His 4

Download as pdf or txt
Download as pdf or txt
You are on page 1of 3

Gandhis Not History

Vinay Lal
First published in Hindustan Times (24 August 2006), p. 10. Also published in Satyagraha 100
Years, 1906-2006: In Pursuit of Truth (Durban: Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, 2006), pp.
29-33.
___________________
In the immediate aftermath of the ferocious fighting that raged along the
border between Lebanon and Israel for close to a month, and as the streets of
Baghdad are daily strewn with the remains of bodies of innocent children
and civilians, the 100
th
anniversary of one of the most significant events of
recent human history is not likely to be remembered. In 1906, an Indian-
born lawyer in South Africa, Mohandas Gandhi, not yet the Mahatma,
encountered the draft Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance proposed by the
Transvaal Government in the August 22
nd
issue of the government gazette,
and at once decided that this legislation would have to be opposed. He saw,
Gandhi later wrote, nothing except hatred of Indians in the proposed
legislation, which, if passed, would spell absolute ruin for the Indians in
South Africa. The Ordinance required all Indians in the Transvaal region
of South Africa, eight years and older, to report to the Registrar of Asiatics
and obtain, upon the submission of a complete set of fingerprints, a
certificate which would then have to be produced upon demand. The
Ordinance proposed stiff penalties, including deportation, for Indians who
failed to complywith the terms of the Ordinance.
Fingerprints were then demanded only from criminals, and the subjection of
women to such a requirement had no other objective but the humiliation of
Indians. Gandhi understood well that the Ordinance effectively criminalized
the entire community and must be challenged. He mobilized the Indians,
who had first arrived in South Africa as indentured laborers in 1860, to offer
resistance. At a meeting held in J ohannesburg, 3000 Indians took an oath
not to submit to a degrading and discriminatory piece of legislation, and
Gandhi spoke at length on the obligation to never repudiate a pledge. Thus
was born satyagraha, or non-violent resistance, and over the course of the
next four decades, first in South Africa and then in India where Gandhi spent
the last three decades of his life, he endeavored to perfect it, offering
satyagraha not only to the British but to the world as a form of ethical
politics and as a consummate lifestyle. Many in Gandhis own lifetime
doubted its efficacy, and some claimed that satyagraha could only have
succeeded against an allegedly gentlemanly opponent such as the British;
many more have since claimed that the unspeakable cruelties of the
twentieth century render nonviolent resistance into an effete if noble idea,
and that though the world loves romantics there is little use for them in real
life.
Indias resounding experiment with democracy, for all its shortcomings and
the one major relapse of the mid-1970s, when an internal emergency was
imposed and constitutional safeguards suspended, may owe much more to
Gandhi than is commonly conceded. However, South Africa, which Gandhi
claimed as his second home and which he left for good in 1914, may present
a more complex case of the assessment of his legacy. The most pressing
charge against Gandhi is that he did little to improve the situation of black
Africans and did not draw them into the struggle against racism and the
ideology of white supremacy. By what right Gandhi could have claimed to
act as a spokesperson for black and colored Africans is a question that the
critics have not adequately addressed. The Natal Indian Congress, in the
founding of which in 1894 Gandhi had a hand, became the model for the
African National Congress (ANC), and it is equally striking that black South
African nationalists, from Chief Albert Luthuli to Nelson Mandela, have
been forthright in pronouncing Gandhi as having exercised an incalculable
influence on their thinking and on the moral tenor of the struggle against
apartheid. The word satyagraha is derived from satya (truth) and agraha
(firmness), and it is not implausible that the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission was not only post-apartheid South Africas homage to Gandhi
but a way of extending satyagraha into the twenty-first century.
If one of the first principles of Gandhian thinking is that a moral politics
rests upon consideration of means rather than ends, then we are not even
called upon to assess the consequences or efficacy of embracing nonviolent
resistance and, more broadly, the entire worldview associated with
satyagraha. The advocates of nonviolent resistance who are dismissed as
woolly-headed idealists should, on the contrary, be more aggressive in
requiring the proponents of violence to demonstrate that violence can
produce enduring good. J ust how far we have traveled in the last one
hundred years is transparent from the ease with which fingerprinting, once
demanded only of criminals, has now been normalized in most societies as
part of the surveillance regime of the modern nation-state. There was some
slight indignation when the Unites States, shortly after 9/11, began to require
fingerprints from every adult visitor, but what was once seen as a form of
oppression is now viewed as a routine activity. One of the least appreciated
aspects of Gandhis worldview is his construal of deception, secrecy, and
perpetration of falsehoods as forms of violence. The advocate of satyagraha
may no more resort to secrecy than to violence, and it is remarkable that,
before undertaking his famous salt satyagraha of 1930, Gandhi addressed a
letter to the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, informing him of his plans to resist an
iniquitous piece of legislation and inviting Irwin to arrest him. Gandhi
would have seen a long thread that not only ties the secret surveillance of
American citizens and residents to American aggression in Iraq and the
brutal culture of violence amidst which we are now living, but that knots
together terrorists and their antagonists in mutual admiration for nefarious
secrecy and violence. At the 100
th
anniversary of satyagraha, even a
modicum of reflection on the debased state of our politics might assist in
recuperating a place for nonviolent resistance.

You might also like