A conversation with Prof. K.P. Shankaran, former Associate Professor of Philosophy, St. Stephens College, University of Delhi who writes regularly on Gandhi in The Indian Express, The Wire and The Beacon

Chair: Amb. K.P. Fabian, Professor, Indian Society of International Law, New Delhi 

Gandhi, as Akeel Bilgrami and Richard Sorabjee have argued, was a philosopher of great eminence. He, like the Buddha and Socrates, was an inventor of an ethics-led philosophical way of life. However what differentiates Gandhi’s ethics-led philosophical way of life from that of the Buddha’s and Socrates’, is its very visible political content. Gandhi wanted development of freedoms for humanity as a whole. He conceived a Constructive Program for this purpose. Only through political action, according to Gandhian ethics, can we implement the constructive program. Therefore Gandhi's philosophical way of life is an explicit desire for a socialist society. It is only logical that an ethics based on the reduction of selfishness can only approve a socialist way of life. Anything that enhances selfishness, like a capitalist economy, was therefore anathema to Gandhi's ethics-led philosophical way of life.