50th
Anniversary of the Death of Gandhi
By JONATHAN POWER
LONDON-- Fifty years on from the death of Mahatma Gandhi,
lawyer, political activist, apostle of non-violence as a
means of settling political disputes and vanquisher of the
British Empire, the world is in crying need again for the
philosophy he propagated and the debate he provoked. As
Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of newly
independent India, said on the day of his assassination,
"the light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness
everywhere".
If only India had listened to him more there would have been
no division with Pakistan. If only the British had learnt
more from him there would have been no colonial massacres in
Kenya or Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland. Perhaps, if Bill
Clinton could spare a thought for Gandhi today, he would
find a way of keeping Saddam Hussein in check without
risking the horrors of war, a war that New York Times
columnist William Safire wrote this week could end with the
use of nuclear weapons. (We must never "hold an entire
society accountable for the decisions of a single demented
leader", said General Lee Butler the former
commander-in-chief of U.S. Strategic Nuclear Command in a
speech on Monday, in an earnest attempt to head off such
dangerous thinking about the unthinkable.)
It was at the late age--for an Indian of his
generation--of 46 that Gandhi returned to his homeland after
three years in England and eighteen years in South Africa.
Yet within five years of his return he had become the
dominant figure in Indian public life. By 1920 most of the
front rank Indian politicians had joined his banner and the
others had practically ceased to count. Rarely has a
political conquest been more spectacular or complete. It was
the Mahatma--the Great Soul--so named by the poet Tagore,
that held the heart of the Indian masses. Yet Indian
politicians did not follow Gandhi unwillingly. They saw in
his non-violent technique the only practical alternative to
speech- making and bomb-throwing, the extremes between which
Indian politics had previously oscillated. Under his
inspiration they turned their backs on creature comforts and
professional ambition, and spent the best part of their
lives in third class railway carriages and British prisons.
In England he had read the Bible from cover to cover. He
also read and re-read the Gita, the Hindu scripture. He took
Christ's admonition to "turn the other cheek" literally and
he interpreted the battlefield of Kurukahata in the Gita not
as an historical account gloryfying violence, as in the
Hindu tradition, but as an allegory illuminating the
futility of violence. He believed in pursuing peaceful ends
through peaceful means. The means and the ends must cohere
because the end is pre-existent in the means and ultimately
destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.
He inspired not only his own but in South Africa the
founder of the African National Congress, Albert Lithuli, in
the U.S. the civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, in
Brazil the human rights activist Archbishop Helder Camara
and in Italy the social reformer Danilio Dolci. It was Dr.
King who once said in an emotive outburst before the
American Jewish Congress, "Perhaps if there had been a
broader understanding of the uses of non-violent action in
Germany when Hitler was rising and consolidating his power,
the brutal extermination of 6 million Jews and a million of
other war dead might have been avoided. Germany might never
have become totalitarian. If protestants and catholics had
engaged in non-violent direct action and had made the
oppression of Jews their very own oppression, and had come
onto the streets to scrub the sidewalks and had Gentiles
worn the stigmatising yellow armbands by the millions, a
unique form of mass resistance to the Nazi regime might have
developed".
It was such non-violent resistance, if not of such
magnitude, nontheless telling, that undermined the Soviet
invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, delaying for about 15
months the appointment of a collaborationist government. It
was non-violent agitation deployed to great effect from the
Polish pulpit by Pope John Paul and from the Gdansk
shipyards by Lech Walesa that triggered the withering of
Soviet power in eastern Europe.
I still remember vividly a long conversation I had with
Basil Liddel Hart in the summer of 1969 shortly before he
died. Considered almost universally as the most important
military thinker of his age (creator of the blitzkrieg form
of warfare, among many other things) this astonishing man
became increasingly impressed with the limitations of
warfare and the power of non-violence. During his
interrogation of German generals at the end of the World War
II he became aware of the difficulties they had had in
surmounting non- violent resistance, particularly in
Denmark, Holland and Norway and to some extent in France and
Belgium, whereas the violent form of resistance had posed
few problems.
Not even Gandhi himself suggested that non-violence is a
recipe for every situation. Violence sometimes is a tragic
inevitability. But before the too easy recourse to pulling
the trigger alternatives are always worth a second look.
This is how it should be with Iraq where sanctions are
grinding away and militarily effective biological weapons
are probably a decade in the future. President Bill Clinton
who once, Gandhian-style, marched for peace against the war
in Vietnam should give the Mahatma fifty years on another
read.
February 4, 1998, LONDON
Copyright © 1998 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172; fax
+44 374 590493;
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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