Gandhi in the 21st century: Relevance of nonviolence as a method towards realizing a peaceful world

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)

Long Walk to Freedom

Last month while travelling to Baku I finished reading Long Walk to Freedom, the autobiography of Nelson Mandela. Mandela’s life story is perhaps known to every person aware of freedom movements or about developments in the last decades of the 20th century. Though I do not remember everything that Mandela wrote in the 500 page book, I certainly remember certain messages that Mandela gave in the book, and which he perhaps wanted to impart to his readers and future generations. 

Every culture has its uniqueness, and its utility, for the people who practice it. Mandela was born into Xhoa tribe, one of the tribes among numerous tribes in Africa, and practiced its customs. For him the customs of his tribe were not hindrances rather they had values for his tribe and his society. For Mandela culture has two major purposes. First, it provides regulation for the conduct of social life of the people who adhere to it. While elaborating, particularly, the rituals including the circumcision ritual he argued he is not going to criticize such practices because for him it has a purpose for regulating life in his society. In another example, he says when he met his mother after a long gap he did not run to embrace his mother (as a person might do in some other cultures), but that did not imply that there was no love between mother and son. That was part of the culture. The same thing I have observed in India. Second, for Mandela culture too has implications for political life of the society as well. Culture determines the relations between old and young, between male and female, between village-elder with others. Its main location may be in society but its political role is obvious. As it, in case of the culture Mandela describes, tends to emphasize on a hierarchical society, it also puts premium on old age, which is akin to experience and wisdom. Hence, in this culture the elders have a dominant voice in public affairs.

For Mandela democracy is a not Western invention because he could witness the purest form of democracy in tribal meetings. Those meetings were purely indigenous in origin and conception as none of the participants were well versed with Western system of governance as many of them were illiterate. Mandela while staying in his guardian’s house after his father’s death used to listen to the debates in the tribal meetings. His guardian being a headman, it provided Mandela the opportunity to listen to the elders. He elaborated these meetings: that everybody in the meeting enjoyed freedom to raise his voice without obstacle or intimidation from the chair. He could speak at length without interpretation. The chair would listen to all the arguments, summarize them, and try to develop a consensus among the participants. He would never impose his views though he might put forward them during his speech. If no consensus was reached, the members might disperse and meet another day. The meetings were democratic and free, and the leaders would often draw from their experience and wisdom, from history and tradition. Madela’s argument that he witnessed pure democracy in tribal meetings may baffle some of his readers but not me. I could draw a parallel between those tribal meetings with the Indian Jana Sabhas or Gram Sabhas (meetings of people or village) in Vedic period in ancient India.

Mandela’s life history is life of tolerance and dignity. A Mandela would never compromise his dignity. Though he was humiliated umpteen times whether during his long time in jail or outside, Mandela would never stoop low for exacting a privilege. He was a mass leader and he always put the interests of the masses before him. His sense of African dignity was vivid when he expressed anger, in his book, against the assault on Chief Albert Luthuli, the leader of the African National Congress, by a security man. He wrote that this security man is not, in any measure, near the great African leader but it is the tragic system that leads to his assault. It needs mention that Luthuli was awarded Nobel Peace Prize in 1960. Mandela was a proud African and he admired African values. But at the same time he harbored no revenge, no hostility towards his colonizers. Even his method of underground warfare under the banner of Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), as detailed in the book, was to paralyze the administration so that a plural and non-racial administration comes to power. His strategy, as he argued, was not aimed at killing any person, whether civilian or armed government official, but to paralyze the administration in order to hasten the goal of freedom. 

I found in Mandela a great negotiator. During his last days at Robben Island and later during incarceration when he was shifted to the mainland, he pursued relentlessly various methods of negotiation with the administration which was not always friendly to him. He was the weaker party in the negotiation, at least from a government perspective which enjoyed absolute power though there were pressures from the United Nations and other countries to dismantle the apartheid regime. Mandela singlehandedly, even at times when his trusted friends disagreed with him, continued pursuing his negotiation tactics. He never gave up, even when his letters gone unanswered from the Botha regime, or even when his voice was not taken seriously by the regime. He was optimistic during his negotiations, and he followed a method of incrementalism, i.e. slowly moving towards the target. There were many occasions of uncertainty but Mandela in his purely Mandelasque fashion never gave up.

From another point of view, the book is a treatise on a freedom struggle, and also a treatise on life in a jail for about three decades. I am not elaborating those here. The tortuous life in jail, the exploitation of jail inmates, both general and political, the ingenuity of jail inmates the evade to notice of the authority while performing ‘illegal’ activities like reading newspapers, the perseverance of Mandela and his friends in continuing their mission provide insights into the freedom struggle and also into the life of Mandela and his friends in the struggle. I also found Mandela an emotional and caring person, who cared for his family and friends. His longing for his wife and children was vivid on many pages in the book. His narration how he missed his children and how he cherished the moments when he was with them displayed the emotional and loving side of this great and sturdy freedom fighter. There was also humor lurking throughout pages. His courting of his first wife before marriage or his comparison of his seafood with jail mates while working in the quarry with the royal marriage party or some of the tactics to evade jail wardens offer rich mine of humor in the book. They also bring out the lighter side of Mandela, one of the great figures of our time.