Gandhi: An Apostle Of Violence?
By C Rammanohar Reddy
The Hindu
28 October, 2003This is the season for peculiar sarkari advertisements, one of which even twists history in the interests of aggressive nationalism. Fortunately, at least one of the ads — the `India Shining' series — has been put into cold storage on a directive by the Election Commission. For those who have been lucky enough not to notice the print, TV and street hoardings, the `India Shining' series is supposed to feed "a feel good factor" about the Indian economy. But with its peculiarly worded running message, stilted grammar ("There has never been a better time to invest, build, create and shine together.") and a text in brown on a white background, the opening ad looked ominously like the stark directives during the Emergency to talk less and work more.
Nothing surely can beat the advertisement put out by the Information and Broadcasting Ministry on Gandhi Jayanti. Readers were startled (they were meant to be) when they saw this quote of Mahatma Gandhi: "I would rather have India resort to arms in order to defend her honour than that she should in a cowardly manner become or remain a hopeless witness to her own dishonour." There was no mention about where and when Gandhi made this statement or what the context was.
A man for whom non-violence was a creed is cited as saying India would be a coward if it did not use arms to defend its honour. A public notice of this kind on Gandhi's birthday has an obvious motive. Members of the ruling dispensation at the Centre and their supporting apparatus have never hid their ambivalence (at best) towards Gandhi while they do not hesitate to celebrate Veer Savarkar. Statements of the kind publicised on October 2 are useful for silently demolishing the unique position that Gandhi occupies in India's history.
I set out to find where and when Gandhi uttered these words. A colleague forwarded an e-mail of a statement put out by a brave non-governmental organisation in Baroda putting Gandhi's words in their original context. A friend pointed out a report in a daily, citing the same NGO statement. I wanted to check the original myself. Fortunately, the same I&B ministry had a few years ago put Gandhi's collected works on CD, an extremely useful compilation if you can ignore the gaudily designed add-on documentation on Gandhi's life.
Gandhi did write those words the I&B Ministry gleefully reproduced on October 2. Yet, a reading of the essay, telling titled "The Doctrine of the Sword", and published in Young India on August 11, 1920, shows that what Gandhi was trying to argue was, naturally, the exact opposite of what this Government would like us to believe. The essay was written at a time when the non-cooperation movement of the early 1920 was gathering momentum. It was just a year since the Jalianwalla Bagh massacre and it required all of Gandhi's skills to make a case for non-violence. The Young India essay was one of many where he laid out the logic of his political philosophy.
Gandhi's arguments, as always, were simple. A person, a society and a country which is weak and helpless has no choice but to resort to violence.
But when you are strong, as India was, non-violence is the true moral instrument in the fight for swaraj. The core message of the article is to be found in the following sentences, not in what the I&B Ministry quoted on October 2: "Non-violence in its dynamic condition means conscious suffering. It does not mean meek submission to the will of the evildoer. It means the putting of one's soul against the will of the tyrant. Working under this law of our being, it is possible for a single individual to defy the whole might of an unjust empire to save his honour, his soul and lay the foundation for that empire's fall or its regeneration. "And so I am not pleading for India to practise non-violence because it is weak. I want her to practise non-violence being conscious of her strength and power."
If these sentences more accurately convey the content of the 1920 essay, what is particularly dishonest about the I&B Ministry's reproduction is that in the very sentence following the words about honour and violence, Gandhi wrote: "But I believe that non-violence is infinitely superior to violence." Given its motives, the Government would not want to give us the true context of Gandhi's statement on the use or arms. Nor would this Government cite the following sentences from the end of the essay: "If India takes up the doctrine of the sword, she may gain momentary victory. Then India will cease to be pride of my heart .... My life is dedicated to the service of India through the religion of non-violence which I believe to be the root of Hinduism."
Perhaps we should not be perturbed about such mischievous distortion of Gandhi's writings. After all, we have had Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon pay homage at Raj Ghat.
This is the same Mr. Sharon, who has been indicted by an Israeli Government Commission as responsible for the killing of thousands of Palestinians in Lebanon in 1982. And we had Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi say on October 2 that his government was the only the State Government in the country to adhere to Gandhian principles.
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