Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Echoes and Intersections I 177
[July 1946:1 Independence must begin at the
bottom. Thus, every village will be a republic or
Panchayat having full powers. It follows, therefo
re, that every village has to be self-sustained and
capable of managing its affairs even to the extent of
defending itself against the whole world ....
[Ulltimately it is the individual who is the unit.
This does not exclude willing help from neighbours
or from the world. It will be a free and voluntary
play of mutual forces ....
In this structure composed of innumerable villages,
there will be ever-widening, never-ascending
circles.22
But as independence approached-and soon after it,
the end of Gandhi's life-he was shunned and politically
isolated by those who had been happy to tap into his massmobilizing
power, but had no use for his antistate and anticapitalist
social vision.
States and Village Republics
For the first few decades after independence, Nehru's secular
socialist democracy was the normative referent for the
notion of the redistributive state. This paradigm for decolonization
equated liberation with state-planned modernization
and development, which was in turn equated with
large-scale industrialization.