Was Gandhi a libertarian? one libertarian pundit thinks so

the libertarian pundit Riggenbach making a preliminary case for Gandhi the libertarian

The frustration some libertarians feel about people swallowing the FDR illusion is the very same frustration I feel when I read (or hear) things like this, especially from people who can easily relieve themselves of the error with a little more study - shouldn't libertarians always look into the revisionist literature as well as the court versions? I really wish he had taken Gandhi a shade more seriously and looked into it just a bit more.

I probably belong in the class of online "pontificators" Riggenbach derides as not understanding all pacifism to be libertarian in essence, because indeed I do not have such an understanding, no doubt due to my ignorance and lack of education. The attention given to Gandhi is inextricably related to the widespread fallacy that his movement was responsible for the independence of India, while I give the greater credit by far to Subhash Bose of the Indian National Army who was the second most popular leader in India by only a few % points, while everyone else, like Nehru, trailed very far behind those two.

Gandhi's "civil disobedience" methods did not in fact achieve much else except a mobilization of the middle classes, and an energization of the ambitious statists like Nehru. Other historical forces were at play, not least WW-II. In my view, as also of some revisionist scholars, the refusal of the soldiers to obey orders, to let their generals be executed for treason - the crisis that actually brought the empire down - was the most libertarian act of all in those events. Gandhi was responsible for needlessly conceding to the act of partition, something that caused human suffering, mayhem and death on a scale unknown in peacetime India before. When courageous statesmanship was needed Gandhi failed.

My big problems with Gandhi are his sabotaging of the democratic process again and again, and his eventually deadly introduction of religious politics into the movement for self-rule. He imposed his will on the Congress by the veiled threat that if he was disobeyed he would take it to the streets, where he had carefully cultivated a saintly image. That is a type of coercion he never chose to apply against any other unjust institution in India. The self-governing village republics that must sound so idyllic to libertarians like Riggenbach would in fact have been caste states, no less coercive for their "social" method of law enforcement. Only in profound ignorance of hindu tradition and social realities could one entertain that Gandhi's 'Ram Rajya' represents a type of libertarian utopia.

Riggenbach's error is commonplace, so I forgive him. Gandhi's hypocrisy, the gap between what he admired - the Thoreau, the Tolstoy, the Christ - and the actions and decisions he took only become visible when one gets beyond the official 'saintly' Gandhi. The liberty he himself demanded from the brits was not the same he was willing to share with his own people, but this Riggenbach was understandably not able to grasp.

The US is a republic that practised slavery and "manifest destiny" and "jim crow" and today practises "war on drugs" and "war on terror" and so on, so perhaps there may not be the same sense of urgency about the total abolition of caste, rather the sense that through gradual reform the thing will slowly disappear. This would be gross error, as the history of India is littered with reform movements, one of which became Buddhism, and another intitiated by the christian king Ram Mohan Roy gave birth to the Congress, yet caste has persisted and remains a brutal reality today from which the ONLY relief the people have received is via the democratic, republican, liberal, humanist constitution written by Dr. Ambedkar.

What we call "independence" is a transfer of state power from one imperial class to another older, even worse, more inhumane one, and the man who supervised the transition, at the cost of the horrors of partition, and the man who endorsed the only bolshevik as the prime minister, is who our libertarian pundit wishes to embrace in the libertarian tradition. Gandhi may have been a "pacifist", Mr. Riggenbach, but he fails that other important test - he gave in to evil. Do we look into what a politician does, or only what he says?

I respectfully disengage from the embrace of Gandhi issued by the Mises Institute.