Gandhian Gram Swaraj

In one line

Gram Swaraj is Gandhi's proposal that India be organised as a very large number of self-governing villages, each managing its own affairs, related to each other not as a pyramid but as widening circles with the individual at the centre.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Gram Swaraj, meaning village self-rule, is Gandhi's conception of the ideal political order, in which every village is a self-sufficient republic managing its own agriculture, industry, education, health, sanitation and justice, exercising full powers over its own affairs, and related to larger units not by subordination but by voluntary cooperation, so that political power is exercised at the level nearest to the people and the state above exists to serve rather than to direct.

The two words

Gram is village. Swaraj is self-rule, and Gandhi insisted the word means more than independence from foreign rule.

His own distinction, from Hind Swaraj. Independence is the removal of a foreign government; swaraj is rule over oneself, which begins with the individual's control over their own conduct and extends outward. A country whose foreign rulers have gone and whose people are governed from a distant capital by people they cannot reach has independence and not swaraj.

That distinction is the whole of Gram Swaraj. Swaraj at the level of a country is only real if there is swaraj at the level of a village, and swaraj at the level of a village is only real if there is swaraj in the person.

What Gandhi proposed

A self-sufficient village. Producing its own food and cloth, meeting its own basic needs, so that it is not dependent on a distant economy over which it has no control. Dependence, on his account, is the opposite of self-rule.

Full authority over its own affairs. Its own agriculture, its own village industries, its own school, its own sanitation and health, its own watch and ward, and its own settlement of disputes.

Managed by a panchayat chosen annually by the adults of the village, exercising the functions of legislature, executive and judiciary together for village matters. Gandhi was explicit that this combination, which would be objectionable at a larger scale, is workable in a body small enough for everybody to see what it does.

Non-violent. The village defends itself by non-violent means, and Gandhi accepted that this required a level of discipline most villages did not have.

Bread labour and swadeshi. Everybody performs some physical work, and needs are met locally by preference.

Trusteeship within the village, so that those with more hold it for the community, which is chapter 750's material applied locally.

The oceanic circle

Gandhi's answer to the obvious question, what holds the villages together, and the image should be reproduced in an answer because it is precisely designed against the alternative.