Mahatma Gandhi inspired nonviolent movements across the world including the civil rights movement in America. This article examines the ideas and relevance of Gandhi on the occasion of his 150th birth anniversary.
During the Indian freedom struggle, a woman inquired when Gandhi is planning to visit America, to which Gandhi replied in jest that there are people in America who want to put him in a zoo. Gandhi alluded not to a real zoo but to the unfamiliarity of his idea and practice of nonviolence and its potency to the American public. On one occasion he wrote, “I respectfully invite Americans to study carefully the Indian National Movement and they will therein find an effective substitute for war.” Notably, Gandhi’s ideas on nonviolence were put in action in the civil rights movements in America in late 1960s. Recently, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, called Mahatma Gandhi, “the spiritual leader of America’s non-violence movement.”
In last October I participated in the Gandhi Global Legacy conference at California State University Fresno, where I talked about the relevance of Gandhi for international society. The university with its beautiful Peace Garden, displaying statues of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez and Jane Addams, appeared an appropriate venue for the conference. Organized by the Gandhian scholar Veena Howard, the conference offered an excellent opportunity to interact with several Civil Rights activists, including, Reverend James Lawson, Mary Elizabeth King, and Dolores Huerta. Reverend Lawson, whom Martin Luther King, Jr. called the ‘leading theoretician and strategist of nonviolence’ told we need to cultivate Gandhian principles to address global problems. This reminded me of Nelson Mandela, who, while unveiling a Gandhi Memorial in South Africa in 1993, stated, “The enemies that Gandhi fought – ignorance, disease, unemployment, poverty and violence are today common place…Now more than ever is the time when we have to pay heed to the lessons of Mahatma Gandhi.” Like his former colleague and leader Martin Luther King, Jr., Reverend Lawson argued there are greater moral forces of the universe, which we have not tapped yet and applied in our daily lives. Among these forces he counted the Gandhian soul-force or love-force as one, which we need to cultivate to make a better world.
Raised in a traditional Hindu family in Porbandar in British India and married at the age of 13, Gandhi wanted to be a lawyer. During his study in London he wanted to learn the manners of British society, but later got disillusioned. At a later stage he chose to shun his suit and wear a loincloth for the rest of his life. The transformation, however, started in South Africa. In 1893 he sailed to South Africa to practice law. While traveling in a train on a first-class ticket in racially segregated South Africa, Gandhi was thrown out of the coach in Pietermaritzburg due to his color. The young man of 23 shivered the whole night in cold and weighed on two options –returning to India to the safety of his family or fight injustice. The later thought prevailed, and thus started the journey of Mohandas Gandhi to become Mahatma (noble soul) Gandhi. Gandhi not only successfully fought against discriminatory laws in South Africa but later spearheaded the freedom struggle in India.
There is something eternally appealing about Gandhi, a frail figure about five feet and four inches tall, weighing about one hundred and ten pounds. He was an adherent of nonviolence, which he also termed love-force or soul-force. To one of his colleagues, who argued that in the history of the past 200 years no freedom struggle has been won without violence and India needs to adopt violent methods to fight British rule, Gandhi replied that India could set an example to achieve independence through the method of nonviolence. Gandhi’s ideas not only inspired leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela, but also leaders and people across continents who fought for nonviolent social change. To acknowledge this, the United Nations observes Gandhi’s birthday on October 2 as the International Day of Nonviolence.
Gandhian worldview can be summarized in the three fundamental principles. First, there are certain universal moral principles that can be applied across divides. These principles are needed to realize positive peace among individuals, societies and nations. Second, these principles are not something outside of human beings and their collectivities. They are found within the human mind and heart. Third, it is the individual who is the center of the universe. Or rather, the individual is the nation and the world in miniature. Martin Luther King, Jr. during his visit to India in 1959, affirmed, “Mahatma Gandhi embodied in his life certain universal principles that are inherent in the moral structure of the universe, and these principles are as inescapable as the law of gravitation.”
For Gandhi, nonviolence is the primary universal moral principle; the supreme virtue in human life. Life is an integral whole, and the nonviolence principle should govern it. His idea is relevant in the contemporary world which apparently witnesses chaos in human life due to the widening chasm between the moral principles and the actual living. His caution rings true: “For one man cannot do right in one department of life whilst he is occupied in doing wrong in any other department. Life is one indivisible whole.” Further, the Gandhian dictum that ‘Nature has for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed’ provides a powerful message. Unless the very basic datum of thinking of individuals, states and their leaders change and factor the principle of nonviolence, Gandhi would argue, it will be difficult to have sustainable peace, at the individual, community or at the international level.
Gandhian nonviolence embodied not only a conviction in the principle but also in its firm application. But there is an apparent paradox – though Gandhi preached and practiced nonviolence and influenced leaders across continents, in the 21st century world world there appear to be fewer adherents to nonviolence. There are ample examples to corroborate this. At the international level, in Syria about a half million people perished in less than a decade while international organizations and conflict stakeholders were engaged in endless dialogue. At the domestic level, thousands of Americans are killed by guns each year. Martin Luther King, Jr., argues there is no choice: “The choice today is no longer between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence.”
Gandhian ideas are relevant to the contemporary world, but selectively and creatively. His letter to Hitler to adopt nonviolent method during World War II, his critique of modern industrial civilization as ‘satanic’, his puritan values may appear at odds with the 21st century world. A selective approach to Gandhian ideas is helpful. First, Gandhi does not have all the answers (he also never claimed to have them). Second, it will facilitate exclusion of his ideas which are outdated.
If Gandhi, King, Jr., and Mandela were leaders and champions of nonviolence in their times, why not individuals, communities and leaders of our time practice nonviolence? Why there is an apparent increase in violence everywhere, while still the names of these champions are invoked? How can the paradox be explained – while policymakers do not factor nonviolence in the policymaking, many popular movements worldwide have increasingly espoused nonviolence and rejected violent tactics? Is nonviolence as a governing principle of life and society not relevant for the contemporary world? Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary provides an occasion to meditate on these questions.
(The article was published in Peace and Justice Institute Journal, Valencia College, Spring/Summer 2020 Issue, pp. 14-15)
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