The political guru

Abstract

In one of his attempts to characterize Indian politics, Ashis Nandy suggests that: ‘the uniqueness of the Indian concept of power lay in its strong “private” connotations. The most respected form of power was power over self – self-control – particularly regulation of one’s instinctual and materialistic self.’ Nandy adds in the same spirit: ‘There is always some pressure on the rulers to indulge in the language of conspicuous asceticism and self-sacrifice, and to vend even the most trivial politics as part of a grand moral design – as if power over one’s own self, the moral self dominating the self-seeking instinctual self – legitimises one’s political power’ ( Nandy: 1980 , pp. 50–51). Here Nandy makes indirect reference to the notion of swaraj , which in India designates an individual’s spiritual control of himself but also, in the political vocabulary of the freedom movement, the control of one’s national destiny, that is to say, independence. This principle was at the heart of the Gandhian approach, as the Mahatma (the ‘great soul’) sought at the same time both spiritual accomplishment and freedom from the British yoke – from which stemmed his political ambivalence, torn as he was between a personal quest and a political agenda, as if self-control were the precondition of successful political mobilization. 1

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