Mantena, Karuna. "On Gandhi's Critique of the State: Sources, Contexts, Conjectures". Modern Intellectual History, Vol.9, No.3 (2012): 535-563.

Mantena, Karuna. "On Gandhi's Critique of the State: Sources, Contexts, Conjectures". Modern Intellectual History, Vol.9, No.3 (2012): 535-563.

• Almost immediately after attaining independence from the British Empire, Indian nationalists abandoned Gandhi's vision for a new non-violent, anti-statist form of governance. Instead, Indian Congress purposefully ignored the Gandhian concept of federalism based on autarkic villages in favor constructing a strong, centralized, and intensely militarized Indian state. Gandhi felt extremely betrayed by these actions, as he felt that the Congress Party had only co-opted his satyagraha for their own aims, while abandoning the hope of 'true swaraj' it was intended to create (536).
• Rather than the conception of the coercive Indian state as epitomized by Indira Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi envisioned a 'panchayat raj', a non-hierarchical, decentralized policy based on federated associations of villages and neighborhoods (536).
• "The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence -- quoted from M. K. Gandhi" (535).
• The focal point for Indian anti-statism was the traditional autonomous village structure, seen to represent a counterpoint to the modern state. The self-contained economic system and rigid social structures of Indian village life were seen to constitute a 'social' which could exist independent of state mechanisms by both Indian nationalists and British colonialists, like Henry Sumner Maine (537).
• "The village stood at the conceptual core of Gandhian politics in three fundamental ways: as the institutional unit of political autonomy, the heart of a future decentralized, nonviolent polity; as a model of swaraj, the moral ideal of self-rule isomorphic with individual swaraj; and, finally, as the privileged site for constructive satyagraha, the exemplary mode of Gandhian political action" (540).
• Gandhi seems to have fully accepted the common imperial belief, made famous by Sir Henry Maine, that the Indian village represented a premodern community which has both 'stuck' in time and economically and socially self-contained. To Gandhi, these represented both the 'original' composition of India and an idealized model for an India under true swaraj (540).
• The key difference between the views of the 'village republics' of Gandhi and Mukerjee from the imperialists is that whereas colonialists saw the 'apolitical' and 'ahistorical' village as a sign of stability and stagnation, Gandhi views the idealized village as a symbol of Indian resilience to foreign methods of rural and a caretaker of 'authentic' Indian life (541).
• British colonial administration was convinced, from the mid-1800s onwards, that Indian rural society has heavily based on these autonomous village groups, each imagined with the autonomy of an independent republic, which remain unchanged and unaffected by both politics and historical change. This unchanging nature of the countryside was meant to explain the relative stability of Indian politics, as it was argued that for people in the 'village republics' nothing outside mattered (541).
• Gandhi reused and repurposed these colonialist conceptions, especially those of Sir Henry Maine, for his own arguments about 'authentic' India. Whereas the original colonial documents had only described Indian village life in terms of 'pre-modernity', Gandhi viewed these false images of the immovable village as an alternative and authentically Indian form of governance opposed to the modern Western nation-state (542).
• Indian nationalists, including Gandhi, looked to imperial and colonialist works to justify their claims about Indian history and Indian politics. For example, Gandhi and other Republicans used the example of supposed democracy in the 'village republics' to show that India had a democratic and republican tradition stretching back to time immemorial (542-543).
• Sir Henry Maine, in 1876 his text Village-Communities in the East and West, claims that kinship groups are the primary system of social and political organization in India. This allows for Indian politics to both be deemed 'unpolitical' or only social due to its conception as an offshoot of natural family structures, and also enables the imperialist understanding of Indian life by legitimating the collection of segmentary lineage systems and demarcating strict caste and tribal boundaries as ways of understanding Indian politics (543).
• Sir Henry Maine and other colonialists took these kinship groups and castes to be the appropriate systems for interacting with Indian subjects. Since they viewed these groups as natural, they created systems of rule which placed castes and tribes as 'natural' intermediaries between the imperial state and the individual Indians (544).
• Gandhi and Mukerjee adopted these same perceptions of kinship groups and castes as the fundamental building blocks of Indian political life. As elsewhere, the two nationalists viewed these systems not as expressions of Indian pre-modernity, but as authentic and beneficial systems of rule which insulated Indians from the harmful effects of modern statehood (544). 
• All three thinkers -- Sir Henry Maine, Gandhi, and Mukerjee -- considered the British imperial state to have an erosive effect on traditional institutions and kinship structures at the village level because its modern systems of law and authority undermined 'traditional' systems of social authority within the village. Sir Henry Maine saw this as progress, whereas Gandhi and Mukerjee saw it as a disaster which needed to be averted (545). 
• The author locates many of Gandhi's critiques of the state within the intellectual and political tradition of pluralism. In the UK, pluralists such as Laski, Cole, and Figgis, rejected key elements of state sovereignty in favour of radical forms of direct democracy. The pluralists argued that during a period when the ability of states to regulate and mobilize power was rapidly increasing, allowing for total state control was dangerous. To prevent this, they argued for the transition from a centralized state to a federal state with functions subordinated to voluntary organizations like churches and unions, who would allow for increased democratic control and consensual rule (545-547).
• These pluralists were fairly radical in their promotion of non-state voluntary groups as a form of sovereignty, by considering structures like churches and labour unions as organization which could potentially replace the state. On these grounds, the pluralists rejected the state's moral right to impose expansive authority, arguing that states only had powers so far as people voluntarily complied (548).
• The works of the British pluralists had a great effect on the development of the swadeshi movement in India, as Mukerjee combined the pluralist notions of decentralization with ideas of village life influenced by Sir Henry Maine. Mukerjee thus thought of the village and the caste system as core components of Indian life, which could be independent and serve to replace state mechanisms (550). Mukerjee believed that Western pluralism still failed to address the root causes of atomization in Western society by keeping the focus on interest groups, whereas he believed the Indian village could serve as a truly autonomous system of control (552).
• Mukerjee also built off of the system of comparative politics explored by British pluralists and Sir Henry Maine, making a comparison between state structures in the West and East. According to Mukerjee, the preexisting village councils and caste guilds had always existed and represented an authentic system of decentralized governance without an equal in the West, which had long ago destroyed its trade guild structures (554).
• Gandhi roundly critiqued the Indian nationalists for their attempt to keep the structures of English rule without the English. Although he supported the decolonization of India, Gandhi did not equate this with true swaraj, which instead required a rejection of imperial forms of governance and their replacement with 'authentically' Indian forms, such as federations of 'village republics' (552-553).
• Both Mukerjee and Gandhi believed that the correct and 'authentic' form of governance for an independent India should be a confederation of villages. Whereas Mukerjee stressed the importance of caste systems as a form of control in the villages and thus advocated a corporatist model of federative statehood, Gandhi was more focused on the capacity of the village to function independently, and thus be an autarkic basis for the implementation of swaraj without the capacity to coerce or be coerced (553).
• According to Mukerjee, although the caste system and the village were the building blocks of Indian society, they possessed political agency and could organize novel systems of governance through their combination, dissolution, and recombination. Mukerjee believed that it in was the capacity of these village groups to come together into corporatist federations that Eastern potential lay (555). 
• Gandhi's model for an independent India focused on promoting the role of the self-sufficient village as the basic unit for governance, without any higher authority. Gandhi stressed the importance of these village republics being autarkic to promote their independence and allow for their complete economic, social, judicial, and executive authority. Although he did imagine higher levels of administration, Gandhi insisted that they neither be directly elected, nor exercise any coercive power over affairs within the village republics; they simply were a voluntary organizational tool (556). 
• Gandhi frequently contrasted his version of ideal village democracy with what he saw as the corruption and inefficiency of modern parliamentary democracy. He believed that modern democracy has majoritarian, coercive, and dominated by elite interests, things which could be avoided in the powerless and intensely personal system of village democracy (557).
• The divide between Mukerjee and Gandhi over the role of the individual in a decentralized federal state is also reflected within the Western pluralists. A central debate has always existed about whether the fundamental unit of radical pluralism should be the individual or the natural society. Mukerjee advocates for the absorption of the individual within caste and village, whereas Gandhi holds that the individuals must be the practitioner of swaraj and thus membership in all organizations, including those of village and caste, must be voluntary and non-coercive (558).
• In its advocacy of radical individualism, Gandhi's philosophy is similar to forms of anarchism. Gandhi's conception of the individual, however, still includes a form of societal order and governance, simply a form of governance which is entirely voluntary and beneficial because it is based off of individuals who have been enlightened by swaraj (559).
• Gandhi's advocacy of an individualist basis of pluralism rather than societal organization was based on a deep pessimism about human nature not shared by Mukerjee. Gandhi believed that humans would be incapable of not dominating one another if given power within social groups such as unions, leading to the same types of coercive systems of governance at lower levels (563).
• Gandhi's most central critique of the modern state was that the basis of its systems of rule was violent and coercive. Even when the state took on humanitarian projects, it destroyed individuality and employed coercive form. The nature of the centralized state was hierarchical, and therefore inherently dependent on force and violence for rule (559).
•  The connection between law and force in particular was troubling to Gandhi, who believed that law should be able to rule on its legitimacy alone. This was one of his reasons for promoting satyagraha, because through mass demonstration it demonstrated when people did not fear the use of force, an illegitmate law was not followed by large numbers of people (560).
• "Swaraj would become a form of self-rule that reimagined the logic of rule as radically nonhierarchical, and satyagraha a principle of action that reimagined the logic of action as radically self-limiting" (560).
• All of the forms of action and authority conceived by Gandhi focused on the independence of the individual and his voluntary participation in these activities. Because Gandhi believed the natural sociability of man, as well as the humility created through meditation and swaraj, would inculcate voluntary cooperation, this system of voluntary interdependence could replace the coercive systems of modern governance (562).