Ahimsa



‘Softer than a flower and harder than a stone’?

Gandhi’s life-long experiment with Ahimsa or non-injury to others was sorely tested during the last days of his life. As he put it in the fragment of a letter dated 2 January 1948, ‘Why is it that the freedom achieved through non-violence is sought to be sustained by violence? (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 158). That he agonized over this question is certain: ‘Maybe it was the will of God that I should witness this day. Now I have to do or die’ (ibid.). Used so effectively against the British, it seemed to fail when two Indian communities, the Hindus and the Muslims, were battling one another in the aftermath of the Partition. It is another matter that the British only protected their own and when Indians were killing one another, they did not or could not interfere. What if Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army had actually marched to and taken Delhi instead of being defeated and repulsed by Indian soldiers in the colonial army? It would certainly have changed the self-perception of Indians, from having won their freedom non-violently to having repossessed their nation after throwing out their foreign rulers. For most, non-violence was the second-best, if more practicable option. Gandhi knew that the superiority of non-violence was for the truly brave; those who were not afraid to die, who could continuously absolve their adversaries of wrong-doing, and who could suffer for the crimes of others, waiting patiently for a change of heart. While he was convinced that it could work against any adversary under any circumstances, many of his followers might not have been as convinced. Could non-violence work against the Taliban, Hitler, Stalin, or, to offer an example from an earlier time, Taimur or Nadir Shah? Many, not only in his time but also today, do not believe it would.

Whatever be the answer to such a question, Gandhi demonstrated again and again that it did work even in the worst cases of rioting and bloodshed between Hindus and Muslims. Gandhi brought peace to Noakhali, Bihar, Calcutta and Delhi. This is a proven historical fact. What the army, the police, and the rest of the political leadership could not do, Gandhi accomplished practically single-handedly. This was the miracle of non-violence or of its only true votary in our times, Gandhi. What Gandhi achieved was so astonishing that it bears closer study.

The terrible bloodletting of the Partition, undoubtedly, brought the frail and ageing Mahatma to the brink of despair, even making him admit that most of the people of India never really believed in ahimsa or practised it. To them, it was merely an expedient, the only available weapon of the weak; what they had practiced was not the non-violence of the brave that Gandhi advocated, but the passive resistance of the feeble, which erupted into barbarism when colonial authority was absent. The violence that he saw all about him, Gandhi termed cowardice. What bravery was there, he asked, in looting, killing and raping those who could not defend themselves? Marauding mobs of rioters were to him a sign of barbarism. When anyone resisted such aggression, Gandhi applauded, even if that meant the death of the resister. When the Pakistani mercenaries and raiders invaded Kashmir, unleashing a reign of terror and pillage on the hapless populace, he reluctantly endorsed the government’s plan to airlift troops to protect them. He justified this by admitting that states and governments could not be entirely non-violent, at least in present times. He also made a distinction between the violence of the brave, which to him was akin to non-violence, and the cowardice of naked aggression and instrumental violence, which he never condoned. Gandhi’s doctrine of non-violence was thus considerably modified in the process, but he never gave up on it. For all disputes between non-state actors, he continued to insist on the efficacy, even necessity, of non-violence. Whatever the odds Gandhi persisted and, in the end, the tide turned. Most Muslims stayed back not only in Delhi, but in the rest of India too. Whatever might have happened in Pakistan, India remained the plural society that Gandhi had insisted upon.

Gandhi explained the ‘law’ of non-violence to his audience during the prayer meeting on 21 September 1947. Non-violence meant non-retaliation; if you do not react, he said, you disarm your enemy:

Suppose there is a friend whom I abuse and he abuses me still more in turn. It is all right. But if I hear his abuses in silence, how long will he go on abusing? If he beats me, I submit to that too. I do not raise my fist against his fist. Do you know what would happen in that case? I have seen that if a man swings his fist in the air, he injures his own hand. Even a boxer boxes against a big stiff cushion. He enjoys the game only when he strikes against some tangible object. But if the boxer does not keep something in front of him he becomes helpless and is able to do nothing.

(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 401–402)

In any game, however adversarial, if one of the two players refuses to participate, the game comes to an end. Gandhi continues:

What I have told you is an eternal truth. I am the only one steadfastly clinging to it. People are not following that path these days. God alone knows if I will be able to stand by that truth till the end. I am making a simple point today.

(Ibid.: 402)

As the example given above shows, non-retaliation works between friends and members of the same family whose enmity is only temporary. That is how Gandhi responded to the violence of the Partition. He saw it as a fight not between enemies but between feuding brothers.

Perhaps Gandhi perceived that few agreed with him that non-retaliation was the best way to counter the violence unleashed by the Partition. Gandhi, continuing his soul-searching in his speech to the AICC on 15 November 1947, even goes to the extent of giving the argument in favour of violent retaliation its due. What if it is true that hitting your opponent back harder than he hits you sends out a strong message?

It is held by some that if we perpetrate worse atrocities on Muslims here than what have been perpetrated on Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan, it will teach the Muslims in Pakistan a salutary lesson.

(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 97: 320)

But even if that were true, what, asks Gandhi, does that do to the Hindus and Sikhs – ‘They will indeed be taught a lesson, but what will happen to you in the mean while?’ (ibid.: 321). Would it not mean that we would also lose our humanity? So Gandhi says, ‘You must be humane and civilized, irrespective of what Pakistan does. If you do what is right Pakistan will sooner or later be obliged to follow suit’ (ibid.). Indeed, ‘we have been obliged to copy Pakistan in its misdeeds and have thereby justified its ways’ (ibid.). In other words, we must emulate only good, never evil, because if we imitate evil that would not be a way to counter but only to strengthen it. If that is what we really wish, why say that we want to counter evil in the first place; we should instead say that we are only looking for an excuse to become evil ourselves. To argue that we will temporarily resort to evil only to overthrow evil is thus a dangerous argument. Instead, non-retaliation actually strengthens, not weakens us:

We will not return blow for blow but will meet it with silence and restraint. Restraint will add to your strength. But if you copy what happens in Pakistan, then on what moral basis will you take your stand? What becomes of your non-violence? … if you maintain the civilized way, whatever Pakistan may do now, sooner or later, she will be obliged by the pressure of world opinion to conform.

(Ibid.: 322)

Even if retaliation might be effective, Gandhi wants India to refrain from doing so. As he said in his prayer meeting on the first day of his fast, 13 January 1948, ‘No one should find fault with the Muslims whatever they may do’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 224); likewise, he told the Muslims, ‘Let them not take offence at whatever Hindus and Sikhs may do’ (ibid.: 225). Absolving the other of wrong-doing and not imitating the wrong oneself was the only way to lasting peace. Unfortunately, the world did not recognize the moral superiority of India’s position, but rather accepted self-interest as the principle of state policy and treated both Pakistan and India as moral equals for ever so long. This perception has changed only recently with proof of the complicity of the Pakistani state in acts of international terrorism.

During his last days in Delhi, Gandhi gradually but definitely moves from this position of absolute non-retaliation to one of qualified, partial and conditional self-defence, even if not retaliation. That is why he said that neither party should be offensive or retaliatory; but this does not mean that one should succumb meekly to the other. As he told his audience in his prayer meeting on 26 September 1947, ‘Let us arrive at a mutual and friendly settlement. Why can we not do so? We Hindus and Muslims were friends till yesterday. Have we become such enemies today that we cannot trust one another?’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 433). But he also warned them of the possibility of war if this was not possible: ‘If you say that you are never going to trust them, then the two sides would have to fight’ (ibid.). Gandhi was not a naive idealist; he knew what the logical outcome of retributive violence was: ‘If they decide to kill two persons for every person killed in Pakistan, who would care for whom?’ (ibid.). His basic position was ‘We should not take the offensive. But we must be ready to fight, because when war comes it does not come after giving a warning’ (ibid.). Speaking on 27 September 1947, and as reported in the 5 October 1947 issue of Harijan, Gandhi once again warned of the possibility of war and urged Indians to be ready for it: ‘In the event of a war between the Union and Pakistan, the Muslims of the Indian Union should be prepared to fight against Pakistan’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 97: 2). The accusation that Gandhi would have passively allowed the wholesale slaughter of Hindus and Sikhs because of his unreasonable insistence on non-violence is quite mistaken.

Gandhi repeatedly insisted that his was not the way of the weak, cowardly and helpless. Instead, he asserted, ‘I have been a fighter for many many years, more than 60 years’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 434). But Gandhi’s ‘weapons’ were unorthodox: ‘But I fight not with the sword, but with the weapons of truth and non-violence’ (ibid.). The real answer, therefore, to the charge that Gandhi was trying to weaken Hindus is that it was not true; he was only trying to teach them how to fight with another set of weapons. The only way to counter that is to allege that he was lying or that he was mistaken, which is to say that we cannot use truth and non-violence to fight, but only swords and guns. Gandhi never said that if you can’t fight with truth and non-violence, you mustn’t fight at all, but instead surrender or die. Instead, he taught unarmed men and women to face superior adversaries without being afraid. What is more, Gandhi would say that without truth, if not some degree of non-violence, no army could function. To keep one’s morale, every soldier had to live by a code of conduct, which involved restraint as much as indulgence in violence.

It might be fair to say that the people who thought they were fighting non-violently were cowards, in which case, why should Gandhi be blamed? If Hindus were a defeated people, how could Gandhi be blamed for it? Moreover, killing unarmed and outnumbered targets, raping women and terrorizing ordinary civilians could by no stretch of the imagination be considered acts of bravery. Gandhi, we must not forget, recruited soldiers for World War I and raised ambulance corps for the Boer War and the Zulu Rebellion. If the safety of Indian citizens was to be threatened by a warlike neighbour, and the people were unable to defend themselves non-violently, Gandhi would not have hesitated to support or strengthen the Indian armed forces. It is only that non-violence was his preferred weapon and he would not accept, in the face of his own experiments over decades, that it did not work. It did work, but it required a high level of training, aptitude, dedication and hard work. But then to be a good soldier in the conventional sense also required similar qualities. Without truth, discipline and self-restraint, none could function effectively. No wonder Gandhi had called ahimsa ‘a universal principle’ whose ‘operation is not limited by a hostile environment’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 74: 129).

Gandhi’s ahimsa did not, as he often said, depend on favourable circumstances, nor did he expect its adherents to buckle under pressure: ‘we would stand firm even if the whole world was against us’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 435). It was not the weapon of the weak, but of the fearless, of those who were not afraid to die. Furthermore, it required faith that ‘No one can kill us. No one can destroy Hinduism. If it is destroyed, it would be at our own hands’ (ibid.). Gandhi did not believe that others had the power to destroy or dominate us; they could do so only if we allowed them to do so. Power over life and death, in all circumstances, was vested only in God, not in human beings. So no one need fear dying before his or her time. What Gandhi preached to his Hindu and Sikh audiences was not meant exclusively for them; equally it applied to their adversaries, the Muslims. He said, ‘Similarly if Islam is destroyed in India, it would be at the hands of the Muslims living in Pakistan. It cannot be destroyed by the Hindus’ (ibid.). Giving people the complete right to their lives and to their faiths, Gandhi enjoined on them supreme responsibility too. By this logic, we had only ourselves to blame for our own downfall, not the wickedness of our enemies, or circumstances. If the Muslims or the British conquered India, it was only because Hindus were weak; we could not blame the latter for our weaknesses; Gandhi famously said in Hind Swaraj, ‘The English have not taken India; we have given it to them. They are not in India because of their strength, but because we keep them’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 10: 262). By the same token, we could take it back from them too. It was a matter of withholding our consent. Similarly, none could harm the Hindus and Sikhs if they did not permit them to. On the contrary, resisting, even through arms if necessary, a large army of invaders would actually be a form of non-violence. In his prayer meeting on 5 November 1947 Gandhi offered this novel interpretation, seemingly going against much of what he had written on the subject, when he spoke at length on the invasion of Kashmir:

Supposing an army of a lakh of armed Afridis invaded the place and a handful of people offered armed resistance in order to protect the innocent children and women and died fighting, then they could be called non-violent in spite of their using arms.

(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 97: 238)

This is one of the rare occasions when he justified armed and violent resistance. He was changing the meaning of non-violence by positing that even armed self-defence against the raiders was a form of non-violence. Yet such self-defence could never turn into retaliation, revenge, or the use of force against the weak and defenceless, or any other instrumental use of violence.

At the same time, Gandhi was also acknowledging that most Indians had not understood his idea of non-violent struggle. He observed on 6 November 1947 in letter to two American friends,

If we grant that such liberty as India has gained was a tribute to non-violence as I have repeatedly said, non-violence of India’s struggle was only in name, in reality it was passive resistance of the weak. The truth of the statement we see demonstrated by the happenings in India.

(Ibid.: 239)

If Indians had been truly non-violent, Gandhi argued, they would never have descended to the barbarism of the Partition. Their non-violence was mere convenience and expediency. They did not wish to fight; they were demoralized and disarmed, so passive resistance suited them. They found it easier to be beaten up than to beat others up; this didn’t mean that they were really brave or unafraid. Gandhi, pushing this line of thought further, admits in his exchange with his American correspondent, Richard B. Gregg,

What has, however, clearly happened in my case is the discovery that in all probability there is a vital defect in my technique of the working of non-violence. There was no real appreciation of non-violence in the thirty years’ struggle against British Raj. Therefore, the peace the masses maintained during that struggle of a generation with exemplary patience, had not come from within.

(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 97: 278–279)

Gandhi had in fact called off civil disobedience when violence broke out in Chauri Chauri. Does this mean that despite the delay of so many years, the masses had still not learnt what non-violent resistance was really about? Instead, it was merely repression. Gandhi continues:

The pent-up fury found an outlet when British Raj was gone. It naturally vented itself in communal violence which was never fully absent and which was kept under suppression by the British bayonet. This explanation seems to me to be all-sufficing and convincing.

(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 97: 279)

Speaking in his prayer meeting on Christmas Eve, 24 December 1947, Gandhi lamented:

The fruit of independence has been that today Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs have become one another’s enemies. As I have admitted earlier I had been under the delusion that our struggle was truly non-violent. God had rendered me blind and I was misled. … What we offered during the struggle was passive resistance which simply meant that we would not kill the British though in our hearts we wanted to kill them. But we had not the power. When the millions took up passive resistance it did bring about our freedom. The freedom we have obtained is crippled freedom. It is only partial.

(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 97: 108)

This is as severe an indictment of India’s freedom struggle and its much-vaunted claims to non-violence as any we might find. It was a flawed non-violence, a flawed satyagraha which resulted in a flawed freedom; Partition was the result, all too palpable and horrible, of this flaw.

Similarly, in the middle of his fast, too weak to go to the prayer ground, in a speech that was broadcast to the audience from his room on 15 January 1948, again, Gandhi admitted: ‘I have made the discovery that what I and the people with me had termed non-violence was not the genuine article but a weak copy known as passive resistance’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 238). Then he went on to say something extraordinary: ‘Naturally, passive resistance can avail nothing to a ruler’ (ibid.). In other words, no state can be seen as cowardly and ineffective, even if some individuals might be permitted to be so. Since we have not found a way for a state to be non-violent, then it must also not practice passive resistance: ‘Imagine a weak ruler being able to represent any people. He would only degrade his masters who, for the time being, had placed themselves under his trust’ (ibid.). Gandhi was saying this in defence of Sardar Patel, who was perceived to be a tough Home Minister. For the state to be weak, said Gandhi, would be only to send the wrong message.

This admission, however, does not shake his own faith in non-violence. If others did not understand or follow it, the ‘law’ of non-violence was not therefore  disproved. On the contrary, here, in the worst conflagration of domestic violence, was the opportunity to test its efficacy again. As he said in his letter to Karl Struve, written on the first day of 1948, and later published in Harijan as ‘Ahimsa Never Fails’:

In any case, whatever I have said does not refer in any way to the failure of ahimsa, but it refers to my failure to recognize, until it was too late, that what I had mistaken for ahimsa was not ahimsa, but passive resistance of the weak, which can never be called ahimsa even in the remotest sense. The internecine feud that is going on today in India is the direct outcome of the energy that was set free during the thirty years’ action of the weak. Hence, the proper way to view the present outburst of violence throughout the world is to recognize that the technique of unconquerable non-violence of the strong has not been discovered as yet. Not an ounce of non-violent strength is ever wasted.

(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 97: 151)

But while Gandhi was ‘mistaken’, what happened to the masses and to the country? Wouldn’t they have been better off if they had a violent outlet, as Franz Fanon argues in the Wretched of the Earth, for their pent up frustration: ‘At the level of the individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect’ (Fanon 1967: 74). Violence can be therapeutic, restoring as Fanon thought, the wholeness of a traumatized and fractured psyche of the colonized, allowing the sufferer to feel empowered and enabled by an outburst against the oppressor. But who is to say that the violence of the weak is necessarily better than the non-violence or passive resistance of the weak? It is strength, whether violent or non-violent, as Nietzsche would say, that is desirable, but even so, isn’t non-violent action and strength necessarily superior to violent action and strength? If non-violence could achieve similar results as violence, with much less loss of life, would it not be better? In India’s case, however, it is not the colonizers that had to bear the brunt of the counter-violence, but Hindu and Muslim subjects themselves, who erupted into a civil war that has still not ended. But Gandhi, obviously, clung to his belief in non-violence, telling General Cariappa, the new Chief of the Indian Armed forces on 3 December 1947, even in the face of the invasion of Kashmir, ‘Violence can only be overcome through non-violence. This is as clear to me as the proposition that two and two make four. But for this one must have faith’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 97: 453).

In his interview with Kingsley Martin on 27 January 1948, just three days before he was shot, Gandhi once again reflected on the ‘failure’ of non-violence in India: Gandhiji explained how the freedom movement had not been a non-violent movement in the highest sense of the term. If it had been the non-violence of the strong no butchery such as had taken place recently could have come about. He discovered this while he was on his pilgrimage in Noakhali and ever since this discovery he had been impressing the fact on everyone. He felt that non-violence during the struggle for independence was an expedient, i.e., resistance to the white man was undertaken in a non-violent manner simply because we had no military strength with which to offer battle.

(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 310)

The upshot of all this is that Gandhi’s non-violence was spectacularly successful in stopping the violence between Hindus and Muslims, not just in Noakhali, Bihar and Calcutta, but also in Delhi. However, he admitted that states as they are constituted at present could not practice it. Therefore, limited violence, with the army and the police using it only as the last resort and only in self-defence, was justified. Gandhi’s last experiments with ahimsa convinced him that a change of heart was a better guarantee for lasting peace than armed might. But the question that he could not, perhaps, answer fully was how to ensure that kindness, non-violence, non-retaliation and self-restraint were not mistaken for weakness or cowardice. That is why during his last days Gandhi gradually became drawn in to an arrangement in which a strong defence establishment would be inevitable for the Indian union, though it would remain under civilian control and a part of the democratic state. But with the reins of organized violence firmly in the hands of the state, Gandhi still wanted non-violence to remain the operating principle in the personal spheres of Indians. Let the states battle between themselves; at least the citizens should learn to live in peace with one another. As he acknowledged in January 1948, ‘They praise my ahimsa but say that it cannot be effective in politics, that it should be confined only to spiritual matters’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 294–295). But accepting this would go against the grain of all of Gandhian praxis.

No wonder, towards the end of his life, in his prayer meeting on 23 January 1948, Gandhi found time to appreciate one of his ‘Others’, Subhas Chandra Bose, who had raised an army to fight the British and wrest India’s independence, in contrast to the non-violent struggle of the Congress Party which he had led:

Someone reminded me of Subhas Babu’s birthday. Subhas Babu was a votary of violence while I am a devotee of ahimsa. But what does it matter? I know that the most important thing is that we should learn from other people’s virtues. … We should emulate him in his virtues and forget his deficiencies. Subhas was a great patriot. He laid down his life for the country. He was not by nature a fighter but he became commander of an army and took up arms against a great empire.

(Ibid.: 293)

There was no meanness and smallness in Gandhi. He was not petty or vindictive, as his opponents alleged. A brave man himself, he respected other brave men, even if they disagreed with him. That even extended to one who was the champion of a violent overthrow of the empire.

Note

1  Every day, Gandhi heard heart-rending, if not heart-inflaming, stories of the woes of sufferers and victims of the horrors of the Partition. In his speech during the prayer meeting of 4 November 1947 he shares with his audience what severe, even hard-hearted, detachment a votary of non-violence had to cultivate when faced with such narratives of barbarism and brutality if he were to continue to eat, sleep, and worship God:

I also feel the same distress in my heart and am equally hurt. But I would not be truly non-violent if I started shedding tears or became gloomy. If non-violence made me so very soft, I would be crying the whole time, and there would be no time left to worship God, and to eat and sleep.

(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 97: 228)

That is when he says that a true believer in non-violence has to be: ‘softer than a flower and harder than a stone’ (ibid.: 229).

See Gandhi and Non-Violence by William Borman (1986) for a fuller exploration of this topic. For a collection of Gandhi’s views on non-violence, see Gandhi on Non-violence: A Selection from the Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, ed. Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1965).