In democracy’s journey to future, Gandhi is the wise guide and co-traveller

Mahatma Gandhi's political writings cannot be reduced only to the technique of non-violent protest. In Hind Swaraj (1909), the only book he never revised, edited or updated, Gandhi set out his sharpest critique of the modern state. He called himself a philosophical anarchist. He distrusted the concentration of power in a centralised state. He preferred a decentralised order built on village self-rule, or Swaraj. This puts Gandhi in unusual intellectual company. Gandhism and Marxism, despite using opposite means, share one long-term goal: a stateless society. Gandhi reached this goal through non-violence and trusteeship, not class struggle or the abolition of private property. That is where the two philosophies permanently diverge.

This anarchist streak did not stop Gandhi from building institutions. Ashrams, constructive-work organisations and disciplined networks of satyagrahis were all his creations. His weekly journal, Young India, became the main vehicle through which he argued that institutions must earn their legitimacy, not assume it. In a 1925 article, he wrote that he remained loyal to an institution only so long as it helped his own growth and the growth of the nation. The moment it stopped doing so, disloyalty became a duty. This is the constructive, institution-building side of Gandhi that is often overlooked when he is remembered only as a symbol of protest.