A different way to fight: For Gandhi, satyagraha was the only way to stop terrorism. By David Hardiman
Do Mahatma Gandhi and
his legacy have anything to offer us in the face of attacks by terrorists?
Gandhi himself was deeply concerned with the question as to how non-violence
could displace violence in political life. In his own day, he was faced with
revolutionary nationalists who believed that imperial rule in India could best
be fought through targeted violence against British officials and institutions.
Gandhi was strong in his condemnation of such a strategy.
We can see this in his
reaction to the assassination by an Indian student called Madan Lal Dhingra of
a retired Indian civil servant, Sir Curzon Wyllie, when he came to speak to a
group of Indian students in London in 1909. Vinayak Savarkar, who was a friend
of Dhingra, argued that he acted as a Hindu patriot. Gandhi was horrified by
the killing. He stated that Dhingra acted in a cowardly manner, and that he had
been “egged on by this ill-digested reading of worthless writing”. Wyllie had
gone as a guest of the Indian students, and he had been betrayed. If the
British left India because of such acts, murderers would become rulers.
Gandhi sought to
provide a different way to fight British rule — namely through nonviolent
satyagraha. He argued that if the established nationalist leaders failed to
provide a nonviolent outlet for the nationalist fervour of young Indians, they
might well be attracted to violent methods. In other words, his form of protest
would provide an outlet for radicalised Indians to protest against what Gandhi
projected as the “terrorism” of the state as well as provide a counter to the
violence of revolutionary nationalists. In a letter of 1919, he maintained
that: “The growing generation will not be satisfied with petitions etc. Satyagraha
is the only way, it seems to me, to stop terrorism.”
He wrote, similarly,
in the same year: “If you do not provide the rising generation with an
effective remedy against the excesses of authority, you will let loose the
powers of vengeance and… violence will spread with a rapidity which all will
deplore… In offering the remedy of self-suffering which is one meaning of
satyagraha, I follow the spirit of our civilisation and present the young
portion with a remedy of which he need never despair.”
According to Gandhi,
means determine ends. He held that unleashing violence was like letting a genie
out of a bottle; once released, it was not easy to put back. Revolutionaries who
had learned to settle matters using violence frequently found it hard to adapt
to more peaceable means after a change of power has occurred... read more:
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