annihilated by sovereign acts—not by sovereign acts of disciplining citizens, as a progressive state might seek to do, nor even by sovereign acts of self-discipline, which cannot ever entirely snuff out internalized dispositions. So far more than sovereign acts, annihilation requires a long and slow cultivation of the self and of the other, both as individuals and as communities; it is this multigenerational and multipronged annihilation that Ambedkar describes with the slogan “Educate, Agitate, Organize.” Such organizing will also, of course, try to mobilize the resources of the state, as of sovereignty, to annihilate caste. But that does not obviate the need for an annihilation that is not sovereign, and yet requires the cultivation of a certain self-discipline.

Why call the relation between annihilation and relinquishment a parallax one? Because neither Ambedkar nor Gandhi are sovereign subjects of the sort who can move without remainder between these two comportments (in fact, they have freely given up on this sovereignty). As such, they remain marked by where they begin from, what they are thrown into. Gandhi begins from the relinquishment of parliamentary swaraj or political democracy; Ambedkar begins from the annihilation of caste. Gandhi moves reluctantly but inexorably to the annihilation of caste; Ambedkar moves reluctantly but inexorably to the relinquishment of political democracy. But the annihilation of caste cannot be to Gandhi what it is Ambedkar, nor can the relinquishment of political democracy be to Ambedkar what it is Gandhi.

Sixth, annihilation in this sense also allows us reframe one of the most intriguing and underdeveloped of the comportments of political friendship—that involved in swadeshi. As Gandhi stressed over and again, swadeshi in his sense had nothing in common with the exclusionary swadeshi of the mainstream nationalist movement (Skaria, 2023). His swadeshi was centered around the “Constructive Program,” his effort at a social movement to not just relinquish structural domination., but to do so in a manner that embraces human finitude—specifically, the neighbor, and the most marginal and oppressed amongst neighbors. The most famous aspect of the swadeshi movement was khadi, but there several other dimensions, including education. Gandhi himself regarded the Constructive Program as the most crucial dimension of satyagraha. But despite his spending more time on it than on any other aspect of satyagraha, the Program limped along even in his own times, and died out by the fifties, hurried into its grave by government Gandhians such as Vinoba Bhave.

That failure was surely in part because the Program as Gandhi pushed it remained purely “constructive” rather than annihilatory. Indeed, as his contemporaries on the left, including Ambedkar, forcefully pointed out, the Program did not challenge forms of domination frontally or even elliptically; all too often, it seemed to work with dominant groups and oppressor castes, depending on their largesse. And yet, at a time when climate change has given new salience to the emphasis on human finitude, has aggressively politicized old ideas such as sustainable development by imparting to them a new degrowth twist (Hickel, 2020), the emphasis on the neighbor in their finitude is especially resonant. What would be an annihilatory constructive program for our times?

And in addressing this question, as also the framing question of what political friendship is, Gandhi remains an indispensable interlocutor, even if our answers often cannot be the same as his.

Ajay Skaria works at the cusp of intellectual and philosophical history, with a specific but not exclusive focus on modern India. His most recent book, Unconditional Equality: Gandhi’s Religion of Resistance, was an exploration of how Gandhi’s ‘religion’ strove for an equality organized around surrender without subordination.

Notes

This essay is a lightly revised version of a talk first given a group of students at the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, in March 2021. Apart from adding some bibliographic references and footnotes, I have retained the informal format of the talk.

1. See, for instance, the 1777 petition by slaves: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2h32t.html.

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2. Personal email from Qadri Ismail, April 13, 2021.

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3. The notion of authority remains strikingly undertheorized. The two major exceptions are Arendt’s “What is Authority” (in Arendt 1961) and Alexandre Kojeve’s The Notion of Authority. For a further discussion of the notion of authority, see Skaria (2023)

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4. However, as CSR Shankar pointed out in an exchange of messages (March 11, 2022), in the aspiration for the withering away of the state, there is a more complicated relation with the will, as also with sovereignty.

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5. I discuss this matter at length in Skaria (2023a), an essay that in many ways complements this one.

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6. The belief-faith distinction I make here is analogous not so much with Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s famous contrast as with Hannah Arendt’s more muted but nevertheless crucial one in her “What is Authority” (in Arendt, 1961). For a more extended discussion of the difference and relation between belief and faith, see Skaria (2023a).

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7. It seems to me quite misplaced to argue, as Shruti Kapila does in her recent book (Kapila, 2021), that Gandhi and Tilak and Savarkar and Ghadar insurgents instituted an “anti-statist political subject.” While Gandhi and Ambedkar had an agonistic relation with statism, and with sovereignty more broadly, most nationalist actors of the period (including Tilak and Savarkar, though the case of Ghadarites is more variegated), even as they opposed the colonial state, continued to be deeply statist and sovereignty centered. Thus, Tilak’s hostility to the colonial state was because he strove for a statism and, more broadly, a sovereignty centered around the dominant castes that he took to be the Indian people. Similarly, Savarkar was bitterly opposed to the statism centered around political democracy, around the empty place of power, which had been put in place by Ambedkar, Gandhi, and Nehru amongst others; he was so bitterly opposed to it, in fact, that he preferred colonial statism to the prospect of the former. But again, his opposition sprang from his fierce commitment to a particularly authoritarian statism—that which is now being realized in the supremacist racism being instituted by the BJP and the Sangh Parivar (on this, see Skaria, 2021).

   Put differently, Tilak and Savarkar were a continuation of the modern tradition of a popular sovereignty that claimed to exist apart from the state, and displaced the older order of paternal patriarchy with a new order of fraternal patriarchy (Pateman 78). And they were a distinctive strand of that tradition. Carole Pateman traces the liberal articulation of this fraternal patriarchy through the separation of public and private. But both in Europe and in the colonies, this fraternal patriarchy also took the non-liberal and non-republican form of a fraternity centered around the substantive oneness of the brotherhood, a oneness that was created by posting an enemy, almost always an intimate one. Tilak and Savarkar were both exponents of that strand in the subcontinent, and Savarkar played an especially crucial role in fashioning it into a supremacist racism.

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8. ‘New Natal Bills,’’ May 16, 1908, in Gandhi (1999, vol. 8, 314). I have previously discussed this remark in Skaria (2002). I now think that essay, my first piece on Gandhi, misunderstood his political friendship in some key respects, which are mostly corrected in this current essay.

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9. “Speech on Swadeshi at Missionary Conference,” February 14, 1916, Gandhi (1999, vol 15, 159).

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10. The classic statement on the challenges posed by modernity to the figure of the neighbor occurs in Ricouer(1965). I discuss the problems with Ricoeur’s logocentric conception of neighbor, and offer an alternative way of thinking the neighbor, in Skaria (2023b).

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11. “Letter to George Joseph,” April 12, 1924, Gandhi (1999, vol. 27, 225).

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12. “Cow Protection,” August 4, 1920, Gandhi (1999, vol. 21, 119).

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13. Again, as with Dalits, there is a strong case to be made that in later years he failed to offer a similar friendship in response to the grievances of secular Muslims, such as Jinnah arguably was well into the 1930s (for a somewhat tendentious but still suggestive case to this effect, see Torri, 2022). But that would be to miss the point of this essay, which seeks to bring out the aspirational dimensions of Gandhi’s politicalness.

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14. For a preliminary discussion of the parallax relation between Gandhi and Ambedkar, see Skaria (2022).

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