By Gene Sharp

    On 30 January 1948 on his way to prayers Gandhi was assassinated, killed by three bullets in his abdomen and chest. The young assassin was a fanatical Hindu who among others had been inflamed by Gandhi’s efforts to bring reconciliation between Hindus and Muslims in riot-torn independent India. After a year of bloody strife, Gandhi’s fast had brought peace to Calcutta and all Bengal. Later, sensing an incendiary situation under the surface, he fasted the last time in Delhi and restored an atmosphere of peace.  For these and similar acts, he was not loved by all. In Calcutta a mob attacked his residence, a brick was thrown at him, and someone swung a heavy bamboo rod (lathi) at his head. Both narrowly missed. During his Delhi fast some shouted outside his quarters, “Let Gandhi die!” A week before his death, a small homemade bomb was thrown at him from a nearby garden during afternoon prayers.
    With those three bullets came the bitter fruit of the murder of an important political leader. India and the world were saddened.  Political leaders and ordinary people alike felt a personal loss.
    In the years which have passed since that January day, many important events have taken place which have altered the world significantly: the death of Stalin, the Communist victory in China, the development of the hydrogen bomb and intercontinental missiles, the Hungarian Revolution, the trial of Eichmann, the end of the British and French colonial empires, President Kennedy’s assassination, and the civil rights struggles in the United States, to list only a few.
    After such events in a world in which history now moves so quickly, does Gandhi still have any political significance? With the passing of years and the opportunity for a more distant perspective, how is Gandhi to be evaluated? Are there points at which our earlier judgment must be revised?

Difficulties in Understanding Gandhi

    For a Westerner—and perhaps particularly for an American—Gandhi poses special problems in such an evaluation. His eccentricities often get in the way so that it is difficult to get beyond them, or to take other aspects of his life seriously. Even for religious people in the West, his constant use of religious terminology and theological language in explanation or justification of a social or political act or policy more often confuses than clarifies.
    The homage which most pay to him by calling him “Mahatma”—the great-souled one—usually becomes a kind of vaccination against taking him seriously. If he was such a saint and holy man, it is thought, this is a full explanation of his accomplishments; we need investigate no further. As a Mahatma, he can be revered while being placed in that special category of saints, prophets, and holy persons whose lives and actions are believed to be largely irrelevant to ordinary people.
    It is sometimes the case that Gandhi’s own candid evaluations of himself and his work now appear to be more accurate than the opinions of some of his followers and the homage-bearers. “I claim.” he once wrote, “to be no more than an average man with less than average ability.”  Indeed, in important respects this was probably true. He went to South Africa only after having failed in his attempt to be a lawyer in India. Nor
was he pleased at the homage given him, although he cherished the affection of people where it was genuine. “My Mahatmaship is worthless,” he once wrote.  “I have become literally sick of the adoration of the unthinking multitude. I lay no claim to superhuman powers. I want none. I wear the same corruptible flesh that the weakest of my fellow-beings wears, and am, therefore, as liable to err as any.”
    There are further difficulties in evaluating Gandhi. These include widespread misrepresentations of Gandhi and his political opinions. These misrepresentations are not usually deliberate, but are often made by people who have not made a detailed study of Gandhi’s views on the point in question. It has, for example, been widely claimed that Gandhi approved of Indian military action in Kashmir, that he would have approved of the Indian invasion of Goa, and even that he would have supported development of Indian nuclear weapons.
    Such misrepresentations are not only made by Westerners, but commonly by educated Indians who often assume, because they are Indians, and have read newspaper reports and repeatedly discussed Gandhi, that they know what they are talking about. Gandhi’s own skepticism about the degree of understanding of his nonviolence and views among Western-educated Indians continues to be verified.
    Some of the difficulties encountered in understanding Gandhi’s views on such questions have roots in the attempt to fit Gandhi into our usual categories. It is, for example, assumed often that he must fit the traditional view of a pacifist or that he is a supporter of military action. When he asserted the existence of political evil which had to be resisted, many people assume that he thereby “of necessity” had supported violence.
    Gandhi’s thinking was constantly developing. Early in his career he did give certain qualified support to war. By the end of his life he no longer did so. But this did not mean he favored passivity to foreign invasions. While believing the Allies to be the better side in the Second World War, he did not support the war. Similarly in Kashmir while believing the Pakistanis to be the aggressors, and believing that India must act, he did not favor military action.  Instead, he placed his confidence in the application of an alternative nonviolent means of struggle to fight political evil. Here he was constantly experimenting, and his advocacy of the efficacy of nonviolent action in crises was not always convincing to the hard-headed realists. This sometimes meant—as at the time of Kashmir—that he was not politically “effective,” but that was quite different from claiming that he had rejected his own nonviolent means. As we shall note later in more detail, it was Gandhi’s primary contribution, not only to argue for, but to develop practical nonviolent means of struggle in politics for those situations in which war and other types of political violence were usually used. His work here was pioneering, and sometimes inadequate, but it was sufficient to put him outside the traditional categories: Gandhi was neither a conscientious objector nor a supporter of violence in politics. He was an experimenter in the development of “war without violence.”
    A final confusion handicaps our attempt to evaluate Gandhi.  His politics are sometimes assumed to be identical with those of the independent Indian government under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Although Nehru had long had a deep regard for Gandhi, and although Gandhi cooperated with the Indian National Congress in the long struggle for independence, the policies which Gandhi favored are not necessarily those of the Congress government under Nehru and his successors.
    Indeed, saddened by the riots between Hindus and Muslims and busy in Calcutta seeking to restore peace, Gandhi refused to attend the independence ceremony and celebrations on 15 August 1947.  The riots saddened him both for their own sake and because he believed they reflected a weakness in Indian society which could bring India again under foreign domination by one of the Big Three (which included China).
    Gandhi had opposed partition of the whole country into Pakistan and India. Congress leaders had accepted it. His plea for nonviolent resistance in Kashmir with nonviolent assistance from India was ignored. Gandhi had dreamt that a free India would be able to defend her freedom without military means. Yet in the provisional government before independence, and in the fully independent government, military expenditure and influence increased, while Gandhi warned of the danger of military rule and of India’s possible future threat to world peace. Her freedom could be defended nonviolently, Gandhi insisted, just as nonviolent means had forced the great British Empire to withdraw.
    Political independence had not brought real relief to the peasants, who Gandhi had said ought nonviolently to seize and occupy the land, and even to exercise political power.
    Gandhi’s picture and name were widely used by the Congress Party in election campaigns. Yet Gandhi had written: “We must recognize the fact that the constitution we want or the social order of our dreams cannot come through the Congress Party of today….”   The day before his assassination he drafted a proposal for abolishing the Congress as it existed and suggested a constitution for converting it into an association for voluntary work to build a nonviolent society and guide India’s development from outside the government.
    Gandhi must be evaluated on the basis of his own outlook and his own policies, not those of others. It is also important that we reexamine some of those views about Gandhi and the nonviolent struggle he led which are widespread in the West. In large degree these are views which have masqueraded as “realistic” assessments.  I suggest, however, that these views are often contrary to the fact and may be more akin to rationalizations which help one to avoid considering Gandhi and the Indian experiments seriously. Let us look at six of these a bit more closely.

“Inherently Nonviolent” Indians
    Outside of India, during and for some years after the Indian nonviolent liberation struggle, it was widely said that such nonviolence was simply a characteristic of Indians who were presumed to be, for various reasons, incapable of violence. The implication of this was that the Indian experiments with nonviolent action deserved very little further analysis. For fairly obvious reasons the assumption that Indians were incapable of violence for political ends is almost never heard any longer. But the implications of this altered view are likewise almost never explored.
    It is forgotten (except in India) that the 1857-59 Indian War of Independence—which the English called the “Mutiny”—ever occurred, and this included not only guerrilla campaigns but full-scale battles. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a terrorist movement developed among Indian nationalists (especially in Maharashtra, Bengal, and the Punjab) which was responsible for a number of assassinations by bombings and shootings. Even after Gandhi was actively on the scene, the terrorists continued their actions. For example, as late as 1929 bombs were thrown and shots were fired in the Legislative Assembly in New Delhi. At the end of that year a bomb exploded under the train carrying the Viceroy, Lord Irvin (later known as Lord Halifax when he was British Foreign Secretary and Ambassador to the United States).  Even that was not the end of the terrorist movement.
    Subhas Chandra Bose by 1928 had achieved an impressive following with his cry of “Give me blood and I promise you freedom.” That year both he and Jawaharlal Nehru (later a supporter of Gandhi’s methods) favored an immediate declaration of independence to be followed by a war of independence. Bose was President of the Indian National Congress in 1938 and was again elected to that position at the 1939 convention though he already had resigned under pressure from Gandhi. During World War II, Bose
headed the “Indian National Army” and fought on the side of the Japanese, capturing the imagination of a significant section of the Indian public.
   The religious riots prior to and after Independence are well known. Thousands were killed. Five millions migrated across the new borders of India and Pakistan. There were well-grounded fears of war—first civil war, and later war between the newly independent countries.
Troops faced each other in Kashmir.
    During the Sino-Indian border conflict, it became unmistakably clear that when faced with a crisis affecting its frontiers the Indian Government was prepared to involve itself in large-scale military preparations. The Indian people shared this reaction by and large: indeed, the most vocal critics of the government felt that it was not sufficiently ready to go to war. The implications of the Indian invasion of Goa and the war in Nagaland, that the Indian government was ready to use military force, were emphatically confirmed. This was as Gandhi had expected. The Indian Government had demonstrated that when it came to military defense, it differed little in its basic approach from other governments.
    All these facts should make it quite clear that the Indians have always been quite capable of using violent means, and that there must have been something special which led them to rely on nonviolent struggle as the main strategy for achieving independence.
    It is of course true that there were elements in Indian religions and traditions which were conducive to Gandhi’s approach, and that as Gandhi drew upon these and spoke in their language, the religious peasants understood him. The most important of these was probably the principle of ahimsa, which roughly meant noninjury to living things in thought, word, and deed. These elements were doubtless important, but, as we shall note later, when Gandhi drew upon them, he always gave them new and vital interpretations.
    Just as there are in Western civilization traditions and principles counteracting the Christian principle of love for one’s enemies. so in Indian religions and traditions there were also counteracting principles. Sikhs and Muslims, for example, believed in military prowess. And the Hindu caste system itself provided for a warrior caste. The Bhagavad Gita—which Gandhi so revered and which he reinterpreted symbolically—related the story of physical warfare and dwelt upon the justification for fighting.
    In light of these various demonstrations of the Indians’ willingness to use violence in political struggles, the view that the Indian independence struggle was predominantly nonviolent because Indians were incapable of approving of violence collapses.
    While for strategic reasons a full-scale war with traditional front-lines might not have been possible, a major guerrilla war certainly would have been feasible. (Assuming that the percentage of casualties in proportion to the total population would have been about the same in such a struggle in India as later proved to be the case in Algeria, that would have meant between 3,000,000 and 3,500,000 Indians dead. The estimated number of Indians killed or mortally wounded while participating in the nonviolent struggle given by Richard Gregg is about 8,000.  One cannot claim that the French are by nature proportionally that much more cruel than the English!
    Rather than Indian nonviolence being entirely natural and inevitable, it is clear that Gandhi deserves considerable credit in getting nonviolent action accepted as the technique of struggle in the grand strategy for the liberation movement. It is clear that this acceptance by the Indian National Congress was not a moral or religious act. It was a political act made possible because Gandhi offered a course of action which was nonviolent but which above all was seen to be practical and effective.

Defying Traditions
    It is widely believed that Gandhi was simply a personification of Indian traditions. As we have pointed out, however, and as has been amply demonstrated by Dr. Joan V. Bondurant, wherever Gandhi drew upon traditional Indian concepts, he gave them a fresh and vital interpretation which differed significantly from the original.  At the same time, it is usually forgotten how un-Indian Gandhi was in many ways. He openly, in words and actions, defied widely accepted traditions and orthodoxies. His fight against untouchability, which he undertook several decades ago when it was many times more entrenched than today, is simply an example.  His whole experimental approach to life and to politics (he called his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth) has overtones of influence by Western science.
    Gandhi’s basic assumption that one must not “accept” or “understand” evil but fight it, although supported by some, was also in diametrical opposition to other schools of Hindu philosophy which held that one must not fight evil. but transcend it, seeing the conflict between good and evil as something which ultimately contributes to a higher development, and hence about which one ought not to be particularly concerned.
    Gandhi’s activity and sense of struggle not only challenged or ignored those schools of Hindu thought, they were contrary to widely established patterns of actual behavior. Passivity and submission were such common traits among Indians of his day that Gandhi frequently found that these qualities, not the British, were the main enemy blocking the way to independence. Gandhi is widely credited with being a major influence in their reduction and replacement by action, determination, and courageous self-reliance.
Non-violence [wrote Gandhi in 1920], does not mean meek submission to the will of the evil-doer, but it means the pitting of one’s whole soul against the will of the tyrant…. And so I am not pleading for India to practice non-violence because she is weak. I want her to practice non-violence being conscious of her strength and power.

Profits and Struggle
    A third popular view of Gandhi and the Indian struggle has been especially expounded by Marxists. They have frequently argued that Gandhi’s nonviolent action had little or nothing to do with the British leaving India, but that they did so because it was no longer profitable for them to hold on to the subcontinent.
    These Marxists often demonstrate their ignorance of Gandhi and his nonviolent action by their assumption that these had nothing to do with reduced economic benefits to the British rulers. This assumed separation is manifestly untrue. The new spirit of resistance and independence among the Indians to which Gandhi contributed, in turn increased the difficulties and expense of maintaining the British Raj, especially during the major non-cooperation and civil disobedience campaigns.
    Even in purely economic terms of trade with India, Gandhi’s program had a significant impact. This is particularly demonstrated by the impact of the boycott during the 1930-31 civil disobedience campaign. This coincided with the world-wide depression, but the drop in purchases of British goods by India was not solely the result of that depression but significantly also attributable to the boycott program .
    The British Secretary of State for India, in the House of Commons in late 1930, (according to J.C. Kumarappa) credited the general depression with a 25 per cent fall in the export trade to India, and credited the balance of 18 per cent in the fall directly to the boycott program carried on by the Indian National Congress.
    Total British exports to India according to statistical abstracts declined (in millions of pounds sterling) from 90.6 in 1924, to 85.0 by 1927, then to 78.2 in 1929 and in the boycott year, 1930, to 52.9.  The total import of cotton piece-goods by India from all countries rose from 1.82 billion yards in 1924 to 1.94 billion yards in 1929 and declined only to 1.92 billion yards in 1930. However, the British export of the same commodity to India fell from 1.25 billion yards in 1924 to 1.08 billion yards in 1929—a decline of 14 per cent. Then it fell to 0.72 billion yards in 1930—a decline of 42.4 per cent.  Between October 1930 and April 1931, when the boycott was at its height, there was a decline of 84 per cent.
    This [essay] is not, of course, an attempt to evaluate the variety of specific factors influencing the achievement of political
independence by India. But this should make it clear that the Marxist view that economic factors were completely separate from Gandhi’s nonviolent action is not based on facts.  The British people must realize that the Empire is to come to an end. This they will not realize unless we in India have generated power within to enforce our will.  The English nation responds only to force.
    This was thus a kind of political jiu-jitsu which generated the maximum Indian strength while using British strength to their own disadvantage. “I believe, and everybody must grant,” wrote Gandhi, “that no Government can exist for a single moment without the cooperation of the people, willing or forced, and if people suddenly withdraw their cooperation in every detail, the Government will come to a standstill.”    The view that Gandhi was ignorant of the realities of political power and that his technique of action was impotent would have been vigorously denied by every British Government and Viceroy that had to deal with Gandhi and his movement.    In a most revealing address to both Houses of the Indian Legislative Assembly in July 1930, the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, declared: “Apparently the political “realist” who has dismissed Gandhi and his technique has some rethinking to do.”  Only Gentlemen and Gentle Men?

Gandhi’s Contribution
    Following the widespread experiments under Gandhi, this technique of nonviolent action spread throughout the world at a rate previously unequaled. In some cases this was directly and indirectly stimulated by the Gandhian experiments. Where this was so, it was often modified in new cultural and political settings. In these cases, the technique has already moved beyond Gandhi.  One of the most important instances of this development is of course the adoption of nonviolent action in the Afro-American struggle against racial segregation and discrimination in the United States. This was a possibility envisaged by Gandhi, as he revealed in conversations with visiting Afro-Americans. In 1937 Dr. Channing Tobias and Dr. Benjamin Mays visited Gandhi, and asked him what advice they might relay from him to the American Negroes, and what he saw as the outlook for the future of their struggle.  Gandhi called nonviolent action the way “of the strong and wise,” and added: “With right which is on their side and the choice of non-violence as their only weapon, if they win make it such, a bright future is assured.”    Earlier, in 1936, Gandhi told Dr. and Mrs. Howard Thurman that “it may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of non-violence will be delivered to the world.”
    Contemporaneously with the spread of Gandhi-inspired nonviolent action in other parts of the world, there emerged in  Communist countries and Nazi-occupied countries independent demonstrations of the technique under exceedingly difficult circumstances.    While no totalitarian system has been overthrown by nonviolent action, there has been more such resistance than is generally recognized. In these cases the fact that the resistance was nonviolent often seemed almost an accident, often without any conscious choice and certainly not the result of moral or religious qualms about violence. Often the nonviolent action even accompanied violence or was tinged with violence, but nevertheless remained basically dependent upon the nonviolent solidarity in noncooperation and defiance of men and women acting without external arms.    The Norwegian resistance during the Nazi occupation is one of the most significant cases. It was largely through such resistance that Quisling’s plans for establishing the Corporate State in Norway were thwarted. The heroism of the Norwegian teachers in refusing to indoctrinate school children with the National Socialist ideology or to become part of the fascist teachers’ “corporation” is perhaps the best known part of this resistance. But it is by no means the only one. Clergymen, sportsmen, trade unionists, and others played their part too.    Other important cases include: major aspects of the Danish Resistance, 1940-45, including the successful general strike in Copenhagen in 1944; major parts of the Dutch Resistance, 1940-45, including large-scale strikes in 1941, 1943 and 1944; the East German Rising of June 1953, in which there was massive non-violent defiance which included women in Jena sitting down infront of Russian tanks; strikes in the political prisoners’ camps (especially at Vorkuta) in the Soviet Union in 1953, which are credited with being a major influence for improving the lot of the prisoners; and major aspects of the Hungarian Revolution, 1956-57, in which in addition to the military battles there was demonstrated the power of the general strike, and large-scale popular nonviolent defiance. The impact of popular pressure in Poland for liberalizing the regime has also been considerable, despite the difficulties. Czechoslovakia in 1968-69 though ultimately defeated, also provided powerful examples against the Soviet invasion and occupation.    The degree of “success” and ”failure” varies in such cases.  These instances have occurred without advance preparations, with neither serious thought, nor training, nor preparations for such action. These cases are nevertheless significant, for they prove something that is often denied: that nonviolent action is possible under at least certain circumstances against a totalitarian system, and that in certain conditions such action can force concessions and win at least partial victories.    In some circumstances such action may lead—and has led in Denmark, East Germany, and Hungary, for example—to increasing unreliability of the regime’s own troops, administration and other agents. Mutiny is simply the extreme form of this.    Other significant developments of nonviolent action have taken place in various parts of Africa, Japan, South Vietnam, and elsewhere the process is continuing.

Of World Significance
My contact with the Western world has led me to think that, contrary to popular belief, Satyagraha, once consciously and deliberately adopted, has more fertile fields in which to grow and flourish in the West than in the Orient. Like war, Satyagraha demands public spirit, self-sacrifice, organization, endurance and discipline for its successful operation, and I have found these qualities displayed in Western communities more than my own.  Perhaps the best craftsmen in the art of violence may still be the most effective wielders of nonviolent direct action.