ABSTRACT
By ‘Indian anarchism’ I mean the movement which was inspired by Mohandas Gandhi and which, after his assassination in 1948, was led by Vinoba Bhave and Jayaprakash Narayan until their own deaths in 1982 and 1979, respectively. Whether this self-styled Sarvodaya (‘welfare of all’) movement and its ideology should be classified as anarchist is disputable. The issue is usually debated with reference to Gandhi, but in this chapter I focus on his successor. I do so partly because Vinoba’s ideas deserve to be better known in the West, partly because his anarchism is in some ways more explicit than Gandhi’s, and partly because of an extraordinary incident in his career which calls sharply into question the nature of his anarchism. The incident occurred in 1975 shortly after Mrs Indira Gandhi, the Indian Prime Minister, imposed on the country emergency rule which amounted, at best, to a constitutional dictatorship. Asked what he thought of the Emergency, Vinoba, who was in the middle of observing a year of self-imposed silence, made a written comment: ‘an era of discipline’. The comment was widely used in the government’s propaganda to suggest that Vinoba endorsed the Emergency. Thus, the man who had been hailed as an anarchist saint was projected in the paradoxical role of ‘the Saint of the Government’ – and a very dubious government at that.
