Difficulty in Ahimsa Practice – Mahatma Gandhi

[Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav]

Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav

Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist

Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India

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Difficulty in Ahimsa Practice – Mahatma Gandhi

 

The reader should read Rev. B. de Ligt’s letter printed elsewhere in this issue. I welcome the letter as of a fellow-seeker in the field of ahimsa. It is entitled to respectful consideration. And such friendly discussion leads to a clearer conception of the possibilities and limitations of non-violence. In spite of the greatest effort to be detached, no man can altogether undo the effect of his environment or of his upbringing. Non-violence of two persons occupying different positions will not outwardly take the same shape. Thus the non-violence of a child towards his father would take the shape of conscious and voluntary submission to his violence when he loses his temper. But if the child has lost his temper, the father’s submission to the child’s violence would be meaningless. The father would take the child to his bosom and instantaneously sterilize the child’s violence. In each case it is of course assumed that the outward act is an expression of the inward intention. One who having retaliation in his breast submits to violence out of policy is not truly non violent and may even be a hypocrite if he hides his intention. It should also be remembered that non-violence comes into play only when it comes in contact with violence.

One who refrains from violence when there is no occasion for its exercise is simply unviolent and has no credit for his inaction. Dominion Status ceasing to be a factor, the points raised from that imaginary event now need not be discussed except to say, that the enjoyment by India of Dominion Status would have meant India, then become an equal partner, instead of being ruled by it, dominating the foreign policy of Great Britain. My general and hearty approval of the Nehru Report must not be taken to mean endorsement of every word of it. My approval need not carry endorsement of the constructive programme for the future governance of free India. My non-violence would prevent me from fighting my countrymen on the many questions that must arise when India has become free. A mere academic discussion can only hamper the present progress of non-violence. I know however that if I survive the struggle for freedom, I might have to give non-violent battle to my own countrymen which may be as stubborn as that in which I am now engaged. But the military schemes now being considered by the great Indian leaders are highly likely to appear even to them to be wholly unnecessary, assuming that we have come to our own demonstrably through non-violent means deliberately chosen and used. My collaboration with my countrymen today is confined to the breaking of our shackles. How we would feel and what we shall do after breaking them is more than they or I know.

It is profitless to speculate whether Tolstoy in my place would have acted differently from me. It is enough for me to give the assurance to my friends in Europe, that in no single act of mine have I been consciously guilty of endorsing violence or compromising my creed. Even the seeming endorsement of violent action by my participation on the side of Britain in the Boer War and the Zulu revolt was recognition in the interest of non-violence of an inevitable situation. That the participation may nevertheless have been due to my weakness or ignorance of the working of the universal law of non-violence is quite possible. Only I had no conviction then, nor have any now, of such weakness or ignorance. A non-violent man will instinctively prefer direct participation to indirect, in a system which is based on violence and to which he has to belong without any choice is being left to him. I belong to a world which is partly based on violence. If I have only a choice between paying for the army of soldiers to kill my neighbours or to be a soldier myself, I would, as I must, consistently with my creed, enlist as a soldier in the hope of controlling the forces of violence and even of converting my comrades. National independence is not fiction. It is as necessary as individual independence. But neither, if it is based on non-violence, may ever be a menace to the equal independence of the nation or the individual as the case may be As with individual and national independence, so with the international. The legal maxim is equally moral: Sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas. It has been well said that the universe is compressed in the atom. There is not one law for the atom and another for the universe.

 

Reference:

Young India, 30-1-1930