Ethics cannot be shaped and sustained in isolation. The heuristic process requires a supportive environment in which public opinion plays a significant role. In every field of activity, the components of ethical conduct have to be identified and its dynamics worked out. Efficiency, economy, effectiveness, equity and equality of treatment, transparency, purity, neutrality, and excellence, among others, are deemed to be commonly the ingredients essential to the conduct of public life. Ethics in more general terms deal with moral duty and obligation.

In the modern times, the underlying forces that shape ethics have undergone many changes. Between what Max Weber called the ‘Protestant Ethics’ to what Wayne A.R. Leys called the ‘Social Ethics’, there is a wide gap. The Protestant Ethics emphasized the quest for individual salvation through individual efforts, thrift and competitive forces. The Social Ethics emphasized that morally good is determined by pressures of society against the individual. Gandhian ethics are far above the two streams. For Gandhi, there are no such water-tight compartments as personal, private or social ethics. Ethical conduct has wider and positive dimensions. Only four days before his assassination, Mahatma Gandhi thus warned the country during his prayer meeting: “The subject of corruption referred to by the correspondent is not new. Only it has become much worse than before. Restraint from without has practically gone. Corruption will go when the large number of persons given to the unworthy practice, realize that the nation does not exist for them but they do for the nation. It requires a high code of morals, extreme vigilance on the part of those who are free from the corrupt practice and who have influence over corrupt servants. Indifference in such matters is criminal. If our evening prayers are genuine, they must play no mean part in removing from our midst the demon of corruption.”Unfortunately the warning went unheeded. This is a matter for soul-searching.

The “highest form of morality” in Gandhi’s ethical system is the practice of altruism/self-sacrificing. For Gandhi, it was never enough that an individual merely avoided causing evil; they had to actively promote good and actively prevent evil. In conflict situation it can be difficult to remember to forsake possible satisfaction by the active prevention of evil to the opponent by working for the good of all parties. The question of why one should act in a moral way has occupied much time in the history of philosophical inquiry. Gandhi’s answer to this is that happiness, religion and wealth depend upon sincerity to the self, an absence of malice towards and exploitation of others, and always acting “with a pure mind”. Gandhi’s ethics, therefore, do not stem from the intellectual deductive formula. “Do unto others as you would have been them unto you”.Gandhi himself beautifully sum up, he alone is religious, he alone is happy and he alone is wealthy, who is sincere in himself, bears no malice, exploits no one and always acts with a pure mind. Such men alone can serve mankind.

Soon after the Congress ministries assumed office, Gandhi threw open the columns of Harijan for the ‘Political education’ of the new rulers and started a series of articles on their duties and responsibilities. In a personal letter to Jawaharlal Nehru, he almost apologized for waning and sought his permission for continuing, ‘to interfere with your handling of the whole situations’, but he felt that it was his ‘duty to write’. Through these articles, he advised the ministers to preserve “rigorous simplicity” in their style of living and to also introduce the same in the administration. They had a vast opportunity now of achieving the Congress objectives if only they were ‘honest, selfless, industrious, vigilant and solicitous’ for the true welfare of the starving millions.

Minister ship, Gandhiji stressed were not prizes but “Avenues to Service” and had “to be held lightly, not tightly”. Gandhi expected the Congress rule “not through the police backed by the military but through its moral authority based upon the greatest goodwill of the people ‘won through’ the service of the people whom it seeks to represent in every one of its actions”. And he expected the same public spirit from the critics of the ministers. While he asserted that “It is not only a right, but a duty for any Congressmen to openly criticize acts of Congress officials”, he also insisted that the “Criticism has got to be courteous and well-informed.” “Healthy, well-informed, balanced criticism is the ozone of public life”, Gandhi said. Gandhi’s advice to the ministers not to rule through the police did not mean, however, that they should tolerate violence. “Civil liberty is not criminal liberty”, Gandhi stated emphatically.

Gandhi was firm in his belief that the lasting cure for all violence (whether inter-religious or international) was to be found in the moral transformation of human being rather than in any institutional arrangements. And that the spiritual resources to bring about this necessary and possible change were already available in the great religions of the world and that India with its tradition of tolerance and pluralism provided the most congenial soil for the active pursuit of the spiritual value of universal brotherhood.

Gandhi’s life-long mission was to educate people and teach them self-reliance for self-rule. If the people were ignorant, they would be exploited. When the people realized their strength and the fact that the bottom sustained the top, it would be well within them. Trusting the inarticulate wisdom, Gandhi hoped to “educate” leaders by entrusting them with responsibility and letting them learn by listening and responding to the people.

In a democracy, government should trust the people and educate them in and through the exercise of freedom. “Real democracy people learn not from books, not from the government who are in name and in reality their servants. Hard experience is the most efficient teacher in democracy”. Gandhi had unbounded faith in the inborn goodness of the common people and their capacity to learn. People should be educated in freedom so that they could “keep the ministers on their toes”.A good government should ensure both freedom and welfare and thus promote the largest good of the people with the minimum of controls.

Gandhi wanted to make his associates responsible persons in every aspects of life and living. Whether it is home or office or ashram, one has to observe perfect discipline. For him there was no dichotomy between private and public life. In money matters too, he insisted on a fool-proof system of keeping a detailed account. “Even if the money is one’s own, one should keep a detailed account of every Kori (sent) spent, for the fact is that nothing in this world is our own. It is our daily experience that everything belongs to God. We should, therefore, be very reasonable in the way we use things and spend our money. He who lives in this would keep for his own satisfaction an account of every pie spent by him”.

Mahatma Gandhi is now universally accepted as an exemplary model of ethical and moral behavior with a rare combination of - personal and public life, individual and social life, theory and the practice, thought and action, and eternal and immediate. He was truly a Karamyogi, to use in Gita’s terminology. He considered life to be an integrated whole, to be lived as a series of ‘Experiments with truth’ thus growing in ethics and ethical conducts (moral status) each day. He took the existing religious and social precepts, fought to remove the ‘excrescence’, and worked incessantly to render selfless service as the way to God and to self-realization. Towards the end, Gandhi could truly say, “My life is my message”. To Mahatma Gandhi, one’s moral or ethical code must not follow from a self-righteous or a self-centered attitude but from a desire to be humble, right, just and true towards others.

While speaking on the resolution setting the objectives of the Indian Constitution in the Constituent Assembly, Nehru Ji referred to Gandhiji as the “architect of this Assembly and all that has gone before it and probably of much that will follow”. These last few words expressed Nehru Ji’s belief that Gandhian principles will continue to govern the affairs of the Indian Republic. This belief is well reflected in the speech Nehru Ji delivered on Gandhiji’s assassination:

The light has gone out, I said and yet I was wrong… the light that has illumined this country for these many years will illumine this country for many more years and a thousand years later that light will still be seen in this country and the world will see it and it will give solace to innumerable hearts. For that light represented the living truth… the eternal truths, reminding us of the right path, drawing us from error, taking this ancient country to freedom.

Let us hope that people in India, the laity and the leaders alike rise morally and follow the path shown by Mahatma Gandhi in thought, deed and action and transform India into a nation of true human beings who are civilized and free from corruption.

The author is a well-known Gandhian thinker and author of ‘Reading Gandhi’