In the case of two other notable theoretical analyses of democracy, Huntington and Gandhi are mentioned but their focus is not on the clash of civilizations debate: Ashutosh Varshney, “Why Democracy Survives,” Journal of Democracy 9, no. 3 (1998): 36—50; and Amartya Sen, “Democracy as a Universal Value,” Journal of Democracy 10, no. 3 (1999): 3—17. Likewise, Mark Juergensmeyer, in Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, from Christian Militias to al Qaeda (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), a longtime Gandhi scholar, refers once to Huntington’s position and only briefly to how Gandhi “applied religious [Hindu] concepts to political tactics” (Ibid., 105, 261), thus choosing not to engage him significantly in the debate or to emphasize that religious toleration was a main pillar of Gandhi’s value system.
If a single article by Samuel Huntington, an international relations specialist who applied political theory to history, could prompt one of the most vigorous and sustained debates within the academy, then can scholars of conflict resolution, drawing especially from literature by and about Gandhi, enter this debate from the perspective of peace studies? The difficulty of this prospect is underscored by Adam Roberts and Timothy Ash, eds., Civil Resistance and Power Politics. The Experience of Non-violent Action from Gandhi to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). In this book, no fewer than twenty-two often distinguished writers from various disciplines address the subject as part of the Oxford University Project on Civil Resistance and Power Politics. Gandhi is invoked throughout the collection and an entire chapter is devoted to him. The book, however, lacks an integrated or unified theoretical analysis of nonviolent power relating to “power politics.” Evidently, a better marriage of theory and history will be needed to gather greater coherence and force if this subject is to be taken to a higher level of credibility in the rough field of international relations and political realism.
2. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” in The Clash of Civilizations? The Debate, ed. James Hoge (Foreign Affairs, 2010), 4—5.
3. Ibid., 13.
4. CWMG 51:129.
5. Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York: Harper, 1958), 102.
6. Said, “The Clash of Definitions,” 577, 584.
7. Nussbaum, The Clash Within, 332.
8. Gandhi: An Autobiography, trans. Mahadev Desai (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993),
9. Margaret Chatterjee, Gandhi s Religious Thought (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 163.
10. A. M. Rosenthal, “On My Mind: Hindus Against Hindus,” New York Times, March 5, 1993, A29.
11. M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, trans. Anthony J. Parel (Cambridge University Press, 1997), xiii. Hereafter cited in text.
12. CWMG 25:424.
13. Dennis Dalton, “Gandhi’s Originality,” in Gandhi, Freedom, and Self-Rule, ed. A. J. Parel (Lanham, M.D.: Lexington Books, 2000).
14. M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, ed. S. R. Mehrotra (New Delhi: Promilla Publishers, 2010).
15. Ibid., 9.
16. Tolstoy quoted in S. R. Mehrotra, Towards India’s Freedom and Partition (New Delhi: Vikas, 1979), 39; and Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, trans. Parel, 139.
17. Mehrotra, Towards India’s Freedom and Partition, 11, 28—29, 82.
18. Letter to a Hindoo: Taraknath Das, Leo Tolstoi and Mahatma Gandhi, ed. Christian Bartolf (Berlin: Gandhi Information-Zentrum, 1997).
19. Gandhi to Ampthill, October 30, 1909, quoted in Mehrotra, Towards India’s Freedom and Partition, 33, 35; and in Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, trans. Parel, 133—135.
20. Gandhi to Polak, October 14, 1909, quoted in Mehrotra, Towards India’s Freedom and Partition, 27; and in Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, trans. Parel, 132.
21. Mehrotra, Towards India’s Freedom and Partition, 70.
22. Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom (New York: Harper, 1958), 176.
23. Faisal Devji, The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics (Columbia University Press, 2008). Hereafter cited in text.
24. See, for a more extensive discussion in this book, pages 134—139 and 228—230.
25. CWMG 25:563, 54:416—17.
26. King, Stride Toward Freedom, 103.
27. Malcolm X, Autobiography (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999), 436.
28. Joseph Kip Kosek, Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2009).
29. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 49.
30. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 321.
31. Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton University Press, 2006), 202.
32. Ibid., 7.
33. Said, “The Clash of Definitions,” 589.
34. Gandhi, Mind Swaraj, trans. Parel, 66—67.
35. Tolstoy quoted in R. N. Iyer, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 24. See also The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1986), especially vol. 1, chapter 4, “Hind Swaraj, Modern Civilization and Moral Progress,” pages 199—369.
36. For one instance of the remarkably candid exchange between Gandhi and Nehru, see the 1945 volume of Towards Freedom, 1937—1947, ed. Bimal Prasad (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Gandhi’s unchanging commitment to Mind Swaraj was met with Nehru’s brusque dismissal that its views were “completely unreal” (Ibid., xxiii).
37. Howard Gardner, Creating Minds (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 355.
38. The second work is Bhikhu Parekh, Gandhi: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
39. Thomas Weber, On the Salt March (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 1997), and “Gandhian Philosophy, Conflict Resolution Theory and Practical Approaches to Negotiation,” Journal of Peace Studies 38, no. 4 (2001): 493—513.
40. CWMG 15:244.
41. Mithi Mukherjee, “Transcending Identity: Gandhi, Nonviolence, and the Pursuit of a ‘Different’ Freedom in Modern India,” American Historical Review 115, no. 2 (April 2010): 453—473.
42. The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson, vols. 1—6 (1929–1963) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, ongoing).
43. See pages 107—108 and 221, note 66, in this book.
44. Thomas Weber, “Gandhian Philosophy, Conflict Resolution Theory and Practical Approaches to Negotiation,” Journal of Peace Research 38, no. 4 (2001): 493—513.
45. Gene Sharp, “Shy U.S. Intellectual Created Playbook Used in a Revolution” New York Times, Feb 16, 2011. See also Sharp’s Web site, www.aeinstein.org.
46. Glenn Paige’s Nonkilling Global Political Science (Xlibris, 2009) has been translated into over thirty languages. See also www.nonkilling.org.
•
CHRONOLOGY
1869: Mohandas Karamehand Gandhi, son of Karamehand and Putlibai Gandhi, was born on October 2, the youngest of three sons, in Porbandar (population 72,000) on the western eoast of India, now in the state of Gujarat. The family was of the Vaisya easte, meaning that it was on a lower rung of the easte hierarchy, usually associated with commerce. But his family did not lack prestige or income: his father served as prime minister in Porbandar and the region of Rajkot. His mother was his father’s fourth wife.
1876—1887: Gandhi was educated at primary school and Alfred High School in Rajkot until twelfth year. He was betrothed to Kasturbai Makanji in 1876 and married in 1882, when they were both thirteen. In 1884 he experimented with eating meat and then severely regretted it, becoming a lifelong vegetarian.
1888: Harilal, the first of his four children (all sons), was born. The others were Manilal (1892), Ramdas (1897), and Devadas (1900). On September 8 Gandhi sailed for England to study law, with the support of his family but in the face of strong disapproval
from his caste elders, who forbade travel abroad.
1888—1891: On November 6 he enrolled as a law student at the Inner Temple in London, and in June 1891 he was called to the bar and enrolled in the High Court of Justice in London. During this period he met H. P. Blavatsky and Annie Besant of the Theosophieal Society and became a member. Although he had previously read the Ehagavad Gita, he now gained a deeper understanding of this supreme sacred text of Hinduism. Later he gained inspiration from the Sermon on the Mount. On June 12 he sailed for India.
1892—1893: He failed to practice law successfully at home, so he left India for South Africa to be a legal adviser to Dada Abdullah & Company, where he would represent members of the Indian community there. But in June 1893 he experienced brutal racial prejudice when he was thrown off a train from Durban to Pretoria. He later recalled this event as a moment of truth that motivated him to combat racial discrimination through the South African courts and in the press.
1894: He studied religious literature, including the Koran and the Bible, as well as the writings of Leo Tolstoy. The latter’s Kingdom of God Is Within You “overwhelmed” him, as he put it in his autobiography, by strongly confirming his faith in nonviolence. On August 22 he organized the Natal Indian Congress (on the model of the Indian National Congress founded in 1885), to oppose discriminatory legislation against South African Indians. He began his twenty-year career in law there by enrolling as a barrister in the high courts of Natal and the Transvaal against the disapproval of European lawyers.
1896—1897: Gandhi sailed to India to mobilize support for Indians in South Africa, but on his return he was attacked by a mob in Durban and barely escaped serious injury.
1899: He organized the Indian Ambulance Corps to provide medical support in the Boer War with the English colonial government.
1904: After establishing a successful law practice in Johannesburg and launching Indian Opinion, he was influenced by reading John Ruskin’s Unto This Last and founded the Phoenix Settlement, his first ashram, near Durban to begin experiments in simple living.
1906: He again supported the English South African government by organizing an ambulance corps to support the suppression of the so-called Zulu Rebellion in June. After he witnessed British brutality toward the Zulus, he deemed the event not a revolt but a massacre. Bitterly disillusioned, he became deeply introspective. Erik Erikson, in his psychobiography of Gandhi, analyzed the profound personal impact of this moment (see page 171). In July he took a vow of chastity (brahmacharya) to gain greater self-discipline. On September 11 he addressed a mass meeting of Indians at the Empire Theater in Johannesburg to urge civil disobedience against repressive government legislation that required registration of Indians. Later he recalled this date as the “advent of satyagraha,” or direct nonviolent action.
1907: Not until a year after this first act of resistance in South Africa did Gandhi read Henry David Thoreau’s famous treatise “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” but once he discovered it, Gandhi acknowledged Thoreau, often later, as the inventor of civil disobedience and among “the greatest and most moral men America has produced” (CWMG 7:279).
1908: Imprisoned in January and again from October to December for civil resistance. He now adopted the term satyagraha, or “truth-force” (as he often defined it), signifying the power of nonviolence when employed in the cause of truth and love. On February 10 he was assaulted and nearly killed by a member of his own Indian community, an ominous foreshadowing of his assassination 40 years later by a Hindu. In the 1908 case, though, Gandhi lived to ask that his assailants be forgiven and to witness their repentance.
1909: After being arrested again and released, he sailed for a five month visit to London, where he carried on a sustained dialogue with Indian terrorists, led by V. D. Savarkar, and English friends like Lord Ampthill who were sympathetic to his cause of Indian freedom. From these exchanges, and inspired by close friends such as P. J. Mehta (see my afterword), he wrote his classic treatise Mind Swaraj, an ideological proclamation of Indian independence, while sailing back to South Africa in November.
1910: In April he sent Tolstoy a copy of Mind Swaraj (translated as Indian Mome Rule), and Tolstoy replied in May that Gandhi was addressing “a question of the greatest importance not only for India but for the whole [of] humanity.” Gandhi then established near Johannesburg his second ashram, called Tolstoy Farm, to train and accommodate civil resisters.
1913: Civil disobedience was revived in South Africa, first by Kasturbai, Gandhi’s wife, who was imprisoned for three months of hard labor, and then by Gandhi, who led a march of over 2,000 Indian coal miners and workers on sugar plantations—men, women and children—to protest discriminatory legislation and abusive work conditions. The march lasted from November 6 to 10, after which Gandhi was sentenced to nine months imprisonment with hard labor for inducing a mass strike. He was released, however, in December in order to negotiate with his main adversary, General J. C. Smuts, leader of the South African government.
1914: On January 22 Gandhi negotiated with Smuts favorable terms for the Indian community, so civil disobedience was suspended, and on July 18 Gandhi sailed for London en route to India, leaving South Africa for the last time. He arrived in England on August 6, two days after World War I began, and he stayed in London.
19l5: He arrived in Bombay on January 9, and by May 20 had established his third ashram, called the Satyagraha Ashram, located in Sabarmati, near Ahmedabad in Gujarat. He resumed his campaign for the abolition of untouchability, admitting an untouchable family to Satyagraha Ashram.
1917: After touring India and Burma in 1916 to familiarize himself with the political situation in South Asia, he began in April 1917 to work on the problems of indigo farmers in Champaran, a district in a remote northern part of India. By October he had concluded his first satyagraha campaign in India, mobilizing sharecroppers to protest unjust labor conditions, and a settlement favorable to the poor peasantry was reached with the indigo planters.
1918: In February he presided over the annual gathering of Bhagini Samaj in Bombay to promote women’s education and empowerment, a prominent cause especially in the civil disobedience campaign of 1930 (see pages 118—119). From February to March he launched a satyagraha in Ahmedabad on behalf of mill workers, and resorted to a fast to reach a settlement with employers. After these sustained uses of satyagraha, he uncharacteristically decided to support the British war effort by trying to raise Indian recruits for the British armed forces. His expectation that this would prompt a sympathetic response from the English, who might make concessions toward India’s independence, was disappointed and led to his disillusionment with the empire the next year.
1919: Oppressive legislation by the British government in India (the Raj) prompted Gandhi to announce on February 24 his intention to lead the first nation-wide satyagraha campaign. In March he issued his “Satyagraha Leaflet,” in which he quoted Henry David Thoreau, and on April 6 he inaugurated the all-India Satyagraha movement with a general strike, or hartal. The government reacted immediately by arresting Gandhi on April 10. Outbreaks of violence ensued, and the Raj now used maximum force. On April 13, in the city of Amritsar, a crowd of 10,000 gathered in the town square to celebrate a religious holiday. General Reginald Dyer, who had earlier imposed martial law, interpreted this as defiance and, marching his troops into the square, fired on the assembly without warning, killing 400 and wounding 1,500. He followed up this attack with acts of public humiliation that were intended to compel Indian repentance. C. F. Andrews, Gandhi’s close friend, wrote that the “Amritsar massacre” turned Gandhi into a revolutionary, though one still firmly committed to nonviolence. On April 18 Gandhi suspended satyagraha to prevent further violence.
1920: Gandhi led meetings of the Indian National Congress to adopt programs of noncooperation to redress the wrongs inflicted on India by the Raj and to declare its objective to be the attainment of independence, or swaraj, by peaceful means.
1921:
The mass campaign of satyagraha began in December after a year of extensive mobilization through the Indian National Congress, which Gandhi had transformed into a full-scale grassroots organization throughout the country. Many Congress leaders were arrested in the campaign.
1922: After a mob of Indians killed twenty-two police officers on February 5 in the town of Chauri Chaura, Gandhi fasted for five days in protest against the violence. Against the advice of Congress leaders, he stopped the entire satyagraha campaign, having determined that the participants were not sufficiently disciplined to sustain the movement nonviolently. The government responded by arresting him for sedition on March 10 and then, after a dramatic trial, sentencing him to six years’ imprisonment. He was released, however, in 1924, after having surgery in prison for appendicitis.
1924: Gandhi advocated for the cause of Hindu-Muslim unity, culminating in a twenty-one day fast to improve relations between these communities, which ended on October 8.
1925: He began writing his autobiography, entitled The Story of My Experiments with Truth, and published serial entries in his newspaper, Young India. The installments—written in Gujarati, his native language—were completed in February 1929.
1927: He advocated the wearing of homespun cloth, or khadi, and made this a vital part of swaraj, because it represented freedom from British manufactured clothing and a simple way of life in solidarity with the poor. He regarded this as part of his “Constructive Program” for social reform, which also included his promotion of the spinning wheel (charka) as a symbol of welfare for all. He toured the country extensively from January to November. See the glossary for definitions of terms like charka, khadi, sarvodaya, and swadeshi and their association with swaraj.
Mahatma Gandhi Page 33