MEGASTARS

"Generations to come will scarce believe that such
a one as this walked the earth in flesh and blood. "

- Albert Einstein about Gandhi

GANDHI THE PEACEFUL WARRIOR

By Essam Farag

 

In an era plagued with fear, war and hostility, many are searching for peaceful messengers or icons in order to bring optimism on the future of the world. This encouraged me to delve into life and world of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who was one of the forefathers of the notions: nonviolence (satyagrahas), equity, sovereignty, unity and spirituality; all of which he believed should start from the inner-self of every person.

Gandhi was born in 1869 in the coastal town of Porbandar, one of scores of tiny princely states and now part of the Indian state of Gujarat. Although the Gandhis, meaning grocers, were merchants by caste, they had risen to important political positions. Mohandas' father was the chief administrator and member of the court of Porbandar, and his grandfather had the same position in the neighboring tiny state of Junagadh. Gandhi grew up in an eclectic religious environment, His parents were followers of the largely devotional Hindu cult of Vishnu. His mother belonged to the Pranami sect, which combined Hindu and Muslim religious beliefs, gave equal honor to the sacred books of the Vishnus and the Quran, and preached religious harmony. Her religious fasts and vows, observed without exception all her life, left an abiding impression on her son. Gandhi was also exposed to Christian missionaries, but Christianity was not a significant presence in his childhood.

Gandhi was a shy and mediocre student, and completed his school education with average results. He was married to Kasturbai when they were only 13 years of age, an experience that turned him into a bitter enemy of child marriage. He continued to enjoy his marriage with his wife until his death and raised four sons which he had before he became celibate at the age of 32 for his reasons of conserving his physical energies for the important political struggles which he had embarked upon.

In 1888, Gandhi left to England to study law, where he discovered both the cultures of the West and the East. He read widely about the British and European law and politics, interacted with the theosophists, and studied Christianity, finding the New Testament deeply moving. He also read about his own religious tradition, especially the Bhagavad-Gita, which initiated him into the Hindu and Buddhist philosophies. Gandhi was called  to the bar three years later, after which he immediately left back to India.

Gandhi in South Africa

His initial work career in India did not interest him, and his services were called upon as a lawyer for a Muslim firm in South Africa in 1893 for a one-year stay, which ended up lasting for twenty-one years. It was in South Africa that Gandhi had experiences that changed the course of his life. One notable incident took place while he was on a train traveling from Durban to Pretoria. He was thrown out of the train in the middle of the night for 'daring to travel first-class', and spent the rest of the night cold in the waiting room of the nearest station contemplating whether to return to India or to stay and fight for his rights, to which his life from then on provides the answer. In 1894, just when Gandhi was about to return to India, the legislature of Natal was debating the Indian Franchise Bill, which would have taken away Indians' right to vote. Gandhi's employer urged him to stay on and lead the fight against it, which he agreed to do. He then founded the Natal Indian Congress and his campaign succeeded in partially reducing the harshness of the bill. However, his campaigns against immigration restrictions and discriminatory licensing laws were much less successful in the legal terms, hence he began to use another strategy. When Transvaal passed a law in 1907 requiring the registration and fingerprinting of all Indians and giving the police the power to enter their homes to ensure that the inhabitants were registered, Gandhi decided to use satyagraha (nonviolent resistance), through peaceful picketing of registration centers, burning registration cards, courting arrest and gracefully accepting punishment and police harassment. With the organizing of two satyagraha periods, he had great success leading to the passing of the Indian Relief Act in 1914.

During his twenty-one years in South Africa, Gandhi's ways of thought and of life underwent important changes, becoming inseparable for him. Thought would have no meaning for him unless it was lived out, while life was shallow unless it incarnated a carefully thought out vision of life. Gandhi was being influenced by religion quite intensely during this time, recreating his own brand of Hinduism that incorporated, what he would have called "advantages" of different faiths. Under the influence of Christian teachings and his British missionary friend, C.F. Andrews, Gandhi incorporated the particular idea of suffering love as exemplified in the crucifixion. Aside from the religious debate, Gandhi learnt a lot of lessons and acquired a lot of political skills. He saw how demoralized and incapable of concerted action his countrymen had become--rather than fight for their rights, they expected others to do it for them and circumvented using bribery. In South Africa, Gandhi had little difficultly uniting Muslim and Hindu traders especially since many of them shared a common language and culture. Upon his return to India, he generalized this experience and both underestimated the distance between the two communities and also seemed to have exaggerated his own ability to bridge it.

Gandhi in India

Having left India as a timid and unsuccessful lawyer, Gandhi returned in 1914 a self-confident, deeply religious and well-known political leader. Whatever the exact reason for his return to India, he returned home equipped with a new method of action and a long-meditated program for India's regeneration. In those days, Gandhi was an enthusiastic supporter of the British Empire, which had given him unrestricted access to Britain and South Africa and had exposed him to many new ways of life and thought. Although a votary of nonviolence, he insisted that his loyalty to the empire required him to give it his full support in times of need.

Shortly after his arrival in India, Gandhi toured almost the entire country with 'his ears open and mouth shut', as the great liberal leader Gopal Krishna Gokhale had advised him, in order to be able to feel the pulse of the country. His observations led him to two primary observations. First, there was considerable opposition to the increasingly oppressive colonial rule with a widespread demand for representative institutions. The Indian National Congress which was founded in 1885 had proved to be ineffective for most of people's needs since it was dominated by middle-class professionals. Some people had resorted to violence to vent their frustrations, however Gandhi saw that violence was inherently evil and unlikely to build up cultural self-confidence. He felt that the method of satyagraha that he developed in South Africa was India's best hope.

Secondly, his study of India convinced him of its 'degeneration'. He believed that due to the centuries of foreign rule, Indians had become deeply divided, caste-ridden, conformist, fragmented, selfish, demoralized, and lacking in civic virtues. Unless the country was revitalized and 'reborn', thought Gandhi, it could neither win nor sustain or even deserve independence. Based on that ideal, he worked out a Constructive Program, which included absolutely essential aspects such as Hindu-Muslim unity, removal of untouchability, ban on alcohol, use of khadi (hand-spun cloth), development of village industries, and craft-based education. He also included equality for women, health education, use of indigenous languages, adoption of a national language, integration of tribal people into political life, helping beggars, and cultivating respect for animals. Gandhi believed that satyagrahas and the Constructive Program held the key to moral regeneration in India, and for nearly thirty years he devoted all his energies to both strategies.

He needed to awaken and unite his countrymen, and so he initiated a series of well-planned satyagrahas, each appealing to a clearly targeted constituency. For his plans, Gandhi required a powerful political organization, and therefore he helped rebuild the Indian National Congress from the bottom up. Above all, he needed to mobilize the masses. After long reflection and experimentation, he formed a distinct mode of praxis. Convinced that human actions derived their emotional energy from the 'heart', only to be activated through symbolic language in recognition of the deeply symbolic Hindu culture, he used such things as the spinning wheel, the khadi, the cow, and the white cotton turban. Not only did he bring up countless symbols of this kind but soon became one himself. Gandhi's symbols appealed to both the mind and heart, interests and cultural memories, present and past, and were designed to reach out to his countrymen and mobilize their moral energy. No other leader before Gandhi had worked out such a clear and comprehensive strategy of action or his massive organizational and communicative skills. The peaceful warrior, Mahatma Gandhi spoke of equality to his countrymen saying:

"RECALL THE FACE OF THE POOREST AND THE WEAKEST 
MAN WHOM YOU MAY HAVE SEEN AND ASK YOURSELF IF THE 
STEP YOU CONTEMPLATE IS GOING TO BE OF ANY USE TO HIM."

For Gandhi, the struggle for political independence has to be run in conjunction with the larger struggle for Indian regeneration. If political independence became more important of the two goals, India ran the risk of valuing political power which would give greater prestige to office-holders than to grassroots workers. The struggles for independence and moral regeneration had different logics and sometimes came into conflict; in addition, the struggle involved both satyagrahas and working within representative institutions provided by the colonial state which sometimes also pulled in different directions.

Although Gandhi's satyagrahas in India followed the broad pattern of those in South Africa, he also introduced, several changes to suit new circumstances and needs. The idea of fasting was one of them and became a subject much debate throughout his life. He had no doubt that a fast was not a hunger strike, nor a way of gaining pity from others, but rather a form of self-sacrifice and a perfectly moral method of action. Gandhi's understanding of fasting derived from the Hindu idea of tapas (penance) and the Christian idea of suffering love. The fast would serve as a means to purify oneself, generate moral energy within oneself and to appeal to the consciences and mobilize the moral energies of its intended constituency.

Non-cooperation Independence Movement

Gandhi became an influential national leader within four years of his return to India. His moral language, complex personality, clarity of vision, use of symbols, enormous self-confidence, and courage to stand up to the established leadership both impressed and intrigued his countrymen, and also added to his charisma. 

A year after the massacre in Amritsar on April 13, 1919 where 379 unarmed civilians were killed by British forces, Gandhi launched the Non-cooperation Movement which lasted for about two years. It was inspired by the simple but dangerous idea that, since the colonial state owed its continuance to the cooperation of its subjects, it would disintegrate if they withdrew it and setup alternative institutions to fill the vacuum. For his role in the Movement, Gandhi was arrested and tried in March 1922. Interestingly he did not hire a lawyer and not only pleaded guilty but asked the judge to take into account some incriminatory material that had been ignored. He thereby forced the judge to acknowledge that there was something profoundly wrong with a system of rule which required incarceration of the likes of him. Being placed in a moral dilemma between, standing for the prevailing system whereby he had the duty to inflict the severest penalty on Gandhi, and if not he would have the duty to resign. The deeply moved British judge bowed to Gandhi and reluctantly sentenced him to six years imprisonment saying that no one would be better pleased than him so see him released sooner. This trial was a remarkable episode in British colonial history, and highlighted Gandhi's style of operation. Gandhi was eventually released early on the grounds of deteriorating health.

Contrary to Gandhi's calculations however, the Movement unwittingly alienated many Muslims. Their middle classes did not wish to give up their hard-won careers or abandon colleges and universities. Indeed, many Muslims thought that Gandhi's plan was a Hindu conspiracy to hold back their progress. He yearned for constructive work, and his mind convinced him that the limitations of the Non-cooperation Movement had highlighted its importance. Accordingly, Gandhi concentrated on improving the status of women, removing untouchability, encouraging cottage industries, propagating the spinning wheel, and popularizing vernacular languages. He also devoted the entire year of 1926 to political silence whereby he devoted his time to calm reflection, experiments in alternative technology, and meeting visitors.

One of Gandhi's growing concerns became the growing separation between India's various communities, especially the Hindus and the Muslims, which the Movement had not only highlighted but also in some cases accentuated. He decided to finally tackle the Hindu-Muslim unity issue, and embarked on a twenty-one day fast in 1924 to create 'mutual respect and tolerance' between them. Apart from placing the subject high on the national agenda, this achieved little and by the mid-1920s the political and economic situation began to worsen with terrorism on the rise. 

After long thinking, Gandhi decided to organize a satyagraha against the tax on salt in 1930. This choice was made because it affected all Indians, united Hindus and Muslims, bore heavily on the poor, and highlighted the inhumanity of the colonial regime. After marching for twenty-four days, Gandhi and his companions reached the Dandhi coast and picked up a palm full of salt in defiance of the government. Despite the many subsequent arrests, this satyagraha not only demonstrated the inhumanity of the British government but also exposed it to considerable world pressures.

Gandhi's Final Struggle

Despite its apparent success, the internal problems among Indians seem to grow rapidly whereby the voices of the minority communities of the untouchables and the Muslims needed to be included in independence negotiations more directly. The acceptance of the British of a separate electorate in 1932 for the untouchables was not acceptable by Gandhi's standards, and being in prison at that time, he resorted to his only course of action, fasting. After days of bargaining, a compromise was reached giving untouchable more reserved seats and providing them special sums of money for their educational uplift.

With regards to the Hindu-Muslim unity, the situation was rapidly crumbling. The Muslim League was arguing that they were a minority community and entitled to a separate electorate and constitutional safeguards. This position quickly escalated to a position demanding their own nation through the partitioning of the country on the basis that they had distinct cultural and political aspects entitled to full equality of status with the Hindus.

While the bulk of the Congress leadership came round to accepting the idea of partitioning the country into India and Pakistan, Gandhi resisted it not because the was worried about the shrinkage of India's territory, but because he considered the idea itself a 'false-hood' since he saw it as denying a thousand years of Indian history and based on the 'evil' principle of religious nationalism. However, under the enormous pressure in favor of the partition, Gandhi accepted the idea and focused on creating a climate that would minimize violence and maximize future reconciliation.

During the last few months of his life, Gandhi fought heroically the wave of violence that had gripped most of north India resulting from religious nationalism. At the age of 77, he decided that since he had been loyal to his God all his life, God would not let him down in his and India's greatest hour of need. He had now become a transcendental, God-possessed figure with no other mission than to tame the 'demon' of violence, as he referred to it. In order to do so, he had only one weapon left, his life, and the only way to sacrifice it was through fasting that would awaken the consciences and moral energies of his countrymen.

Even when Indian independence came on August 15, 1947, Gandhi did not even send a message to Delhi since he was too busy fighting violence and saw no reason to celebrate. Right after independence, the city of Calcutta became the theatre of mass violence, and he was urged to go to the city. When all his appeals failed, on September 2, 1947, he began a fast unto death. Within three days, many of those who had been killing arrived at his bedside, wept at his tormented body, surrendered their weapons, and gave him a written undertaking that they would allow no more violence to occur. This event confirmed Gandhi's lifelong conviction that the force of the soul was infinitely more powerful than the physical.

Hearing of riots raging in Delhi, Gandhi moved there to try to reconcile the people and end the violence, whereby he commenced his last fast on January 13, 1948 in order to  create 'real peace' in place of the calm imposed by troops, and to also pressure the Indian government not to renege on its solemn promise to transfer to Pakistan its share of collective assets. After five days of fasting, Gandhi's demands were met, however he feared the futures for the two countries.

However, his position that seemed supportive of the Muslims and Pakistan did not sit well with Hindus in India, and violence was drawing closer to him whereby he received death threats and insulting chants during his meetings. Yet, this violence had not only sapped his will to live but created a positive desire to die a violent death in the hope that his death might achieve what his life had not.

Evidently, Gandhi had told his great-niece the night before his death that he should be called a 'true Mahatma' only if 'someone shot me and I boldly received his bullet in my bare chest without a murmur and while continuing to chant the name of Rama'. The following day, a well-educated militant Hindu, who stood for almost all that Gandhi rejected, killed him after bowing to him in reverence. His assassination on January 30, 1948 had a cathartic effect. It discredited Hindu extremists, chastened moderate Hindus, reassured the minorities, and pulled the mourning nation back from the brink of a disaster.

Non-violent Resistance

In their pursuit of political goals, adherents of a philosophy of non-violence and peace face significant constraints on their choice of means to turn their ideals into reality. This problem is particularly relevant for advocates of nonviolence such as Mahatma Gandhi, for whom the notion of ahimsa (not harming, nonviolence) represents not merely a political tactic or a prudent means towards an end, but a moral way of life grounded in a metaphysical-religious view about the nature of reality. Building on the Indian traditions of nonviolence mixed with his own lens that incorporates his experiences through Western education, Gandhi considered ahimsa a mode of being and action consistent with a deeper "truth" that points to the unity of all human beings. Adding a Christian notion of 'active love' to his interpretation of nonviolence, Gandhi departed significantly from the orthodox Hindu interpretations: "Belief in nonviolence is based on the assumption that human nature in its essence is one and therefore unfailingly responds to the advance of love."

Basically nonviolence can be expressed in a negative and a positive form. The former means that one does not injure any living being whether by body or mind, while the latter refers to ahimsa, which is the largest love and greatest charity. In this sense and in the works of Gandhi, the concepts of love and ahimsa were interchangeable. Although Gandhi often seemed to be an advocate of nonviolence in the physical sense, his ideas focused more on interpreting this physical violence as an effect of harmful mental violence. Hence, he actually saw that the deeper mental and conceptual layer of violence was the root of all other forms of violence.

"Our violence in word and deed is but a feeble 
echo of the surging violence of thought in us."

Emphasizing that nonviolence contained the universal ethical and political imperative to treat human beings in all respects as ends in themselves--and that nonviolent action was therefore morally right in general--Gandhi proceeded on the fundamental premise that his political opponents too were worthy of the same love, ahimsa, as his allies.

It is this very emphasis on the universal love as both the means and the end of all political activity that gives Gandhi's theory of nonviolence its moral authority. At the same time, however, it also limits the range of his political weapons to those 'benign' methods involving discussion, persuasion, appeals, and various other forms of nonviolent resistance. Throughout his career as a political thinker and activist, Gandhi encountered the agonizing dilemma of either remaining faithful to his nonviolent principles and risking the failure of the Indian nationalist movement, or focusing on the seizure of political power at the expense of his moral message. Gandhi's dilemma in India represents a particularly intriguing example of the more general political predicament involving the reconciliation of moral principles with political power.

Since Gandhi cherished the role of bridge-builder and mediator, he came to believe that it was indeed possible to reconcile his nonviolent principles with the effective pursuit of nationalist political power. In other words, Gandhi argued that Indian self rule could be achieved without sacrificing the universalist moral imperatives of his nonviolent philosophy: "The task before nationalists is clear. They have to win over by their genuine love all minorities including the Englishmen. Indian nationalism, if it is to remain nonviolent, cannot be exclusive."

In the world we live in today, that places a lot of emphasis on nourishing nationalisms, a proper understanding of the situation can only be reached through the analysis of nationalist theorists, such as Gandhi. He forces us to ask the question whether it is indeed possible to construct a benign type of nationalism that is rooted in neither physical nor conceptual forms of violence. For most of his life in India, Gandhi was wedded to the notion that the successful involvement of the masses in nonviolent direct action was not only possible, but indispensable to his project of forging an Indian national identity consonant with his moral principles.

Mahatma Gandhi's moral politics of redemptive love and nonviolence still represents an appealing vision for this 21st century. Gandhi's unfettered commitment to truth and nonviolence and his desire for social justice shine forth in the darkness of an age of war, terrorism, nuclear weapons and genocide. Gandhi, the peaceful warrior, will remain an inspiration for all generations of thinkers and activists of different ethno-cultural backgrounds and religious faiths that hold strongly the hope in achieving justice through nonviolent resistance.

Further Readings:

Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World by Louis Fischer. New American Library; Reissue edition (May 1989)

Gandhi: Behind the Mask of Divinity by G. B. Singh . Prometheus Books; (July 2003).

All Men Are Brothers: Autobiographical Reflections by Gandhi, et al (Paperback - March 1980)

Gandhi, Mao, Mandela, and Gorbachev: Studies in Personality, Power, and Politics by Anthony R. Deluca. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000.

Gandhi An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth -- by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Mahadev Desai, Sissela Bok, Beacon Press; Reprint edition (November 1993).

The Essential Gandhi: His Life, Work, and Ideas: An Anthology -- by Louis Fischer (Editor) 1983.

Gandhi's Passion: The Life and Legacy of Mahatma Gandhi -- by Stanley A. Wolpert, 2001

Non-Violent Resistance (Satyagraha) by Gandhi, M. K. Gandhi (Paperback - June 2001)

Gandhi: A Photo Biography by Peter Rühe (Hardcover - October 2001)

Gandhi : Peaceful Warrior (Easy Biographies) by Rae Bains, Scott Snow (Illustrator) (Paperback - January 1990)

Gandhi's Dilemma: Nonviolent Principles and National Power. Manfred B. Steger. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.

Gandhi. Bhikhu Parekh. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Toward a Just Civilization: A Gandhian Perspective on Human Rights and Development. J.I. Bakker. Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press, 1993.

Essam Farag, BA Honors (Dalhousie) is a second year Master's student and graduate teacher's assistant of international development at the University of Guelph, Canada. Email: essamfarag@hotmail.com

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