Does Gandhism still exist in India? An existential and modern case study

Abstract

This paper looks critically at the political, social, and economic path in modern India by the analytical approach of the Gandhian philosophy. Based on the major Gandhian concepts of ahimsa (non-violence), satya (truth), swaraj (self-rule), decentralization, trusteeship, and communal harmony, the study analyzes how the current governance, communal relations, economic policies, and civil society activities are in and out of the normative framework of Gandhi. The study employs a qualitative interpretive research design and examines secondary data on the topic namely scholarly literature, human-rights reports, inequality databases, and policy documents. The results demonstrate some major deviations of the Gandhian ethics: growing political centralization, enhancing surveillance, diminishing civil space, growing communal polarization, and increasing economic inequality. These tendencies are a contradiction with the visions of Gandhi about the moral government, pluralism, decentralized government, and equal economic life. Meanwhile, the paper also finds some continuity in the areas of the civil society, where the grassroots movements still use the non-violent and participatory approaches which are driven by the Gandhian ideas. These developments are placed in the context of more general issues of democratic backsliding, majoritarian nationalism, and socio-economic change. In general, the study shows that although the Gandhian philosophy continues to be an essential normative and analytical paradigm that can be applied to analyze the democratic health of India, existing structural realities restrict its scope, and thus new ethical and institutional changes are necessary.