MAHATMA GANDHI (1869-1948)-A Lonely Truth (By Shashi Tharoor)
(India's 'great soul' inspired oppressed peoples everywhere. But his dogma of nonviolent resistance is of little use against unrelenting brutality.)
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By Shashi Tharoor
Issue cover-dated November 25, 1999
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In 1983, the American Academy of Motion Picture Sciences awarded an unprecedented slew of 13 Oscar awards to Sir Richard Attenborough's film Gandhi. Disgruntled supporters of the competition, which included Steven Spielberg's blockbuster E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, sourly remarked that the Academy was supposed to be rewarding cinematic excellence, not handing out the Nobel Peace Prize. But Gandhi, of course, never won the Nobel Peace Prize (a distinction the Swedish Academy has since conferred on a series of self-proclaimed Gandhians, from Martin Luther King to Adolfo Perez Esquivel). His prize had been something less tangible.
Publicity posters for the film proclaimed that "Gandhi's triumph changed the world forever." I saw the posters, enjoyed the film (despite its many historical inaccuracies) and rooted for it when the Oscars were handed out. But I never stopped wondering whether Gandhi had in fact triumphed, let alone changed the world.
Gandhi's life was, of course, his lesson. He was unique among the statesmen of the 20th century in his determination not just to live his beliefs but to reject any separation between beliefs and action. In his life, religion flowed into politics; his public persona meshed seamlessly with his private conduct. The claim emblazoned on the film's posters suggested that the lessons of his life had been learned and widely followed. But even for the man who swept aside the British Raj, Paul Newman and Tootsie in his triumphal progress toward a shelfful of golden statuary, this was a difficult claim to sustain.
The Power of Truth
Mahatma ("Great Soul," a term he detested) Gandhi was the kind of person it is more convenient to forget. The principles he stood for and the way in which he asserted them are easier to admire than to follow. While he was alive he was impossible to ignore. Once he had gone he was impossible to imitate.
Shortly before he was killed, Gandhi had announced his intention to spurn the country he had failed to keep united and to spend the rest of his years in Pakistan, a prospect that had made the government of Pakistan collectively choke. But that was Gandhi: idealistic, quirky, quixotic and determined, a man who answered to the beat of no other drummer but got everyone else to march to his tune. Someone once called him a cross between a saint and a Tammany Hall politician; like the best cross-breeds, he managed to distil all the qualities of both and yet transcend their contradictions.
Gandhi was the extraordinary leader of the world's first successful nonviolent movement for independence from colonial rule. At the same time he was a philosopher who was constantly seeking to live out his own ideas, whether they applied to individual self-improvement or social change: His autobiography was typically subtitled "The Story of My Experiments with Truth." No dictionary imbues truth with the depth of meaning Gandhi gave it. His truth emerged from his convictions: It meant not only what was accurate, but what was just and therefore right. Truth could not be obtained by "untruthful" or unjust means, which included inflicting violence upon one's opponent.
To describe his method, Gandhi coined the expression satyagraha--literally, "holding on to truth" or, as he variously described it, truth-force, love-force or soul-force. He disliked the English term "passive resistance" because satyagraha required activism, not passivity. If you believed in truth and cared enough to obtain it, Gandhi felt, you could not afford to be passive: You had to be prepared actively to suffer for it.
Road to Nonviolence
This was the approach Gandhi brought to the movement for India's independence--and it worked. Where sporadic terrorism and moderate constitutionalism had both proved ineffective, Gandhi took the issue of freedom to the masses as one of simple right and wrong and gave them a technique to which the British had no response. By abstaining from violence, Gandhi wrested the moral advantage. By breaking the law nonviolently he showed up the injustice of the law. By accepting the punishments imposed on him he confronted his captors with their own brutalization. By voluntarily imposing suffering upon himself in his hunger strikes he demonstrated the lengths to which he was prepared to go in defence of what he considered to be right. In the end he made the perpetuation of British rule an impossibility.
Of course, there was much more to Gandhism--physical self-denial and discipline, spiritual faith, a belief in humanity and in the human capacity for selfless love, the self-reliance symbolized by the spinning wheel, religious ecumenism, idealistic internationalism, and a passionate commitment to human equality and social justice. The improvement of his fellow human beings was arguably more important to him than the political goal of ridding India of the British. But it is his central tenet of nonviolence in the pursuit of these ends that represents his most significant original contribution to the world.
The case for Gandhi's worldwide relevance rests principally on the example of Martin Luther King, who attended a lecture on Gandhi, bought half a dozen books on the Mahatma and adopted satyagraha as both precept and method. King, more than anyone else, used nonviolence most effectively outside India in breaking down segregation in the southern United States. "Hate begets hate. Violence begets violence," he memorably declared, echoing Gandhi: "We must meet the forces of hate with soul-force." King later avowed that "the Gandhian method of nonviolent resistance . . . became the guiding light of our movement. Christ furnished the spirit and motivation and Gandhi furnished the method."
So Gandhism arguably helped change the Deep South forever. But it is difficult to find many other instances of its success. India's independence marked the dawn of the era of decolonization, but many nations still came to freedom only after bloody and violent struggles. Other peoples have fallen under the boots of invading armies, dispossessed of their lands or forced to flee in terror from their homes.
Nonviolence has offered no solutions to them. It could only work against opponents vulnerable to a loss of moral authority--governments responsive to domestic and international public opinion, capable of being shamed into conceding defeat. In Gandhi's own day, nonviolence could have done nothing for the Jews of Hitler's Germany, who disappeared unprotestingly into gas chambers far from the flashbulbs of a war-obsessed press.
The power of nonviolence rests in being able to say, "to show you that you are wrong, I punish myself." But that has little effect on those who are not interested in whether they are wrong and are already seeking to punish you whether you disagree with them or not. No wonder Nelson Mandela, who wrote that Gandhi had "always" been "a great source of inspiration," explicitly disavowed nonviolence as useless in his struggle against apartheid.
On this subject Gandhi sounds frighteningly unrealistic: "The willing sacrifice of the innocent is the most powerful answer to insolent tyranny that has yet been conceived by God or man. Disobedience to be 'civil' must be sincere, respectful, restrained, never defiant, and it must have no ill will or hatred behind it. Neither should there be excitement in civil disobedience, which is a preparation for mute suffering."
For many smarting from injustice around the world, that would sound like a prescription for sainthood--or for impotence. Mute suffering is all very well as a moral principle, but it has rarely brought about meaningful change. The sad truth is that the staying power of organized violence is almost always greater than that of nonviolence. And when right and wrong are less clear-cut, Gandhism flounders. The Mahatma, at the peak of his influence, was unable to prevent the partition of India. Gandhi believed in "weaning an opponent from error by patience, sympathy and self-suffering"--but if the opponent believes equally in the justice of his cause, he is hardly going to accept that he is in "error." Gandhism is viable at its simplest and most profound in the service of a transcendent principle like independence from foreign rule. But in more complex situations it cannot--and, more to the point, does not--work as well.
Gandhi's ideals had a tremendous intellectual impact on the founding fathers of the new India, who incorporated many of his convictions into the directive principles of state policy. Yet Gandhian solutions have not been found for many of the ills over which he agonized, from persistent sectarian (or "communal") conflict to the ill-treatment of the "untouchables." Instead his methods (particularly the fast and the deliberate courting of arrest) have been abused and debased by far lesser men in the pursuit of petty sectarian ends. Outside India, too, Gandhian techniques have been perverted by terrorists and bomb-throwers declaring hunger strikes when punished for their crimes. Gandhism without moral authority is like Marxism without a proletariat. Yet few who wish to use his methods have his personal integrity or moral stature.
Internationally, Gandhi expressed ideals few can reject: He could virtually have written the United Nations Charter. But the decades after his death have confirmed that there is no escape from the conflicting sovereignties of states. Some 20 million more lives have been lost in wars and insurrections since his passing. Universal peace, which Gandhi considered so central to Truth, seems as illusionary as ever.
As governments compete, so religions contend. The ecumenist Gandhi who declared "I am a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a Zoroastrian, a Jew" would find it difficult to stomach the exclusivist revivalism of so many religions and cults the world over. But perhaps his approach was always inappropriate for the rest of the world. As his Muslim rival Mohammed Ali Jinnah retorted to his claim of eclectic belief: "Only a Hindu could say that."
Small Isn't Beautiful
And finally, the world of the spinning wheel, of self-reliant families in contented village republics, is even more remote today than when Gandhi first espoused it. Despite the brief popularity of intermediate technology and "small is beautiful," there does not appear to be much room for such ideas in an interdependent world. Self-reliance is too often a cover for protectionism and a shelter for inefficiency in the developing world. The prosperous countries are those who are able to look beyond spinning chakras to silicon chips--and who give their people the benefits of technological developments that free them from menial chores and broaden the horizons of their lives.
But if Gandhism has had its limitations exposed in the years since India's independence in 1947, there is no denying Gandhi's greatness. While the world was disintegrating into fascism, violence and war, Gandhi taught the virtues of truth, nonviolence and peace. He destroyed the credibility of colonialism by opposing principle to force. And he set and attained personal standards of conviction and courage that few will ever match. He was that rare kind of leader who was not confined by the inadequacies of his followers.
Yet Gandhi's Truth was essentially his own. He formulated its unique content and determined its application in a specific historical context. Inevitably, few in today's world can measure up to his greatness or aspire to his credo. No, Gandhi's "triumph" did not "change the world forever." It is, sadly, a matter of doubt whether he triumphed at all.
(Shashi Tharoor is communications director for United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and author of India: From Midnight To The Millennium published by Harper Collins.)Courtesy:Far Eastern Economic Review. |
