LONDON– Fifty years on from the death of Mahatma Gandhi, lawyer, political activist, apostle of non-violence as a means of settling political disputes and vanquisher of the British Empire, the world is in crying need again for the philosophy he propagated and the debate he provoked. As Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of newly independent India, said on the day of his assassination, “the light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere”.
If only India had listened to him more there would have been no division with Pakistan. If only the British had learnt more from him there would have been no colonial massacres in Kenya or Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland. Perhaps, if Bill Clinton could spare a thought for Gandhi today, he would find a way of keeping Saddam Hussein in check without risking the horrors of war, a war that New York Times columnist William Safire wrote this week could end with the use of nuclear weapons. (We must never “hold an entire society accountable for the decisions of a single demented leader”, said General Lee Butler the former commander-in-chief of U.S. Strategic Nuclear Command in a speech on Monday, in an earnest attempt to head off such dangerous thinking about the unthinkable.)
It was at the late age–for an Indian of his generation–of 46 that Gandhi returned to his homeland after three years in England and eighteen years in South Africa. Yet within five years of his return he had become the dominant figure in Indian public life. By 1920 most of the front rank Indian politicians had joined his banner and the others had practically ceased to count. Rarely has a political conquest been more spectacular or complete. It was the Mahatma–the Great Soul–so named by the poet Tagore, that held the heart of the Indian masses. Yet Indian politicians did not follow Gandhi unwillingly. They saw in his non-violent technique the only practical alternative to speech- making and bomb-throwing, the extremes between which Indian politics had previously oscillated. Under his inspiration they turned their backs on creature comforts and professional ambition, and spent the best part of their lives in third class railway carriages and British prisons.
In England he had read the Bible from cover to cover. He also read and re-read the Gita, the Hindu scripture. He took Christ’s admonition to “turn the other cheek” literally and he interpreted the battlefield of Kurukahata in the Gita not as an historical account gloryfying violence, as in the Hindu tradition, but as an allegory illuminating the futility of violence. He believed in pursuing peaceful ends through peaceful means. The means and the ends must cohere because the end is pre-existent in the means and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.
He inspired not only his own but in South Africa the founder of the African National Congress, Albert Lithuli, in the U.S. the civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, in Brazil the human rights activist Archbishop Helder Camara and in Italy the social reformer Danilio Dolci. It was Dr. King who once said in an emotive outburst before the American Jewish Congress, “Perhaps if there had been a broader understanding of the uses of non-violent action in Germany when Hitler was rising and consolidating his power, the brutal extermination of 6 million Jews and a million of other war dead might have been avoided. Germany might never have become totalitarian. If protestants and catholics had engaged in non-violent direct action and had made the oppression of Jews their very own oppression, and had come onto the streets to scrub the sidewalks and had Gentiles worn the stigmatising yellow armbands by the millions, a unique form of mass resistance to the Nazi regime might have developed”.
It was such non-violent resistance, if not of such magnitude, nontheless telling, that undermined the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, delaying for about 15 months the appointment of a collaborationist government. It was non-violent agitation deployed to great effect from the Polish pulpit by Pope John Paul and from the Gdansk shipyards by Lech Walesa that triggered the withering of Soviet power in eastern Europe.
I still remember vividly a long conversation I had with Basil Liddel Hart in the summer of 1969 shortly before he died. Considered almost universally as the most important military thinker of his age (creator of the blitzkrieg form of warfare, among many other things) this astonishing man became increasingly impressed with the limitations of warfare and the power of non-violence. During his interrogation of German generals at the end of the World War II he became aware of the difficulties they had had in surmounting non- violent resistance, particularly in Denmark, Holland and Norway and to some extent in France and Belgium, whereas the violent form of resistance had posed few problems.
Not even Gandhi himself suggested that non-violence is a recipe for every situation. Violence sometimes is a tragic inevitability. But before the too easy recourse to pulling the trigger alternatives are always worth a second look. This is how it should be with Iraq where sanctions are grinding away and militarily effective biological weapons are probably a decade in the future. President Bill Clinton who once, Gandhian-style, marched for peace against the war in Vietnam should give the Mahatma fifty years on another read.
