Power of Ahimsa- 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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Power of Ahimsa- Mahatma Gandhi  

 

If I have anywhere referred to India having received the fullest support from world opinion, it should be set down as an unconscious exaggeration. I should like to be shown such a statement of mine if I have made one. For myself I have absolutely no idea of having made any such statement. The correspondent, by comparing the condition of unarmed India pitted against the British military power to that of a defenseless woman thrown at the tender mercy of a ruffian, has done an injustice to the strength as well of non-violence as of woman. Had not man in his blind selfishness crushed woman’s soul as he has done or had she not succumbed to ‘the enjoyments’ she would have given the world an exhibition of the infinite strength that is latent in her. What she showed in the last fight was but a broken and imperfect glimpse of it. The world shall see it in all its wonder and glory when woman has secured a equal opportunity for herself with man and fully developed her powers of mutual aid and combination. And it is wrong to say that a person is unarmed in the sense of being weak that has ahimsa as his weapon. The correspondent is evidently a stranger to the real use or the immeasurable power of ahimsa.

He has used it; if at all, only mechanically and as an expedience for want of a better. Had he been saturated with the spirit of ahimsa, he would have known that it can take the wildest beast, certainly the wildest man. If, therefore, the world’s blood did not boil over the brutalities of the past year, it was not because the world was brutal or heartless but because our non-violence, widespread through it was, good enough though it was for the purpose intended, was not the nonviolence of the strong and the knowing. It did not spring from a living faith. It was but a policy, a temporary expedient. Though we did not retaliate, we had harboured anger; our speech was not free from violence, our thoughts still less so. We generally refrained from violent action, because we were under discipline. The world marveled even at this limited exhibition of non-violence and gave us, without any propaganda, the support and sympathy that we deserved and needed. The rest is a matter of the rule of three. If we had the support that we received for the limited and mechanical non-violence we were able to practise during the recent struggle, how much more support should we command when we have risen to the full height of ahimsa? Then the world’s blood will certainly boil. I know we are still far away from that divine event. We realized our weakness at Cawnpore, Benares, and Mirzapur. When we are saturated with ahimsa we shall not be nonviolent in our fight with the bureaucracy and violent among ourselves. When we have a living faith in non-violence, it will grow from day to day till it fills the whole world. It will be the mightiest propaganda that the world will have witnessed. I live in the belief that we will realize that vital ahimsa. 

 

Reference:

Young India, 7-5-1931