In Hind Swaraj (1909), a text which is often privileged as an authentic statement of his ideology, Gandhi offered a civilisational concept of Indian nation. The Indians constituted a nation or praja, he asserts, since the pre-Islamic days. The ancient Indian civilisation - "unquestionably the best" was the fountainhead of Indian nationality, as it had an immense assimilative power of absorbing foreigners of different creed who made this country their own. This civilisation, which was "sound at the foundation" and which always tended "to elevate the moral being", had "nothing to learn" from the "godless" modern civilisation that only "propagated immorality". Industrial capitalism, which was the essence of this modern civilisation, was held responsible for all conflicts of interests, for it divorced economic activities from moral concerns and thus provided imperatives for imperial aggression. Indians themselves were responsible for their enslavement, as they embraced capitalism and its associated legal and political structures. "The English have not taken India; we have given it to them." And now the railways, lawyers and doctors, Gandhi believed, were impoverishing the country. His remedy for this national infliction was moral and utopian. Indians must eschew greed and lust for consumption and revert to village based self-sufficient economy of the ancient times. On the other hand, parliamentary democracy the foundational principle of Western liberal political system and therefore another essential aspect of modern civilisation- did not reflect in Gandhi's view the general will of the people, but of the political parties, which represented specific interests and constricted the moral autonomy of parliamentarians in the name of party discipline. So for him it was not enough to achieve independence and then perpetuate "English rule without the Englishmen"; it was also essential to evolve an Indian alternative to Western liberal political structures. His alternative was a concept of popular sovereignty where each individual controls or restrains her/his own self and this was Gandhi's subtle distinction between self-rule and mere home rule. "Such swaraj", Gandhi asserted, "has to be experienced by each one for himself." If this was difficult to attain, Gandhi refused to consider it as just a "dream". "To believe that what has not occurred in history will not occur at all", Gandhi replied to his critic, "is to argue disbelief in the dignity of man." His technique to achieve it was satyagraha, which he defined as truth force or soul force. In more practical terms, it meant civil disobedience but something more than that. It was based on the premise of superior moral power of the protesters capable of changing the heart of the oppressor through a display of moral strength. Non-violence or ahimsa was the cardinal principle of his message which was non-negotiable under all circumstances.
It is not perhaps strictly correct to say that Gandhi was rejecting modernity as a package. Anthony Parel notes in his introduction to Hind Swaraj that this text is presented in the genre of a dialogue between a reader and an editor, "a very modern figure", with Gandhi taking on this role. Throughout his career he made utmost use of the print media, editing Indian Opinion during his South African days, and then Young India and Harijan became the major communicators of his ideas. And he travelled extensively by railways while organising his campaigns. Yet, by offering an ideological critique of the Western civilisation in its modern phase, Gandhi was effectively contesting the moral legitimacy of the Raj that rested on a stated assumption of superiority of the West.
It will be, however, misleading to suggest that Gandhi was introducing Indians to an entirely new kind of politics. And so far as mass mobilisation was concerned, the Home Rule Leagues of Tilak and Annie Besant prepared the ground for the success of Gandhi's initial satyagraha movements. Indeed, when in 1914, Tilak was released from prison and Annie Besant, the World President of the Theosophical Society, then stationed in Madras, joined the Congress, they wanted to steer Indian politics to an almost similar direction. But although Tilak was readmitted to Congress in 1915 due to Besant's intervention, they failed to reactivate the party out of its almost decade-long inertia.
Gandhi succeeded in uniting both the moderates and extremists on a common political platform. In the divided and contestable space of Indian politics, he could effectively claim for himself a centrist position, because he alienated neither and tactically combined the goal of the moderates with the means of the extremists. He adopted the moderates' goal of swaraj, but was "delightfully vague" (to borrow Nehru's expression) about its definition, as any specific definition, he knew, would alienate one or the other group. So each group could interpret it in their own ways. His method of satyagraha looked very much like the passive resistance of the extremists; but his insistence on non-violence alleviated the fears of the moderates and other propertied classes, apprehensive of agitational politics. There was also a rift in the Muslim community around this time, between the Aligarh old guards and the younger generation of Muslim leaders. Gandhi aligned himself with the younger leaders by supporting the khilafat issue. He highlighted its anti-British aspects and underplayed its pan-Islamic tendencies, and thus for the first time united the Hindus and the Muslims in a combined battle against the British.
