16
Suffering and Love: A Possible Politics of Means
Gandhi’s politics, though necessarily dialogical in nature, is not a theory of
deliberation. The enemy’s mind has to be changed, not merely by reason
22
, but
through one’s own suffering.
Gandhi collapses the distinction— well accepted by most modern western
political theorists since Hobbes— between the personal and the public. Gandhi’s
autobiography, as Susan and Lloyd Rudolph observed, read more like a
confession (those written by Saints) than one of a public figure.
23
In it he writes
agonizingly about his dietary habits or his sexual practices. This is because the
personal was fundamental to what was the political for him. If politics was about
searching for the truth, that truth was not doctrinal to be discovered in an
authoritative text, it was lived. The kind of clothes he wore (Khadi), the kind of
food he ate (Vegetarian, and minimalist), his sexual practice (celibacy) all were a
part of his larger political vision. It was the creation of a new self who would be
able to practice the new politics that he had in mind. Many of these practices
drew heavily on the Indian tradition, thereby aiding in creating a charisma, which
was rooted in the idea of the ascetic in Indian tradition. But it was by no means a
political strategy. As he wrote to Ambedkar,
22
As Gandhi wrote: “The reasoning faculty would raise a thousand issues; only one thing would
save us from these, that is faith.”
23
Loyd I. Rudolph Supra note 15, at 159.
Convention