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Second, he uses the reconstructed valuedistribution foundation to demolish the neoclassical theory of profit, which hinges on the untenable premise of capital being given a priori, as a quantity or period of production, independent of distribution. Given the structure of price-quantity correspondences in neoclassical theory, Sraffas critique deals a death blow to the whole edifice of neoclassical theories of prices and output. Sinha raises the issue, among many others, of what prices represent in Sraffas classical standpoint. He argues prices there have only a functional role, as logical conditions ensuring replacement of the

economy. Evidently, they are neither indices of scarcity as in neoclassical economics, nor in some sense, indices of exploitation as in Marx. Sinha raises a number of other technical issues arising out of PCMC, or, in effect, from Sraffas silence. Are prices in Sraffa system dependent on the case of constant returns to scale? Are they dependent on the Smith-Ricardo centres of gravitation? Does the case of intrinsic joint production pose an insuperable challenge to the Sraffa propositions? Is Sraffas economy static, stationary or dynamic? Space constraints prevent us from broaching these issues and, at any rate, a satisfactory resolution of at least some of

them must await the publication of Sraffa manuscripts in full. Meanwhile, readers of Ajit Sinha can look forward to a lively and engaging discourse that displays the authors meticulous scholarship and breadth of vision. Both graduate students and teachers of political economy will find in the book an excellent reader on the state of the art in classical and Marxian theories of prices. They are also themes that we may hope will shape the future course of economic science.
G Omkarnath (omkarnath.hyd@gmail.com) teaches classical economics at the department of economics, University of Hyderabad.

The Paternal Reason

Shaj Mohan, Divya Dwivedi

he book, Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi for the Twenty-First Century, follows the imperative of returning to Gandhi: in his words, we must write the horoscope of this century and his authority we must invest in our actions. This is consistent with much of Gandhi studies today. These contributions, including essays by some of the most important Gandhi scholars such as Anthony Parel, Bhiku Parekh and Vinit Haksar, familiarise us with the perceived indigence of the contemporary world, and the diverse recommendations on how its needs may be met. According to the editor Douglas Allen, the need of our times varies across contributors. However there is agreement on the absence of a fundamental unity and completion in the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG), which invites imaginative interpretations There are multiple Gandhis and multiple ways of analysing his thought and action (p viii). Allen argues that we must choose a Gandhi out of the multiple according to our needs.1 As we will see, the need, with certain exceptions, is a question of religion.

The Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi for the Twenty-First Century edited by Douglas Allen (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), 2008; pp xviii + 263, Rs 695.

A Political Religion
The nation has chosen Gandhi for its father, though it has not yet chosen his religion. Progenies inherit the religion of the father. The indeterminacy of Gandhis religion
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maintains the nation in a state of religious indeterminacy. We can sense a battle for the fathers religion in Gandhi studies today, seeking his perfectly determined second birth. Gandhis statements about religion are organised around two poles. On the one hand, he admitted himself into every religion: I am a Moslem, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Christian, a Jew, a Parsi.2 On the other hand he claimed that by religion he understood that religion which underlies all religions, and is therefore unlike any religion.3 Accordingly, his nation could have three destinies it could be (1) the nation of the religion unlike any other, (2) the nation of all religions, and (3) the nation of one particular religion from the list of religions. The two series of statements on religion mentioned above should have occasioned a genuine research into his conception of religion. Bhiku Parekh and Anthony Parel are two of the foremost Gandhi scholars, in whose writings we sense the waves of pulsation extending from Gandhis writings. However, the former evades the religion-problem with the statement, Gandhis arguments for a belief in God are suspect (p 13). The latter
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composes a manifesto for political religion between the two series. In his previous works Parekh had shown the value of Indian traditional thought for Gandhi. A chapter called Satyagraha and a Non-rationalist Theory of Rationality in his book Gandhis Political Philosophy (1989), in many ways, anticipated this present anthology. In the book under review, in Gandhi and Interreligious Dialogue, he expresses a need of displacing secular fundamentalism: The historical settlement that Europe reached in the aftermath of the religious wars of the seventeenth century needs reassessment (p 2). The secular needs to be a bit non-secular, and it needs to admit conflict as inherent to religion. There are intra-religious conflicts, but interreligious conflicts require more attention since they occasion the calls for the retraction of religion as such. However, the immediate incentive for interreligious dialogue is the conflict between the religious and the secular: a shared interest in combating secularism (p 2). But such an interest would still have limits in the victory of religions over secularism, hence Parekh, seeking an enduring need that would commit religions to dialogue, interprets Gandhis vague ideas freely. The wispiness of Gandhis words and the authority of his name are locus and reason for the need Since Gandhis ideas are sometimes vague or inadequately developed, I have interpreted them freely. He holds that religious men are practitioners of relative truth, and hence must learn from one another the need is to

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become better religions. By implication, religions must allow adherents and outsiders to interpret and adapt freely: All religious boundaries are porous and free, and all doctrinal disputes are ultimately pointless (p 10). Here, it is reasonable to infer that religion should be a perpetual field of conversion, and the religious man a migrant of the relative truth. It would then appear that conversion and native religion4 are not religious problems, but political: the problem of the definition of a nation and of a people who define that nation. That is, what precedes the soldiers who look out of the geographical borders of the nation is the installation of an inner map in its people. Religion in its codes supplies the map, and, in the vigilance over sentiments, it guards the inner bounds of the people. The idea of a Hindu India, then, would serve to contain, by means of its religious definition, the spillage of the people of India into religions of other lands. Over the tomb of religion, the seventeenth century accord was the first day out for politics: the fight for freedom. In 1871, Mikhail Bakunin wrote about the enemy that religion feared since its inception, the eternal rebel, the first free thinker and the emancipator of worlds (p 2). That is, religion as obturating the spacing for worlds, and politics as emancipation of worlds, are opposed to one another. On the other hand, in the present offerings, Parekh, Parel, Paranjpe, Dallmayr and Prabhu propose a political religion.

Author-ity of Gandhi
Gandhi lets Anthony Parel protract the same need that was buried without sanctimony in the 17th century. In his essay Bridging the Secular and the Spiritual, instead of religion, Parel proposes spirituality a new religious attitude. Unlike many who prefer to leave it vague, he specifies that By spiritual is meant here that which pertains to the spirit or the immortal soul. Humans are taken to be body-soul composites. Their fulfilment takes place not only in time but also in life outside time (p 20). Spirituality ensures the survival of a hope of fulfilment outside time. Then the reasonable question arises: cannot matters of spirit, soul and immortality be debated and settled in the life

outside of time where time apparently is in abundance? In presenting radical Islam and radical secularism as the two evils, Parel is accompanied in this anthology by Parekh and Fred Dallmayr in varying degrees. When in Gandhi and Islam Dallmayr writes a dreadful tale of Jinnah and post-partition violence Nor did the man most responsible for the partition, Jinnah, lift a finger to douse the flames of communal mayhem he turns an acute ignorance of historical research into a coy appeal (p 155). He persists without acknowledging, as Ayesha Jalal has advised, the domain of political contingency, containing possibilities of different outcomes, that lay between the adoption of the Lahore Resolution and partition several years later (Jalal 2005: 123). In The Postmodern Discourse on Gandhi Naresh Dadich finds similarity in Gandhis writings to Rousseau, Marx, Kant, Hegel, Gramci and Lyotard, but emphasises Gandhis proximity to existentialism. In his own words: Naresh Dadich disputes the commonly held view that Gandhi was a representative of the orthodox Indian tradition [...]. Dadich sums up: Gandhian thought in its major thrust and broad outline is nearer to existentialism in its utility and contemporariness (p 183). In distancp ing his Gandhi from political religion, Dadich demonstrates a limitless interpretability invested in CWMG. Nicholas Giers Nonviolence as a Civic Virtue is similarly concerned with enumerating allied contemporary positions and finding Gandhis relevance with respect to them. He opposes himself and Gandhi to both modernity and French deconstructionists, affirming instead, premodern harmony of humans, society, and the sacred (p 125). Accordingly for him, Gandhis allies from ancient to present times are Confucius, Socrates, Heidegger, MerleuPonty, Buber, Derrida, Buddha and Arendt. Both essays impeccantly exhibit Gandhi as the material needed for the craftsmen of political religion; they reveal the extensibility that any interpretation of Gandhi may obtain to, although, unlike Parekh and Parel, they do not themselves state a need which could place an external limit to such interpretations. Venerable authority extends from the past towards a need of the present and
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sanctifies it. Paranjpe reckons that Gandhi is past enough. Of the two series of Gandhis positions on religion mentioned earlier, Paranjpe fastens to the first (where Gandhi incarnates every religion) to choose a Hindu Gandhi: Gandhi, by his own admission, was a Sanatani Hindu (p 206). Now the nation can have a Hindu father and will be a Hindu nation. Paranjpe would like to secern the name and the bloodline, Gandhi. He laments that the only Gandhi the present central government in India promoted was Rajiv. Much worse, for him, is the nations recognition of an Italian Indian called Sonia (p 205). A Sanatani Hindu Mahatma would foreclose the future which is a serendipitous mixture of lines, seeds, and fates. From Gandhis many reprimands, westernised Indians is picked by Paranjpe and presented as the cause for the loss of purity of the surname. However, Gandhi never read anyones bloodline. He wished those British to stay in India who would follow the code of passive resistance, or who at least did not sabotage the parliamentary swaraj in the making, which for him was Hindu-Muslim unity.5 While separating bloodlines for a Hindu nation, Paranjpe expresses token disapproval of the strident rhetoric of Hindutva (p 204). This gesture of distance is often called soft-core Hindutva as opposed to hard-core Hindutva, a division which has served well all forms of fascism. In When the Silent Majority Backs a Violent Minority Sumanta Banerjee stated this plainly: Well meaning secularists who hope to bring about peace among Hindus and Muslims by harking back to selective quotations from their respective

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scriptures in support of religions harmony appear to be barking up the wrong tree. All that remain of those scriptures are their corpses that have become breeding ground of communal pestilence (p 1185). In other words, the soft-core is the realcore: they will ritualistically bury the hard-core and animate the dead again at the opportune moment. Two of the exceptions to political religion in this anthology are significant. Richard L Johnson in his Three 9/11s opposes terrorism and counter-terrorism to satyagraha. Freedom, if obtained through terror, will not be true freedom. It will result in a state that secures and protects its interests through brute force leading to counterterrorism, the name for the legitimised form of terror. Counter-terrorism in itself is a fosterage of terror, that is, it can inspire terror alone. Johnson contends that Gandhi understood this modern civilizational trait as including Hindu extremists of his time. Two of the most important extremists were Shyamji Krishnavarma and Vinayak Savarkar [...]. [Krishnavarma] wrote in 1909 that Gandhis philosophy of non-violence was utterly subversive of all ethical, political and social ideals. Savarkar agreed. Nathuram Godse, who assassinated Gandhi in 1948, was an ardent supporter of Savarkar (p 103). Johnson holds that, for Gandhi, moral actions are responses to the contemporary unlike the purely spiritual which is a preparation for a life outside of time. That is, the spiritual and the moral were convertible and hence, Gandhi was a thinker of here and now. Rather than express a need, the conclusion Johnson draws for these times is that whatever, imperially, organises men, a crowd, under the unity of a need such as nationalism and religion, will produce the cycles of terror and counter-terror. He raises through the index of a date, 9/11, a Gandhian warning: Every iron fist rusts, and through its pores seeps in a fit of restlessness.

obeys the law in the Socratic mode of politics. However, the question is how a court of law determines the degree of punishment in each instance of satyagraha, which requires classification of civil disobedience. Haksar proposes: Even if our opponent is not right, but is sincere and reasonably wrong, this should be taken into account in sentencing as well as in deciding to prosecute. But if our opponent is unreasonably wrong we should be less tolerant (p 72). Contrasting the Narmada movep ment and Babri masjid demolition, he argues that the consequence shall determine the punishment. During the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), Arundhati Roy violated the law, was punished by the court of law and she complied with the judgment. Her act of civil disobedience exposed the plight of the displaced and the political economy of displacement. Authorities elsewhere will be mindful of the people who have been thus informed in future before undertaking such projects. In comparison, the forcible demolition of the Babri masjid resulted in countrywide communal violence and the ascending obturation of political freedom extending to the present time.
In the case of the Ram Sevaks, we are not just suspicious of their sincerity (in other words do they really believe they know so precisely where Ram was born when no one even knows which millennium he was born in?), but we are also disturbed by the fact that their cause seems to lead to violence and communal disharmony (pp 73-74).

inveterate is written upon the surface of the new and the reason of needs which necessitates it. In the persisting milieu of post-modern consensus reason has died, in the manner of a failure to live up to itself and in the manner of failure before the greater reason of morality. Yet the oddment of the demise of reason persists. The oddment is the authority of reason without the travail of reason. Allen defines this new avatar of reason, which combines the reason of authority and the authority of reason, in his editors introduction: The adequate nonrational is never the irrational (p ix). Since adequating is itself an act of reason, we can reformulate it this way the rational irrational is rational. In most instances in the volume the irrational which is rationalised through needs of the times is religion. The authority of the name Gandhi is proper to name the new reason: A reason authorised in Gandhis name is a valuable catalyst for us (p xiv). Most essays in this anthology branch from this paternal reason.
Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi (shajdivya@ gmail.com) are philosophers based in India.

Notes
1 Allen stated elsewhere, My position is that a highly selective (emphasis added) approach to Gandhi, when integrated with compatible nonGandhian approaches, provides invaluable insights and potential for creative and more adequate formulations of peace education; Mahatma Gandhi on Violence and Peace Education, Philosophy East & West, p 290. 2 Quoted in Louis Fischer, p 544. 3 Hind Swaraj, p 42. 4 Native religion is the basis for the conversion debate. The argument is that the religion which gives membership into it only by birth defends its numbers. 5 Hind Swaraj, p 73.

The Right to Civil Disobedience

In Satyagraha and the Right to Civil Disobedience Vinit Haksar argues for a constitutional provision for civil disobedience since it is not contrary to law. First, the satyagrahi follows the law of conscience. Second, by fully submitting to the punishment given according to the law he
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In both cases the law was broken, but the consequences of NBA made it a noble civil disobedience movement; it was a fight for freedom. In his 1971 essay Gandhis Non-Violence as a Tactic, Robert Klitgaard had used game theory to classify passive resistance. But the suspended question there was of the object quantity in the payoff matrix, for example, quantity of money or territory. Haksar shows us that it is the degree of freedom obtained by or revealed before a society in the act of civil disobedience that determines its justification. This anthology alerts us about the devices and programmes into which Gandhi is being allocated and the ways in which he is made amenable to these, especially by assuming a fundamental disunity in the CWMG. It reminds us how easily the
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References
Allen, Douglas (2007): Mahatma Gandhi on Violence and Peace Education, Philosophy East & West Volume, University of Hawaii Press, July , Vol 57, No 3, pp 290-310. Bakunin, Mikhail (1871): God and the State, Kessinger Publishing. Banerjee, Sumanta (2002): When the Silent Majority Backs a Violent Minority, Economic & Political Weekly, 30 March-5 April, Vol 37, No 13, pp 1183-85. Fischer, Louis (1997 reprint): The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, 1951 (London: Harper Collins). Gandhi, M K (2007 reprint): Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, Anthony Parel (ed.) South Asia ed. (Delhi: Cambridge University Press), 1997. Jalal, Ayesha (2005): Between Myth and History in M R Kazimi (ed.), M A Jinnah: Views and Reviews (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp 119-23. Klitgaard, Robert E (1971): Gandhis Non-Violence as a Tactic, Journal of Peace Research, Vol 8, No 2, pp 143-63.

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