Gandhian View on Swaraj
Swaraj for Gandhi is part of Truth which is God. According to Gandhi ,swaraj could be obtained only by intense suffering and struggle.It would never come as a gift.In an article ,Gandhi wrote that spreading disaffection against the British government in India was the Dharma of Indians.He warned the imperialist countries that domination over others would threaten the moral fibre of the great powers.Gandhi accepted the truth of the famous Mantra given by B.G.Tilak that Swaraj is the birth right of Indians.He said that the every ruler is alien that defies public opinion.Gandhi believed that Indians were entitled to freedom because of the immense sufferings they had undergone for it.The swaraj of Gandhi’s conception was to champion the interests of the down trodden and starving millions.He believed that every labourer should get enough remuneration to feed and clothe himself and his family.A government that doesn’t ensure this much is no government.It is anarchy,and thus should be resisted peacefully.
Gandhi dedicated his whole life to secure the freedom of India from imperialistic bondage.He pleaded for personal freedom and civic freedom.He also advocated freedom of speech and pen.This freedom was the foundation of Swaraj.He never accepted the theory of freedom as arbitrariness of license.Freedom results in self- denial for the sake of society.License means the desire to enjoy exclusive privileges even by resort to violence.Moral freedom for him lay not in the egoistic assertions of the claims of the individual ego but in identification with the spiritual being.Freedom in other words,means conquest of the empirical demands of the senses for the realisation of the transcendent self.
To Gandhi,freedom was a whole, Moral freedom as emancipation from the slavery of passions, National freedom as emancipation and realisation of truth, were all phases of freedom.Thus we see that Gandhi’s great gospel was that freedom is a whole.To him freedom was a process of growth in quest of an articulated system of coherent moral purposes and actions.A man who obtains freedom over his passions would not tolerate the social and economic exploitation of his neighbours because they are really his own selves.According to Gandhi,all war is unjust,but still the aspirant after freedom would distinguish between the aggressor and the defender,and render all moral support to the latter.He would not be bound down to the creeds and conventions of a particular society or nation but would embrace mankind.