M.K. Gandhi, Attorney at Law

by DiSalvo, Charles R.

  Nonviolent discipline was essential to the success of the Salt Campaign. But more important, the campaign worked because the participants engaged the dynamic that leads to social and political change. It did so in a way that revealed the two basic ways disobedience can be understood to lead to change. The salt campaigners made the sacrifice to endure jailings, beatings, and even death. When their suffering was seen by the public, including the international public, the public sympathized. This created pressure on the British government, which in turn led to curative institutional reaction. At the same time, the Salt Campaign was a massive withdrawal of consent to the salt laws as tens of thousands of people all across the subcontinent broke the laws governing the manufacture and sale of salt.

  The salt disobedience is as clear an instance of success in creating change as there is in the Gandhian portfolio of disobedience. It resulted in a liberalization of the administration of the salt laws and in the withdrawal of ordinances restricting civil liberties. Even more important than a new understanding of the law, it created a new respect for the power of the Indian independence movement. As Gandhi scholar Thomas Weber has described it, the campaign “was about empowerment; it told people that they were stronger than they thought and that the rulers were weaker than they imagined.”14

  After World War II, Britain calculated that maintaining its rule was more trouble than it was worth. It finally gave India its independence in 1947, and at the same time consented to the establishment of Pakistan, a separate Muslim state, created from Indian territory. Gandhi was deeply distressed by this partition of India and his failure to ultimately bridge Hindu-Muslim differences.

  Just months later, a bullet fired by a disgruntled Hindu nationalist brought his life to an end.

  GANDHI’S SIGNIFICANCE TODAY

  Because neither the Salt Campaign nor any of Gandhi’s other civil disobedience campaigns brought about the immediate liberation of India, scholars argue about the weight to give Gandhi’s contribution to the struggle for independence. Some give Gandhi the lion’s share of the credit, while others severely discount his role. In some respects the criticism is quite unfair because immediate liberation was not always Gandhi’s goal. His most successful campaign, the Salt Campaign, had the more limited goal of raising India’s stature in the eyes of Britain and the world and of providing Indians with a sense of their own considerable power. The Salt Campaign achieved these goals and more by engaging the dynamic that connects suffering to social and political change.

  In other instances the criticism is more justified. Judith Brown observes that the failure of Gandhi’s civil disobedience during World War II casts “doubt on the viability of non-violence as a political mode except in very restricted, small-scale situations, where its exponents could be carefully disciplined and deployed.”15

  Professor Brown is correct to emphasize the need for nonviolent discipline. The history of civil disobedience movements is littered with the debris from campaigns that foundered on lack of discipline. Campaigns lacking nonviolent discipline play right into the hands of the oppressor, who wants the disobedients to use violence. The use of violence delegitimizes the resistance in the world’s eyes, practically eliminates the possibility of sympathy for the disobedients, and places the contest directly on grounds where the oppressor invariably has an overwhelming advantage.

  The leadership of the American civil rights movement understood this reality when it imported Gandhi’s thinking in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. James Lawson, a colleague of Martin Luther King, Jr., who had spent time in India, helped introduce Gandhian thinking and tactics into the movement at large and the lunch counter sit-ins in particular. The sit-ins were extremely successful in desegregating southern lunch counters in the early 1960s in no small part because of the stress Lawson put on nonviolent discipline when he prepared sit-in participants for their disobedience. Lawson’s influence also extended to the Freedom Rides, another campaign that relied on strict nonviolent discipline and one that succeeded in desegregating bus depots throughout the American South.

  The leading civil rights figure of his time, King more than once acknowledged Gandhi’s influence on his thinking. In a radio broadcast during his 1959 visit to India, he said: “Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever . . . that . . . nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice. . . . 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.”16

  At the point of the American civil rights movement in the evolving history of nonviolent civil disobedience, the argument could still be made that Gandhian civil disobedience could succeed only when it embraced nonviolent discipline and that nonviolent discipline was possible only in very controlled situations. What no one could foresee was the programmatic application of Gandhian disobedience to such a broad range of controlled situations—some involving very large numbers of participants—that it could serve as an extremely powerful and fairly reliable tool for bringing down repressive, autocratic regimes.

  No one, that is, except for Gene Sharp.

  For more than fifty years, it has been the mission of nonviolence scholar Gene Sharp to demonstrate that nonviolence works better than violence in toppling oppressive, nondemocratic regimes. (As used here, “nonviolence” includes civil disobedience as one of its primary manifestations.) Sharp’s claim is that “all governments can rule only as long as they receive replenishment of the needed sources of their power from the cooperation, submission, and obedience of the population and the institutions of the society.” He goes on to argue that nonviolence “is uniquely suited to severing those sources of power.”

  Sharp’s inspiration came from Gandhi. His first book, published in 1960 by India’s Navajivan Publishing House, was a study of Gandhi. Today Sharp and those who are carrying on his work are careful not to promote nonviolence as a morally superior path to self-reform and freedom, as Gandhi often did. Rather, their argument is straightforwardly pragmatic: nonviolence in general and civil disobedience in particular, when properly used, are tools that work better than any other in liberating oppressed populations and paving the way for functioning democracies.

  And work well they have.17 Sharp’s book From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation is changing the world. Translated into more than thirty languages, it serves as a virtual handbook for nonviolent revolution. This is the book that was put in the hands of the young people of Serbia that helped them throw the dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, out of office in 2000. Their nonviolent resistance movement, known as Otpor (Resistance), was heavily influenced by Sharp. After Otpor defeated Milosevic, the movement praised Sharp’s approach as “an astoundingly effective blueprint for confronting a brutal regime.”

  The Otpor lesson was not lost on young activists in Tunisia and Egypt. They studied Otpor—and they took to Sharp. Egypt’s April 6 Movement created a symbol to resemble Otpor’s clenched fist, and elements of the movement went to Serbia to meet with Otpor. Another Egyptian group, the Academy of Change, also relied on Sharp’s work.18 It is no exaggeration to say that Sharp was an intellectual father of the Arab Spring—and Gandhi a grandfather.

  Gandhi would feel quite comfortable with King’s understanding of Gandhian nonviolence as having a foundation in morality, and at least somewhat uncomfortable with Sharp’s promotion of nonviolence on purely pragmatic lines. But despite this fissure among devotees of nonviolence, this much is true: Gandhi’s technique of nonviolence lives on and has made a material difference in freedom movements all around the globe, from bus stations in the American South to public squares in Cairo, Egypt.

  Gandhi may not have become a practitioner and theorist of nonviolence had he not been a lawyer in South Africa. Admittedly, there is a risk of oversimplification associated with seeing Gandhi’s world primarily through his life in the law and the c
ivil disobedience to which it led. In that vein, I recognize that Gandhi’s motivations were always complex. To understand them, scholars over the years have isolated them. Some have written about his religious motivations, some about his philosophical motivations, some about his political motivations, some about his cultural motivations, and still others about his psychological motivations. A fair criticism of what I have done here is that my work is in that tradition. To this, I plead guilty. I will leave the legitimate and important task of broadly contextualizing Gandhi’s time in the law to other scholars at other times. My object is clear—and different. One of the last great unexplored areas in the Gandhi story deals with the two decades he spent practicing law. My mission here is to demonstrate how the law played a critical role in bringing Gandhi into a position from which he was forced to invent his philosophy and practice of nonviolent civil disobedience—a signal development the consequences of which threaten oppressive regimes even to this day.

  It is my hope that this book illuminates Gandhi’s path to disobedience and, along the way, permits him to teach us by example what it means to have a life that brings into near-perfect unity one’s public behavior with one’s mostly deeply held spiritual beliefs.

  ONE

  * * *

  Dispatched to London

  It seems strange that any man should take one of the most important steps of his life, and one on which his future happiness largely depends, without duly weighing what it means beforehand. Yet, in the case of many Barristers, this is so.

  BALL, The Student’s Guide to the Bar (1879)

  IT WOULD BE SURPRISING IF anyone noticed him. The person who arrived on the SS Clyde on September 29, 1888, at Tilbury Station, twenty miles south of London, England, was not the ascetic, politician, and saint whose campaign for Indian independence would make his loin-clothed image instantly recognizable a century later in Richard Attenborough’s Academy-award winning film, Gandhi. Rather, the figure stepping gingerly into that inhospitably cold and foggy Saturday night was a timid, even frail, eighteen-year-old child from an obscure part of a continent thousands of miles away, dispatched from his Hindu homeland to the foreign Christian and Western culture that was nineteenth-century Britain.1

  What transformed this shy boy into a respected leader? What drew the leader to civil disobedience? The answers, in part, are to be found in the experiences Gandhi underwent in the law. Before passing into that phase of his life during which he dedicated himself to the liberation of India from British rule, Gandhi practiced law for twenty years, at first briefly and unsuccessfully in India and then for a substantial period and quite successfully in South Africa before giving up the practice and returning to India. During the period of his legal education and then his practice, Gandhi was severely tested and, in response, found his voice and his focus. He established his identity as one who saw injustice clearly and acted decisively against it, saw truth clearly and acted decisively for it. He succeeded in conjoining his practice with his beliefs, making of the law not simply his profession but his vocation. And in the end, even as he recognized the limits of traditional legal processes, he discovered the great dynamic within the law that converts civil disobedience into social change.

  CHOOSING A VOCATION

  The choice of career, like the choice of marriage, was not Gandhi’s to make. Just as his marriage at age thirteen to Kasturba was arranged for him, so, too, was the decision to study law the product of family forces other than his own will. Gandhi’s father, Karamchand Gandhi, had met with some success in ascending to positions of high bureaucratic power, serving as prime minister of the small dominions of Porbandar, Rajkot, and Vankaner. While Karamchand’s political career failed to make his family wealthy, neither did the family want for the basics of life. Theirs was a day-to-day stability. Karamchand’s health, however, worsened as a result of age and accident, and eventually he was forced to give up his career in government. When he passed away, he did not leave the family anything on which to live. None of Gandhi’s three older siblings had the prospects required to carry the family. Accordingly, the burden settled on the shoulders of young Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

  After completing high school, Gandhi passed the Bombay University matriculation examination and took up his studies at Samaldas College in Bhavnagar in 1887. He wasn’t much of a student, being both uninterested in and unable to follow his professors’ lectures. Compounding the difficulty he had with his studies were his physical problems. Gandhi complained of constant headaches and nosebleeds due, some conjectured, to the hot climate. Gandhi’s summer vacation from Samaldas could not come too soon. In late April 1888, at the start of his vacation, Gandhi and his oldest brother, Lakshmidas, decided to visit a friend of the family, the Brahmin Mavji Dave. On hearing Gandhi’s complaints about college, including his prediction that he would fail his first-year examination, Mavji suggested that Gandhi be sent to England to study for the bar. This, he thought, would prepare Gandhi to reclaim his father’s position and income in much better fashion than would the pursuit of an ordinary college degree. The calculus being made at this time did not involve altruistic concerns. The naked purpose of providing young Gandhi a legal education was to guarantee an income for the family. It is not surprising, then, that when Gandhi was asked in 1891 why he had come to England to study the law, his forthright reply was “ambition.”

  There are no reports indicating just what Gandhi thought at this time of what a life in the law meant, if he gave any thought to it at all. Indeed, there are no reports indicating any resistance on Gandhi’s part to the idea of training in the law, except his timid inquiry whether he could be sent to study his first love, medicine, instead of law, a proposal which was quickly discarded in the wake of his brother’s declaration that it was their father’s wish that Mohandas become a lawyer, not a physician. Thus it appears that Gandhi accepted the choice of profession made for him with little more objection than that he voiced to the choice of a wife his family made for him.

  Regardless of the little thought Gandhi himself may have given to studying the law or being a barrister, we do know that he relished the prospect of three years in England. Perhaps this is what motivated him to overcome four serious obstacles to his studying law there: the lack of any means to finance his legal education overseas, the concerns of his wife’s family, the uncertainty of his mother, and the opposition of his caste.

  OVERCOMING OBSTACLES

  Lakshmidas assumed the task of obtaining financing. His first attempt at securing the necessary funds was to send Gandhi off to beseech Frederick Lely, the British administrator of Porbandar state, for governmental assistance. The Gandhis hoped that their reputation with Lely, established by the late Karamchand, would lead Lely to open the state coffers. After a four-day journey to Porbandar and after elaborately rehearsing his request, Gandhi was startled when his request was dismissed out-of-hand. Lely brusquely advised him to secure his B.A. before attempting the study of law, after which Lely would consider granting some aid. Gandhi then turned to his cousin Parmanandbhai, who promised his financial support, as did Meghjibhai, another cousin. Despite their promises, there is no evidence that either of these cousins aided Gandhi; indeed Meghjibhai is on record as later angrily denying Gandhi any help. Two additional governmental representatives whom Gandhi approached were as unhelpful as Lely. Other than some small amounts of money and a silver chain that some of his friends gave him on his departure from Bombay, it appears that Gandhi received no financial help from any of his friends, extended family, or governmental officials. If Gandhi was to go to London, it would be by exhausting what capital remained with his immediate family after the death of Karamchand.

  Money, however, was the least-complicated of Gandhi’s problems. He was married to Kasturba, the daughter of the merchant Seth Gokaldas Makanji of Porbandar—an arrangement put together according to Indian custom by the families of the children. Now here was the eighteen-year-old Kasturba, pregnant with the couple’s child,2 about to
be abandoned for three years by her husband. This did not sit well with Kasturba’s parents. Gandhi spent many hours convincing them of the wisdom of his intentions and reassuring them that Lakshmidas would look after Kasturba. Speaking of the difficult project of winning over Kasturba’s parents to his plan, Gandhi later said, “Patience and perseverance overcome mountains.”

  But an even more difficult task lay ahead—obtaining the blessing of Gandhi’s mother, Putli Ba. Naturally, she had the reluctance any mother would to bid adieu to her youngest child.3 Perhaps as an expression of this fear, but more likely as an expression of genuine spiritual concern, Putli Ba, a devout Hindu, worried that her son would surrender his Hindu practices to the English appetite for the forbidden pleasures of wine and meat. Indeed, there was an idea abroad at this time in India that wine and meat were actually necessary for survival in the English climate. Determined to go to England, Gandhi devised two ways of dealing with his mother’s concerns. First, by his own admission, he exaggerated the benefits of his English sojourn. Second, to quiet her concerns about his moral purity, he secured the services of Becharji Swami, a Jain monk and a family advisor, to administer an oath to him that he would refrain from wine, meat, and for good measure, women. With these steps reassuring Putli Ba, she granted her permission.