Mahatma Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi

Introduction

Born in Porbandar, Gujarat, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was later known as mahatma or “great soul.” His father was a public servant and his mother, who had a great influence on him, was an adherent of a nonviolent strain of Hinduism. Between 1888 and 1891, the young Gandhi studied law in London and was admitted to the bar there. After returning to India for a few years, he moved to South Africa, where he spent most of the next 22 years. In response to its racial policies, Gandhi employed nonviolent civil disobedience and there formulated his theory of satyagraha, which can be translated as “truth force” or nonviolent resistance. His campaigns in South Africa were generally directed to the legal and economic conditions of Indians.

On his return to India in 1915, his initial expressions of nonviolent action were not directed against the government, but within a few years, he initiated the first of several mass civil-disobedience campaigns against British colonial rule, and not all of them nonviolent as Gandhi had demanded. In 1922, he suspended a satyagraha campaign after 22 policemen were killed in Chauri Chaura. His last campaign was on behalf of immediate Indian independence during World War II. The British relinquished power in 1947 but to a largely Hindu India and predominantly Moslem Pakistan. As Moslem-Hindu violence mounted, Gandhi tried to quell the killing and hatred through his appeals for peace and his fasting and calming the areas he visited. On his way to a prayer meeting in 1948, he was assassinated by a Hindu fundamentalist who feared Gandhi's appeals for communal harmony, friendship, and peace (Slate, 2006).

Discussion

Gandhi's Theory of Nonviolence

Gandhi is most famously known for his theories of nonviolent civil disobedience and direct action. As he saw matters, violence should never be used, even for ostensibly moral purposes. Violence not only inflicts pain, destruction, and often death on the combatants as well as innocent victims but also changes those who employ violence. Each side believes it must return violence for violence; indeed, combatants are convinced they must apply superior violence if they are to carry the day. Gandhi argued that those locked in violent conflict convince themselves that their end justifies their means, including employing greater levels of destruction and suffering. Because he believed the end can never justify the means, Gandhi insisted that we cannot dispense with moral, ethical, and humane conduct because we think we are fighting on the side of righteousness. On his reading, none of us possesses the complete truth, although most of us grasp important fragments of the truth. Not omniscient, we have no warrant to play god, to determine who is worthy and who is to be violently punished.

Gandhi believed that satyagraha is self-limiting in ways that violence cannot be. Holding that we are all equal and deserving of respect, the satyagrahi (or one who practices nonviolent direct action) is said to enter the contest without rancor, hatred, anger, or revenge. Because violence carries such dispositions, Gandhi argued, violence contradicts rational discourse, but ...