Karuna Mantena's surreal Gandhian realism

 Karuna Mantena, a Professor of Poli Sci at Columbia, has sought to depict Mahatma Gandhi as a political 'realist'. 

This seems strange. The Internet Encyclopedia defines Political Realism as ' a theory of political philosophy that attempts to explain, model, and prescribe political relations. It takes as its assumption that power is (or ought to be) the primary end of political action, whether in the domestic or international arena. In the domestic arena, the theory asserts that politicians do, or should, strive to maximize their power, whilst on the international stage, nation states are seen as the primary agents that maximize, or ought to maximize, their power. The theory is therefore to be examined as either a prescription of what ought to be the case, that is, nations and politicians ought to pursue power or their own interests, or as a description of the ruling state of affairs-that nations and politicians only pursue (and perhaps only can pursue) power or self-interest.'

In what sense could Gandhi be called a political realist?

Prof Mantena writes-

Though Gandhi is often taken to be an exemplary moral idealist in politics, this article seeks to demonstrate that Gandhian nonviolence is premised upon a form of political realism, specifically a contextual, consequentialist, and moral-psychological analysis of a political world understood to be marked by inherent tendencies towards conflict, domination, and violence.

If you have a crazy theory about the world and act upon that crazy theory, you are not a realist. You are crazy. Political Realism is premised on the notion that power shapes political reality. Scolding power does not shape reality though it may be part and parcel of some wider set of circumstances which are causing power to slip away from those who currently wield it.  

A crazy person may use 'contextual' or 'consequential' reasoning- e.g. they will explain that wearing a tin-foil hat keeps out negative brainwaves broadcast by Lizard People from Planet X. But this does not mean these nutters are 'realists'. They are simply mad. 

By treating nonviolence as the essential analogue and correlative response to a realist theory of politics,

which is like treating tin-foil hats as the essential analogue and correlative response to negative brainwaves broadcast by shape-shifting lizard people 

one can better register the novelty of satyagraha (nonviolent action)

What novelty? There were plenty of non-violent movements- e.g the General Strike of 1926 in the UK- at that time. The novelty of Gandhi's national satyagrahas in India was that they left the Indians in a weaker position and the diehard Tories in a stronger position.

as a practical orientation in politics as opposed to a moral proposition, ethical stance, or standard of judgment.

I think Gandhi's satyagrahas succeeded in giving him and his acolytes a higher ethical and spiritual position- precisely because they failed. Had they succeeded, people who would have thought Gandhi was a shrewd fellow- rather than a Saint too good for this world. One corollary would have been that all sorts of people would have started satyagrahas against Gandhi. What is sauce for the goose etc. By showing satyagraha was shit, Gandhi got to monopolize that type of nuisance. 

The singularity of satyagraha lay in its self-limiting character,

It was set up to fail. Is that what Karuna means? This makes sense if Gandhi's chief aim was to get the Indians to blow off steam in a way which didn't damage the Raj. However, the same could not be said of the Quit India movement. Thus, the safer judgment is that he was Saintly but stupid. Nothing wrong in that. Good people are good even if they believe silly things. 

as a form of political action which sought to constrain the negative consequences of politics while working towards progressive social and political reform. The politics of nonviolence thereby points towards a transformational realism that need not begin and end in conservatism, moral equivocation, or pure instrumentalism

I suppose a belief in magic could be said to involve 'transformational realism'. But what is the point of saying any such thing? People will think you to be not just a gullible fool but a verbose and psuedo-intellectual gullible fool. 

Mantena is seeking to associate Gandhi with a long literature warning against a cynical 'power for power's sake' Machiavellianism.  The King should be disciplined and live in a chastened manner. In India, this tradition is embodied in 'Niti' literature- e.g. the Arthashastra. The Jains have preserved this well in Gujarat and Gandhi grew up with it. His father himself had been a Dewan and thus knew all about the need for the monarch to practice virtue and abstain from vice and act in a judicious rather than capricious manner. 

Sadly Karena does not mention the literary tradition which influenced Gandhi. Instead she speaks of

lineages of other realisms can also been discerned in Thucydides and Hobbes, and especially in the eighteenth century liberalism of Montesquieu, Hume, Madison, and Burke, thinkers who likewise provide sober assessments of the passions, vices, and enthusiasms that drive political conflict and competition but aim to restrain and moderate rather than extol them

Mantena does not mention the two writers who genuinely influenced Gandhi- Carlyle and Ruskin. He also read Mazzini when that was de rigueur but made little mention of him later on. I think Gandhi saw himself as a Fredrick the Great with a spinning-wheel, not a sword. This was a far cry from the doctrine of the Indian Liberals or Servants of India Society etc. However many stalwarts of that doctrine surrendered to the matchless charisma of the Mahatma. 

In a footnote, Mantena writes

Though Machiavelli is the inevitable touchstone here, Lenin and Schmitt might also be seen as purveyors of this harder-edged political realism.

This is foolish. Lenin was a practical politician who- like Stalin- spent a lot of time talking sense to crazier folk. Schmitt, like Heidegger, was a failed Catholic who wrote highfalutin' nonsense.  

In the latter cases, as well as in the broader range of Marxist realisms, idealist moralism is not only criticized for being ineffective (e.g. the case of utopian socialism) but also ideological and itself a justificatory discourse of and for power (i.e. the case of liberalism), to which a kind of revolutionary and radical Realpolitik is seen as the appropriate response

Mantena doesn't seem to have noticed that this 'Marxist realism' disappeared decades ago. Her own self-appointed mission is ' to make room for another realism, one that neither forsakes an agenda of reform nor sacrifices ethics at the altar of power politics. 

This is easily done. Punish political wrongdoing in an effective and transparent fashion. In this way 'agendas of reform' can compete with each other without 'dirty tricks' or amoral deal making. What this entails is having a free and independent press, police and judiciary. Also a professional civil service must be protected from the caprices of politicians. 

In this reconstruction of realism, I enlist a seemingly unlikely candidate – M.K. Gandhi.

But Gandhi did not believe in Courts or Hospitals or Universities or any sort of Government. 

 Gandhian nonviolence is often taken as an exemplar of pure conviction politics. 

Sadly, it was more often taken as the creed of a timorous but cunning mercantile class belonging to a Religion which had been long oppressed by foreign rulers of alien faiths. 

On the other hand, it is possible to believe that Gandhi- like Mother Theresa- was sincere in his beliefs and actions. A Saint may be as stupid as shit while a sinner may achieve much good. Yet the Saint can be your intercessor in Heaven whereas the sinner suffers the torments of the damned. 

Karuna  believes, Gandhi’s politics were sustained not only by the strength of moral convictions but also by sharp political analysis and judgment. 

Gandhi did believe he had a 'sharp lawyer's mind'. Some British politicians did think he was a cunning fellow. Then it was discovered that he was a stupid as shit because his fundamental beliefs about the world weren't realistic at all. They were moonshine. 

Indeed, I contend that Gandhi’s understanding of politics was fundamentally realist, and it is this underlying realism that renders nonviolence a plausible practical orientation in politics and not purely a moral proposition, ethical stance, or standard of judgment.

Politics, like Commerce, in a country under the rule of Law is wholly non-violent. Money power is non-violent power. I buy a groceries by handing over money, not by threatening to beat the grocer or by going on hunger strike till he gives me stuff for free. 

Consider Gandhi’s response to Nehru’s entreaty in 1933 to define more sharply the egalitarian goals of Congress’s future economic policy: I know that though there is such an agreement between you and me in the enunciation of ideals, there are temperamental differences between us.

This wasn't true. Nehru had come out as a Socialist- i.e. wanted power to be stripped from Princes and landlords in a wholly independent India. Gandhi continued to believe that Princes should retain much power but should use this power in a manner he approved of. 

 Thus you have emphasized the necessity of a clear statement of the goal, but having once determined it, I have never attached importance to the repetition. 

Yet Gandhi kept repeating stuff he actually believed in.

The clearest possible definition of the goal and its appreciation would fail to take us there if we do not know and utilize the means of achieving it. 

In other words- Congress is impotent. If it tries to help the Indian masses, it won't get any money from the rich who merely want to keep it around as a thorn in the side of the Brits. 

I have, therefore, concerned myself principally with the conservation of the means and their progressive use. 

In other words, Gandhi would continue to do whatever it was that he got paid to do. 

I know that if we can take care of them, attainment of the goal is assured. 

Because sooner or later everyone will realize that Gandhi is super smart. 

I feel too that our progress towards the goal will be in exact proportion to the purity of our means. 

The problem here was that people only believed Congress would be non-violent so long as the Brits were around to kill them if they were not. 

If we can give an ocular demonstration of our uttermost truthfulness and non-violence,

nothing would be achieved because the Brits would kill them if they were violent. 

 I am convinced that our statement of the national goal cannot long offend the interests which your letter would appear to attack. We know that the princes, the zamindars, and those who depend for their existence upon the exploitation of the masses, would cease to fear and distrust us, if we could but ensure the innocence of our methods.

In other words, we must show that we can't displace the Brits. The rich will only trust us so long as we appear utterly impotent and useless. But they will give us money simply so as to piss off the Brits.

 We do not seek to coerce any. We seek to convert them. This method may appear to be long, perhaps too long, but I am convinced that it is the shortest ([1933b] 1999, 393). What Gandhi termed his “temperamental differences” with Nehru are couched in terms of a broader statement about why the clarification of goals “would fail take us there” without a serious consideration of effective means.

 Previously, Gandhi could threaten to out Nehru as a Leftie and thus destroy his standing in Congress. But, by 1933, Gandhi's Salt Satyagraha had failed. It was obvious that only a 'land to the tiller' program would mobilize the masses and destroy the foundations of the Raj.

The problem was that if the rich had no use for Congress, then Congress would disappear. Its 'non-violent politics' was just 'money-politics'. 

 It is obvious that Gandhi was playing for time. The truth is Gandhi- like Nehru- thought that the peasants would turn their backs on urban barristocrats once they got the land. That is why both back-pedaled on the one big issue facing India. Indeed, in the Fifties, an American Ambassador was pressing Nehru to do more in this respect while Nehru pretended that Vinobha Bhave's Bhoodan would do the job 'non-violently'. The truth was Nehru had a low opinion of the peasant. Most lawyers did. They loved to tell the story of the peasant whose reaction to a good harvest is to kill one or two of his neighbors secure in the knowledge that the can afford to pay the lawyers to get him acquitted.

 More subtly, Gandhi implied that the manner in which ends are invoked, presented, and insisted upon can themselves engender resistance,

Telling the Rich you will take away their money will certainly engender resistance. They may kill you before you rob them.

 that is, they may prove counterproductive to the process of converting natural opponents to the cause of reform. 

Whereas pretending the rich will give up their money once they come round to your point of view is not counterproductive at all because...urm... peeps be as stupid as shit. 

At the extreme, an uncompromising insistence on ideals may not only lead to the use of coercion but may well slide into a moralistic politics of conviction or ideological dogmatism which, for Gandhi, were especially liable to breed contempt and engender a logic of escalation.

This is all very well but anyone can make this sort of argument. Consider Stalin's advise to the Indian Communists which caused them to give up a Maoist strategy and rise up a bourgeois party.

You ask: how should the impending revolution in India be evaluated?

We Russians view this revolution as primarily agrarian. This means the liquidation of feudal property and the division of land between peasants into their personal property. This means the liquidation of feudal private property for the sake of establishing private peasant property. As you see, there is nothing socialist here. 

This is the crux of the matter. If landlords own the land, then the Cities can squeeze money out of them in return for protection. Thus Imperialists or Nationalists would prefer to keep the landlords. If the peasants take over the land they won't hand over cash. There will be what the Bolsheviks called a 'Scissors crisis'- i.e. the peasants keep their food and get fat while the Cities starve. The alternative would be for the Cities to produce nice shiny things to sell to the countryside- but that is just Commerce. It isn't Politics. 

We do not think that India is on the threshold of a socialist revolution.

Because Socialism is shitty. Peasants have enough shit in their lives. They don't want more of it. 

 This is also the Chinese way which they talk about everywhere, that is, an agrarian revolution, anti-feudal without any confiscation and nationalization of the property of the national bourgeoisie. This is a bourgeois-democratic revolution or the first stage of a people’s democratic revolution. The people’s democratic revolution which started before China in the countries of Eastern Europe has two stages. The first stage is an agrarian revolution or agrarian reform, if you wish. The countries of the people’s democracies in Eastern Europe went through this stage in the first year after the war. China is in this first stage right now. India is approaching this stage. The second stage of a people’s democratic revolution, as it has manifested itself in Eastern Europe, consists of moving from an agrarian revolution to the expropriation of the national bourgeoisie.  This is already the start of a socialist revolution. Factories, mills, and banks have been nationalized and handed over to the state in all the people’s democratic countries of Europe. China is still far from this second stage.  This stage is also far from India or India is far from this stage.

Clearly Stalin underestimated the Chinese. But, till quite recently, so did the Americans

Karuna does not appear to have much knowledge of dharmic notions of ahimsa. She writes

Gandhi’s turning of ahimsa outwards, as an imperative to relieve worldly suffering,

That is a separate duty involving 'karuna' compassion. The notion is that some 'himsa' is involved even in relieving suffering but this 'klesha' or blemish can be removed by 'prayaschitham'- i.e. ritual penance involving a charitable gift. Gandhi, as Sorabji has recorded, had previously leapt to the defense of one of his financiers who had ordered the killing of all dogs at the site of his mill. The silly man started babbling about why everybody should go around chasing bow wows and beating them to death. People were impressed that this nutter would abandon any semblance of moral principles so as to rush to the aid of a rich guy who gave him lots of money. But Gandhi need not have been so silly. He could have got Sarabhai to give money for a new orphanage or hospital as part of his 'prayaschitham' penance. Sadly, Gandhi didn't know much about Hinduism and thus fucked up monumentally. Still, Indians feel good when a barrister from London is discovered to be stupider than we are. 

 signaled a much broader understanding of the sources and consequences of himsa. In translating the metaphysical doctrine into avowedly social and political terms, Gandhi effectively reinvented the theory of ahimsa in manner that often dismayed traditional adherents (see Parekh 1989b, 120-155).

They laughed at the fool. Suppose you step in shit. Your shoe smells like shit. What do you do? Declare that shit actually smells like roses because your heart is pure? Or do you just wash the shit off your shoes? 

There is a duty to help the suffering and a separate duty not to harm anybody. If harm is done then, as when you step in shit- there is some approved action which remedies the situation. 

 Gandhi was often piqued by dogmatic forms of ahimsa which “made non-killing a blind fetish” and were seemingly motivated more by the care of one’s soul than the suffering of others: The current (and in my opinion, mistaken) view of ahimsa has drugged our conscience and rendered us insensible to a host of other and more insidious forms of himsa like harsh words, harsh judgments, ill-will, anger and spite and lust for cruelty; it has made us forget that there may be far more himsa in the slow torture of men and animals, the starvation and exploitation to which they are subjected out of selfish greed, the wanton humiliation and oppression of the weak and the killing of their self-respect that we witness all around us today…([1928a] 1999, 59)

Why does Karuna not quote the sentence preceding this in Gandhi's article? 

 Suppose for instance, that I find my daughter whose wish at the moment I have no means of ascertaining is threatened with violation and there is no way by which I can save her, then it would be the purest form of ahimsa on my part to put an end to her life and surrender myself to the fury of the incensed ruffian.

Gandhi was very proud of this discovery and went around repeating it till his acolytes got together and told him to stop being so silly. There may be some men who want to kill their daughters so as to themselves get raped by young men but they tend to keep quiet about it. 

But the trouble with our votaries of ahimsa is that they have made of ahimsa a blind fetish and put the greatest obstacle in the way of the spread of true ahimsa in our midst

Very true! Daddies should be killing their daughters and offering their own backsides in compensation to any passing young man. 

Of course, people understood that Gandhi was a guy who got money from mill owners who did well out of the boycott of British textiles. The nonsense he babbled was just gesture politics with no meaning whatsoever. Karuna however thinks that actions which are utterly useless aren't gestural. They are 'self-limiting'. Sadly the reverse is the case. Gesture politics can have horrendous consequences. Why? Because the possibility of doing a deal is obviated. Thus, as happened with the Hindu-Muslim question, mob violence decided the outcome.

 What concerns us here, more than its structural aspects, is violence as a dynamic feature of political contestation.

Violence may have no 'dynamic' aspect but simply reflect a deadlocked 'stasis'. 

 For Gandhi, political action – like all action – intervenes in a complex causal web. 

No. Gandhi had seen that most political actions- like other types of action- were utterly inconsequential. It is seldom in the interest of the person with power to change anything of importance. Giving long speeches is so much safer and more comfortable.

Action initiates irreversible chains of cause and effect, which in Gandhi’s view were understood to be so intricate as to be unknowable and therefore unmasterable and in any deep or final sense.

But Gandhi believed in re-incarnation. He and his acolytes might get reborn on a paradisal planet where everybody lived for a billion years and there was no sex or science or nasty stuff of that sort. 

 The political analogue of the metaphysical problem of himsa was therefore an understanding of politics as necessarily interactive and deeply consequentialist, where chains of intentionality and responsibility reverberate in unforeseen and unintended ways. 

However, this life would be blessedly short. Anyway, if everybody had just given up sex- like Gandhi wanted them to- this horrible planet would be left unpeopled. 

One fundamental implication of this view is that individual will, intention, or motive alone cannot fully exhaust, master, or determine the outcomes of political action.

This was not the view of Indians at that time. They had seen the British Empire grow and grow. Even after everybody else realized that the Raj was on its last legs, Nehru remained convinced that the Brits would manage to extend their stay till after he was in his grave. 

The peculiar thing was that India could have got independence at around the same time as Egypt and Afghanistan and Ireland. Gandhi had unilaterally surrendered just when the Raj was at its weakest. Indeed, the Imperial Chief of Staff had warned that Britain didn't have enough troops even to prevent a Bolshevik insurrection in the home country. 

 To admit indeterminacy in the face of the interactive logic of politics, however, is not to foreswear attempts at shaping political trajectories.

Gandhi needed money for his crackpot schemes and money-pit Ashrams. Thus he could not 'foreswear' politics because then he'd stop getting money. 

 Here the analogy with Gandhi’s response to himsa assumes added force: rather than abjuring the consequentialism of politics and recommending withdrawal, Gandhi put forward a model of self-limiting action, action that could do as much as possible to internally constrain these negative effects and still work towards positive political goals.

In other words gesture politics of a kind which the Brits could see posed no danger to them whatsoever. Instead, they got a free hand in deciding when and how power would be devolved to elected administrations in the Provinces. 

Consequentialism of this kind demands attention to the mechanisms that interactively shape political outcomes, especially the recurring entailments of political action. By entailments, I mean effects and consequences of particular kinds of political action that may not be logically given in the nature of political ideals or intended by political actors but nevertheless regularly recur as their reactive outcome. For Gandhi, the problem of political entailment was especially acute in the case of violence, for in being an absolute, irreversible deed, violence initiates definite dynamics of resentment, retrenchment, and retaliation – a dynamic that is often prosaically referred to as the cycle of violence. 

This is silly. Gandhi came from a part of the world where, thanks to the Brits, cycles of violence between Princedoms had completely ceased. There was no 'dynamics of resentment, retrenchment and retaliation'. One Prince might gleefully tell another- as did the Maharaja of Patiala to the Nawab of Pataudi- that the string of pearls he was wearing had been looted from his ancestor. Both had a good laugh. The bad old days when an Aristocrat had to defend his harem with his sword were well and truly gone. The Brits had seen to that. How? They had recruited a standing Army with good fighting spirit. So long as that Army remained cohesive, the India would remain cohesive. Periodic bloodletting between border clans or communal riots in crowded cities didn't really change anything provided there was a clear winner. 

Violence, even when taken for the sake of justice or a final peace, necessarily puts into motion chains of animus and dissension that ultimately result in instability. 

No. There is no instability if insurgents are immediately and brutally crushed. By contrast, where the Government has lost the monopoly of asymmetric violence, there will be instability even if there was no previous sense of grievance. 

Overt violence was merely an extreme instance on what was, for Gandhi, a very expansive spectrum of forms of force, domination, coercion, and imposition that themselves seemed definitive of modern politics. 

Gandhi was competing with guys who kept saying 'British are looting and killing us and subjecting us to fellatio and cunnilingus'. But the thing was a mere pretense. He got paid by the mill owners who did well out of the Modi-Lee agreement. 

Even ostensibly mild forms of coercion – for example, when a democratic majority adopts legislation that is unpalatable to a minority – can initiate similar dynamics of antipathy and hostility which likewise lead to insecure and illegitimate outcomes.

Only if the Army was shit- as happened in Sri Lanka. The Burghers in the Army had tried to assert themselves and so Sinhala politicians weakened the military which led to a Trotskyite uprising and then a Tamil uprising. Now that the Sri Lankan Army is kicking ass and taking names, no one fears 'instability' there. 

The subjective – or moral-psychological dimension – of violence was equally important in the manner of its justification. Implicit in the turn to violence was a claim to infallibility; according to Gandhi, man, however, was “not capable of knowing the absolute truth and, therefore, not competent to punish”. 

The question was whether it would be right to kill an officer like Brigadier Dyer. Gandhi was saying- not for satyagrahis. That was sensible. It meant people like G.D Birla- who had to go into hiding because of the Roda Cartridge case- could be seen to be Nationalists (which boosted his status within his community) without being suspected of helping Jugantar. Incidentally, Tegart- who brutally suppressed Jugantar- became a good friend of Birla and, after retirement, became a Director of Birla's London holding company. 

Gandhi’s objection here is often construed as an epistemological critique of violence, founded upon a conception of truth as many-sided.

It can be no such thing because Gandhi was a Hindu who had translated the Gita. Thus he knew that, epistemologically speaking, none kill or are killed. This is merely a delusive appearance. 

 But, for Gandhi, the posture of infallibility was also a moral-psychological one, a problem of pride and, at the same time, of weakness and cowardice.

Gandhi believed Hindus were cowardly and weak. He forgot that Hindu agricultural and pastoralist castes have a long martial tradition as do some Brahmin lineages. For the Rajput and other Kshatriya castes, War was a way of life. 

 The extreme irreversibility of violence demands hubris in its undertaking and in its continued justification, 

Not according to the Gita. 

a precarious subjective orientation that made acknowledging errors of judgment and policy reversals difficult and rare. For Gandhi, the fortitude that accompanies violence was a brittle posturing, a papering over of ego-driven investments. The militant Hindu “who will protect by force of arms a few cows but make away with the butcher” or the militant nationalist “who in order to do supposed good to his country does not mind killing off a few officials…are actuated by hatred, cowardice and fear. Here love of the cow or the country is a vague thing intended to satisfy one’s vanity or soothe a stinging conscience” ([1916] 1999, 253-254).

Or it may simply be the upholding of a family tradition. People understood that Gandhi was a timid Gujerati bania. They imagined he was scolding some equally emaciated and timorous caste-fellow who was foolish enough to believe he could emulate the deeds of more valorous castes. 

 Conviction here is motivated by a need to protect and project one’s self, betraying an egoism grounded in weakness rather than, in Gandhi’s terms, a genuine and detached commitment to truth.

The problem here is that the Gita counsels taking up arms to fulfil the duty of one's caste. Gandhi's caste's business was to make money. He himself raised plenty of money for Congress. But the 'banias' are a tiny minority. What is right for them is wrong for the vast majority.  

Finally, Gandhi was concerned with the long-term, unintended consequences of violence, namely the ways in which violence attains moral and political legitimacy. For Gandhi, when coercion is deemed rightful conduct against recalcitrant opponents or enemies (again, this can apply to both the extreme case of war/revolution or everyday modes of democratic politics), the result is that everyone is more inclined to become power-seekers, either for protection or as emulators, and thus all become accustomed to, and accept, competitive domination as the preeminent mode of modern politics.

No. Gandhi understood that he was seen as a 'bania'. Indeed, he often mentioned his caste status. It is blindingly obvious that where some compete for power through violent means, some others may make a point of staying rigidly away from violence. True, they will have to pay money to whoever prevails but the sheep that is shorn lives to be shorn again. 

Gandhi's great utility was that he bridged a generation gap. Fathers could tell their sons to go to jail for being non-violent rather than for being violent. This was because non-violent offenders weren't beaten and tortured or hanged. Rather the thing was a feather in one's cap. 

 Far worse than individual acts of violence or demonstrations of force was therefore the universal respect given to the capacity for imposition such that power and domination appear as markers of legitimate authority. This was the foundation of Gandhi’s exhortation in Hind Swaraj to Indians to find a mode of resisting British rule that did not at the same time emulate (and thereby legitimate) imperial claims to authority. Gandhi famously claimed that “the English have not taken India; we have given it to them. They are not in India because of their strength, but because we keep them” (261). For Gandhi, it was not the mere preponderance of force that brought or kept India under British rule but Indian weakness. 

Gandhi was very useful to the British because he trained Indians to be weak and to accept defeat even when no force on earth- save stupidity- could keep victory from them. 

The second feature which was fundamental to Gandhi’s understanding of politics was the inherent tendency towards escalation in conflict.

Gandhi had been an eye-witness to the Boer war and had recruited for the British Army during the First world war. I think it would be fair to say that both wars involved an 'escalation' which got out of hand.

Why did Gandhi himself escalate conflict with the British after the War? The conventional explanation was that he represented the 'moderates' who did not want leadership to pass to the radicals- some of whom were in touch with the new Bolshevik regime in Moscow. 

In other words, Gandhi was more interested in preserving stability than bringing about change. This is a perfectly reasonable view because what Britain had achieved in India was unprecedented. You had a truly national Army capable of force projection in the MENA and even European battlefields. Why rock the boat? Pax Brittanica was a genuine benefit. Swaraj might be a chimera. 

 The problem of escalation is closely tied to an idea of political action that emphasizes its interactive effect in complex causal sequences. 

Not if threat points are asymmetric. Hysteresis is another name for 'complex causal sequences'. But where threat points are asymmetric hysteresis is purely gestural. 

Political conflict, confrontation, and antagonism characteristically proceed through a dynamic logic of actions, reactions, counter-reactions. 

But 'Muth Rationality'- i.e. hysteresis free outcomes- prevail unless the system is genuinely chaotic. 

And again, here, for Gandhi, these dynamics of contestation include moral-psychological elements that drive them beyond mere conflicts of interest. 

Where to? Surely 'interests' include moral and psychological elements? 

The performative aspect of political interaction transformed political actors’ motivations and subjective investments. 

This is because the performer has different interests from the non-performer. Some performers get paid a lot which is why they stick to performing. Non-performers may find that they aint got a pot to piss in. So they are forced to start performing. 

Therefore to speak of the ways in which violence (or coercion or contestation) expectedly leads to forms of entrenchment, resentment, and mutual hostility is to call attention to the central role of affect in political life.

Nonsense! Talking pi-jaw calls attention to the fact that you are a virtue signaling cretin. 

As we have seen, Gandhi was especially attuned to this particular dimension and took passions such as pride and egotism – and their derivatives such as anger, ambition, humiliation, insolence, revenge, retaliation, etc. – to be key forces for understanding the structure and psychology of violence and escalation.

This is reasonable. Gandhi had seen what happened in South Africa and read English papers during the War. 

 Thus undercutting or moderating these same passions would be central to the dispositional politics of nonviolence. 

This was where Gandhi failed. 

Humility and fearlessness must be cultivated to avoid the slide into the egoism, hubris, and cowardice that engenders violent escalation. 

Yet there was violent escalation on Gandhi's watch. The only alternative to conflict is cooperation. But Gandhi was committed to non-cooperation. 

To note the importance of our emotional and psychological attachment to belief is also to recognize distinct limits to rational persuasion in politics. For Gandhi, political conflicts – even when based in a rational conflict of interest, i.e. between landlord and peasant, upper caste and lower caste – have a tendency, in and through contestation, to take on an increasingly ideological character. 

I am not aware of any evidence for this view. Gandhi belonged to the upper class which had a firm ideological belief in the duty of the lower class to serve them and give them any spare cash they might get hold off. 

The egoist’s passions in particular are activated and heightened when beliefs are questioned and contested, as they inevitably are in the realm of politics. In such situations rational argumentation and moral criticism would be ineffectual or, worse still, counterproductive, for repeated attempts to demonstrate the rightness of your position and correlative wrongness of your opponent’s elicits resistance.

But Gandhi did nothing except criticize others! I don't understand what Karuna is getting at. 

 As Bilgrami has provocatively argued, criticism for Gandhi can never be pure in motive and moralizing criticism directed at others is easily susceptible to corruption (egoistic investments) and has “the potential to generate other psychological attitudes (resentment, hostility) which underlie inter-personal violence” (2003, 4136).

The problem here is that a 'Mahatma' is supposed to chastise his acolytes as well as condemn evil doesrs. The same is true of the leader of a political organization. However, by taking the path of constructive cooperation such criticism can come to be seen as helpful and salutary. 

Motilal Nehru and C.R Das, as heads of the Swaraj Party, should have cooperated with the Labor Party when it took office. Gandhi should not, with hindsight, have cooperated with Khilafat. Why? Labor aimed at the same thing as the INC. The Khilafat movement aimed at something else entirely.

 Here contestation stirs the passions which more often than not result in entrenchment and escalation rather than moderation and agreement. In Hind Swaraj, Gandhi offered the following parable to outline the manner in which a response to injustice can easily lead to an escalation that undoes the conditions of a just resolution. In this example, the dynamic of confrontation begins with a thief illegitimately stealing your property. In response, you, full of anger, resolve to punish the thief who has stolen from you, “not for your own sake, but for the good of your neighbours.” You organize an armed band to counter-attack; the thief responds defiantly and “collects his brother-robbers” and “pesters your neighbours,” who complain that the robber has only 13 resorted to open threats against them “after you declared hostilities against him.” You feel badly that you have exacerbated the situation but feel trapped. Knowing you will be “disgraced if you now leave the robber alone,” you instead distribute arms to all your neighbors “and so the battle grows…the result of wanting to take revenge upon the robber is that you have disturbed the peace; you are in perpetual fear of being robbed and assaulted; your courage has given place to cowardice” (288-289).

This is crazy shit. If you are robbed, you report it to the police. In India, the landlord or District Commissioner had an incentive in catching robbers so as to leave taxable income in the hands of the productive class. 

Vigilantism will get you into trouble with the Magistrate. Why should we believe you really were the victim of a theft? Where is the police report of the crime? By what authority did you take the law into your own hands? 

Gandhi was a barrister. True, he wrote a lot but what he wrote was shit because he had shit for brains. That doesn't mean he wasn't a good man- indeed a Saint after a fashion.

 One of the overt lessons of this story is that improper means

illegal and very stupid means

 chosen to respond to injustice can lead to unintended and deleterious consequences – more violence, injustice, and instability. The parable also shows how the investment in, and motivation for, seeking justice and redress is imbricated in the agent’s sense of self such that this investment itself becomes a vehicle for escalation and a barrier to reaching lasting and just resolution.

No. Gandhi, in his muddled way is saying

1) English are very bad. Don't become like them. (He believed that the 1832 electoral reform had been achieved by violence and thus the English had become very horrible and forgotten all about their duties and thought only about their rights. Also many English women were walking in the street. Chee Chee! How can they not all be prostitutes? Westminster is no better than a brothel because Members of Parliament are constantly putting themselves under a new Prime Minister who probably shoves Black Rod up their poop-holes. Believe me, English all constantly bumming each other. I am barrister from London, don't you know?)

2) If thief comes you should help him rob you so that he has a change of heart. Hopefully he will not insert Black Rod into your poop-hole

3) Means don't matter because meaning does not exist. Thus Gandhi writes-

Let us first take the argument that we are justified in gaining our end by using brute force because the English gained theirs by using similar means. 

Indians knew that the English weren't using brute force precisely because they were well organized and had created a vast Navy able to transport large professional Armies to distant places. They paid for this by creating an effective administrative and judicial machinery which extracted taxes as the price for peace and security. 

India lacked any similar organized and technologically competent force. Indeed, the administration and judiciary, at the higher levels, were still staffed by Britishers because Indians trusted them more than people of their own color. 

It is perfectly true that they used brute force and that it is possible for us to do likewise,

Indians knew this was not the case. Without a strong navy and a national army, India would be vulnerable to invasion or insurrection or both. 

 but by using similar means we can get only the same thing that they got.

What they had got was the ability to rule India with much credit to themselves. 

 You will admit that we do not want that. 

Why not? Is it because the Indian preferred to be ruled by Britishers? 

Your belief that there is no connection between the means and the end is a great mistake. 

There was no connection between the means Gandhi was using- which was writing stupid shit- and the end he was aiming at- viz. making Indian think he was smart. This does not mean Gandhi wasn't a Saint after a fashion. 

Through that mistake even men who have been considered religious have committed grievous crimes. Your reasoning is the same as saying that we can get a rose through planting a noxious weed. 

No it isn't. There is a necessary connection between seed and plant. There is no necessary connection between means and ends. 

If I want to cross the ocean, I can do so only by means of a vessel;

An ocean going vessel- yes. But there is a necessary connection between what that vessel can do and what it was designed to do. 

 if I were to use a cart for that purpose, both the cart and I would soon find the bottom. "

Gandhi probably did use a cart to get to the Railway Station to catch a train to Bombay from where he got on a steamer to London. 

As is the God, so is the votary", is a maxim worth considering. Its meaning has been distorted and men have gone astray. The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree; and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree. 

This simply isn't true. An ocean liner can be dry docked and turned into a tourist attraction of some type. The Indian James Bond could have his tonga redesigned so as to turn into a mini-submarine. Most seeds don't turn into trees. 

I am not likely to obtain the result flowing from the worship of God by laying myself prostrate before Satan.

But Hindu Gods are considered Satanic by some non-Hindus. The message of the Gita is that it doesn't matter what you worship. 

 If, therefore, anyone were to say: "I want to worship God; it does not matter that I do so by means of Satan," it would be set down as ignorant folly. We reap exactly as we sow. The English in 1833 obtained greater voting power by violence. 

No they didn't. The thing was wholly peaceful. The Whigs won the 1831 election and implemented the reform they had promised.

Did they by using brute force better appreciate their duty? They wanted the right of voting, which they obtained by using physical force. But real rights are a result of performance of duty; these rights they have not obtained. 

The British had a great sense of duty- particularly civic and patriotic duties. Indians admired them for it and sought to emulate them by using similar means. The Indian National Congress was very much in a British mould. 

We, therefore, have before us in England the force of everybody wanting and insisting on his rights, nobody thinking of his duty. And, where everybody wants rights, who shall give them to whom? I do not wish to imply that they do no duties. They don't perform the duties corresponding to those rights; and as they do not perform that particular duty, namely, acquire fitness, their rights have proved a burden to them. In other words, what they have obtained is an exact result of the means they adopted. They used the means corresponding to the end.

The British had been using peaceful means to achieve greater and greater peace and prosperity for themselves. Indians saw this and have imitated them quite successfully- though not perhaps in economic matters. 

 If I want to deprive you of your watch, I shall certainly have to fight for it; if I want to buy your watch, I shall have to pay you for it; and if I want a gift, I shall have to plead for it; and, according to the means I employ, the watch is stolen property, my own property, or a donation. Thus we see three different results from three different means.

This is foolish. Either the thing is legitimately owned (assuming the Rule of Law prevails) or it isn't. It does not matter whether the thing was a gift or acquired by 'adverse possession' or bought and paid for. If the thing was stolen but there is no proof that a theft occurred then again it is legitimately owned. 

 Will you still say that means do not matter?

Yes. All that matters is how outcomes are categorized. 

Karuna ignores the fact that Gandhi was a lawyer and the British Empire was under the Rule of Law. She thinks that Gandhi was showing 'political realism' by talking stupid shit. There is something to be said for this view. An Indian writing nonsense could not be regarded as an enemy of the Raj. The fellow was just confused and might need to be sent to prison, or the lunatic asylum, periodically. But there was no real harm in him.

 The attachment to principle, perversely, becomes more important as the consequences become negative or less tangibly beneficial. 

In other words, Gandhi was just virtue signaling coz he made money out of appearing to be some sort of Sadhu-Mahatma. 

And principled conviction functions as an alibi for a violence born of weakness

Or a non-violence born of weakness and stupidity and the desire to get money for pretending to be a Saint. 

It was in response to this specific understanding of politics – one that emphasizes the dynamics of violence and its legitimation and the tendency towards escalation in political contestation – that Gandhi developed modes of intervening in politics that would constrain and counter the adverse consequences of politics. 

In other words, a way of being political without doing anything except virtue signal. The problem is that more is demanded of you if you need lots of money for your various crackpot schemes.

Gandhi was acutely aware that all political action, even ostensibly nonviolent action, held within itself tendencies towards escalation and latent violence.

No. He was acutely aware that 'non-violence' means 'money power'. He was welcome to escalate things against the Brits provided the Mill owners who financed him got lots of money for supplying cloth to people who had burned their British textiles.

 This was particularly true of collective action, not only when it threatens spontaneous or mob violence but also when the sheer strength of numbers does the work of compelling or coercing compliance. Gandhi’s challenge, therefore, was to create, define, and delineate the conditions through which nonviolent action, especially in its collective form, could mitigate these negative dynamics and repercussions.

This involved doing stuff which made your donors richer so you could get more money from them.

 The term Gandhi invented for the forms of self-limiting political action he proposed and practiced was satyagraha. Satyagraha, Gandhi insisted, was not simply a species of pacifism, non-resistance, or passive resistance ([1925c] 1999, 94-98). Rather it was open, adversarial, and extra-institutional, a form of direct action that mobilized and refashioned techniques of collective protest to take the place of traditional methods of political violence, as nonviolent equivalents of war and revolution (Shridharani 1939; Horsburgh 1968). 

Gandhi collected money for this worthless activity. He says he saw a couple of half naked women in Orissa. He took the one penny they had. Then he pissed that money against a wall by paying lawyers not to go to court. 

Civil disobedience, non-cooperation, the boycott, strike, and hartal (full work-stoppage) were reframed as viable forms of satyagraha but only when embedded within a robust politics of nonviolence. 

i.e. Gandhi got paid. Soon every politician had his hand out to both the Trade Unions and the Capitalists they were fighting. Thus Netaji Bose got money of both the Tatas and the Bengali workers in Jamshedpur. 

Gandhian satyagraha, therefore, does not imply one set course of action or a static injunction to restrict action to nonviolence but, rather, the strategic interplay of nonviolent techniques, methods, stances, that in themselves had to be as various and dynamic as the nature of political conflict itself.

But only so long as the money flowed in. Gandhi went to Bihar where Muslims were being massacred by Congress men. He raised some money and then decamped for Delhi where his pal Birla put him up in his mansion. 

 In other words, satyagraha is best understood not as a norm but a practice; its “objective is not to assert propositions, but to create possibilities” (Bondurant 1958, vii).

The possibility of getting lots of money for talking stupid shite. Soon the Gandhi cap was viewed all over India as a machine for making money. 

A primary tenet of Gandhi’s realism was his insistence on a means-orientation to politics. 

But 'means-orientation' is mere magical thinking. Realism involves identifying the correct Structural Causal Model. 

This orientation serves, on the one hand, as an antidote to the kinds of disjunctures between means and ends characteristic of political idealism as well as instrumentalism; 

Means are distinct from Ends. Where there is a necessary connection, there is a causal relationship. Suppose you see me paying a lot of attention to a frumpy woman who you later learn is the wife of our boss. You may say 'Vivek cultivates that woman as a means to win the boss's favor.' However, if you saw me flattering the boss you would not say 'Vivek flatters the boss as a means to get a promotion'. You would say 'Vivek flatters the boss because he wants that promotion.' We use the word means where the is no necessary connection and the thing is 'round-about' and fallible. Thus, it may be that the boss hates his wife. A smart chap would not think her a good means to gain career advancement. 

on the other, it pointedly frames politics in terms of the problems and possibilities of political action.

as opposed to what? Pointedly framing politics in terms of the problems of twerking? 

 To prioritize means does not dispense with the question of ends but seeks to reformulate its reciprocal relationship to means.

This is foolish. Doing first order good is an end in itself. Others may say it is also the means to some other desirable goal but we are not concerned with that. 

 Gandhi’s understanding of means and ends to be, in his words, “convertible terms” ([1924d] 1999, 497) suggests two kinds of articulations. In its stronger version, convertibility would imply a very tight imbrication such that means would have to embody their ends. In Hind Swaraj, for example, Gandhi offered an organic metaphor which seemingly so intertwined means and ends that no end could function as such, or ever come to light, if it were not already given in the means utilized to attain that end; “there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree…We reap exactly as we sow” (287).

If you believe, as Gandhi did, in Reincarnation, this is the simple truth. True, the reward or punishment may be in your next life but it will accrue all the same.

 In the strong version, then, means are ends-creative and action consistent with this view might take the form of exemplary or principled action (in the Arendtian sense), in which the principle or end is expressed and entailed in the act (Horsburgh 1968, 41-53). 

This is nonsense. Others may say of some action good in itself that it was the means to something else, but that is merely to gild the lily. I eat up my tasty snack not because that snack is a means to some greater good but because it was the good I can gain right now. Obviously, if you see me gobbling up my food and want to say something nice, you might remark that I will grow up to be a big strong boy who will win acclaim as the closest Humanity has gotten to achieving porcine status. 

Gandhi’s understanding of swaraj or self-rule may be the clearest instance of an end that is constitutive of the act itself.

Clearly, things Karuna thinks are 'clearest' are as clear as mud to ordinary mortals. The fact is India was ruled by Britain. It wanted to be independent. But Independence is not self-constitutive. The Kurds may want to be Independent. But having that end does not mean that by some magic it will be 'self-constituted'. Of course, one could say 'by Independent, I mean not being Independent at all'. But that is obfuscation. It is not clarity. 

 As is well known, Gandhi repeatedly dissociated swaraj for India from the mere fact of political independence from Britain.

Because he had promised to deliver it within 18 months if enough money was collected but then had panicked and ignominiously and unilaterally surrendered. 

Incidentally, Bernie Madoff wasn't a crook. When he said 'I'll make you rich', he meant that true Wealth is poverty. 

 Self-rule for Gandhi was premised on a fundamental moral-psychological transformation, an overcoming of fear, and, in this sense, an immanent achievement that could not be granted or given, as it were, by the British. Politically, swaraj was attained through individual and collective practices of self-rule that worked to make British rule irrelevant. In this, Gandhi contended that “the attempt to win swaraj was swaraj itself.”

But it wasn't really. It is one thing to say 'those grapes were probably sour'. It is another to pretend that the grapes had popped into your mouth unbidden. 

If the prioritization of means defines the orientation of satyagraha, its substance lies in suffering.

But greater suffering could be attained under more cruel masters. Oh. I just got why Gandhi wanted the British to Quit India at precisely the moment they were most needed because the Japanese were at the gate. 

 For Gandhi, “non-violence in its dynamic condition means conscious suffering” ([1920e] 1999, 135). Tapas/tapasya, usually translated by Gandhi as both self-suffering and self-discipline, was therefore the distinguishing feature of all modes of nonviolent action and key to their effectiveness.20 For Gandhi, suffering properly practiced was noncoercive, and its mode of operation forestalled and disrupted the escalating logic of politics. Moreover, the disposition towards sacrifice implied in suffering allowed for self-correction and self-examination, a disciplined humility that was performed and cultivated through detached action. In the disciplined suffering that nonviolent action seeks to dramatize, these aspects coalesce to enable a more lasting and just form of resolution, what Gandhi strikingly called a kind of political conversion.

The Dandi Salt March was the visible manifestation of this foolish creed. The Satyagrahis formed an orderly line to get whacked on the head by policemen. Why did the policemen whack them on the head? It was because they got a salary for doing so. What paid that salary?- the Salt tax. That's why India still has a Salt tax. 

Back then, Viceroys still took the trouble to talk to Gandhi. After his stunning achievement at the Second Round Table Conference- Gandhi singlehandedly got everybody else to agree that the INC was shit- Viceroys simply locked the fellow up if he got up to any monkey tricks. 

A central contention of political realism is that context is an essential, even determinative, starting point of political action and judgment. 

No. The central contention of realism is that reality- not some supposed context- is all that matters. 

The emphasis on context implies a view of politics as always historically and institutionally located and a sense that political decision making – in the face of the brute contingencies and complexities of political life – has to be situational to be effective.

No. Realists say 'don't bother with what people are saying or the banners they are waving. Look instead at the reality of the situation, not the rhetoric or the drama.'

 In this vein, realists have taken political judgment to be less a theoretical science in which right conduct can be deduced from universal principles and more akin to a skill or art, a form of practical reason that is sensitive to particulars (Geuss 2010a, Galston 2010). 

In which case, they aren't realists at all. Particulars don't greatly matter. Noise tends to cancel itself out. Hysteresis yields to ergodicity. Look at the fundamentals and try to find the best structural causal model. That's it. That's the whole story.

One perennial worry with judgment conceived in these terms is that it often leads to the conclusion that politics requires making unpleasant moral choices or, indeed, a suspension of moral norms.

Why should politics be different from any other activity- e.g. farting- in this respect? 

 Emphasizing flexibility and mutability can also make political judgment appear mystical or, worse still, a cover for plain decisionism. 

Does decisionism need a cover? Or is it just trying to keep up with procrastinationism in this respect? 

Gandhi’s understanding of satyagraha offers more defined parameters or precepts for determining the appropriate course of action in given contexts. 

Yes. Talk nonsense and ask everybody for money. 

It suggests that one can think more constructively about paradigmatic contexts of political conflicts and the kinds of political responses they demand and, thereby, help navigate the terrain between morally strict categorical imperatives and morally lax decisionism.

Coz navigating terrain between some stupid shit academics pulled out of their asses is sooooo important- right? 

 Gandhian satyagraha was especially attuned to

getting money.

 structural and historical relations of power 

which people of Gandhi's caste were trying to disrupt so as to get more money

and the sequences and stages of polarization which framed contestation between antagonists and potential allies. 

That was what they were shit at. Still, Gandhi's financiers did well. Jinnah's financiers- like the Raja of Mahmudabad- did not. 

There is a tendency to take civil disobedience, and the Indian anticolonial campaign against British rule, as the exemplary instance of satyagraha, to which one would turn to tease out its conceptual underpinnings. 

Why? Because the thing existed nowhere else. Moreover, the Indian National Congress ruled India for most of its history and did a very good job of renaming everything after some Gandhi or the other. 

While due mention is made to Gandhi’s other campaigns of the time, such as the campaigns against untouchability and for Hindu Muslim unity, 

which failed completely- non one speaks of 'Harijans'. They use Ambedkar's term 'Dalits'. 

these are often viewed as indications of Gandhi’s progressive social views rather than as themselves theoretically significant examples of nonviolent politics in action.  Against this tendency, Skaria

a cretin

 (2002) has reformulated the category of ahimsa as a set of broad-ranging practices of neighborliness,

Why? India has a concept of that sort which is wholly divorced from ahimsa. One reason that Indian residential spaces tended to be segregated by caste was because of different conceptions of what it was permissible to kill and eat. Still, there is a notion of fraternity which papers over these distinctions. 

 which seek to create, reform, and sustain political relationships in accordance with Gandhian notions of justice and equality. 

both of which turned out to be vacuous nonsense.

Skaria rightly conceptualizes ahimsa as less a static position than an ongoing activity, a “rigorous politics” which works through different and distinct modes of tapasya to produce the conditions of neighborliness (957).

This is crazy shit. You go off to a forest or a mountain to do tapas. The thing has nothing to do with neighborliness- which involves pretending you are all brothers and sisters and so forth. 

 In this vein, Skaria offers a very suggestive typology for distinguishing forms of nonviolent action in terms of the structural relationship between political partners and/or antagonists. In his view, nonviolent action is differently enacted when it is practiced vis-à-vis political superiors, equals, or inferiors/subalterns. Against your dominators, or superiors, one would enact a politics of confrontation, resistance, and civil disobedience;

and then cool off in jail because your 'enactment' of 'a politics of confrontation' was entirely masturbatory

 with equals, one sought political friendship;

till they discover you are a useless tosser

 with the subaltern, one would demonstrate service and seek atonement (957, 976-981).

till they discover you are useless, hypocritical, tosser. 

 Here I connect this typology to Gandhi’s own two-fold differentiations between destructive and constructive satyagraha and the more abstract contrast he drew between relations with a tyrant versus a lover

But 'zalim', the tyrant, is the beloved for Indian poetry.

i. Destructive and constructive satyagraha 

Destructive satyagraha revolves around the tactics of civil disobedience and noncooperation. It is a mode of militant and direct political action against unjust laws or an unjust political order, an order with which you are in, or place yourself in, an antagonistic relationship. 

Till you surrender and go off meekly to jail.

Constructive nonviolent action, by contrast, is driven less by an urgency to resist, withdraw, or undo existing political authority, but rather by the need to create political bonds and forms of association and authority on a voluntary and non-coercive basis. 

Either this yields 'synergy' and material benefits for all involved or the thing collapses as a pointless circle-jerk. Suppose Gandhi had been able to set up parallel courts- as Sinn Fein did- or parallel schools and colleges as good as those of the Government, then he'd have prevailed. But all his schemes were stupid money-pits. Khaddar was shit. Nai Talim was shit. Everything the guy touched turned to shit. Why? They added no value. They could not pay for themselves. Thus they ended up being mere gestures or shibboleths.

One of the most striking examples of constructive satyagraha in the realm of political judgment and political leadership was Gandhi’s understanding of the conditions for forging Hindu-Muslim unity.

This had already been achieved by Jinnah on the basis of reserved seats.

 Though the creation of greater Hindu-Muslim unity was a central plank of the constructive program, it was by all accounts a deep political failure both for Gandhi and Congress politics, evidenced in the polarizations that resulted in Partition. Yet, it was Gandhi’s involvement with the pan-Islamic Khilafat movement (1919-1924) that had initially elevated him to a position of national leadership in the first major mobilizations against British rule. As the Khilafat campaign eventually dovetailed with the Non-Cooperation movement (1920-1922), this period is often recounted as the heyday of Hindu-Muslim solidarity. Despite its later unraveling, the distinctive formula that Gandhi articulated in the period as the basis for Hindu-Muslim unity and friendship remains provocative. 

It was crazy. Gandhi promised that Hindus would go to jail for the sake of the Turkish Caliph. They refused to do any such thing. Any way, Gandhi unilaterally surrendered to the Brits. A couple of weeks later the Muslims discovered that the Viceroy, who they thought was their enemy, had actually been putting pressure on the Cabinet back home to secure justice for the Turks. It became clear that the Hindus had betrayed them whereas the Brits had tried to protect their interests. 

Skaria (2002) and Devji (2005) have both drawn attention to the novelty of Gandhi’s formulation of political friendship as one that is performed through unconditional acts of solidarity.

If Hindus had filled up the jails in the Khilafat cause, that would be solidarity. But they did not such thing. Gandhi called off the movement without stipulating for the release of Khilafatis in prison.

 Rather than a strategic alliance of interest, based on a kind of quid pro quo – in which, for instance, Hindu support for the Khilafat demand would be tied to Muslim acceptance of a ban on cow slaughter – 

in which case, some Hindus would have gone to jail under the Khilafat banner because they could show this was directly linked to cow- protection.

Gandhi attempted to “win permanent friendship with Mussulmans” in “a spirit of love and sacrifice independent of expectation of any return” ([1920f] 1999, 119).

The problem was that no sacrifice was actually presented. Gandhi had advanced himself- and thus the Hindus- without the Muslims gaining anything. 

 What Gandhi proposed was not primarily an ideology (or national narrative) that could convince Hindus and Muslims that they shared political interests and goals (or that they already formed a single political community) but a mechanism that could disarm growing enmity and escalating distrust: When men become obstinate, it is a difficult thing. If I pull one way, my Moslem brother will pull another. If I put on superior airs, he will return the compliment. If I bow to him gently, he will do it much more so; and if, he does not, I shall not be considered to have done wrong in having bowed. When the Hindus became insistent, the killing of cows increased. In my opinion, cow-protection societies may be considered cow-killing societies ([1909] 1999, 272).

Gandhi wrote this some seven or eight years before the cow-protection riots in Bihar which did compel Muslims to give up cow-slaughter. He himself was sent off to Champaran to distract attention from what was happening.

There was a good reason why the Muslims wanted to do a deal on cow-protection rather than accept unilateral help for Khilafat. This was because there were many other such deals to be made. That's how politics works. Empty promises increase mutual suspicion. Good contracts give both parties a self-interested motive to keep their end of the bargain. 

Here we see the central mechanisms of satyagraha, suffering and sacrifice, 

were useless. You may claim to suffer greatly on my behalf. This doesn't help me at all. However if we do a mutually beneficial deal then there is a possibility that our relationship will grown closer and more trusting. 

mobilized towards creating the conditions for mutual respect, trust, and equality. But the attempt to do so, required a sensitivity to the nature of the structural and historical relationship between Hindus and Muslims.

No. All that was required was the striking of mutually beneficial bargains and thus the burgeoning of an increasingly amicable and trusting relationship.

 Thus, the “heart unity” that Gandhi sought could not ignore or deny the difference in status and interests of each community, indeed it was premised upon the heightened duty of the Hindu community as the majority community to “surrender out of strength to the Mussalman in every mundane matter”([1925a] 1999, 159).

This did not happen. On every mundane matter, the majority community prevailed. 

 Trying to create the conditions of unity – overcoming mutual distrust, feelings of superiority/inferiority or insecurity – was, for Gandhi, “essentially the work of Hindus” ([1921c] 1999, 18). 

Muslims like the Ali brothers felt betrayed by Gandhi. Jinnah too came to see the fellow as a repulsive hypocrite. Paradoxically, those Muslims who had come under Gandhi's spell- Azad, Badshah Khan, etc.- increased the determination of the Muslims to have their own country. After all, some of their own number were vulnerable to the Siren Song of the maha-hypocrite. 

For it was incumbent on those in positions of power, strength, and security to both accept its responsibility for enmity and actively seek its undoing.

These are mere crocodile's tears. When those in power claim their hearts bleed for those under them, those under them know they are going to get shafted. 

Incidentally, Rajaji was a bigger shithead than Gandhi because he claimed it was a Hindus religious duty to go to jail for the Turkish Caliph! Gandhi's language was more guarded. Karuna writes in a footnote-

Gandhi’s formula for Hindu-Muslim friendship was most explicit and arguably most effective only during the Khilafat campaign. Though never renounced, it was also never again given such prominence nor practiced so publicly in Congress politics.

Because the Ali brothers had left Congress and were denouncing Gandhi's treachery.

 There were however some meager attempts: consider Gandhi’s offer to Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League and founder of Pakistan, the prime ministership as a way to ward off Partition in the eleventh hour. 

But Nehru and Patel could already testify that the Prime Minister had no power under the Cabinet Mission Plan. Partition was the price of a strong center. 

More interestingly, Rajagopalachari, one of Gandhi’s closest political associates, had argued for various forms of compromise on the question of Pakistan, from accepting the League resolution of 1940 to a lifelong campaign to resolve the Kashmir dispute.

Rajaji shat the bed in Madras by championing caste based education. He had some currency on the Right because he favored free market policies. Also the Americans liked him. But in Tamil Nadu his name was mud. Anti-Brahmin movements triumphed there. 

. Rajagopalachari often formulated these various acts of reconciliation in Gandhian terms, as unilateral acts of friendship meant to dissolve suspicion and fear; his striking maxim for peace with Pakistan was “not peace at any cost but friendship at any price.”

This is not striking. It is silly. Cost and price mean the same thing. Peaceful neighbors are likely to be friendly. If they are aloof and stand-offish you shouldn't try to buy their affection with expensive gifts. 

Karuna remarks briefly on perhaps the most controversial tactic in Gandhi’s political repertoire and one that most often was seen as morally coercive: the political fast or hunger strike.

The Suffragettes had pioneered the use of this weapon. The Government responded with forced feeding and the 'Cat and Mouse Act'. Gandhi didn't want a tube to be stuffed down his throat. In any case, he wasn't an English lady. The Brits didn't care if some coolie starved himself or perished of famine. 

 The majority of Gandhi’s fasts were personal acts of self-purification, penance, prayer, and remembrance. Even many of his political fasts can be construed as acts of self-purification after political failures, to atone for falling short of his own ideals and the lapses of his followers (i.e. when he felt responsible for outbreaks of violence) (Gandhi 2008, 827-831). He also fasted for straightforwardly political reasons, to influence the course of events, most famously as the prelude to the Poona Pact of 1932 and to quell communal riots at Partition. Gandhi was acutely aware that fasts could very easily be coercive and thus he elaborated precise and demanding rules in their undertaking.

Yet he endangered Dalit lives in the villages by going on a fast so as to blackmail Ambedkar. 

 It was always to be a weapon of last resort, used only when all other avenues had been exhausted. To attest to how reluctant Gandhi was to carry out this tactic, it is worth remembering that Gandhi at no time fasted against the British government or British rule as such, and never in the name of an open-ended demand for independence.

What about the February 1943 fast? The Brits thought this was aimed against them. The Secretary of State for India told the Commons- 'By rejecting the offer of the Government of India to release him for the period of his fast and declaring that his fast would be unnecessary if he were released, Mr. Gandhi has also made it clear that the object of his fast is simply to enforce his unconditional release.
The Government of India, composed when the decision was taken of nine Indian and four European members, including the Viceroy, decided that they could not yield to this threat. His Majesty's Government are in entire agreement with their decision'

 For Gandhi, fasting against a political antagonist or enemy functioned only to escalate bitterness and conflict, for your enemy would necessarily experience the fast as exhortative and coercive. One could not “fast against a tyrant” but only against those whose consciences could be stirred by your willingness to sacrifice your life ([1933a] 1999, 377). 

This is silly. Gandhi understood that if he died during a fast then there would be violence- or if violence was not possible, then ill-will- against whoever he was fasting against. 

Only in the context of that kind of relationship – Gandhi called it a relationship of love – would fasting work as moral suasion and not as sheer blackmail. 

Ambedkar evinced no great love for Gandhi. Neither did Churchill. 

The categories of tyrant and lover had, for Gandhi, “a general application. The one who does injustice is styled ‘tyrant.’ The one who is in sympathy with you is the ‘lover.’” The true satyagraha fast “should be against the lover and for his reform, not for extorting rights from him” ([1924a] 1999, 323).

The same could be said of holding your breath till you die and then Mummy will be sorry she didn't let you eat up all the cake. The problem with this sort of behavior is that people tend to lose sympathy for you. They think you a nuisance. They ignore you or tell you to fuck off. 

Sadly, the Brits took a different course. Their favorite adage was 'spare the rod and spoil the child'. Clearly beating Gandhians on the head would help with their mental development. Churchill may have thought Indians a beastly people. But his great love for India meant that he would have been very happy to arrange more beatings for them so they might evolve into something less bestial. 

 This does not mean that in practice all of Gandhi’s fasts necessarily conformed to these strict criteria; indeed Gandhi himself admitted his own lapses in this regard. But it does vividly demonstrate the degree to which Gandhi was attuned to the ambiguities of moral coercion in nonviolent resistance,

This seems an odd use of the word 'attuned'. We do not say that a habitually flatulent person is better attuned to the effect of smelly farts on those in the vicinity. Instead we hold our noses and point him to the lavatory. 

and more importantly, how for Gandhi the question of appropriate uses of nonviolent action in general was closely tied to an assessment of the contexts and dynamics of specific political confrontations

This is foolish. Gandhi simply wasn't a guy with a lot of tricks up his sleeve. Indeed, he didn't actually have sleeves or wear shirts. The poor chap had a rather limited repertoire. At least, he stuck with fasting rather than farting. 

Karuna concludes thus

At its core, realism asks us to confront the question of what is given – immutable and endemic – in politics. 

No. Realism means looking beyond the appearance of things even if they are 'immutable and endemic'- e.g. the fact that all politicians bullshit almost all of the time. 

In the tradition of moderating or liberal realism, the given is often linked to aspects of human nature and psychology, passions and interests that are viewed as perhaps partially tamable but never wholly overcome. 

That may have been true in the eighteenth century. Modern realism is economic and geopolitical. 

Montesquieu, Hume, and Madison based their political analyses on a motivational realism of this kind and thereby rejected the view that politics and political institutions ought to require or depend upon great transformations of fundamental human passions. Such attempts to reshape, educate, or suppress human nature would either be foolhardy or dangerous. Instead, workable political institutions had to take into account and constrain (in indirect ways) the inevitable play of pride and self-interest in politics. Gandhi’s politics were also premised on an understanding of the crucial role of passions such as pride and self-regard in politics, yet Gandhi was also straightforwardly a moral perfectionist. 

This is nonsense. Gandhi was in the tradition of Naoroji and Gokhale- mathsy economists. He got money from industrialists who wanted a Listian economic policy for India. He talked spiritual bollocks because the vast majority of Indians were agriculturists would have preferred to buy cheap manufactured goods from abroad rather than expensive and shitty homegrown stuff. Gandhi also tried to con the weavers- who wanted good terms for manufactured yarn (including high quality imported yarn)- and did not at all want the product of Gandhi's spinning wheel which, more often than not, added negative value- i.e. was too coarse to be used to weave anything.

The key question here was not whether but how political passions could be constrained. Gandhi did not look to political institutions to check, harness, or moderate the most unstable and dangerous passions. Institutions were untrustworthy in this regard and more often than not effected reform and discipline through coercion. Rather, moderation was to be sought “in and through action,” in satyagraha as a distinct form of disciplined, self-limiting action. 

This is the crux of the matter. Gandhi's satyagrahas kept ending in violence. The Brits would jail him and his people for a bit till they calmed down. As such, this game could have carried on indefinitely. But Quit India- when the enemy was at the gate- was taking things too far. After Independence, Gandhi fasted against a Cabinet decision. Almost immediately he was shot. An American caught the assassin. 

Ultimately, for Gandhian realism the question of the given is less about marking a line between what can and cannot be changed than the necessary starting point for the work of politics. In other words, Gandhi’s realism rests not in disavowing the transformative possibilities in and of politics but in insisting that political action has to begin from, and work outward from, the givens – the situated contexts and inherent dangers – of political life. 

This scarcely squares with the facts. The political life can't be lived in a remote Ashram. Doing stupid shit- like spinning cotton or setting up supposedly self-financing schools- isn't political. It may be religious or spiritual. But equally, it may simply be silly or part of some sort of swindle.

And it is in this respect that Gandhian realism serves as an instructive example of exactly the kind of realist reversal in the directionality of political theorizing that scholars such as Geuss and Williams have recommended. 

Who, in a post-Brexit, post-Trump world thinks Geuss or Habermas or Williams didn't have shit for brains?

The key lies in Gandhi’s central focus on the question of action, and especially the manner in which the question of means is taken as the fundamental problem of and for politics. 

What possible key could lie in the 'central focus' of a fool and a failure? 

The Gandhian imperative to construct nonviolent means not only puts into sharp relief the ethical and practical dilemmas of political violence,

for whom? The Taliban? The British Raj was pretty peaceful. Nutters fasting or lining up to get hit on the head were picturesque. But things changed once Britain's naval supremacy was challenged. The White Man was putting down his burden. The Brown Man had to get real- which meant waving goodbye to Mahatmas and Dalai Lamas. 

it also prioritizes action and contexts of action in a manner that works to helpfully displace and reformulate realism’s normative bind. 

The Gandhian solution to realism's normative bind would be an enema. Gandhi was constantly administering enemas to all and sundry. 

The traditional dilemma about normativity – about the relationship between is and ought – arises

out of an 'uncorrelated asymmetry'. Everyone can agree who is the owner of x. Nobody can agree who ought to be the owner of x. In the one case, there can be Kripkean rigid designation. In the other, a new entrant can upset the applecart. 

 partly because of a prior framing and implicit assumption that political theorizing primarily concerns itself with the constitution, generation, and justification of norms. If that is the perspective from which one views the realism/idealism debate, then realism may well come up short. But if we were to shift the is/ought question from the domain of norms to that of action, the issue is no longer one of how normative guidelines (the ought) can be derived out from the web of existing beliefs and constraints (the is), an issue that can admittedly pose fundamental challenges for the practice of criticism. Rather, the question becomes one of interrogating the conditions and mechanisms by which we can move from the world as it is to the world as it ought to be. That is, from the standpoint of political action, the is/ought question is reconfigured as a means/ends question, one in which the tighter imbrication of the normative and the empirical that realism recommends can be enabling rather than constrictive. 

This is fine if mechanism design- which is 'reverse game theory'- is actually being evaluated. But smart peeps can make a lot of money doing that in the private sector. True, stupid peeps have to study a shite subject like Poli Sci. But all we require of them is that they not masturbate in public. 

In Gandhi, we can see how tethering political potentiality to the given constraints of political life does not entail an a priori restriction on imaginative possibilities, 

e.g that fasting or farting can cause nasty peeps to become very nice. Come to think of it, Mahesh Yogi made billions teaching people to levitate and thus spread 'peace rays'. 

it only insists on scrupulous attention to the means of working out from and through these constraints towards envisioned ends.

Scrupulous attention means looking at the Professor and taking notes. It does not mean fisting yourself sullenly when you get bored with the lecture.

 In this form of realism, the ends and goals of political life may even be high-minded, demanding, and radical (as surely many of Gandhi’s were) but the means for the effectuation of norms cannot be left unspecified and, hence, unreal.

Indeed not. You must learn to levitate so as to spread 'peace rays'. 

In this manner, with Gandhi, political realism can perhaps be rescued from its association with amoral instrumentalism and status quo politics

like that of Rahul Gandhi?

 and  instead be viewed as offering an alternative way of thinking pointedly and precisely about the conditions for effective and principled political action. 

You heard the lady. Enroll today for your Doctorate in Yogic Flying at the Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa. What's the matter? Don't you want to help bring about World Peas and Carrots? After all, bullshit must be good for something.