Government policy is wrong, that is, not because it is immoral but because it is unenforceable. As a police officer, Curry sees himself as being placed by his superiors in an impossible situation and clearly resents it. He is overcome with physical revulsion as his duties increase with his mounting “nervous tension” and “unable to account for this unless it was due to extreme distaste at the idea of using force against these ‘non-violent’ people.”
These memoirs, written thirty years after the salt satyagraha, do not convey a tone of righteous conviction but rather of lasting uncertainty about what better path the Government might have followed. Curry knows that “the Congress very cleverly put the Government on the horns of a dilemma” because “they virtually compelled the police” to arrest them and so gave the whole world “a completely false idea of the nature of the British raj.” What ultimately caused him “extreme exhaustion” and resignation from the police in 1930 was this: “I now think that the most powerful [reason for resigning] probably arose from mixed feelings about the nature of the British raj in India.”162 Gandhi described the Government at this time as “puzzled and perplexed.”163 He was right.164
Yet perhaps in a sense the raj was also right. The costs of hesitation can be appreciated without invoking Hamlet, but one wonders whether his immortal lines might have crossed the minds of Irwin and his men:
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.165
The Strengths and Limitations of Satyagraha
The story of the salt march suggests that Gandhi’s ingenious creation of ambivalence through nonviolence constituted a vital step in his exercise of power. However, the necessity of creating ambivalence in the first place may also indicate an inherent limitation of the method. Can Gandhian nonviolence work against totalitarian states, or even petty despots, where power is wielded in a dictatorial manner, without hesitation or restraint? To take an extreme case, could European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s have employed satyagraha against the Nazi regime? Joan Bondurant remarks that Gandhi “believed that [satyagraha] could have been used in such concrete cases as the opposition of Jews in Germany to the Nazis,” and then Bondurant supports his belief, arguing that if the Jews had used satyagraha they would have “mobilized world opinion behind them much more rapidly than they did.”166
Gandhi did indeed believe that satyagraha could succeed against Nazism. He first addressed the issue in November 1938, when readers of his journal Harijan pressed him to comment on the plight of Jews in Germany. He began by recognizing that “the German persecution of the Jews seems to have no parallel in history,” yet then affirmed his belief in the efficacy of nonviolent resistance. Such resistance to Hitler “may even result in the general massacre of the Jews.” But, at worse, this would not wreak greater destruction than nonresistance, and, at best, it might have a result like that of the Indian satyagraha in South Africa. Gandhi insisted, however, that nonviolence could work only if practiced as “an article of faith,” that is, not as “passive resistance of the weak” (duragraha), but as “active nonviolent resistance of the strong” (satyagraha). If so practiced, then its power would be invincible in any circumstance or situation:
[Satyagraha] can and does work in the teeth of the fiercest opposition. But it ends in evoking the widest public sympathy. Sufferings of the nonviolent have been known to melt the stoniest hearts. I make bold to say that if the Jews can summon to their aid the soul power that comes only from nonviolence, Herr Hitler will bow before the courage which he has never yet experienced in any large measure.167
When The Statesman of Calcutta editorialized a week later (in response to Gandhi’s views) that Hitler would hardly be impressed by Jewish acts of courage, he reprinted the editorial in Harijan and then replied:
The hardest metal yields to sufficient heat. Even so must the hardest heart melt before sufficiency of the heat of nonviolence. And there is no limit to the capacity of nonviolence to generate heat…. Herr Hitler is but one man enjoying no more than the average span of life. He would be a spent force if he had not the backing of his people. I do not despair of his responding to human suffering even though caused by him. But I must refuse to believe that the Germans as a nation have no heart or markedly less than the other nations of the earth. They will some day rebel against their own adored hero, if he does not wake up betimes.168
On March 9, 1939, Martin Buber and J. L. Magnes sent directly to Gandhi two lengthy replies to the comments in Harijan169 Buber’s letter especially represents an earnest and thoughtful attempt to reach Gandhi. It begins by refuting Gandhi’s assertion that there is “an exact parallel” between the persecution of Jews in Germany and the discrimination against Indians in South Africa. Buber relates in detail the horrors of Nazi oppression and implies that Gandhi’s assumption that the two cases are comparable indicates his basic misunderstanding of the German context.170
Magnes asks “how can Jews in Germany offer civil resistance? The slightest sign of resistance means killing or concentration camps or being done away with otherwise. It is usually in the dead of night that they are spirited away. No one, except their terrified families, is the wiser. It makes not even a ripple on the surface of German life.” Magnes implores Gandhi to contrast this with the effect of the salt march, “when the whole world is permitted to hang upon your words and be witness to your acts.” Both Buber and Magnes write with sincere respect, but the latter comes gently to the weakness in Gandhi’s position when he says: “One of the great things about you and your doctrine has been that you have always emphasized the chance of practical success if Satyagraha be offered. Yet to the German Jews you have not given the practical advice which only your unique experience could offer.”171
There is unfortunately no record of Gandhi having received these two letters.172 However, another Jewish correspondent did reach Gandhi. Hayim Greenberg, editor of The Jewish Frontier in New York, had knowledge of Indian culture and recent political history as well as a sympathetic understanding of Gandhi’s thought and leadership. He responded in 1939 to Gandhi’s statement of November 1938, apparently without knowledge of the Buber and Magnes correspondence, but arguing along similar lines. After observing in more detail than the others the differences between the German and Indian situations that made the use of satyagraha impossible for Jews, Greenberg emphasized how Britons appreciated Gandhi’s appeal to conscience and so used restraint in their response to civil disobedience. Such consideration could not be expected of the Nazis. Jews in Germany faced the worst circumstances for nonviolent resistance: an overwhelming and largely unsympathetic gentile majority commanded by an unprecedentedly ruthless totalitarian regime.173
Gandhi replied directly to Greenberg on May 22, 1939. He began by praising the thoughtfulness of Greenberg’s letter and explained that he had commented in the first instance only “at the pressing request of Jewish friends and correspondents.” He then continued: “It is highly probable that, as the writer says, ‘a Jewish Gandhi in Germany, should one arise, could function for about five minutes and would be promptly taken to the guillotine.’ But that will not disprove my case or shake my belief in the efficacy of ahimsa. I can conceive the necessity of the immolation of hundreds, if not thousands, to appease the hunger of dictators who have no belief in ahimsa. Indeed the maxim is that ahimsa is the most efficacious in front of the greatest himsa [violence]. Its quality is really tested only in such cases. Sufferers need not see the result during their lifetime. They must have faith that if their cult survives, the result is a certainty.”174
As in his previous statements, Gandhi gives no indication of exactly how he thinks Jews might offer satyagraha against Hitler. His next and last published comment on the subject came seven years later, in 19
46, when Louis Fischer pressed him for a verdict on the Holocaust: “‘Hitler/ Gandhi said,’ killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs …. It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany…. As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.”175
With comments like these, Gandhi discredited his own position.176 Where is his compassionate understanding for the oppressed or even a hint of a practical program of action? He seemed unable at this time to grasp the enormity of the Holocaust.177 Yet the differences between Nazi Germany and British India were evident then as now. A government’s capacity for ambivalence must matter because it gives a resistance movement license to mobilize or to publicize its cause. Hitler’s willingness and ability to use state power in an unrestrained extermination process precluded organized nonviolent action. Jews throughout Europe certainly did resist Nazi persecution but anything like a widespread satyagraha campaign was unthinkable.178 Whether as small, isolated communities surrounded by hostile gentile majorities or ostensibly assimilated into the latter, the European Jews remained a very vulnerable minority without access to national media or methods of mass politicization.
By contrast Indian satyagrahis swam in relatively friendly waters with an immense advantage of media access at all levels, including regional, national, and international press and film agencies. With a leader like Gandhi who could employ mass mobilization techniques to maximum effect, the Indian case provides the premier example of how nonviolent resistance movements may develop. Thus, while the specific political and social context of Nazi Germany exemplifies conditions least favorable to satyagraha, those of the British Raj in India reveal the contrary. Gandhi did not create his historical context but he did show an uncanny intuition for creatively exploiting its political potential. That this intuitive sense was lacking in his advice to Jews only highlights the need for a leader to be intimately familiar with a political situation in order to translate ideas into action effectively.
Most governments do not fall into the category of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, or Communist China: dictatorships prepared to kill a sizable portion of their own civilian population to maintain power. If the difficulty of imagining large-scale civil disobedience against such regimes is conceded, this does not rule out the practicality of nonviolent action in most countries. In fact, political experience since World War II and especially in the last few years has seen a surprising susceptibility of dictatorships to mass nonviolent protest. From the toppling of powerful leaders like Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to the overthrow of despotic governments in Eastern Europe, political pundits have failed to predict or later even to acknowledge the extraordinary effectiveness of nonviolent power. We must not miss the import of that elementary axiom of politics, established long before Gandhi but demonstrated by no one better than he, that the very existence of any government depends on the consent of its people.179
But every velvet revolution does not make for satyagraha. Most forms of nonviolent action Gandhi criticized as passive resistance or duragraha. The crucial distinction lies with the connection between satyagraha and swaraj. The buzzword “people power” often assumes quite wrongly that democracy and freedom follow from any nonviolent expression of the popular will. Such optimism is unwarranted. Even free elections can produce authoritarian regimes, and even democracies may harbor tyrannies of the majority. Gandhi tried to give new meaning to terms like democracy and freedom with his ideas of swaraj and satyagraha. As noted above in chapters 2 and 3, Gandhi’s theory of democracy began by rejecting all concentrations of state power. He proposed satyagraha not duragraha as a remedy for abuse of power, even within a democracy. Real democracy emerged not from an instant exercise of people power somewhere in the world, but from a process of personal liberation, an attitudinal revolution within each citizen. He insisted that this process could be furthered only through satyagraha: a nonviolent use of power in pursuit of truth, the kind of truth that brings self-knowledge, self-awareness, and self-control. In India, the relationship of satyagraha to swaraj meant that people could engage in nonviolent action in ways that may liberate them from fear or enmity—that their political involvement might nurture a heightened self-esteem, to attain a free India of equality and justice for all. These were the ideals behind the independence movement. The next chapter shows how Gandhi applied them after India’s independence, but this time, near the end of his life, to a country mired in civil war.
If ever a person’s life may be portayed as a journey,
then it was Gandhis. The dramatic changes that
occurred in his ideas were usually accompanied by
differences in dress or facial expression, as illustrated
in these photographs.
Mohandas Gandhi, age 7, at his birthplace of Porbandar, Kathiawad, in western India; and at age 17, in nearby Rajkot, where he graduated from high school in 1887.
During his loyalist period, as a staunch auimrer of the British Empire: first, age 21, as a law student in London (1890); and then, age 37, at the height of his lucrative career as a barrister in Johannesburg (1906).
A change of dress and countenance that signaled a profound change of thought and action: age 45, at the successful conclusion of a six-year civil disobedience campaign in South Africa (1914); and at age 49, in local dress, after his return to India, in the midst of a tax resistance movement in Gujarat (1918).
By age 55, Gandhi had so simplified and reduced his clothing that Winston Churchill could call him a “half-naked fakir.” British cartoons depicted him thus, but Gandhi saw this as part of his philosophy of renunciation and knew that Indian tradition valued its symbolism.
Gandhi, age 60, beginning the salt march on March 12, 1930. Pyarelal Nayar (at right of Gandhi), his secretary and biographer, called this moment the most dramatic in modern Indian history. At its end, on April 6, at Dandi, Gandhi picked up natural salt—an illegal act that inspired a nation to civil disobedience.
At age 62, on the eve of his 1932 fast against untouchability, he joked that he possessed few clothes and fewer teeth. And at age 65, he ranked among the world’s most prolific writers and journalists, editor of a weekly paper entitled Harijan.
At age 70, in 1940, with Kasturba: their marriage began when they were both 13 and ended with her death 62 years later, when they were in prison together. Also in 1940, with Rabindranath Tagore, his friend and critic and India’s poet laureate, at Tagore’s home, Santiniketan.
At age 77, in late 1946, Gandhi walked 116 miles through riot-torn Noakhali, Bengal, visiting 47 villages in a desperate effort at calming the Hindu-Muslim conflict that raged there during India’s civil war.
In August-September, 1947, at the peak of religious conflict in northern India, Gandhi fasted in Calcutta with dramatic success and received congratulations from Lord Mountbatten, the last British Viceroy. The letter is a testimony to the power of nonviolent action.
One of the last notes to be signed and left by Gandhi in 1948 as a final testament of his deepest belief.
Gangabehn and Ramjibhai Badhia, a harijan (untouchable) couple in Gandhi’s Satyagraha ashram. Gandhi recognized Gangabehn’s unique authority in the community and wrote to her often about ashram matters. He called Ramjibhai his “guru in khadi weaving” and included him among the Dandi marchers.
Two Britons on opposing sides of India’s independence movement: Lord Edward Irwin (1881-1959), as Viceroy of India during the salt satyagraha was Gandhi’s chief adversary. Reginald Reynolds (1905–1958) was an English Quaker who joined Gandhi’s ashram and then hand-delivered to Lord Irwin Gandhi’s letter of March 2, 1930, with its historic proclamation of civil disobedience.
Gandhi’s letter of March 11, 1930, to Jawaharlal Nehru. It was written from his ashram on the eve of the salt march and begins: “It is nearing 10:00 A.M. now—the air is thick with the rumour that I shall be arrested du
ring the night.” But the British hesitated and did not arrest him until May 5, thus giving the movement time to mobilize.
• CHAPTER FIVE
The Calcutta Fast
“Let Hindus and Muslims understand firmly that the cornerstone of swaraj, the cornerstone of the freedom of India is Hindu and Muslim unity.”
—Gandhi, April 7, 19211
“Lovers and makers of swaraj must not be dismayed by these omens. My advice is satyagraha first and satyagraha last. There is no other or better road to freedom.”
—Gandhi, September 9, 19462
India attained independence on August 15, 1947. The long struggle against British imperialism—longer than that of any other colonized country—had ended and the process of decolonization throughout the world had begun. Gandhi, who was as responsible for this process as any person on earth, would have had cause to celebrate if India had not been submerged in mass violence. The religious strife among Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs that engulfed northern India from 1946–1948 marked one of the worst civil wars in history. It demonstrated the grim truth that Indian culture had at least as much capability for civil violence as any other, that this could occur despite all the emphasis given to nonviolence since 1919, and that although India had gained independence, it certainly had not achieved swaraj.
Mahatma Gandhi Page 21