Policies for Ethnic Communities-Assimilation in India- A Gandhian Perspective (original) (raw)
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2017
FD: Gandhi understood that self-interest, whether in its individual or collective form, represents the basic category of liberal politics. He also realised that it is not something given to us by nature but has to be set in place through considerable effort. Since interest conceived as ownership was tied to the regime of private property, however, it could only have a marginal existence in a place like India, where property and so ownership had not yet come to define all social relations. This meant that Indian social relations were often marked by modes of behaviour and practice, both violent and non-violent, that could not be accommodated within the logic of interest. Instead of trying to eliminate these altogether, which he thought an impossible task, Gandhi wanted to purify and expand them as forms of disinterest and altruism that deployed sacrifice in the cause of non-violence. He argued that all societies were in fact founded upon such sacrificial or disinterested relations, i...
International Journal of Gandhi Studies, 2011
The question I wish to address here is whether and to what extent Mahatma K. Gandhi's theory of nonviolence can serve as the basis of a public philosophy-specifically, a standard of public argumentation and discourse surrounding competing truth-claims-in multicultural democracies. By competing truth-claims, I refer to the problem of radically different "truths" that often confront each other in the public realm in these societies; truths that are based, we might say, on metaphysical, religious, moral, or spiritual beliefs about the nature of human beings and of the universe and of the human good. The belief in these truths, as we know, intervenes frequently in public life, and these truths often collide with one another in multicultural societies where different members of the polity live by different sorts of moral and metaphysical truths. European nations, for instance, are struggling with the conflicting truthclaims that have appeared on the national agenda by increasing numbers of immigrants, whether it is the issue of veiling among young Muslim women in France or patriarchal family practices that conflict with the values of sex equality in Scandinavia. In the United States, deep-seated disagreements over issues like abortion or euthanasia continue to bubble despite a long-held and uneasy legal truce on many such matters. Political theorists have struggled to confront this problem through a variety of conceptual lenses. Debates pertaining to the politics of multiculturalism, toleration, or recognition have all been concerned with the question of pluralism as one of the most urgent facts of political life, in need of both theoretical and practical illumination. 1 I want to ask the question: Does Gandhi's political theory offer us some way in which we can understand Gandhi's Civic Ahimsa • 3 dilemmas beyond their own time and place by causing us to rethink our favorite assumptions and reimagine the political universe through new lenses of vision.
(ed.) Gandhi and the Contemporary World (London:Routledge 2020),Foreword by Bhikhu Parekh)
London: Routledge, 2020
‘Mahatma Gandhi has made a lasting contribution to political philosophy and this requires that succeeding generations of scholars interpret that contribution in ways that meet the needs of the changing times and intellectual trends. Gandhi and the Contemporary World meets this requirement very admirably: it presents Gandhi in a critical, lively and timely fashion. Enjoy this excellent addition to Gandhi literature’. Anthony J. Parel, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Calgary, Canada ‘
(ed.) Gandhi and the Contemporary World (Routledge : London ,2020)
Routledge:London , 2020
‘Mahatma Gandhi has made a lasting contribution to political philosophy and this requires that succeeding generations of scholars interpret that contribution in ways that meet the needs of the changing times and intellectual trends. Gandhi and the Contemporary World meets this requirement very admirably: it presents Gandhi in a critical, lively and timely fashion. Enjoy this excellent addition to Gandhi literature’. Anthony J. Parel, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Calgary, Canada ‘This riveting collection of essays included in the volume throws valuable light on Mahatma Gandhi’s activist political philosophy and on some of its legacies today.Comprehensively discussed and examined are his ideas of truth and non-violence in their bearing on his conception of satyagraha and on his approach to the postcolonial Indian nation’. Thomas Pantham, former Professor at M S University of Baroda, Baroda, India