State as a Threat to Human Security: Gandhian Insights

When we think about security, we usually picture armies, borders, and a powerful state standing guard against threats. Mohandas Gandhi turned that picture upside down. For him, the state was not the protector of the people but one of the gravest dangers to them. He saw it as an organised form of violence that, however well-intentioned, ultimately rested on coercion and force. This idea sits at the heart of Gandhi’s political thought and offers a striking lens through which to examine modern debates about human security.

Why Gandhi saw the state as organised violence 🔗

Gandhi’s most quoted line on the subject is blunt. He described the state as representing violence in a concentrated and organised form. He argued that while an individual has a soul, the state is a soulless machine that can never be freed from the violence on which its very existence depends. This was not abstract philosophising. Gandhi had personally experienced how state power could humiliate and dehumanise, from racial discrimination in South Africa to the machinery of British colonial rule in India.

His core claim was simple but radical. The state’s primary tool for maintaining order is the threat or use of force. Police, prisons, armies, and the legal system all ultimately function because the state can compel obedience. Even a democratically elected government, in Gandhi’s view, governs through coercion rather than through genuine moral consent. This dependence on force is what made the state inherently suspect to him.

The soulless machine argument 🔗

The phrase “soulless machine” captures something important about Gandhi’s reasoning. A machine has no conscience. It does what it is built to do, regardless of moral consequences. When citizens hand over their power to such a machine, Gandhi worried, they surrender their own moral responsibility. They stop thinking about right and wrong and simply obey. For Gandhi, this loss of individual moral agency was itself a form of insecurity, because a person who cannot act on conscience is not truly free.

The clash with traditional security thinking 🔗

To appreciate how unusual Gandhi’s position was, it helps to recall the dominant view of security in his time and ours. Traditional, or realist, security theory places the state at the centre. Security means protecting territorial borders, preserving sovereignty, and building enough military strength to deter rivals. The individual matters only insofar as he or she is a citizen of a protected state. This state-centric approach dominated international relations throughout the Cold War.

Gandhi rejected this framework entirely. He believed the modern state, built on force, was incapable of dealing with the deeper forces of disorder, whether they came from outside or within. A nation might possess a formidable army and still leave its people poor, fearful, and morally diminished. Security measured only in tanks and treaties, he felt, missed the point of what human beings actually need to live with dignity. As the scholar Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha notes in a Cambridge volume on peace and conflict, Gandhi’s vision of peace was not merely the absence of war but the expansion of human potential without harming others.

Non-violence as the path to real security 🔗

If the state and its force could not deliver genuine security, what could? Gandhi’s answer was ahimsa, or non-violence. He treated non-violence not as a passive avoidance of conflict but as an active, courageous force capable of transforming both individuals and societies. A scholarly examination of Gandhi’s thought in Project MUSE highlights how he broadened our understanding of violence to include the structural and psychological harm embedded in everyday institutions, not just physical brutality.

This broader view matters. Gandhi recognised that violence is not only the soldier’s bullet. It is also the poverty that kills slowly, the language that demeans, and the economic system that keeps people dependent and powerless. A society that funds a permanent war economy while neglecting human needs is, in this reading, committing structural violence even in peacetime.

Satyagraha and individual empowerment 🔗

Gandhi’s method for resisting this violence was satyagraha, often translated as truth-force or soul-force. It empowered ordinary people to confront injustice without becoming violent themselves. The genius of satyagraha was that it located power in the individual rather than in the state. People did not need permission, weapons, or institutional backing to resist wrongdoing. They needed only the moral courage to refuse cooperation with injustice and to accept the consequences.

This is where Gandhi’s idea of security becomes deeply personal. Real security, for him, grew from self-discipline, moral development, and the capacity of individuals to govern themselves. A people trained in non-violence and self-reliance would not need a coercive state to keep them safe, because they would pose no threat to one another in the first place.

Swaraj, Ramrajya and enlightened anarchy 🔗

Gandhi’s critique of the state pushed him toward what scholars describe as a form of philosophical anarchism. His ideal was a society needing little or no centralised state authority. He called this vision Ramrajya, a term drawn from the righteous rule of Rama, symbolising governance based on morality rather than force. In its purest form, this utopia would require no army, no police, and no representative government, because people would regulate themselves through conscience.

Central to this was the concept of swaraj, or self-rule. Swaraj operated on two levels. At the personal level, it meant each individual learning to master their own desires and act with moral discipline. At the collective level, it meant a nation free to govern itself. Writers exploring whether Gandhi was an anarchist point out that he insisted every person must achieve swaraj individually before the nation could be truly free. The journalist and Gandhi Peace Fellow Rajni Bakshi has similarly described swaraj as a process of nurturing cooperation, mutual aid, and respect for human dignity, rather than simply dismantling government.

Decentralisation and village self-rule 🔗

Gandhi did not expect a stateless society to appear overnight. His practical route toward it was radical decentralisation through self-governing village communities, or panchayats. Instead of power flowing down from a central capital, authority would rise up from countless self-reliant villages, each managing its own affairs. He imagined these communities federating with one another voluntarily, held together by moral force rather than legal compulsion.

This model directly addressed his fear of the soulless machine. The smaller and more local the unit of governance, the more it depended on relationships, conscience, and direct participation, and the less it needed coercive force. A discussion of Gandhi and non-violent revolution hosted on the INFLIBNET educational platform underscores how peace and non-violence were, for him, the essential preconditions for any genuinely developed society.

How Gandhi’s critique connects to modern human security 🔗

Decades after Gandhi’s death, the global community began to rethink security in ways that echo his concerns. In 1994, the United Nations Development Programme published a landmark report that introduced the concept of human security. The report argued that security should be equated with people rather than territories, and with development rather than arms.

The parallels are striking. The UNDP framework, crafted largely by the economist Mahbub ul Haq, identified two guiding ideals: freedom from fear and freedom from want. It listed seven dimensions of security, including economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community, and political security, as noted in overviews such as the one compiled by scholar Walter Dorn. Like Gandhi, this people-centred approach insisted that protecting borders means little if individuals remain trapped in poverty, repression, and daily fear.

Gandhi’s contribution was to identify the state itself as a potential source of that fear and repression. Modern human security thinking does not go quite as far, since it still works largely within and through states. But it shares Gandhi’s fundamental insight that the well-being of the individual, not the power of the government, should be the true measure of security.

The criticisms and limits of Gandhi’s view 🔗

Gandhi’s position was never free of difficulties, and honesty requires acknowledging them. His belief that a non-violent society would have no enemies assumed that all aggressors could eventually be moved by moral example. History offers reasons for doubt. His advice that Britain and even the Jewish people resist Nazi Germany through non-violence was widely criticised as dangerously impractical, since the Nazi regime showed no responsiveness to moral pressure.

Critics also question whether a stateless, village-based order could function in a vast, diverse, and modern society. Coordinating defence, justice, and large-scale economic activity across a sub-continent without central institutions seems, to many, unworkable. Gandhi himself conceded that his Ramrajya was an ideal picture that might never be fully realised, arguing only that a society should know what it aspires to before it can move toward it. Even the human security concept he anticipated faces its own critics, who argue that its breadth makes it vague and difficult to translate into clear policy.

What do you think? If the state ultimately relies on force to maintain order, can it ever be a genuine guarantor of human security, or is Gandhi right that real safety must grow from individual conscience and self-rule? And in a world of complex global threats, how much of Gandhi’s vision of decentralised, non-violent community remains realistic today?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/topic/human-security
2. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/peace-and-conflict/structural-violence-and-human-security-gandhis-visions/EA72730C58653B9A7040C7C847A59FE3
3. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/5/article/217391
4. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/josh-fattal-was-gandhi-an-anarchist
5. https://www.gatewayhouse.in/decoding-anarchism-and-swaraj/
6. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/psp07/chapter/mahatma-gandhi-and-non-violent-revolution/
7. https://www.undp.org/speeches/25th-anniversary-human-security-concept
8. https://walterdorn.net/23-human-security-an-overview