My experiments with law: Gandhi’s exploration of law’s potential

The Gandhian archive reveals not a dismissal of the law, but rather a creative and passionate engagement with it, writes Arvind Narrain. 

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THE 155th birth anniversary of M.K. Gandhi coincides with the growing salience of his thoughts in the world that we live in. Right from climate change activists to de-growth thinkers, peace activists and animal rights activists, Gandhi has become a patron saint.

I will engage with a question that I think has been insufficiently engaged with, namely what Gandhi means in the contemporary world for human rights lawyers and activists.

Though Gandhi was a lawyer, most people are likely to remember Gandhi's blistering attack in Hind Swaraj on lawyers as those who "advance quarrels, instead of repressing them" and use their profession as means not to "help others out of their miseries, but to enrich themselves".

However, the Gandhian archive reveals not a dismissal of the law, but rather a creative and passionate engagement with it. For Gandhi, there are at least two modes of engaging with law.

Firstly, he engages creatively with the forms of law to counter the narrative of the State by producing an alternative truth. Secondly, by disobeying an unjust law on the basis of his conscience, he articulates that the law can only command obedience if it is linked to justice.

The Champaran Agitation

Both ideas came to the fore in the first agitation Gandhi undertook on his return to India. The South Africa experience trained him in the arts of agitation, research, fact-finding as well as— most famously— civil disobedience.

He applied this learning in Champaran in 1917. In Champaran, the ryots were oppressed by the tinkathia system, where they were forced to cultivate indigo on a third of their land and were also subject to a range of other levies by the owners of the indigo factories.