Question

Mahathma Gandhi's volantary poverty-What Gandhi values on politics and political life

Answer 1

Mahatma Gandhi was a great political man. He followed always values of politics. He did never compromise to it. He took decisions in the favour of society. Political values are ideas expressing the attitude of social groups as a whole, toward the needs of other social groups and of the whole of that society, ideas that have significance for political subjects. Present-day confrontation of social systems and civilizations implies a confrontation between various systems of values. As creations of given social forces, each type of civilization embodies the values of the respective social forces. We distinguish between the logic of politics and society. And the axiological approach to values. To some degree the former disregards the intrinsic substance of value. The axiological approach is based on historical experience, on the social situation, on the interests and ideology determining the way in which a social group, a human community, a society ascertains values, no values and anti values. In Marxist philosophy, there is a correspondence between these two approaches. Mahatma Gandhi described, “If he, with a poet's imagination, had seen that I was incapable of wishing to cramp the mind of the Indian woman, and I could not object to English learning as such, and recalled the fact that throughout my life I had fought for the fullest liberty for women, he would have been saved the injustice which he has done me, and which, I know, he would never knowingly do to an avowed enemy. The Poet does not know perhaps that English is today studied because of its commercial and so-called political value.”1

We define political values as political relationships, institutions, organizations, views and ideas resulting from the transforming, creative sociopolitical practice of the social forces that meet the requirements of social progress and of the development of human personality on a social scale. We reject the postulation of an abstract hierarchy of values or exclusivist of values, but nevertheless emphasize the special role of political values. Mahatma Gandhi described, “I happened to preside at a meeting of condolence on the death of the great Irish patriot Macs winey and humbly expressed my opinion that I could not ethically justify the fast on the facts that the public had then before them. I have since seen no new facts to alter my opinion. I am not here concerned with the political value of that celebrated fast, if it had any. Nor must I be understood to cast any reflection upon the memory of the deceased patriot. I am simply giving my view as a satyagrahi on the ethics of the fast.”