OFTEN in silent midnight one feels in Nature the
throb of centuries. It seems that all that has happened in the past is crowding
upon you. It overlays all that one thinks or does. Within it all is a force
that has been differently interpreted by science, philosophy, or religion. But
there is no denying the force itself. It is life-force, elan vital or
what you will call it. It is what our own lives are sprung from and very
probably return to.
Not an abstract or a vague force either. It is at
work in individual life and in life collective. It works in one’s person, it
works through history. From birth to death life registers in revolving joys and
sorrows what men love to call their destiny. The collective destiny of humanity
is registered by history. There is today no wholesale opposition to the
materialist interpretation of history. At least, the working of economic causes
is recognised as history’s prime motivating factor. Even less disputed is the
broad historical foundation of life.
Unto that force is today added, beyond all
possibility of controversy, the life and message of Mahatma Gandhi. In a
compass of barely one-third of a century, he has created for all humanity a new
sense of values, if only in re-assertion and revival of certain values already
discovered. But he has not merely repeated them. He has given them a new and
active content, not only derived from the internal situation of the Indian
sub-continent but related to the struggle of entire humanity towards a better
life. Altogether he has left himself in history as a query and a challenge.
It is a commonplace now that Mahatma Gandhi toppled
the mightiest empire in history and successfully led the struggle of four
hundred millions of Indians for liberation. Pakistan is the result of secession
of Muslim-majority areas from liberated India, and would not have been possible
without the liberation which Mahatma Gandhi secured for the entire group of
humanity living in undivided India. Yet that is not the whole or even the best
part of the Mahatma’s work. The method of non-violence that he used has been
recognised as something unique in the particular context. That method has
however not exhausted itself within the immediate political range. Out of the whole
compass of the Mahatma’s life and death it has emerged as the lever of final
peace and adjustment between man and man, class and class, nation and nation.
There is however a snag. Non-violence is in peril
of abuse. Not because it might be considered a weapon of the weak against the
strong, but because it lends itself to the service of the strong. Inasmuch as
non-violence is a curb on revolt against oppression, it is allegedly
counter-revolutionary. The responsibility for violence is not of those who revolt
against oppression; it belongs to the oppressor. Violence is not caused of
itself; it is caused, has a logical background. Therefore non-violence per
se is illogical. It is the philosophy of suppression of revolution. The
present State and Society are founded on, and maintained by, violence; on them
lie the onus of discarding violence, not on those who would establish a better
State and Society. Gandhism is unacceptable because it amounts to submission to
the present State and Society in the name of non-violence.
This argument would be unanswerable, were violent
revolt against the present society proved to be a sure means to the
establishment of a better order. Even if it be conceded that the Communist
society, as established in Russia, is a better order, it is not proved that
humanity has reached in it anything like consummation. It may also be conceded
that Soviet society has created conditions of better living for the masses.
Even then there is no denying, even without subscribing to inspired capitalist
propaganda, that the regimented pattern of Soviet society has not found that
full expression of freedom for the individual which must remain humanity’s
final goal.
Yet there is no denying that Soviet society
represents an attempt at equal distribution of the opportunities of life. After
all is said and done, that remains its abiding appeal to the masses of mankind.
That is why even those who would shun Communism as a totalitarian creed are
concerned to prove themselves Socialists of some sort or other. There is no
going back on Socialism as a step in the progress of human civilisation. And
Communism, after all, claims to be the perfect and logical consummation of
Socialism. Be that as it may, however, the question remains one of the
establishment of a social order in which the individual can indeed find his or
her fulfillment as a unit of the collective being. That Communist society has
not reached that ideal is apparent from the fact that it has no room for
unorthodox, even though sympathetic, thought. Even conceding that Communist
society makes possible voluntary, even spontaneous merger of the individual
into community life, it cannot very well afford to shut out liberal democratic
thought which has maintained, in the face of world reaction, its progressive
significance. But signs are against such accommodation and for total
rigidification of the social structure and its merger into an international
anti-capitalist bloc. So Jan Masaryk has had to commit suicide; President Benes
resigned in disillusionment, then died. The bonafides of neither was
open to question by Soviet Russia. Indeed Mr. Churchill has testified to the
great help Benes gave Russia to avert an internal crisis. But both were crushed
under the wheel of the Communist ‘all or nothing.’ There are other instances
too. Not the least is Marshal Tito’s stumble on the rock of Soviet orthodoxy.
This quality of ruthlessness might deserve a word
of praise. It is conscious of the vicious unscrupulousness of the enemy. It has
no use for compromise, because the enemy has not proved himself deserving any
the least accommodation. He is ruthless, deceitful, and unjust. Resistance to
him must therefore be total. No gaps, no loopholes must be left. This attitude,
however, carries with it an intolerance even of fellow travelers who might not
go the whole hog,–not because they are any the less opposed to social
injustice, but because they are afraid also of the inverted injustice of
suppression of individual development under the positive pattern built up in total
opposition to the existing order. Such are regarded by the orthodox as lacking
in revolutionary quality and so undependable in a moment of crisis. It is not
merely the belief that those who are not with us are against us it is that
those who are ninety-five per cent with us, but not the remaining five percent,
are greater enemies than those who are not with us at all. For, we know those
that are opposed to us, but might be led into a trap by those who seem to be
with us but might consciously or otherwise stop short at the crucial moment,
the last hour. This political attitude is built up into a social and cultural
pattern which impinges upon individual liberty. It is not slow to enforce
itself by violence; and the justification for violence lies in that violence
can be opposed and destroyed only by violence.
That is not, however, a doctrine limited or capable
of being limited to any particular purpose. It lends justification to
resistance by violence wherever you feel or suspect there is violence. It has
established itself with a vengeance in communal civil war. There it has laid
violent hands on all human values, has shattered the very foundation of life.
It is not possible to compartmentalise violence. Transfer it to the
international sphere: there is war. There is need then to cry a halt to
violence, to call for an end of violence.
That call came from Mahatma Gandhi with elemental
force. It was not mere sermonising from the mountain; it was a living
exhortation out of the struggle for freedom of four hundred million people.
That was a struggle with the mightiest empire in history: against a most
brutal, violent, unscrupulous imperialist system. Yet the man who led it
decided that the struggle must be waged non-violently, by resisting and
non-co-operating with the evil rather than fighting it. For three decades the
people thus suffered and fought. Not that there were not occasional outbursts
of violence; but the struggle as a whole maintained its non-violent character.
It was essentially a moral and physical withdrawal from support to foreign
rule; and there was no violence except where even passive withdrawal, such as
dissociation from war effort, is met by what Mahatma Gandhi himself was
constrained to call ‘leonine violence.’ It happened particularly in the last
phase of the struggle, when imperialism felt the world tottering from under its
feet in the August (1942) movement. That movement signified the final
withdrawal by the masses of India of all support to foreign rule. It was the
epic finale of the story of the self-liberation of the people from the moral
and physical chains of foreign imperialism. It had a numbing effect on all the
vital limbs of the imperialist State. And then, when the epic story of the
Indian National Army became known, the army, navy, and air force all succumbed
to the devitalisation that non-co-operation had wrought within the imperialist
structure. Revolts therein left an unmistakable lesson. Meanwhile, war had
performed the process of the economic liquidation of imperialism. The
administration was on the verge of collapse, and fortunately, in the meantime,
England had placed in power a Labour Government which acknowledged the reality
in India and decided that there was no alternative to transfer of power. The
task Mahatma Gandhi had set himself in the early twenties was done.
Yet, not his life’s task. Rather, the grand finale
was still to come. Once he had tried to unite the Hindus and Muslims as such.
That was by joining the Khilafat issue to that of Swaraj. But the fact was that
religion, as such, was not operative in the collective being of the people.
Failing it, only the sectarianism in both religions got into play. That is why
the wisdom of the Mahatma’s action in joining religion to politics has been
questioned. But it was predetermined. The religious dissensions that had lain
dormant under feudal Hindu or Muslim personal rule and been kept under check,
until in their own interest encouraged, by the foreign government, were coming
in the wake of democracy to the fore. They had to be reckoned with in the
context of incoming democratic independence. Eventually they were adjusted to
the separate Muslim State of Pakistan, but not before they had played havoc
with the lives of millions in all communities. When they appeared to continue
even after the establishment of two national States and threatened to prevent
the consolidation of independence, if not independence itself, Mahatma Gandhi,
at the age of nearly eighty, found himself confronted with the hardest task of
his life. It was not merely a political task; politics was almost incidental.
It was the task of reclaiming all humanity and Society from a total eclipse of
moral values, whereunder murder, arson, loot, and rape appeared to be normal
human action and the more extreme form it took, the more creditable it seemed.
The country appeared to be sinking under an abyss and carrying us all with it.
Mahatma Gandhi felt himself called upon to prevent the disaster; else, all that
he had dreamt, fought for, and achieved would lie in ruins. He proved equal to
the task, in a manner not hitherto expected even in one who had led forty
crores of men and women to liberation. With the establishment of two sovereign
States on the basis, respectively, of Hindu and Muslim majority areas, communal
disturbances had wholly taken the form they had revealed largely also before:
oppression of the minority. Mahatma Gandhi’s stand against them was by the same
method by which he had ushered the struggle for freedom: non-violent resistance
against evil. Here naturally it took the form of resistance of his own
community. No other way was possible for the Mahatma. He succeeded, and peace
came back to India and Pakistan. But he was soon to called upon to pay the
supreme price for it,–his life. That was the greatest sacrifice he could have
made for his ideal. He had not even deflected from it an inch; still he was
made to make the sacrifice. It was as if no lesser martyrdom would have
befitted the Mahatma.
That consummation of his message was also in a way
pre-determined. Not without it could that message have revealed its human
quality in a surpassing degree. Not to harm anybody, yet to resist harm with
one’s life is a philosophy with infinite sympathy as its background. It is
imbued with an appreciation of individual pains and struggles such as get lost
in accounts of ‘two thousand dead and five thousand wounded,’ and more so in
controversies that the number of killed and wounded is rather a thousand more
or less. That is why men and women ran to Mahatma Gandhi for succor: people of
other communities no less than his own. In the wake of the Buddha, Jesus, and
Mohammed he treads this earth of ours in death, even as he did in life.
Stricken humanity he consoles erring humanity he corrects; to plodding humanity
he shows the path; to eager humanity he preaches. No man has made a greater
human appeal in modern times.
That explains why it has been suggested in the
beginning of this article that a new force has been added to those working at
human destiny through history. It is apart from, and a challenge to, the
alternative political systems that are clamouring for acceptance. Let it be
remembered, however, that ad hoc non-violence will not work. And those
interested in the present social order may do worse than accept the demands of
the people while there is yet time. There is, however, little hope of that, and
violent revolution or, to suppress it, counter-revolution appears certain.
There will yet remain the problem of building up the State and Society into the
full pattern of liberty. We may avoid the Gandhian way, but not by-pass the
Gandhian challenge.
It is necessary to take not here of the Gandhian
philosophy which is but a projection of the Gandhian method. Non-violence, as a
social philosophy, amounts to class collaboration by class abnegation. In the
individual sphere, it does carry the potentiality of subtly working on the mind
of the antagonist who experiences a loss of moral stature before one who
refuses to retaliate for a wrong he knows himself to have committed, or perhaps
totally ignores it. Even then, however, its use pre-supposes a strong moral
background, and also a knowledge of the necessary psychological technique. A
peaceful strike by workers in a factory might well come under the category of non-violent
non-co-operation; but there, the required moral atmosphere is most often
absent. In the very nature of things it is the atmosphere of struggle against
wrong, enlivened by a deep sense of grievance and motivated by the spirit of a
fight. There, indeed, ad hoc non-violence is not found to work. Even
less to be expected is any move in the existing social order for
self-liquidation by way of social re-adjustment. Is the way then through
violence to adjustment, and, if that is so, where would be any scope for
liberty and the human values?
Listen then to the message of the Master; and if India, after she has attained liberty, is to make a contribution to the social philosophy of the world, she can do no better than realise the message and impart it in the way that France delivered the message of Democratic Revolution and Russia presented to the world the equitarian principle of Communism at work. The crime of the assassination of the Mahatma lies heavily on us all; and a very scientific interpretation of the unavoidability of expiation lies in the despondent sense of guilt that must necessarily haunt us. Yet the martyrdom has itself left the message of our redemption. It has lifted us above the spirit of mean vengeance, and deposited us within the shrine of the abiding values of the human spirit. To the extent that we are capable of absorbing those values, we may at produce social cum cultural standard that, though not finally resolving the problem of the adjustment of human relations, may serve as to go by. So, in the background of humanity today is the grand existence of a life, a message, a purpose with evolutionary potential, proved to be no less explosive than revolution, which constitutes a permanent challenge to humanity’s supreme effort at self-deliverance and is, in its solace, lesson, and directive, the abiding legacy of the Master.