Gandhi's political thought
Political Science - Theory and Thoughts · Unit III · Topic 12 of 17 · 6 min read
On this page
Cases checked to exist. Read the judgment before quoting a holding.
Every case cited here has been checked to exist — the citation resolves and names the right parties. The propositions attributed to each case have not been verified line by line against the judgment. Case names link through to the full judgment: read it before quoting a holding in an examination answer, and never carry a proposition from notes into court on trust.
1. Background and influences
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948) trained as a barrister in London, practised in South Africa from 1893 to 1914, where he first developed satyagraha against racial laws, and led the Indian national movement from 1919. He was not a systematic theorist; his ideas come from practice and from his writings, chiefly Hind Swaraj (1909), his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth, and his journals Young India and Harijan.
Influences: the Bhagavad Gita (action without attachment), Jainism and Buddhism (ahimsa), the Sermon on the Mount, Tolstoy (The Kingdom of God is Within You), Thoreau (Civil Disobedience), and Ruskin (Unto This Last, which Gandhi paraphrased in Gujarati as Sarvodaya).
2. Truth and non-violence
- Satya (truth): Gandhi moved from “God is Truth” to “Truth is God”. Truth is the goal of life, and politics is one field for its pursuit. He said that those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means: spiritualisation of politics.
- Ahimsa (non-violence): not only refraining from physical harm, but absence of ill-will towards anyone, including the opponent. It is the means to truth and is a weapon of the brave, not of the weak. Where the only choice was between cowardice and violence, he said he would advise violence; but non-violence is infinitely superior to both.
3. Ends and means
For Gandhi means and ends are inseparable: “the means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree” (Hind Swaraj). Impure means cannot produce a good end. This is the direct opposite of Machiavelli’s view that the end justifies the means, and of the Marxist acceptance of violent revolution.
4. Satyagraha
Literally “holding fast to truth” or truth-force. It is the method of resisting injustice by voluntarily accepting suffering, not by inflicting it, so as to convert the opponent rather than defeat him. The satyagrahi must be truthful, non-violent, fearless, disciplined and free of hatred.
Techniques:
- Negotiation and arbitration, always tried first.
- Non-cooperation: withdrawal of cooperation from an unjust system (boycott of foreign cloth, of government schools, courts and titles; the Non-Cooperation Movement, 1920–22).
- Civil disobedience: open, deliberate, non-violent breach of unjust laws, with acceptance of the penalty (the Salt March to Dandi, 1930; the Civil Disobedience Movement, 1930–34).
- Fasting: to purify oneself and to appeal to the conscience of the opponent, not to coerce.
- Hartal, picketing, strikes and hijrat (voluntary migration).
Satyagraha differs from passive resistance: passive resistance is the weapon of the weak, may use violence when possible and seeks to embarrass the opponent; satyagraha is the weapon of the strong, excludes violence absolutely and seeks to convert the opponent.
5. The State
Gandhi was a philosophical anarchist. The State represents violence in a concentrated and organised form; the individual has a soul, but the State is a soulless machine. He therefore wanted the least possible State: “that government is best which governs the least” (the phrase he adopted from Thoreau). His ideal was a stateless, non-violent democracy of self-regulating individuals. As a practical compromise he accepted a predominantly non-violent State, with a police force acting as reformers and servants of the people rather than as instruments of force.
6. Swaraj and decentralisation
- Swaraj: not only political independence from Britain but self-rule in the moral sense, the rule of each person over himself. Swaraj for the masses meant freedom from hunger, untouchability and exploitation.
- Gram swaraj: every village a self-sufficient republic managing its own affairs through an elected panchayat, with society arranged as “ever-widening, never-ascending circles”, not a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom.
- Economic decentralisation: cottage and village industries, khadi and the charkha, bread labour (everyone should do some physical work), and suspicion of large-scale machinery that displaces labour and concentrates wealth.
7. Sarvodaya and trusteeship
- Sarvodaya, the welfare of all, as against the utilitarian “greatest good of the greatest number”. From Ruskin he took three ideas: the good of the individual is contained in the good of all; a lawyer’s work has the same value as a barber’s; and the life of labour is the life worth living. Vinoba Bhave carried the movement forward after Gandhi, with the Bhoodan (land-gift) movement from 1951.
- Trusteeship: the rich should hold their wealth as trustees for society, keeping only what they need. Change is to come by persuasion and change of heart, not by expropriation. If persuasion fails, non-violent non-cooperation may be used. This was Gandhi’s alternative to both capitalism and Marxist class war.
8. Other ideas
- Rights and duties: rights flow from duties well performed; “the true source of rights is duty”.
- Equality and social reform: abolition of untouchability (he called the untouchables Harijans), Hindu–Muslim unity, uplift of women, basic education (Nai Talim, 1937).
- Democracy: true democracy is one in which the weakest has the same opportunity as the strongest, and it cannot be worked by violence.
- Internationalism: nationalism without hatred of other nations.
9. Gandhi and the Constitution
Several Directive Principles are called Gandhian: Article 40 (organisation of village panchayats), Article 43 (promotion of cottage industries), Article 46 (promotion of the interests of weaker sections), Article 47 (prohibition of intoxicating drinks), and Article 48 (prohibition of the slaughter of cows and calves). Article 17 abolished untouchability. The Seventy-third Amendment, 1992, gave constitutional status to panchayats (Part IX), carrying forward the idea of gram swaraj.
10. Assessment
Criticism: idealistic and impractical for a modern industrial State facing external threats; a stateless society is utopian; hostility to machinery runs against economic development; trusteeship depends on the goodwill of the rich; and religious language in politics can be misread. Value: satyagraha proved effective in mass movements and was adopted by Martin Luther King Jr. in the American civil rights movement and by Nelson Mandela’s generation in South Africa; his emphasis on decentralisation, simple living and the moral basis of politics remains relevant to debates on sustainability and local democracy.
How this is examined
January 2026 (80-mark): “Explain the political ideas of Mahathma Gandhi” (10 marks). June 2025: “Discuss the Gandhiji’s Political Thought” (10 marks). April 2023: short note on Gandhiji’s political thought (6 marks). August 2024: “Non-cooperation and civil disobedience” as a 6-mark note: use section 4, with the two movements and their dates.
Now try the real questions: Political Science - Theory and Thoughts past question papers.