It is hard to properly study Gandhi’s moral and political concepts without studying his personality. Einstein said of him that generations to come will “scarcely believe that such a one as this, ever in flesh and blood, walked upon this earth”. More books and essays have been written about Gandhi than any other figure in world history apart from the founders of great religions. He has been celebrated as perhaps the greatest man to live in the 20th century and has been compared to a wider range of historical personages than anyone else, from the likes of the Dalai Lama, Krsna, Rama, Buddha and St Joan, to Cromwell, Jefferson, Mazzini, Lincoln, and Lenin, and yet again to Thoreau, Marx, Rousseau and Tolstoy – comparisons that can be more confusing than helpful but none the less show his level of influence and how many people admire him.
Gandhi combined many roles in his life that show why these comparisons were made. He was the leader of a large successful human rights campaign in South Africa in the early 1900’s; he was a skilled lawyer; the founder of many ashrams and communes; a voice against oppression as he championed many causes such as woman’s rights, animal rights and rejected the caste and class systems; and the revolutionary leader of a mass nonviolent movement that played a very large part in removing the British from India.
Unfortunately his personality, radiant goodness and kindness, has had such an intense impact that it has diverted attention from his claims to be a political thinker. In India he is viewed more as a saint or a prophet than a revolutionary and is called “the father of the nation” – this is compensation by a large portion of the intelligentsia for its failure to study his writings and to put serious consideration into his moral and political thoughts. Moral and political thought that showed the world that revolution is possible without ever taking up arms.
Gandhi’s life
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in 1869 in Porbander in the state of Gujarat, India.
He studied Law in London and was called to the bar in 1891. He then enrolled in the high court of London but later that year returned to India where he accepted a job at an Indian law firm in Durban, South Africa. While in South Africa, Gandhi became appalled with the treatment of Indian immigrants who were without political rights. He decided to fight the South African government and launched a non-violent direct action campaign.
After seven years of non-violent action and multiple periods in prison, Gandhi and his followers forced the South African government to concede to many of Gandhi’s demands. He returned to India shortly afterwards.
In the 1920’s Gandhi attracted millions of followers as he began campaigning for Indian independence from Britain by organising strikes, boycotts of British goods and institutions, as well as protests. He knew that it is impossible to rule without cooperation and showed that much can be done to achieve this without acting with aggression. In 1930 he wrote “Much can be done... Liquor and foreign cloth shops can be picketed. We can refuse to pay taxes if we have the requisite strength. The Lawyers can give up practice. The public can boycott the Courts by refraining from litigation. Government servants can resign their posts...” Throughout his life he put many of these tactics and more into practice to force the British out of India.
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| Gandhi and followers on the famous “Salt March in 1930 |
As the peaceful non-cooperation movement grew, Gandhi was sentenced to six years in prison - just going to show how effective his actions were and how much of a threat his movement had become to British rule. He viewed this as a success and it did not deter him as the nonviolent resistance movement continued to grow.
On the 6th of April, 1930, a 61 year old Gandhi, now addressed by many as Mahatma (great soul), embarked on his most famous act of nonviolent action. He arrived at small village on the Indian coast and gathered salt. Soon hundreds of thousands of people were doing this – breaking the British salt laws. This may seem like a relatively insignificant law to break but salt was something that was needed by all members of Indian society, rich and poor. This act showed a defiance of the British monopoly on a vital resource, that neither they nor anybody else had a right to control. From this simple act, the civil disobedience movement grew and Gandhi, along with thousands of others, was again arrested. This only succeeded yet again in increasing Gandhi’s support and the numbers of people engaging in non-violent action.
The British grew more and more worried at this response. They were well equipped at dealing with violent uprisings and crushing them but did not know how to respond to an active non-violent campaign. Throwing people in jail only succeed in gaining more support for Gandhi and in filling the prisons to the point that no further arrests could be made, the British were forced to release Gandhi, and sub-sequentially invited him to a round table conference in London to negotiate the possible terms of Indian independence.
The conference failed and it wasn’t until 1942 that Gandhi issued his last call for independence from Britain where he asked every Indian to lay down their life, if necessary, for the cause of freedom. The protests, strikes and boycotts started once again and in 1947 the British could no longer hold power and left India. Gandhi had succeeded in his aim to remove the imperial oppressors but unfortunately this did not lead to the world Gandhi was hoping to make as India split along religious lines into India and Pakistan. He was assassinated in 1948 by a Hindu nationalist fanatic.
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| A quote off of a Gandhi monument in South Africa |
Gandhi’s Politics: Ahimsa, Satyagraha and Civil Disobedience
Gandhi highly valued the principle of ahimsa, which literally means nonviolence. He believed that violence used against oppression was not only morally wrong but also a mistake. It could never really end injustice because it inflamed the prejudice and fear that fed oppression. He wrote in 1909 “The means may be likened to a seed and the end a tree; and there is just the same invioble [sic] connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree... we reap exactly what we sow”.
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| Gandhi teaching about Satyagraha in India |
Gandhi knew that the use of violence dehumanises those upon which violence is used, and can only create a system that is unequal and can never lead to peace – where the poles reverse and the oppressed become oppressors rather than creating equality.
Gandhi used methods of political action that were effective and nonviolent. He called this “passive resistance”- a term he later rejected as there was nothing passive about it. It worked like this:
1) Announce opposition to an unjust law (such as restrictions on free movement)
2) Break the Law (by crossing a border illegally)
3) Suffer the consequences (arrest, physical abuse, prison)
Gandhi believed that resister’s calm and dignified suffering would open the eyes of oppressors and weaken the hostility behind oppression. Rather than adversaries being bullied to give in they would be obliged to see what was right, and that would make them change their minds and actions. Gandhi called this satyagraha which translates to “truth” and “holding firmly”. Gandhi realised that for this to work it needed to do more than just appeal to oppressors. It needed to put pressure on them and force change.
Satyagraha was developed because terms such as Ahimsa, nonviolence, and the absence of violence, did not show the pro-active nature and the strength of his political action. Gandhi was a non-violent political activist, not a pacifist, and had contempt for any kind of non-active pacifism stating that he would rather see someone resist violently than not resist at all. He saw pacifism as cowardly, stating “Violence is any day preferable to impotence. There is hope for a violent man to become non-violent. There is no such hope for the impotent.”
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| Howard Zinn and Gandhi agree about the necessity of law breaking to make change |
In order to be forceful, satyagraha needed to threaten rule and control. Strikes stopped productions and vital services such as the communication networks the British relied on and well as power production and the transportation of food and water. Law breaking, or civil disobedience, despite the possible violent oppression from the British that could ensue, removed the British oppressors’ ability to bully and control.
Would Gandhi have been as successful if his was challenging a more brutal oppressor?
The argument has frequently been made that Gandhi’s tactics could only have worked against the British due to their “good nature”, “fairness” and “respect”. This argument fails to acknowledge that the British Empire was a ruthless fighting force that secured land and maintained control through its military. This is as true in India as it was throughout the rest of the British Empire.
No case shows this better than that of the Pathans who lived in and around the Khyber Pass – the gateway from India to Afghanistan. The Pathans were Muslim-tribesmen who where known as some of the most warlike people in the world (as were the British). The British sent thousands of troops into the Pathan hills to control the gateway to central Asia. They shelled the Pathans in the 19th century and bombed them from the air in the 20th. Thousand of Pathans were killed, flogged and beaten. After decades of this the Pathans made a decision that made them much more of a threat to the British – they joined Gandhi’s nonviolent movement. The “gentle” British did not believe that the Pathans were capable of this. They sealed off the area for two whole decades and brutalised the nonviolent resistors through mass executions, torture, imprisonment and hangings. Despite this, tens of thousands more Pathans swore vows of nonviolence and became a large part of the movement that removed the British from India.
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Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan leader of the Pathans with Mahatma Gandhi.
Khan was closely identified with Gandhi and he is known in India as the `Frontier Gandhi'.
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Gandhi wanted to achieve a world of equality and peace. In 1931 a cartoon in “The Star” newspaper depicted him in a loin cloth besides Mussolini, Hitler, de Valera and Stalin, who were clad in black, brown, green and red shirts respectively. The caption, "And he isn't wearing any blooming shirt at all" was not only literally but figuratively true. For a man of nonviolence, who believed in the brotherhood of man, there was no superficial division of nations into good and bad, allies and adversaries. This did not, however, mean that Gandhi did not distinguish between the countries which inflicted and the countries which suffered violence. His own life had been one struggle against the forces of violence, and Satyagraha was designed at once to eschew violence and to fight injustice.
Gandhi’s life and struggles were only one out of many steps towards creating a world of peace and equality. He inspired many, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who have used his methods since to make positive social change. We can do this and unite to overcome the injustices of the current world system as Gandhi has shown is possible. But to do so we must study the mistakes and the successes of revolutions throughout history; protest and campaign; organise and unite; and remove the elite and oppressors in our society- forcefully and non-violently in order to create a world of equality and freedom. History has show that oppressors will never voluntarily give up their power. Fortunately the likes of Gandhi have shown us that it is possible to remove them with the weapons of love and truth.
If you would like to do this, join the Organisation for Global Nonviolent Action (OGNA).
