The Notepad of Michael the Great
This Bloc Notes was published in Start Magazine on 18 December 2018. In agreement with the director Michele Arnese, I propose it again because perhaps it contributes, in my opinion, to dispel some misunderstandings about Gandhi’s doctrine and practice of non-violence. Western pacifism refers to these days of war. He has never argued that in order not to create conflict, one must accept the status quo. The refusal that the Mahatma opposes to violence is not of an absolute nature. Gandhian non-violence does not imply the impossibility of distinguishing a just cause from an unjust cause, even where both sides employ violence. Correct and therefore the interpretation, which is given in this paper,
Enjoy your reading (Mi.Ma)
**********
Twenty years ago Amartya Sen looked with concern at the rise of the BJP (Bharatija Janata Party). The parliamentary arm of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), an anti-Muslim Hindu extremist movement, had in fact risen to government in 1998 with the support of a series of regional formations, animated by a localist spirit of opposition to the leadership of the Congress Party. The then rector of Trinity College in Cambridge, however, ruled out that the most populous democracy on the planet could sacrifice on the altar of a surprising economic vitality a millennial spiritual heritage, which had allowed the coexistence of the most diverse religious and cultural traditions. Today, however, he is alarmed for the future of India.
In an interview with Corriere della Sera on the eve of Narendra Modi’s announced electoral triumph (2014), he was instead alarmed for the future of India. In fact, he feared the danger of an alliance between business and Hindu fundamentalism in a country that now seems anxious to leave its past behind, to launch into the pursuit of the new values proposed by modernity. More prosaically, the Indian industrial and financial bourgeoisie had bet on the leader of the BJP also to erase the statist entropy of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and to promote an opening of the market that meets the growing interest of foreign companies. Though cautious in signing his obituary,
Founded in 1885, the Indian National Congress assumed this aspect only from 1920, after the initial “loyalty” towards the English Crown. Author of the turnaround is the 51-year-old Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. His family (unrelated to Indira Gandhi’s) belonged to the vaisya or merchant caste, the third in the Indian caste system after those of brahmins or priests and kashatryas or warriors. After studying law in London, Mohandas arrives in Durban in 1993 as legal consultant for a firm in Portabandar, his hometown. He will remain there until 1914. he returns to his homeland the following year preceded by a reputation as a shrewd lawyer and skilled negotiator of the rights of Indians residing in South Africa, but not much more.
Thus began his extraordinary political commitment, marked by massive campaigns of civil disobedience and defense of the peasant masses, by memorable hunger strikes and interminable periods of detention. A long march that is interrupted on January 30, 1948. After his usual public prayer, he is killed with three revolver shots by a Hindu journalist. Crumbling to the ground, Gandhi invokes the name of God: “He Ram”. A few months earlier, on August 15, 1947, India had gained independence, but mutilated by the provinces that will constitute Pakistan (which literally means “Land of the pure”). MuHammad Ali Jinnah, advocate of an Islamic state and fierce opponent of the secular state advocated by Gandhi, had won. For the Mahatma (which in Sanskrit means “great soul”) it was a tragedy,
As Giuliano Pontara observed in a golden volume, the most conflicting opinions were expressed on the figure of Gandhi (“Theory and practice of non-violence”, Einaudi, 1996). Winston Churchill regarded him as a seditious eastern fakir whose mere sight made him sick. Albert Einstein, on the other hand, found it hard to believe that a personality of such moral stature could exist in flesh and blood. Those who, underlining certain distinctly ascetic traits of his customs (such as vegetarianism, chastity, the natural cure of diseases), have compared him to a guru without any universal message are close to Churchill’s idea. Sigmund Freud had even dismissed it as a manifestation of the “jungle of Bengali mysticism”. How many are close to Einstein’s idea,
According to Pontara, these ways of seeing are – more than unilateral – incorrect, since they preclude the possibility of critically grasping the fundamental nucleus of “Gandhism”. An expression also repudiated by Gandhi himself, who feared a degeneration of his thought into ideological sectarianism. Of all the judgments that have been given, perhaps the most balanced and correct is the one he himself left us in his “Autobiography”: “I do not pretend to be perfect. But I pretend to be a passionate seeker of Truth, which is nothing but a synonym for God. It is in the course of that research that I discovered non-violence. Its diffusion is the mission of my life. I have no other interests in life other than carrying out this mission ”.
Over time, the verb of non-violence has received equally disparate interpretations. To name a few, it was welcomed with enthusiasm by Romain Rolland, by Aldo Capitini and, to some extent, by Giorgio La Pira. But in Italy only the radicals of Marco Pannella will take the effigy of the Mahatma as their symbol. His doctrine was instead branded as utopian by Jean Paul Sartre and Franz Fanon, and even as reactionary by Herbert Marcuse and Malcolm X. But what non-violence are we talking about
The question is crucial. Gandhi has always distinguished non-violence as a belief (“non-violence as a creed”) from non-violence as a tactical choice (“non-violence as a policy”). The first is that of the strong (or “satyagraha”), which is based on the moral rejection of violence and which requires audacity, self-denial, discipline and a profound faith in the goodness of one’s cause. The second is that of the weak (or passive resistance), used by those who do not feel resolute enough to take up arms.
The latter, in turn, should not be confused with the non-violence of the coward, the result of pure cowardice or petty selfish interests. Although – he wrote in 1938 – “violence is not lawful, when it is used for self-defense or to protect the defenseless it is an act of courage, far better than cowardly submission”. In this sense, Gandhi’s position cannot be identified with Leo Tolstoy’s absolute pacifism, as the American sociologist Irving L. Horowitz has argued (“The Idea of Peace and War in Contemporany Philosophy”, 1957). Nor can it be identified with certain variants of Western pacifism, such as conscientious objection to military service and the refusal to kill not only one’s fellowmen, but any living creature.
This position, which however did not exclude recourse to euthanasia in particular cases while condemning recourse to abortion, becomes explicit in at least four circumstances. Gandhi in fact participates directly in the conflict against the Boers (1899) and in the repression of the revolt of the Zulu (1906). Furthermore, he collaborated with the British authorities in two moments of the First World War: in 1914, when from London he invited his compatriots residing in England to enlist as volunteers in his army; and in 1918, when from Delhi he promised to recruit soldiers for his troops. In a chapter of the aforementioned “Autobiography”, he makes amends for having guilty late understanding the colonialist nature of His Majesty’s Empire, but then states: “It is possible that the authorities are not always right, but as long as the subjects recognize the authority of a state, it is their precise duty to conform and give their support to the decisions of the state ”. The principle recalled here thus establishes an obligation of loyalty to which every citizen is subordinate, even if in the moment in which “two nations are fighting each other – inquisitive – the duty of a follower of ahimsa [non-violence] is to put an end to the war” .
Gandhi, on the other hand, will never cease to reiterate that “if civil disobedience is not accompanied by a constructive program, it is a criminal act and a waste of energy”. The essential features of this program had already been summarized in a 1909 pamphlet, “Hind Swaray” (“The power of truth” in the Italian translation, but “Swaray” means self-determination). It is a pioneering project of a “non-violent society”, which was divided into multiple objectives: from the abolition of the institution of “out-of-order” or “untouchables” (the most marginalized and deprived social stratum) to gender equality ; from the enhancement of manual labor to the promotion of small village industry; from a new education system to reducing the unsustainable gap between rich and poor; from fighting the use of drugs to spreading the national language. But the central point of the project was the introduction of khaddar, that is, of spinning and weaving in cotton houses. Because “khadi employs everyone, machine-spun fabrics employ some while depriving many of honest employment. Khadi serves the masses, the mechanical loom serves the classes. The khadi serves the work, the mechanical loom exploits it ”(“ Harijan ”, 1937). Deep connoisseur of the works of Tolstoy and impressed by reading a book by John Ruskin, “Unto This Last” (Until the last “, 1862), Ghandi has always attributed to manual work – individual and collective – a relevant pedagogical value, as well as than cheap. And in this context that he elaborated a training plan for the “peace brigades” in 1938,
The idealization of manual labor, the small farmer and the craftsman, as well as the guarded attitude towards the civilization of machines, are the most controversial aspects of Ghandi’s social conception, and those that most exposed him to the accusation of obscurantism and of boycott of technological progress. Here is what he wrote in 1939 in the magazine “Harijan”: “God forbid that India should ever adopt industrialism according to the Western model. The economic imperialism of a single small island state [England] holds the world in chains today. If an entire nation of three hundred million inhabitants got in the way of such economic exploitation, it would denude the world in the manner of the locusts ”. Therefore – he continued – “we must concentrate on the village considered as an autonomous unit that produces above all for its own needs”. Economic self-sufficiency of the village and highly decentralized political power, therefore, as lanes of a revolutionary process in which socialism and satyagraha meet, giving rise to a completely original perspective of social transformation.
Gandhi approached socialism more through the exegesis of the texts of the Hindu ethical-religious tradition, the “Upanishads” and the “Bhagavad Gita”, than by studying the classics of Marxism. Only in 1944, a prisoner in the palace of the Aga Khan, read “The Capital”. Four years earlier, addressing the problem of the relationship between democracy and violence, he denounced “Western democracy, in its current characteristics, as a diluted form of Nazism and fascism”, or “at most a screen to mask […] the longing for the sharing of the spoils of the world “. To the expansionist aims of imperialism he contrasted an ideal of egalitarian social justice, aimed at giving each people and each individual goods and opportunities proportionate to their respective vital needs. Nonetheless, while not concealing his admiration for the aspirations and spirit of sacrifice of the Bolsheviks, Gandhi will always remain hostile to the class struggle: “In India a war between the classes is not only not inevitable, but it is avoidable given that we have understood the message of non-violence “. Of course, this did not imply that he denied the existence of a contrast between capital and labor. Proof of this is the massive non-violent campaigns he directed against the large landowners of Champaran, Kheda, Bardoli, and in support of the textile workers of Ahmedabad (over the decade 1918-1928). this did not imply that he denied the existence of a contrast between capital and labor. Proof of this is the massive non-violent campaigns he directed against the large landowners of Champaran, Kheda, Bardoli, and in support of the textile workers of Ahmedabad (over the decade 1918-1928). this did not imply that he denied the existence of a contrast between capital and labor. Proof of this is the massive non-violent campaigns he directed against the large landowners of Champaran, Kheda, Bardoli, and in support of the textile workers of Ahmedabad (over the decade 1918-1928).
However, even when it resorts to extreme forms of action and contestation, for Gandhi satygraha demands a relentless willingness to compromise. He had said to his biographer Louis Fischer: “I am essentially a compromise man because I am never sure I am right” (“A Week With Gandhi”, 1947). And he was inclined to insist on compromise also because in the non-violent struggle it was necessary to build bridges of communication with the opponent, not to put his back to the wall, not to exacerbate the conflict without first having tried to resolve it with negotiation and discussion, although “the time for compromise can only come when [both sides] agree on fundamental issues”. This is the limit that distinguishes the compromise in the Gandhian non-violent struggle from the compromise which is generally practiced in the political struggle. In short, it is not a do ut des, as a “complete surrender to what is not essential is a condition that must be satisfied by those who want to acquire the inner strength necessary to defend what is essential at the cost of their own life” (“Hrijan “, 1940).
The satygraha method has not had much echo in Western culture and politics. For Karl Jaspers, for example, his success was inextricably linked to exceptional conditions: the non-violent tendencies of Hinduism and the liberality of English rule (“The atomic bomb and the destiny of man”, 1966). In reality, the entire history of India demonstrates quite the opposite, up to the recent and very recent fratricidal massacres between Hindus and Muslims. In the twentieth century, moreover, historical non-violent struggles were staged in regimes of all kinds. All apply to that of Martin Luther King’s black Americans for civil rights and that of Nelson Mandela’s black South Africans against apartheid. Some were defeated, others drowned in blood. Gandhi’s has not succeeded in changing Indian society in the direction indicated by his “constructive program”, but has succeeded in shaking an immense people from their long torpor, restoring their independence and dignity. His favorite disciple Pandit Nehru recalled him thus: “[When he appeared] it was like a powerful current of fresh air that hit us, making us stretch our limbs and breathe deeply, like a ray of light that pierces the darkness […], as a whirlwind that upset the way people think and behave “(” The Discovery of India “, 1959).
You certainly cannot blame Thomas Hobbes when he argued that “pacts, without the sword, are but words”. No reasonable person, however, can deny the nagging actuality of the search for plausible alternatives to violence, in social conflicts and in relations between states. Jackets, as Gandhi once said, even the cause of freedom becomes a mockery if the price that must be paid for its victory and the annihilation of those who must enjoy it. Shortly before the assassination of the Mahatma, Albert Camus, wondering about the choice of non-violence, wrote that “if the man who hopes in human nature is a madman, he who despairs in the face of events is a coward” (“Ni victimes Ni bourreaux “, in” Combat “, November 1946). Neither victims nor executioners, in fact, this is the problem.
