"Rarely do we hear talk of ‘nurture’, ‘harmony’, ‘balance’, ‘fertility’ or ‘osmosis’, which also happen to be more female friendly terms, in the context of struggles for social change, but it is high time we did."

In January this year the Indian government celebrated the centenary of Mahatma Gandhi’s first satyagraha in South Africa, an act of non-violent protest against the white apartheid regime.

When it comes to peaceful civil disobedience there is no doubt that Gandhi, who honed his skills in the battle for India’s independence from British colonial rule, was probably its most successful practitioner the world has ever known. While it is an exaggeration to attribute the success of the Indian freedom movement entirely to such civilized methods of protest there is no doubt, along with the Second World War and other factors, it did play a key role in forcing the British to wind up their Raj and exit the country.

The satyagraha centenary celebrations in India however, were a low key affair for the fact is Gandhi and his methods are today largely forgotten in his own land. Successive Indian governments since Independence have shown scant respect for any of its citizens practicing Gandhian non-violence against the State on various issues.

Today routinely the Indian government shoots, arrests and tortures its citizens under trumped up charges while parts of the country, from Kashmir to the restive North-East, are witnessing virtual civil war conditions with populations rising up in revolt against the despicable colonial methods of the ‘post-colonial’ State.

In the Indian province of Manipur various groups for decades have been resisting peacefully and unsuccessfully the imposition of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, a draconian legislation from the colonial era, which allows even foot soldiers of the Indian army to shoot anyone on suspicion of being a ‘militant’ or a ‘terrorist’. Hundreds of people have been shot dead or disappeared over the years and the perpetrators of these atrocities hide behind this black law that unfortunately has also been upheld by the highest court in the Indian judicial system.

The most famous of the Manipuri protestors is 34 year old Irom Sharmila, who has been on fast for the past six years and who is routinely arrested and force fed by the authorities to prevent her from dying. Several young activists have even immolated themselves in public in protest against the oppressive law and its heinous consequences but with little impact on the conscience or behaviour of the Indian state. The spirit of Gandhi in other words is killed every day in Manipur, as in other parts of India, and the plain fact is nobody in the establishment, pretending to sing paeans to the old man, really gives a damn.

So if the idea of civil disobedience does not seem to have much sway in the land of Gandhi what exactly is its global future? How can civil disobedience, as interpreted by Gandhi be applicable in theatres of conflict like Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon or occupied Palestine. Non-violent resistance to the butchers of the Israeli or US armies who routinely bomb civilian targets, shoot at ambulances and casually kill women and children at checkpoints would seem to most as a fail-fail strategy and outright foolish too.

The history of civil disobedience

There is no doubt at all that the idea of civil disobedience is probably as old as human civilization itself for one of the fundamental characteristics of all forms of life – from super apes to microbes – is resistance to anything that threatens their survival or well-being. The subjugated and the oppressed have always found ways of defying immoral and unreasonable laws imposed on them by their real or would-be masters throughout history.

In modern times however the emergence of civil disobedience as a specific strategy to oppose injustice, in particular by powerful state apparatus, was innovated by Henry David Thoreau in the nineteenth century who called for non-payment of taxes and other peaceful violations of ‘law’ to oppose actions of the then US government. In the hands of Gandhi this form of protest took on a mass dimension in the battle against the British Empire, which took over its colonies through brute force and imposed a complex set of laws and institutions that tried to ‘normalize’ colonization.

Gandhi essentially called upon the Indian people to see through the British pretence of ‘civilising the natives’ while wantonly looting their resources. By refusing to obey British laws or recognize their institutions Gandhi struck at the Empire’s carefully built up legitimacy and hegemony – key props of power anywhere in the world.

Violence versus Non-Violence

By keeping his agitation peaceful Gandhi ensured maximum participation by all sections of Indian society while denying the British any excuse to crush the movement beyond recovery.

For Gandhi though the use of such methods was not a utilitarian, strategic choice but part of his very idea of personal salvation, bound closely to the Jain religious principle of ‘ahimsa’, that forbids harm to any form of life. This is an important point to remember while discussing Gandhi as it is impossible to understand his persistence with peaceful methods of resistance in the face of all kinds of provocation without reference to this spiritual dimension of his motivations.

Nevertheless the Mahatma’s insistence on what he called ‘non-violence’ has confused entire generations of activists up to our times and caused, in my opinion, needless debate and divisions on what is the best way forward for people’s movements everywhere.

The simple truth is that no one really knows what ‘non-violence’ – or its supposed opposite ‘violence’- really means. Even Gandhi, when persistently asked as to what the Jews of Europe should do to fight Nazi terror, finally said that it is better to stand up and fight them than to run away and be a coward.

Let us examine these terms a bit more carefully. On the face of it ‘violence’ means any action that causes physical injury to one’s opponents and ‘non-violence’ is the avoidance of all such action (against them, not necessarily their property).

As a counter to these definitions it has been argued that ‘violence’ can be done even without resorting to any direct physical injury. After all if thousands of young children die in South Asia due to malnutrition every year is that not ‘violence’ against them by the State which should take responsibility for the welfare of its citizens? When millions of Africans die due to lack of access to life-saving medicines are they not subjected to grave ‘violence’ by the pharmaceutical industry and the world community? Or for that matter how can one describe the death and devastation caused by the ‘non-violent’ US-led sanctions against Iraq throughout the nineties?

In many ways the concept of ‘non-violence’ also depends crucially on how ‘violence’ is defined. So it can be argued that what constitutes ‘non-violence’ can be understood only by looking at the kind of ‘violence’ that is perpetrated. In other words, the notion of proportionality is very crucial to understanding what constitutes ‘non-violence’ and what does not. For instance if I am threatened by a regime that merely sends me to jail for dissent then the corresponding ‘non-violent’ strategy will different than if the regime tries to bomb me and my entire neighbourhood out of existence (a la Iraq).

Given the blurring of distinction between ‘violence’ and ‘non-violence’ in terms of their possible impact, it is obvious however that neither of these methods is inherently more ethical than the other. All depends on what purpose they are used for.

To me, the ethics of protest lies in first having the wisdom to identify injustice wherever it occurs and secondly showing the courage to oppose it unmindful of the personal cost involved. The methods used really depend on what one is faced against and the overall context in which one operates.

Disobeying Newton’s Laws

Over the years I have come to believe that one of the fundamental problems that many activists face while trying to choose the best method for mobilizing people or getting the powers-that-be to respond to the demands of ordinary people lies in the very categories used to understand human societies and its working.

The real challenges facing practitioners of civil disobedience in our times go well beyond the superficial debate over ‘violence’ and ‘non-violence’ and the assumption that the avoidance or infliction of physical injury is entirely a matter of conscious human choice.

For that matter the idea of civil disobedience as a deliberate breaking of human made social, political and economic laws is also quite inadequate today. The laws that need to be really broken consciously are the so called ‘laws’ of 19th Century physics that have come to dominate our social, political thinking to a point where even it dictates the course of even radical dissent.

It never ceases to amaze me for example how much the language of social and political protest that we use all over the world today is so heavily influenced by Newtonian physics and mechanical engineering to the virtual exclusion of almost all other disciplines of knowledge.

So we have social ‘movements’ and ‘forces’, political ‘agitations’, ‘activists’ issuing calls for ‘building’ new societies or to keep the ‘momentum’ of change going and of course making arguments with a lot of ‘gravity’. All these are very male terms also with the emphasis being on physicality and expenditure of large amounts of raw energy.

Given their enormous prestige, developed in the course of the industrial revolution, this domination is not surprising at all but the fact remains that both physics and engineering involve the study of dead objects and cannot really capture the complex organics (not ‘dynamics’) of the way human beings behave – both as individuals and as a collective. Applying such concepts to living societies can work only by converting the constituents of these societies into dead objects and establishing the ‘peace of the graveyard’.

Rather it may be more fruitful to look for categories from the life sciences to understand human societies, which after all are closer to non-linear ecological systems than to a linear factory floor of any kind. Rarely do we hear talk of ‘nurture’, ‘harmony’, ‘balance’, ‘fertility’ or ‘osmosis’, which also happen to be more female friendly terms, in the context of struggles for social change, but it is high time we did.

One of the key problems of Soviet style socialism for instance was its heavy emphasis on ‘engineering’ changes in society and maintaining these changes through application of physical force. Ultimately the Eastern Bloc systems collapsed, not because the Communists were necessarily ‘bad people’, but because the dead ‘moulds’ of social restructuring they were working with could no longer ‘tame’ the rich, diverse and jungle-like societies they presided over.

There is much to be learnt from this experience both in terms of conceiving new forms of socialist organization as well as for developing resistance to the ‘actually existing’ capitalist world we live in today.

Epilogue

The real importance of Gandhi, lies in his recognition of human societies as eco-systems full of diverse living creatures and not agglomerations of dead objects to be pushed around, manipulated or even ‘moulded’ with good intentions. In that sense it is interesting for me that someone like Che Guevara, who is often pitted as the anti-thesis of Gandhi due to his use of ‘violent’ methods, had a similar ecological sensibility when it came to his understanding of people and societies.

So instead of posing the question in terms of ‘Gandhi versus Che Guevara’ or ‘violence versus non-violence’ I think if the world is to move forward and tackle the problems we confront in creative ways we need to find a way of learning from both these great figures of modern history.

What I believe such a creative synthesis will evolve into is something close to what the great Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh represented – both saint and revolutionary rolled into one. And at a time when the monster of US Imperialism is doing a naked dance of death across the globe what can be a better spirit to invoke for the protection of our planet than Uncle Ho? But more about that another time.

Satya Sagar is a journalist, writer and video maker from India living in New Delhi. He can be reached at sagarnama@yahoo.com