Twentieth century has been a century of violence. Would the 21st century be a century of nonviolence? Nazareth in this paper says yes if the issues of peace and security are pursued through justice and mutual agreements based on the legitimate aspirations of both sides of the conflict situations.
By Pascal Alan Nazareth
"Twentieth
century has been a century of violence. Would the 21st century be a century of
nonviolence? Nazareth in this paper says yes if the issues of peace and
security are pursued through justice and mutual agreements based on the
legitimate aspirations of both sides of the conflict situations."
The
20th century has certainly been the most violent and destructive in human
history. Over 90 million people have died in the two world Wars, in the Spanish
and Greek civil wars, Hitler’s gas chambers, Arab-Israeli and India-Pakistan
wars, and innumerable local conflicts in different parts of the world. Yet,
quite possible more people live in constant dread of sudden and violent death
today than at any time in the past. The collapse of the blazing World Trade
Towers on September 11, 2001 has seared themselves on the human mind
universally. The suicide bomber has become the new symbol of terror of our
times. Even the most sophisticated surveillance systems of a super power have
proved in capable of preventing terrorist attacks in broad daylight.
This
some what pessimistic reading of history is challenged by one major exception,
Mahatma Gandhi’s application of politics and techniques of nonviolence in
India. Gandhi’s success both redeems human nature from the inevitability of its
historical experience and also suggests the viability of nonviolence in modern
situations.
When
Gandhi arrived on the Indian political scene in 1915, the Russian revolution
had just taken place. This and the widespread antipathy for British rule had
generated strong revolutionary fervor among Indian nationalists. Their father
figure was the Bengali novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, whose popular novel,
“Anandmath” was the inspiration for secretes societies, and its hero Satyanand,
the model for “revolutionaries”. It contained the rousing hymn “Bande Mataram”.
Aurobindo Ghosh was the other influential figure. Educated in England, and
selected for the coveted Indian civil service he had given it up to join the
“revolution”. Like many others who had studied abroad, including Jawaharlal
Nehru, he was deeply impressed by the achievement of Mazzini and Garibaldi and
Japan’s defeat by Russia in 1905. Besides, like the rest of India, he was
outraged by British division of Bengal on religious lines in 1904. Bartaman
Rananiti, ‘Modern Art of War’ published anonymously in 1907 propagated Bankim’s
idea that the destruction was another form of creation and that funds for
revolutionary activities must be raised by any means including terrorism.
During the 1905-1915 periods, there was a spate of assassinations of British
officials not only in India, but also in England.
At
the 1919 Amritsar congress session when Gandhi spoke about Truth and
Nonviolence, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, a senior nationalist leader who had
connection with and sympathies for the revolutionaries, contemptuously retorted
“My friend, Truth has no place in politics”. Two decades later another
nationalist leader Subhash Chandra Bose, who assessed the nonviolent approach
impractical and ineffectual, secretly left India for Germany and Japan. In
collaboration with the latter he set up the “Indian National army” with Indian
troops taken as prisoners of war by the Japanese in South East Asia. Gandhi’s
task in promoting Truth and Nonviolence within the Indian national movement
was, therefore, not an easy one. He succeeded only because of his great moral
strength, his total identification with the poverty-stricken Indian people, and
the impressive results his nonviolent campaigns, based on mass participation,
produced vis-a vis the British, 1920 onwards. Besides Tilak died in 1920 and
left a more open arena for him.
Gandhi
ardently believed that truth was an objective moral reality as real and mighty
as God himself. Truth was what constituted the “Right Path”. For him, there was
no greater strength than the strength of the Human Spirit when it was imbued
with Truth and was unafraid to die, unarmed, upholding it. Since Humans have
been created “In the image of God” and have the “Divine Spark” in them they
have to be motivated and governed by Reason and Love rather than by fear and
violence. When one is steadfastly rooted in Truth, reason will always lead him
along the path of Love and Righteousness. One has to live, and be ready to die,
for Truth, Love and Righteousness but never to kill. “Given a just cause,
capacity for endless suffering, and avoidance of violence, victory is a
certainty”, “Peace will come when truth is pursued, and Truth implies Justice”
and “the end of nonviolent struggle is always a mutually acceptable agreement,
never the defeat, much less the humiliation of the enemy” are the three
cardinal principles of Gandhi’s trust and Nonviolence strategy.
Within
30 years of Gandhi launching his nonviolent national struggle for Independence,
the British withdrew from India voluntarily and among the first acts of
independent India was to become a member of the British Commonwealth renamed as
Commonwealth of Nations. Britain and India parted and stayed as friends. The
nonviolent struggle for Independence has been amply justified. Gandhi’s
strategy of Truth and Nonviolence also has had notable successes outside India.
Using this strategy, Martin Luther King managed to bring about more beneficial
change for his fellow blacks in the US in the single decade of the 1960s, than
a bloody civil war and the subsequent one-hundred years of constitutional and
legal struggle had achieved. It also brought about a fundamental transformation
among them.
In
the 1960s and 70s, over one hundred European colonies in Asia and Africa
achieved independence. This came about partly because they used the same
efficacious tool of nonviolent struggle, and partly because the national
movements led by Gandhi and Martin Luther King effectively changed the global
mindset on the acceptability of Imperialism, Colonialism and Racism. In the 80s
and 90s , nonviolent movements have successfully brought down oppressive
regimes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Philippines and South Africa. Using
the same technique, one lone, frail woman, Aung san Su Ki has bravely stood up
against oppressive military might in Burma and effectively swung world public
opinion in support of her democratic cause. In accepting his Nobel prize in
December 1989, he spoke thus: “I accept the prize with profound gratitude on
behalf of the oppressed everywhere, and all those who struggle for freedom and
work for world peace. I accept it as a tribute to the man who founded the
modern tradition of nonviolent action for change Mahatma Gandhi whose life
taught and inspired me. And of course, I accept it on behalf of the six million
Tibetan people, my brave countrymen and women inside Tibet, who have suffered
and continue to suffer so much.
Gandhiji’s
nonviolent resistance strategies aroused much interest in the US, Europe and
other parts of the world not only among civil rights and peace activists and
people’s movements the Hungarians used them after the Soviet Invasion of 1956
but also among military strategists. Paul Wehr in his articles on ‘Nonviolence
and National Defense’ in the book, “Gandhi in the Post-Modern Age’ writes:
Gandhi‘s ideas on nonviolent national defense made their way to a western world
on the brink of war. Pacifists there were looking desperately for a viable
alternative.” Kenneth Boulding’s essay “Path of Glory: A New way with War”
proposed nonviolent resistance as a functional substitute for war. He observed
that the technological revolution had made war dysfunctional. This point he
made so many years ago continues to provide the basis for contemporary social
defence research, as does his concept of transarmament. Boulding appears to
have been the first to suggest that a notion, in this case Great Britain, adopt
a nonviolent defense policy, though others like Lindberg in Denmark, Vrind in
Holland and John Galtung and Arne Naess in Norway were thinking on the same
lines Their work was a direct link between Gandhi and modern social defense
policy. “By the late 1950s in the looming shadow of the mushroom cloud, social
defense seemed more credible as an option for national defence. By 1962, the
concept of ‘social defense’ had taken root in western Europe The 1964 Oxford
Conference on civilian defense brought together peace researchers, military
strategists and people having direct experience with nonviolent resistance. By
1980, ‘Social Defense’ or Non-military resistance’ had in one form or the other
become an integral pair of overall defense policy in Denmark, Norway, Sweden
and Finland.
On
the nuclear bomb, Gandhi’s views were clearly articulated by him in the tragic,
aftermath of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945: The
moral to be legitimately drawn from the supreme tragedy of the bomb is that it
will not be destroyed by counter bombs. Unless the world adopts nonviolence, it
will spell certain suicide fro mankind. Albert Einstein echoed the same
sentiments when he started: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed
everything but our thinking; thus we are drifting toward a catastrophe beyond
comparison. We shall require a new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.
Interestingly,
the great theoretician and proponent of nuclear weapons as an instrument of
statecraft, Henry Kissinger began his July 31st, 1979 testimony to the US Senete
Foreign Relations committee on SALT II with the following words: “In his essay,
‘Perpetual Peace’, the philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote that world peace would
come about on one of two ways: after a cycle of wars of every increasing
violence, or by an act of moral insight in which the nations of the world
renounced the bitter competition bound to lead to self-destruction.”
What
was Gandhi’s approach to societal, national global peace? It was based on the
simple assumption that if one really wanted peace, one had to strive for peace
rather than prepare for war. One had to cleanse one’s mind hatred, arrogance,
avarice and fear, and avoid all actions, which create these emotions in others.
Terrorism
is dreadful scourge but it can neither be wished away, nor bombed off the face
of the earth. Much of it today emanates from various brands of religious
fanaticism or religion masked political extremism, though at deeper levels
historical inequities in land distraction, living conditions, political,
economic and cultural dominance and military presence are also involved. The
9/11 terrorist attack has traumatically shown how devastating the consequences
of just one scenario of war, and ushered in the epoch of “asymmetric warfare”
where the enemy is invisible, minuscule in number and strikes not from outside
but from within our societies and nations.
Then
crucial issue to be faced by all countries plagued by violence and terrorism is
whether peace and security are better pursued through justice and negotiated,
mutually acceptable agreements based on the aspirations and legitimate demands
of both parties in a conflict situation, or through massive preemptive or
retaliatory military action, and multibillion dollar national security plans.
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s heroic visit to Jerusalem in 1977 and the
successful outcome of his subsequent peace negotiations with Israeli Prime
Minister Izhtak Shamir at Camp David is irrefutable proof that the nonviolent,
negotiated path to peace can and does produce outstanding, enduring results for
both parties in a conflict situation, even in the most difficult times.
References:
- Bultjens, Ralph (1984), ‘Foreword’. Gandhi in the Post Modern Age : issues in War and Peace by Standford Krolick & Betly Cannon (ed): Colorado School of Mines.
- Gandhi, M. K. (1928), ‘The Curse of Assassinations’, Young India
- Wehr, Paul (1984), ‘Non-violence and National Defence’ in Gandhi in Post Modern Age.
- Boulding, Kenneth (1937), Path of Glory: A New Way with War.
- Armstrong, Karen (1984), Battle for God, Toronto: Angli Can Centre.
- Huntington, Samuel P. (1997), Clash of Civilizations and Remaking of World order, Penguin Books.
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