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political vision as “enlightened anarchy” became the official “father” of a state
that has one of the biggest bureaucracy and standing army in the world.
The story of this failure of Gandhian political project is not at all one of betrayal
or corruption. It would be inaccurate to understand it in terms of the Congress
party’s approval of the instruments of state power once they were in control of it.
The leaders of the independent Indian state were completely open about their
great respect for Gandhi (who was the political mentor for most of them), as well
as their disagreement with him over their vision of what is the best path to follow
for an independent Indian nation – and those disagreements were not merely
borne out of compromising principles for the sake of power.
Instead, I would like to argue in this paper, that to appreciate the fate of the
Gandhian project, one must look at two significant aspects of Gandhi’s thought.
First, is the scope of his critique. Post-colonial national movements are often
understood within the logic of legitimacy. That is, the colonial state is illegitimate
since the people ruled are not represented in it. Gandhi espoused this narrow
particularizing critique of the colonial state for a more fundamental critique of
modern sovereign state structure itself. It was universal in the sense that it could
be applied not just by subjects of colonial states, but of any sovereign state even if
it is “legitimate” in the sense of representation. That is why his critique is not
exhausted by the creation of the sovereign state of India, ruled by the “legitimate”
representatives of the people, as long as it failed to do away with the logic and
institutions of the modern state. In the first part of this paper, I would try to
sketch an outline of this critique, focusing on two of the most significant tenets
(or as I would argue, rationales) of the modern state that is problematic for
Convention