Gandhi and Gen Z

GANDHI BELIEVED IN an intricate connection between body politic and the corporeal body. His idea of swaraj was not simply about political freedom and rights but producing truly sovereign selves that claimed autonomy and dignity through the principle of co-responsibility. As individuals and collective, we need to take responsibility for injustice and uncivility, even if we are not directly responsible for the acts of exclusion and discrimination. It is not in directly intervening, blaming and criticizing that one fulfills one’s responsibility but in becoming an exemplar that sets an example for others to follow. One inspires others in praxis and not in making propositional claims. It is in one’s preparedness for suffering and facing and owning the responsibility for the consequences that one generates a moral experience. If you break the law, you should also court arrest. A satyagrahi has to feel and experience, not in merely changing one’s consciousness and ideology but in changing one’s relation with the body politic. 

Gandhi was deeply involved in trying to stall the growing communal violence in Noah Khali in Bengal. It was also the same time that he was carrying out his experiments in Bramhacharya. Bramhacharya here is not merely about celibacy but about supreme self-restraint that generates soul force, which travels and creates a moral force on others. It is an intangible psychic energy that can be felt but cannot be seen. Similar is Gandhi’s invocation of fasting. Fasting is an ability to convey the purity of one’s intention. It is in creating the vulnerability that one gains power and control. Power is in regulating one’s own self and not in dominating others. Fasting is a way of externalizing one’s conscience. Gandhi said conscience is the only tyrant he is willing to submit himself to. It is through the diktats of conscience one strikes an ethical relation with others, which is what historian Ajay Skaria refers to as an act of ‘surrendering without subordination’. We surrender our ‘self’ in the interests and wellbeing of others but that is not subordination. The best instance to watch this is in friendships. Intimacy demands surrender but not subordination.

It is such deep understanding of Gandhi that is central to his understanding of democracy, sovereignty, personal autonomy and dignity. Democracy survives not just in making good laws and Constitutions but carefully nurturing personal ethics and new forms of sociality. This is not too far from Ambedkar’s understanding that even the best of Constitutions can be ruined if people pursuing the constitutional vision are found wanting. It is in bringing laws and personal conduct in close consonance that democratic spirit thrives.

Who would have thought that the Gandhian spirit in unsaid ways would revisit and come alive at the Jantar Mantar when the Gen Z walked the streets? Gandhian spirit is part of the collective subconscious of the Indian way of living. In the last decade or so, we had assumed that old India and Gandhi were dead. India had become uncivil with a naked display of prejudice, exclusion and discrimination as a means to mobility, and violence against and humiliation of the weak as a legitimate way to assert one’s self. Family Whatsapp groups had become toxic and socially indifferent, neighbourhoods had become battlefields of conflict and aggression, and workplaces had become places of institutionalized uncivility with little scruples. India was sinking into an abyss of self-destruction moving to a point of no return. It was in such a bleak and gloomy context that Gen Z decided to walk the streets of Jantar Mantar reclaiming swaraj as dignity, and swaraj as the innate ability to speak truth to power.