Gandhi's view on non-violence
The real significance of the Indian freedom movement in Gandhi's eyes was that it was waged nonviolently. He'd have had no interest in it if the Indian National Congress had espoused Satyagraha and subscribed to pacifism. He expostulated to violence not only because an unarmed people had little chance of success in an fortified rebellion, but because he considered violence a clumsy armament which created more problems than it answered, and left a trail of abomination and bitterness in which genuine conciliation was nearly insolvable.
This emphasis on
pacifism jarred likewise on Gandhi's British and Indian critics, though for
different reasons. To the former, pacifism was a disguise; to the ultimate, it
was sheer soppiness. To the British who tended to see the Indian struggle
through the prism of European history, the professions of pacifism rather than
on the remarkably peaceful nature of Gandhi's juggernauts. To the radical
Indian politicians, who had browsed on the history of the French and Russian
revolutions or the Italian and Irish nationalist struggles, it was patent that
force would only yield to force, and that it was foolish to miss openings and
immolation politic earnings for reasons more applicable to ethics than to
politics.
Gandhi's total constancy to pacifism created a gulf between him and the educated nobility in India which was temporarily bridged only during ages of violent political excitement. Indeed among his closest associates there were many who were prepared to follow his doctrine of pacifism to its logical conclusion the relinquishment of unilateral demilitarization in a world fortified to the teeth, the scrapping of the police and the fortified forces, and the decentralization of administration to the point where the state would" wither down". Nehru, Patel and others on whom fell the task of organizing the administration of independent India didn't question the superiority of the principle of pacifism as enunciated by their leader, but they didn't coperider it practical politics. The Indian Constituent Assembly include a maturity of members owing constancy to Gandhi or at least holding him in high regard, but the constitution which surfaced from their labours in 1949 was grounded more on the Western administrative than on he Gandhian model. The development of the Indian frugality during the last four decades can not be said to have conformed to Gandhi's generality of" tone-reliant vill democracy". On the other hand, it bears the marks of a conscious trouble to launch an Indian artificial revolution.
Jawaharlal
Nehru-Gandhi's"political inheritor"- was completely invested with the
humane values inculcated by the Mahatma. But the man who spoke Gandhi's language,
after his death, was Vinoba Bhave, the" Walking Saint", who kept out
of politics and government, Bhave's Bhoodan ( land gift) Movement was designed
as much as a measure of land reform as that of a spiritual renewal. Though
further than five million acres of land were distributed to the landless, the
movement, despite its early pledge, noway really entwined into a social
revolution by concurrence. This was incompletely because Vinoba Bhave didn't
command Gandhi's extraordinary genius for organizing the millions for a public
campaign, and incompletely because in independent India the tendency grew for
the people to look up to the government rather than to calculate on voluntary
and collaborative trouble for effecting reforms in society.
Soon after Gandhi's
death in 1948, a delegate speaking at the United Nations prognosticated
that"the topmost achievements of the Indian savant were yet to
come""Gandhi's times," said Vinoba Bhave,"were the first
pale dawn of the sun of Satyagraha."Forty times after Gandhi's death, this
sanguinity would feel to have been too grandly- pitched. The manner in which
Gandhi's ways have occasionally been invoked indeed in the land of his birth in
recent times would appear to be a travesty of his principles. And the world has
been in the grip of a series of heads in Korea, the Congo, the Vietnam, the
Middle East, and South Africa with a noway- ending trail of blood and
bitterness. The shadow of a thermo-nuclear war with its valuable hazards
continues to hang over humanity. From this dilemma, Gandhi's ideas and ways may
suggest a way out. Unfortunately, his motives and styles are frequently
misknew, and not only by mobs in the road, Not long agone, Arthur Koestler
described Gandhi's station as one"of unresistant submission to bayonetting
and violating, to townlets without sewage, septic nonage's and
trachoma."Such a judgement is of course fully with the same tenacity with
which he battled with the British Raj. He supported pacifism not because it
offered an easy way out, but because he considered violence a crude and in the
long run, an ineffective armament. His rejection of violence stemmed from
choice, not from necessity.