Relevance of Gandhi

by Sandip K. Dasverma

In an article in The Washington Post, September 8, 2004, Anne Applebaum wrote:

Some of the Beslan survivors have said that they were told by their captors that "Russian soldiers are killing our children in Chechnya, so we are here to kill yours." But there is no moral justification, no intellectual line of reasoning, no political logic. The hardest thing in the world is to resist injustice without hatred, or to resist brutality without brutality, or to fight any kind of war without losing your own humanity. By failing to do so, the Chechen terrorists may have just defeated their own stated cause.

And yet more than 100 years back, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, universally known as Mahatma Gandhi, not only preached but also practiced to counter “brutality without brutality”. He showed that: “we could fight a war without losing our own humanity”. He practiced it for retrieving national dignity in racist South Africa and later in colonial India.

One has to be reminded that in those days there was much less communication and hardly any knowledge of what was going on in far corners of the world. The sympathy of impartial outsiders uninvolved in the local issues was not easy to come by – since they did not know about the local issues till months, if not years afterwards. Knowledge of government repression or police brutality – if they were known at all – by virtue of some daring reporters' exposé of government's actions, was way in the future. That is why in the Third World countries, the governments still try to control the media; and, for example, in the case of numbers of persons killed in a police shooting, they report much less than the actual numbers.

This made the task of communication far more difficult in those days. Gandhi had to garner sympathy from local inhabitants on the opposite side by his dignified moral actions, wherever he protested the brutal actions of inhuman regimes. He even volunteered for the British as a Red Cross worker on the side of the bitter foes, the British, in the brutal Boer War (1905) in South Africa. Time and again he commanded and got the pledge of total non-violence from his followers in the face of extreme provocation and brutality. In the process, when non-violent protesters marched to protest some government action and the police acted against them by resorting to a baton charge or shooting, the local solidarity and sympathy of opponents tended to lie on the side of the non-violent protestors. And, thus, minimal physical harm and minimal incarceration resulted.

This lowering of hurdles led to larger mass participation in subsequent non-violent reactions to each police action or repressive regulation. It was both brilliant and effective tactics in those days of isolation, when sympathy had to be earned from among the local partisans of the opposition.

Gandhi, though a devout Hindu, got these ideas from Christian ethics. His inspiration came from Ruskin and Tolstoy, the great humanists and philosophers of yesteryears. He never hated his enemy and never targeted innocents. His tactics could be used today – the days of sound bites and media glare, to resolve many questions of international and national dispute much faster and with much less loss of life and property.

Both the civil rights movements of the United States, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and of South Africa, led by Nelson Mandela against apartheid, succeeded due to their commitment to non-violence, lack of hate, and the resulting reduction of fear of reprisal among the opponents.

In contrast, the gruesome Beslan tragedy was a great loss to the victims' families of nearly 400 lives. Sadly, it achieved for the combatants and their cause exactly the opposite of what they wanted.

Nonviolent methods can be used for better resolution of other hot issues of today, like Kashmir & Palestine. This brings back to mind the RELEVANCE of Gandhi, in today's violent and unjust world.

Sandip K. Dasverma of Richland, Washington, is a proponent for the underprivileged and the low castes of India, who were Gandhi’s prime concern. He is an admirer of Gandhi’s "Satyagraha"(truth force) because it encapsulates ideas of empowerment and rights of and compassion for the poor and underprivileged. Sandip is a Mechanical Engineer by profession.