gandhi

Today, Jan 30 2008 marks the 60th anniversary of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s assassination, and I thought I’d take a few moments to reflect on his life and death, and those of a few others whom I know he influenced, and who suffered a similar fate.
Gandhi was, on the surface, a modest, self-effacing and not particularly impressive individual. But he was also a brilliant, creative and original thinker, a stubborn, and remarkably self-possessed person. He was a middle-class lawyer, educated in the UK. It was while on business in South Africa, when he experienced his epiphany.
The story is told that he was riding in a train, and the police came through and ordered him out of the second class car on the grounds that he was “colored.” He reflected later in life that he was disgusted by the treatment of blacks in South Africa, but he was willing to go through his life and his business trying not to think about the problems of others too much. He said at the time he actually thought of himself as “of the better sort”. As a lawyer, educated in London, as an Indian of a business caste, he thought he could expect at least middle class treatment. But this event and others from his time in South Africa forced him to confront the fact of the injustice of segregation face on, because the problem was no longer academic — it was suddenly a very real fact of life and affected him personally. That is actually something for us all to think about long and hard.
Upon his return to India in 1915, then, like South Africa, still under British colonial rule, he looked around himself and noticed with new eyes the division of races, and the essential unfairness of European imperialism and racism (to say nothing of the Hindu caste system, I suppose, both literally and metaphorically). It was around this time that he acquired the honorary title “Mahatma” that is, “Great Soul.” He always considered the title a burden and the responsibility weighed heavily on him.
Gandhi was a member of the Jain sect, which one might think of something like a fundamentalist Hindu.
Jains abstain from meat and alcohol, and have some other practices that might seem extreme, but are all based in the philosophy of respecting all life, including plant and animal life. For example, Jains have been known to sweep the streets before them as they walk in order to avoid accidentally stepping on a beetle and harming it.
Naturally, Jains are also strict pacifists.
So informed by his faith, Gandhi considered possible approaches to the seemingly invulnerable Raj, as British hegemony over India was called, which had lasted for something like 300 years. Preceded only by another 300 years of Moghul rule, and before that the subcontinent was essentially a collection of independent nations, alternately warring and starving, the Indians hadn’t ruled themselves, come to think of it, ever.
He finally concluded that the only way to defeat the British military rule was through the method of nonviolent civil action and peaceful resistance.
It was a truly revolutionary concept, without precedent in the modern world. It was unheard of, and could not possibly work.
Yet as we know now, it did.
But as Aldous Huxley said, in order to impose social order, governments will “make use of all the mind-manipulating techniques at their disposal and will not hesitate to reinforce these methods of non-rational persuasion by economic coercion and physical violence.”
Its easy now to canonize men like Gandhi and easy to forget how hard it was for them to accomplish what they did, what sacrifices they made, how profound the resistance to their movements were, how bitter the struggle became, how many lives were lost, and how when really challenged, our supposed “civil” government reveals a very ugly face.
In the end Gandhi was successful and India achieved independence. But shortly afterward, he was assassinated, for reasons that are not clear. Tragic.
These thoughts were in my mind already as I have recently gone back to listening through my collection of Martin Luther King sermons. King was very strongly influenced by Gandhi, and was likewise a deeply religious man. Although their religions seem on the surface utterly alien from one another, philosophically, King’s interpretation of Jesus’ teaching is not at all far from Gandhi’s interpretation of Hinduism. King said, “hate transforms the hater into a distorted personality, and to the hater beautiful is ugly and ugly is beautiful. No, it is only by loving our enemies, by sending the transforming power of love out into the world, that we can truly change it.”
I listen to those words once again in the car on my way to work this morning, and some forty years after they were uttered, I find myself moved. Inspired. But also saddened, when I think about the world we live in today, and what sort of force Martin Luther King might have been in American politics, indeed in world politics, if he had not also been tragically assassinated.
And I thought of how I read in a biography of J. Edgar Hoover, how he hated King, despised him as “the lowest sort of nigger” and much worse. How he refused to investigate allegations of lynchings and terrorism conducted by whites against the mostly peaceful civil rights protesters, and how he had a special team set up at the FBI whose sole task was to try to dig up dirt to destroy King “by any means necessary.”
And I think whatever faults he may have had, what a man he was, what character he had. How he said, “I have had that call at midnight, when my wife and children are sleeping in the other room, where the caller’s voice is thick with hatred, and he says ‘we’re tired of you and your mess. we’ll give you three days, and if you’re not out of this town, we’re going to come bomb your house.'” But he did not turn, he did not stop. They did in fact burn down his house at least once. But he survived. He prayed, he says, night and day, and took every step he could to protect his family. Well meaning friends tried to persuade him to let up, but he was not going to stop, because people were counting on him, and he had to see it through.
And I thought of others who had been assassinated over the past decades and other more recent events. People killed in the most vile, cowardly way, sometimes not only killed, but destroyed, falsely discredited, just for doing what they thought was right. All just because they stood up for what they believed in. And I thought there is no bound, there is no limit to what certain forces will do to destroy what they may perceive as a threat to the existing order.
And I was saddened, but also inspired, even encouraged to be just a little braver, if only for their sakes. We all need to have the courage to stand up for what we believe in, to think for ourselves, and act on our principles, no matter what. Its not only our right, its our most important responsibility as citizens in a democracy.
And its the least we can do to honor the memories of these brave souls.