THE SMALLEST ARMY IMAGINABLE: GANDHI’S CONSTITUTIONAL PROPOSAL FOR INDIA AND JAPAN’S PEACE CONSTITUTION (PART 2)

COMMENTARY ARCHIVES, 21 Jan 2010

C. Douglas Lummis – Japan Focus, The Asia-Pacific Journal

Gandhi and the Art of the Possible

I wrote above that it is strange that while plans for ideal polities such as those of More, Morris, and others are well known and still in print in many editions, Gandhi’s proposal is out of print and virtually unknown outside of India. There are many possible reasons for this. Gandhi’s comments on the subject are cursory, and even Agarwal’s book lacks the meticulous detail of the other utopians, nor is it written in the form of an entertaining novel as are Utopia or News from Nowhere. There may, however, be another reason. More wrote without the slightest inkling of a hope that the plan of Utopia could be realized in the England of his day, and in his political life, despite having extraordinary skills as a politician, made no effort in that direction. Morris’ novel is placed a millennium in the future, and ends in a deep note of sadness when the protagonist is returned to the (19th Century) present. Fourier’s phalanstere is grounded in crank science. We don’t think of these models as something that might come into being now or might have come into being then. Today the works of these and other utopian writers are read for their theoretical interest, which means that there is no particular reason to go out of one’s way to dismiss them as "unrealistic": they are non-threatening.

Gandhi, on the other hand, seriously believed that his federation of Panchayat republics was a real possibility for the subcontinent of India if the leaders of The Congress could only gather the political will to make it so, and was deeply disappointed when they did not. It was never his intention to write a utopian proposal "of theoretical interest", but to propose a working constitution for India. Thus his plan did not presuppose some radical transformation in human nature, or massive leap in consciousness to a level never before known in history. Rather it was rooted in the reality of the historic Indian village. (Here Gandhi was influenced by Henry Sumner Maine’s Village Communities in the East and West (25), which book was in turn influenced by Maine’s many years living in India) As such, it probably would have entailed far less change in consciousness and custom than did the founding of the Indian State.

Moreover, the puzzle that plagues all utopian proposals — by what agency of change could such a thing ever be brought about? — had in this case been answered. The agency would be Gandhi himself, or more accurately, the Gandhi Phenomenon: Gandhi and his supporters in The Congress and in the public. For it had already been proved to the world many times over that, for reasons no one has ever been able fully to explain, this combination of The Congress of India with Gandhi at its head had the power to transform manifest impossibilities into possibilities, and then into accomplished facts. For Gandhi, politics as The Art of the Possible took on a different meaning. Under his leadership, phenomena hitherto dismissed as impossible in the political world were brought into being. Again and again, people who mocked his "unrealism" were forced to eat crow. Surely that is why his constitutional proposal inspires a feeling of unease that other utopian proposals do not. For while it is difficult to imagine his constitution being realized in India today (except in a few scattered ashrams), it was a possibility then, or would have been had the leaders of The Congress not deserted Gandhi and opted for an ordinary (violent) state.

But if the founding of the Gandhian Constitution is hardly imaginable now, why does it still make us feel uncomfortable? The very fact that it was a manifest possibility in the recent past upsets an axiom of our political belief: that the (violent) nation state is inevitable and necessary; that it is not to be doubted; that it has no alternative; that the establishment of the state, including the Indian state, was not a human choice, but a Destiny (as in "tryst with . . ."). The Gandhian Constitution forces one to realize that, at that time, it was a choice. It is poignant to think that this shabby, ignored little used book on my desk outlines India’s Road Not Taken.

Hobbesian War, Radical Peace

But enough of speculating about what might have happened; it is time to turn our attention back to what did happen. And what did happen was that the leadership in both The Congress and the Muslim League opted for the modern state structure, resulting directly, as happens so often when the modern state is imposed on a region artificially unified by colonial power, in a demand for partition and horrific communal bloodshed. Gandhi was heartbroken. And when the Congress did accept partition, he began speaking obsessively about his death. "What sin," he asked Patel, "must I have committed that He should have kept me alive to witness these horrors?" (26)

Gandhi had more than one reason to be horrified. For aside from the simple awfulness of the communal violence itself, it also threatened to bring his political dreams to a catastrophic end. Communal violence was rapidly reducing Indian society to a Hobbesian State of Nature, a condition for which, Hobbes had so persuasively argued, state domination is the only solution. Of course communal violence is not, strictly speaking, a War of Each Against All, but it is close enough to pure chaos to make the organized and "legitimate" violence of the police and army look like peace by comparison. And in fact this is how the state did react, sending police and army out to stop the violence with greater violence. Nehru even threatened to bomb Bihar. (27) Faced with the stark fact of communal violence, Gandhi’s talk of a non-violent state began to seem utter fluff.

Seen in this context what Gandhi did next was to launch one of the most extraordinary political actions ever conceived. If the fact of communal violence provided overwhelming justification for the violent state, Gandhi began a one-man campaign to change the fact. Walking from village to village in Noakhali, setting up household in the most riot-torn area of Calcutta, walking again from district to district in rioting Delhi, utterly heedless to the danger to his life at every moment, he poured all the powers of his being into persuading people to stop the killing. And he met with both bitter setbacks and stunning successes. Viceroy Mountbatten, in his note congratulating Gandhi’s "miraculous" success in bringing peace to Calcutta, showed that he partly understood what was at stake, but tried to muddle it by seeing Gandhi as a one-man army: "In the Punjab we have 55 thousand soldiers and large-scale rioting on our hands. In Bengal our forces consist of one man, and there is no rioting. As a serving officer, as well as an administrator, may I be allowed to pay my tribute to the one-man boundary force!" (28)

But Gandhi was no "boundary force", nor was he seeking only to establish peace where the soldiers could not: he was determined to establish a kind of peace that soldiers can never achieve, however successful they may be in stopping overt rioting. In the written pledge that ended his last fast in Delhi, he even insisted that the difference be included as a clause: "We give the assurance that all these things will be done by our personal efforts and not with the help of the police or the military." (29) Thus when he walked from village to village, from district to district, he was struggling to refute the Hobbesian world view not by making arguments against it but by creating facts that contradict it, creating, that is, a peace that did not depend upon the violent state for its enforcement. Of course, such action is subversive, for actually to create such a peace would be to eliminate the need for the violent state. And that was how Gandhi understood it: his attack on the rioting was also aimed at undermining the "necessity" for state military dominance that the rioting seemed to produce. As he put it in Calcutta,

"How nice it looks when soldiers march in step! I am opposed to military power, for it results in killing human beings. There is only one way to vanquish military power, and it is this." (30)

And while he was not able to bring this peace to all of India — without the support of his party, how could he? — his local successes showed that in principle it could be done. Once again, he was transforming impossibilities into possibilities, in this case demonstrating the possibility, even in the most bitterly violent of situations, of establishing a non-Hobbesian peace, what could be called radical peace. At the same time he was founding, village by village, the essence of his Panchayat Raj Constitution. It was while he was in the midst of this activity that he was assassinated.

The Other Constitution

On the morning of January 30, 1948, Acharya Jugal Kishore, then General Secretary of the A.I.C.C. (All-India Congress Committee), was handed a proposal for a new constitution for the Congress, which Gandhi had just completed. According to his secretary, Pyarelal, Gandhi, though exhausted, had stayed up late the night before to get it done. He was behaving as though he almost knew what was coming. It was this same morning, January 30, when he stopped Manubehn from preparing some medicine for the evening, saying, "Who knows, what is going to happen before nightfall, or even whether I shall be alive. If at night I am still alive you can easily prepare some then." (31)

The document was a bombshell, or would have been if Nathuram Godse had not acted to defuse it. Despairing at the sight of what its attachment to the state was doing to his beloved Congress, and despairing of the state’s capacity to reform, Gandhi proposed that the Congress withdraw from the state altogether, and return to the villages.

"Though split into two, India having attained political independence through means devised by the Indian National Congress, the Congress in its present shape and form, i.e., as a propaganda vehicle and parliamentary machine, has outlived its use. India has still to attain social, moral and economic independence in terms of its seven hundred thousand villages, as distinguished from its cities and towns. The struggle for the ascendancy of civil over military power is bound to take place in India’s progress towards its democratic goal. It [the Congress] must be kept out of unhealthy competition with political parties and communal bodies. For these and other reasons, the A.I.C.C. resolves to disband the existing Congress organization and flower into a Lok Sevak Sangh [people’s service organization] under the following rules . . . ." (32)

There follows a set of rules that in effect follows Gandhi’s long-cherished constitutional model, a tiered system with five-person panchayats at the base, elected second-grade leaders over them, and so on, expanded until it covers all of India. Gandhi’s idea seems to have been that if panchayat raj could not be established in place of the state, perhaps it could be established within the state. From that position it could devote itself to "constructive work" — building the concrete economic and social base for autonomy in the villages — and at the same time "struggle for the ascendancy of civil over [state] military power."

Taken as a serious political proposal, which it surely was, the idea is stunning. Imagine what would have happened if it had been carried out as Gandhi conceived it. If the Congress, which at that time was almost synonymous with India’s political class, had vacated the government and gone back to the villages, what a massive shift in power, not laterally but from top to bottom, that would have been. It would have brought about a revolution of a sort never before seen — not the people at the bottom rising up and seizing the state, but the people who have just seized the state, walking away from it and joining the people at the bottom. Such a move would not, of course, be without its dangers — the danger, for example, that the offices vacated by Congress members might be quickly occupied by generals and colonels (Gandhi’s proposal doesn’t say what should be done with the military, except that it should be struggled against). But as a revolutionary model, in which the revolutionary organization seeks to spread itself into every nook and cranny of society while deliberately not seizing the state, it anticipates by four decades (though there are important differences) the notion of the "self-limiting revolution" as practiced in Poland and other East European countries in the 1980s.

It is not likely that many members of the Congress would have found the proposal attractive. But in any case, the question was soon moot. Within hours of the time the proposal was handed to the A.I.C.C. chairman, its author was dead.

Founding and Sacrifice

"Sacrifice: The slaughter of an animal or a person (often including the subsequent consumption of it by fire) as an offering to a God or a deity."

On the morning of the penultimate day of his life, Gandhi was visited by Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv. It was a remarkable last meeting of India’s three great modern assassin victims. Rajiv, then four, began wrapping flowers around Gandhi’s bare ankles and feet, but the old man scolded him and pulled his ear, saying, " You must not do that. One only puts flowers round dead people’s feet." (33) Are children sometimes clairvoyant?

By all accounts, there was something strange about Gandhi’s assassination. There is the fact that even though, a full ten days earlier, the police had arrested one of the conspirators when he exploded a bomb at Gandhi’s prayer meeting and the man had talked, they proceeded with remarkable lethargy, and were somehow unable to track down the others or prevent the assassin from entering the Birla House garden carrying a pistol on January 30. Robert Payne, after detailing the unusual inertia of the police, concluded, "[t]here were people in high places who acted as though they had no business interfering with a conspiracy which must be permitted to take its course," (34) and to describe the phenomenon coined the expression: "permissive assassination". The person in the highest place in the government department most responsible for Gandhi’s safety was Home Minister Sardar Patel, a man who had been one of Gandhi’s most devoted disciples, and who as the "Iron Man" of the new government most sharply disagreed with him. After the assassination Patel was accused of "inefficiency", and his colleague Maulana Azad believed that it was this that caused his heart attack two months later, which eventually led to his death. (35)

It is not my purpose here to go through all the evidence attesting to the strangeness of the assassination; that has been done elsewhere. Ashis Nandy, in his elegant essay on the subject, argued that it was Gandhi’s challenge to the deep structure of mainstream Hinduism that made him intolerable to a large part of that community, even including those who, with political correctness, continued to hail him as Mahatma and Father of the Nation. The assassin Nathuram Godse, Nandy says, far from being a marginal outsider, "was a representative of the centre of the society." (36) I have no quarrel with this thesis, but only wish to point out that it does not fully account for the timing of the assassination, namely, the moment at which the State was being newly founded, and while the Constitution was still being debated. If there was a conflict between Gandhi and middle class Hinduism on the issue of that class’s domination of society and on the issue of the role and meaning of womanhood, that must have been an ongoing, if hidden, conflict going back to the 1920s or before. But if there was a conflict between the Father of the Nation and the emerging State, wouldn’t that have provoked a national crisis demanding immediate solution?

It seems that the subject of Gandhi’s death had become a public topic long before the assassination. People were shouting "Death to Gandhi!" or, when he went on his fasts to death, "Let Gandhi Die!" Bricks and stones were thrown at him. But perhaps the person most obsessed with the subject of Gandhi’s death was Gandhi himself. He continuously talked about it, sometimes in a mood of depression ("What sin have I committed that He should have kept me alive to witness all these horrors?"), sometimes enigmatically ("It might be that it would be more valuable to humanity for me to die." (37)), sometimes as the apotheosis of his life (" . . .if someone shot at me and I received his bullet in my bare chest without a sigh and with Rama’s name on my lips, only then should you say that I was a true Mahatma." (38)) But not only that, it was Gandhi who forced his death on the attention of the nation by making it a public issue. When he went on one of his "fasts to death", the last one of which he said was "directed against everybody" (39), no one doubted his perfect readiness to die if his conditions were not met. In a remarkable passage, Rajni Kothari wrote that at the end of his life Gandhi carried out three "heroic acts": his pilgrimage through Noakhali, his "fast to death" against the government in Delhi, "and finally being shot to death by a fanatic Hindu . . . ." (40) Gandhi’s assassination is characterized as one of his acts; it is as if he had flung himself at the bullets, rather than the bullets coming to him.

Consider the situation of those who were directly engaged in the building of the new Indian State. The chief leaders among them were some of Gandhi’s closest associates and disciples. By all indications they genuinely loved him. Though he had no official position in the government they consulted with him at every opportunity and even had what amounted to cabinet meetings in his presence. At the same time he was the most maddening obstacle to their project. Again and again he made proposals and even demands that flew in the face of state-power logic: Give the whole government to the Muslim League; Remove the police and army from rioting areas; Give Pakistan its share of the national treasury, despite the war (this demand enforced by the abovementioned "fast to death"); on and on. Even if they never allowed the word "death" to escape their lips, surely they must have often found themselves wishing he would just . . . go away.

Of the Hindu middle class, Nandy wrote, "If not their conscious minds, their primitive selves were demanding his blood." (41) The expression strikes a chord of recognition, for the most perceptive theoreticians of political founding have regularly observed that the moment of founding seems to elicit a primitive demand for blood — especially intimate blood. For Freud, founding takes place through patricide (the sons murder the father-king), for Hannah Arendt it is fratricide (Cain killed Abel, Romulus killed Remus), for Machiavelli — but let us look at Machiavelli again a bit more closely.

How would Machiavelli have read this story? One can find a clue in the way he understood the founding of the Roman Republic by the insurgent Brutus. As the story is told by Livy, after Brutus drove out the Tarquin monarchy, Brutus’s sons participated in a conspiracy to bring it back. Brutus had them condemned to death, and stood witness to their execution, his face, Livy tells us, showing both his agony as a father and his grim determination as head of state. Machiavelli judges this action as "not only useful, but necessary." (42) He explains,

"Every student of ancient history well knows that any change of government, be it from a republic to a tyranny, or from a tyranny to a republic, must necessarily be followed by some terrible punishment of the enemies of the existing state of things. And whoever makes himself tyrant of a state and does not kill Brutus, or whoever restores liberty to a state and does not immolate his sons, will not maintain himself in his position long." (43)

This is the primal political sacrifice, which Machiavelli took to be essential to the task of foundation. It is not simply a matter of purging the state of its present and potential enemies, though that may be part of it. At a deeper level, it is a matter of driving into the consciousness of the people what the state is: not only a violent institution, which will not hesitate to use violence to establish itself and to protect itself, but also one whose violence is enshrouded in the mystical cloak of sovereignty, which places the state outside the realm of human judgment, and gives its agents the authority to carry out acts that would not be permitted to ordinary human beings. Thus it will not allow itself to be interfered with by ties of friendship, love, or blood: when you act in the name of the state, you must be ready to destroy your friend, your father, your brother, or your son. For Machiavelli it is not enough simply to explain this in words. It must be acted out in bloody ritual sacrifice. And for the purposes of the sacrifice, the more intimate the victim, the better.

It will be objected that Nathuram Godse was no agent of the state, but an assassin acting outside the law, who was tried and executed by the state for his crime. Of course this is true, so for the above thesis to apply to his act it would be necessary to show at least 1) that Godse saw himself as acting in the name of the state, and 2) that there were those among the agents of the state who, if not positively demanding Gandhi’s blood, were troubled enough by his existence that they could not bring themselves to take strong measures against the one who was coming to draw that blood.

As for the first, Godse’s words are clear, and even eloquent. Godse, like all assassins, was depicted by many as a demented fanatic, but if you read his own account of his action and his reasons for it, he appears as intelligent, articulate, clear-headed, patriotic, and courageous. (According to all accounts, before shooting the Father of the Nation he put his hands together in respectful greeting; according to his own account, after the shooting he raised his hand with the pistol into the air and shouted "Police!") Nandy insists that Godse "more than any other person" knew what he was doing. (44) Surely then, we ought to take his words seriously. In his statement in English to the court he said,

"Briefly speaking, I thought to myself and foresaw that I shall be totally ruined and the only thing that I could expect from the people would be nothing but hatred and that I shall have lost all my honour even more valuable than my life, if I were for [sic] kill Gandhiji. But at the same time I felt that the Indian politics in the absence of Gandhiji would surely be practical, able to retaliate, and would be powerful with armed forces. No doubt my own future would be ruined but the nation would be saved . . . ." (45)

Moreover, he said that developments after the assassination had given him "complete satisfaction" that everything had turned out just as he had expected. For example,

"The problem of the State of Hyderabad which had been unnecessarily delayed and postponed has been rightly solved by our Government by the use of armed force after the demise of Gandhiji. The present Government of the remaining India is seen taking the course of practical politics. The Home Member [Patel?] is said to have expressed the view that the nation must be possessed of armies fully equipped with modern arms and fighting machinery. While giving out such expressions he does say that such a step would be in keeping with the ideals of Gandhiji. He may say so for his satisfaction." (46)

With Gandhi gone, the government was now able to arm itself without reserve, and to use its military in a "practical", i.e. realpolitik, manner. Godse was not surprised that government spokesmen now claimed that such actions were "in keeping with the ideals of Gandhiji"; he knew that had Gandhi been still alive, they would never have been able to say such a thing. Must we not admit that, from Godse’s point of view, the assassination was a crashing success?

As for the second point, while there is no decisive evidence (only Godse held a smoking gun), there is plenty of circumstantial evidence, much of which has already been mentioned. Given the terrible double bind they had been in, the impossible contradiction between the demands of raison d’etat and the demands of their beloved leader, who can doubt that, entwined within the turmoil of mixed emotions they must have felt after the murder was done, there was also an overwhelming feeling of release? Now they could get on with the business they had set themselves, build a powerfully armed state, send the troops out against enemies domestic and foreign, transform panchayat raj into "local administration", tell the people that Gandhi would have approved of it all, and build monuments to him, without the old crank interfering at every step.

Machiavelli drew from the story of Brutus what he believed to be a general law of politics: if you wish to found a tyranny you must kill Brutus; if you wish to found a republic you must kill his sons. Had Machiavelli been alive to witness the events in India at the middle of the 20th century, would he not have formulated another, more fundamental, general law? That is,

"If you wish to found a violent state, you must kill Gandhi."

By "violent state" I do not mean here a tyranny, or a militaristic state, or a war-mongering state. I mean a perfectly ordinary state, one that fits Max Weber’s definition as an organization claiming a monopoly of legitimate violence. Remember that Godse was not trying to found some kind of extremist or fundamentalist state; he claimed to be quite satisfied with the Indian state as it evolved under Nehru and Patel after Gandhi’s death, and believed that it was his action that had made it possible. So he for one agreed with the above general law, and acted according to it.

Arguably, Gandhi also would have understood this general law. Certainly as it became increasingly clear what kind of state independent India was going to become, he spoke constantly of his waning influence, describing himself as a "back number" and a "spent bullet", and, as mentioned above, in a variety of ways expressed a wish to die, and even a wish to be killed. He genuinely loved as his own sons the men who were building the new state, he said again and again that he didn’t want to interfere with their work, but being who he was, he could not stop himself. Thus his "fast to death" to force the government to honor its obligation to hand over to Pakistan its share of the national treasury — from the standpoint of state reasoning, utterly absurd behavior in time of war — can be seen as an almost pure manifestation of the above general law: "If you wish to engage in that kind of realpolitik, you must kill me." In this case the government backed down and paid the money. It is said that this was the incident that persuaded Nathuram Godse to carry out the assassination.

But, it might be objected, where else in the world has such a thing happened? More than a hundred new states were founded in the 20th century. Where are the Gandhis who should have been sacrificed in each? How can you propose a general law on the basis of a single instance? The answer is simple enough. While surely every country has had and does have dedicated and good-hearted people struggling for a peaceful world, none of these has had the power — spiritual or political, as you wish — that Gandhi had. So if this general law has manifested itself only in the single instance of India, isn’t that because India was the only country that had a Gandhi to kill?

In what Robert Payne described as an "irony" of history, Gandhi’s funeral was arranged by the Indian military. (47) In his chapter entitled "The Burning", Payne described the arrangements. The body was to be placed on top of a huge weapons carrier, and pulled by two hundred soldiers, sailors and airmen. "Four thousand soldiers, a thousand airmen, a thousand policemen, and a hundred sailors would march in front of or behind the weapons carrier, and in addition there would be a cavalry escort from the bodyguards of the Governor General." Air force planes were sent to fly over and drop roses. (48) Payne wrote, "There were many who wondered whether the government had acted wisely in ordering the Defense Ministry to take command of the funeral." (49) But to Nathuram Godse, the arrangements must have seemed perfect beyond his wildest dreams. While a million people watched, the military carried Mahatma Gandhi off to be burned. Payne says the procession resembled a "triumph". Indeed.

It is said that after the cremation there was "a dramatic cessation of communal riots throughout the country." (50) One wonders, were the rioting elements shamed, or sated?

Postscript

In his play St. Joan, George Bernard Shaw tells the story of another deeply religious, though by no means pacifist, fighter for her country’s national independence, who was burned as a witch after the battle was won. In the Epilogue to the play, Shaw has Joan return in the dream of King Charles, who she had crowned. One by one the other principal players — those who had ranted for her death, those who had reluctantly convicted her, those who had backed off and done nothing to help her — appear, and each confesses that he was mistaken and that Joan is to be revered. Then, using the extra poetic license the dream gives him, Shaw brings in a messenger from the year 1920, who announces that Joan has been canonized. All fall to their knees in worship of Saint Joan. Then Joan, with her typical wit, says,

"Woe unto me when all men praise me! I bid you remember that I am a saint, and saints can work miracles. And now tell me: shall I rise from the dead, and come back to you a living woman?" (51)

The embarrassed worshippers all rise to their feet and, mumbling excuses, one by one slink off the stage.

NOTES:

(1) I wish to thank the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies for granting me the position of Rajni Kothari Chair in Democracy for 2004-5, during which this paper was written. In particular I wish to thank Centre Director Suresh Sharma for his many kindnesses. I am of course indebted to the entire faculty of the Center for encouragement and instruction in matters concerning Gandhi and Indian politics. Prof. Ashis Nandy of the Centre, Prof. R. Jeffery Lustig of California State University at Sacramento, and historian Frank Bardacke all read an earlier draft of this paper and offered valuable comments. Prof. Meeta Nath gave me very helpful assistance in identifying and locating resources. But if you don’t like what you read here, don’t blame them.

(2) The Hindustani Times, 5 Sept., 1931. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Electronic Book version, New Delhi: Publications Division, v. 53, p. 312. In citations below, the Collected Works will be referred to as CW.

(3) The countries are, Costa Rica, Dominica, Kiribati, Liechtenstein, Mauritius, Maldives, Monaco, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, San Marino, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Solomon Islands, and Panama.

(4) Koseki Shoichi, The Birth of Japan’s Postwar Constitution, Ray A. Moore, tr. Westview, 1997, p. 201.

(5) Max Weber, "Politics as a Vocation", in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, tr. and ed., From Max Weber, New York: Galaxy, 1946, p. 78.

(6) R.J. Rummel, Death by Government, Transaction, 1997, p. 14.

(7) Ibid.

(8) Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince and The Discourses, Max Lerner, intro., New York: The Modern Library, 1940, p. 171.

(9) Gene Sharp cites examples of non-violent resistance (not always successful) against Nazi domination in Holland, Norway, Denmark, Bulgaria, Italy and France. Gene Sharp, Civilian-Based Defense; A Post-Military Weapons System, Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1990, p.9.

(10) Young India, 8 Nov., 1920; CW, v. 21, p. 133.

(11) Speech broadcast on All India Radio. CW vol. 98, p. 113

(12) Speech at a prayer meeting, 27 Sept., 1947. CW, v. 97. p. 5.

(13) Thomas More, Utopia, New York: Everyman, (1910) 1992.

(14) His actual words are that he would be taken as a spy or a traitor, for which the punishment, of course, would be death.

(15) George Orwell, "Reflections on Gandhi", in Orwell, A Collection of Essays, San Diego: Harvest, 1981, p. 182.

(16) Speech at Prayer Meeting, 4 October, 1947. CW, v. 97, pp. 36-7.

(17) See note (11) above.

(18) Shriman Narayan Agarwal, Gandhian Constitution for Free India, forward by Mahatma Gandhi, Allahbad: Kitabistan Press, 1946.

(19) Harijan, 21 June, 1946. CW vol. 91, p. 325.

(20) Bikhu Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy, Notre Dame, Indiana: U. of Notre Dame Press, 1989, p. 114, italics added.

(21) Op. cit. Agarwal, p. 85, italics in original.

(22) Teodor Shanin, ed., Late Marx and the Russian Road, New York: Monthly Review Press. 1983.

(23) Shriman Narayan Agarwal, The Gandhian Plan of Economic Development for India, Bombay, Padma Publications, 1945 (?).

(24) The Hindustani Times, 17 Oct., 1935; CW, v. 65, p. 318.

(25) Henry Sumner Maine, Village-communities in the East and West; six lectures delivered at Oxford to which are added other lectures, addresses and essays by Sir Henry Sumner Maine. H: Holt, 1889. Gandhi acknowledged his debt to Maine: "Maine has said that India was a congeries of village republics. The towns were then subservient to the villages. They were emporia for the surplus village products and beautiful manufactures. This is the skeleton of my picture to serve as a pattern for Independent India." "Speech at Meeting of Deccan Princes", The Hindu, 1 Aug., 1946. CW v. 85, p. 79.

(26) Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase, v. 10, Part II, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1958, p. 457. CW, v. 97, p. 475.

(27) Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, New York: Harper, 1950, p. 447.

(28) Op. cit. Pyarelal, p. 382.

(29) Op. cit. Payne, p. 565.

(30) Manubehn Gandhi, The Miracle of Calcutta, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1951, p. 50.

(31) Op. cit. Pyaralel, p. 767.

(32) Harijan, 15 Feb., 1948. CW vol. 98, pp. 333-5.

(33) Krishna Nehru Huthseeing, We Nehrus; New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1967, p. 222. Quoted in op. cit. Payne, p. 577.

(34) Op. cit. Payne, p. 630.

(35) Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, India Wins Freedom; An Autobiographical Narrative, Bombay: Orient Longmans, 1959, p. 225.

(36) Ashis Nandy, "Final Encounter; The Politics of the Assassination of Gandhi", in Nandy, Exiled at Home, Oxford, 1988, p. 76

(37) Vincent Sheean, Lead, Kindly Light, New York: Random House, 1949, p. 183, quoted in op. cit. Payne, p. 576.

(38) Manubehn Gandhi, Last Glimpses of Bapu, Delhi: Agarwala, 1962, p. 297-8.

(39) Ibid. p. 144.

(40) Rajni Kothari, Politics in India, New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1970, p. 75.

(41) Op. cit. Nandy, p. 91.

(42) Op. cit. Machiavelli, p. 405.

(43) Ibid.

(44) Op. cit. Nandy, p. 87.

(45) Nathuram Godse, May it Please Your Honour, Delhi: Surya Bharti Prakashan, 1987, pp 154-5.

(46) Ibid. pp. 155-6.

(47) Op. cit. Payne, p. 593.

(48) Ibid. p. 594.

(49) Ibid. p. 597.

(50) Op. cit. Kothari, p. 75.

(51) Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan; A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue, Penguin, 2003, p. 163.

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This article is a revised version of an article that appeared in Alternatives, 31 (2006).

C. Douglas Lummis, a former US Marine stationed on Okinawa, is the author of Radical Democracy and other books in Japanese and English. A Japan Focus associate, he formerly taught at Tsuda College.

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