Fear Of Non-Violence As Well As Maoism
By Vidyadhar Date
20 December, 2009
Countercurrents.org
The year 2009 marked the centenary of Mahatma Gandhi's important text Hind Swaraj in which he among other things spelt out the importance of non-violence as the creed for resistance. It is also a coincidence that during the same year the issue of armed resistance by Maoists in India and the issue of the Indian State's use of violence to quell people's struggles against injustice came to the fore.
A study of human nature shows that a normal human being is almost incapable of killing another human being. Humans are not by nature violent. Non-violent resistance can be very powerful. That is why a constant effort is made by the oppressive State apparatus and various agencies to discredit non-violence and build up violence as manly and non-violence as womanly, effeminate.
Ashis Nandy, noted scholar, revealed in Mumbai on December 19 an interesting encounter between eminent Gandhian Nirmala Deshpande and a former army chief in Pune some years ago. She told him that she felt the people of Kashmir should take to the path of non-violent resistance. The army man kept quiet for some time and then said to her not to suggest anything like that if she was patriotic.
The implication was that it would be much easier to tackle an armed resistance in the valley. Nandy made the point while speaking at a three-day seminar on Hind Swaraj organised by New York-based academic Prof Arjun Appadurai, and others. It was also organised as a tribute to Carol Breckenridge, Arjun's wife and academic, who did much to promote grassroots research in India.
Some people argue that Gandhi succeeded with his non-violent struggle because the British were decent, democratic rulers. This is not true. Earlier, Gandhi had succeeded with the strategy in South Africa, a highly repressive , racist state.
Violence is not intrinsic to human nature. Dave Grossman, a psychologist, professor of military science and former American military officer, has written in his books how difficult it is to train soldiers to become killers. So, they are put through a rigorous course in the process. Research on the previous two world wars shows that even in face to face combat soldiers did not exhaust all their ammunition.
The three major figures in the resistance movement in the world in the last few yeas all used the power of peace , Nelson Mandela, Dalai Lama and Aung Sui Ki.
However, the other view is that the Indian state is not responding to people's peaceful struggles and is itself resorting to violence. This argument was strongly made by some experts at a conference at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai earlier this month on Development Under Scrutiny.
The government is cracking down on peaceful marches in the Bastar areas in central India where the State is launching an armed offensive on people resisting an exploitative pattern of development.. The middle space of democratic resistance is being killed by the Indian State, said Gautam Navalakha, activist, writer and consulting editor of the Economic and Political Weekly.
The government has been launching a dirty war on its own people in Kashmir and other areas the last 62 years and it was now doing that in the very heart of India.
Democracy has run its course. Peaceful protess are not yielding success. Nothing works. Even sting operations exposing corruption have little effect, said Saroj Giri, an academic of Delhi university.
Even an insect bites when stepped upon. The tribals are bound to hit back when attacked. Regarding scepticism that people may not succeed against the powerful state machinery, he said major revolutions were carried out by groups, who were small in the beginning, but then gathered support. It is possible for the people to short circuit the system.
There is internal colonisation in India, argued B.D. Sharma, a former bureaucrat in Madhya Pradesh and fomer commissioner of scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. States on the margins of India had now become centre stage because of their mineral wealth but the people there were being marginalised.
The tribals would not remain poor if they were allowed access to their the bounty of Nature, their land, forests and rivers. The tribals were much better off under the British who did not interfere with their way of life, Dr Sharma said.
