“State.......... does the greatest harm to mankind by destroying individuality, which lies at the root of all progress.” — Mahatma Gandhi. Elucidate. (Answer in 250 words)

- “State .......... does the greatest harm to mankind by destroying individuality, which lies at the root of all progress.” — Mahatma Gandhi. Elucidate. (Answer in 250 words)
Introduction
Gandhi's hostility to the state is moral rather than administrative. Because the state is coercion organised, it substitutes obedience for conscience, and conscience is the faculty through which individuals, and therefore societies, improve.

Body

1. The state as concentrated violence: Gandhi told Nirmal Kumar Bose that the state represents violence in a concentrated and organised form, and that being a soulless machine it can never be weaned from the violence to which it owes its existence.
2. Individuality as the engine of progress: Swaraj begins as rule over oneself. A citizen who obeys from fear rather than conviction has surrendered the moral agency that alone produces reform, a lesson he drew from Thoreau, Tolstoy and Ruskin.
3. Enlightened anarchy as the ideal: In his ideal order everyone is his own ruler, and there is no political power because there is no state. For the interim he accepted only a predominantly non-violent and minimal state.
4. The alternative architecture: An oceanic circle of self-sufficient villages rather than a pyramid, with village swaraj, bread labour, trusteeship and decentralisation replacing coercion by voluntary obligation.
5. Means and ends are one: A violent instrument cannot produce a non-violent society, which is why satyagraha and civil disobedience, not the capture of state power, are his method.

Conclusion
Ambedkar's reply proved decisive for Indian practice: for those whom the village oppressed, the state was the only available liberator. Gandhi's warning survives as the standard against which the reach of the developmental state is still judged.