{"id":43012,"date":"2019-03-31T01:00:40","date_gmt":"2019-03-31T05:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=43012"},"modified":"2019-02-28T08:53:01","modified_gmt":"2019-02-28T13:53:01","slug":"qotd-gandhis-not-so-non-violent-followers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/03\/31\/qotd-gandhis-not-so-non-violent-followers\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Gandhi’s not-so-non-violent followers"},"content":{"rendered":"

… it is not widely realized (nor will this film tell you) how much violence was associated with Gandhi\u2019s so-called \u201cnonviolent\u201d movement from the very beginning. India\u2019s Nobel Prize-winning poet, Rabindranath Tagore, had sensed a strong current of nihilism in Gandhi almost from his first days, and as early as 1920 wrote of Gandhi\u2019s \u201cfierce joy of annihilation,\u201d which Tagore feared would lead India into hideous orgies of devastation \u2014 which ultimately proved to be the case. Robert Payne has said that there was unquestionably an \u201cunhealthy atmosphere\u201d among many of Gandhi\u2019s fanatic followers, and that Gandhi\u2019s habit of going to the edge of violence and then suddenly retreating was fraught with danger. \u201cIn matters of conscience I am uncompromising,\u201d proclaimed Gandhi proudly. \u201cNobody can make me yield.\u201d The judgment of Tagore was categorical. Much as he might revere Gandhi as a holy man, he quite detested him as a politician and considered that his campaigns were almost always so close to violence that it was utterly disingenuous to call them nonviolent.<\/p>\n

For every satyagraha<\/em> true believer, moreover, sworn not to harm the adversary or even to lift a finger in his own defense, there were sometimes thousands of incensed freebooters and skirmishers bound by no such vow. Gandhi, to be fair, was aware of this, and nominally deplored it \u2014 but with nothing like the consistency shown in the movie. The film leads the audience to believe that Gandhi\u2019s first \u201cfast unto death,\u201d for example, was in protest against an act of barbarous violence, the slaughter by an Indian crowd of a detachment of police constables. But in actual fact Gandhi reserved this \u201cultimate weapon\u201d of his to interdict a 1931 British proposal to grant Untouchables a \u201cseparate electorate\u201d in the Indian national legislature \u2014 in effect a kind of affirmative-action program for Untouchables. For reasons I have not been able to decrypt, Gandhi was dead set against the project, but I confess it is another scene I would like to have seen in the movie: Gandhi almost starving himself to death to block affirmative action for Untouchables.<\/p>\n

From what I have been able to decipher, Gandhi\u2019s main preoccupation in this particular struggle was not even the British. Benefiting from the immense publicity, he wanted to induce Hindus, overnight, ecstatically, and without any of these British legalisms, to \u201copen their hearts\u201d to Untouchables. For a whole week Hindu India was caught up in a joyous delirium. No more would the Untouchables be scavengers and sweepers! No more would they be banned from Hindu temples! No more would they pollute at 64 feet! It lasted just a week. Then the temple doors swung shut again, and all was as before. Meanwhile, on the passionate subject of swaraj<\/em>, Gandhi was crying, \u201cI would not flinch from sacrificing a million lives for India\u2019s liberty!\u201d The million Indian lives were indeed sacrificed, and in full. They fell, however, not to the bullets of British soldiers but to the knives and clubs of their fellow Indians in savage butcheries when the British finally withdrew.<\/p>\n

Richard Grenier, “The Gandhi Nobody Knows”, Commentary<\/em><\/a>, 1983-03-01.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

… it is not widely realized (nor will this film tell you) how much violence was associated with Gandhi\u2019s so-called \u201cnonviolent\u201d movement from the very beginning. India\u2019s Nobel Prize-winning poet, Rabindranath Tagore, had sensed a strong current of nihilism in Gandhi almost from his first days, and as early as 1920 wrote of Gandhi\u2019s \u201cfierce […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,23,41,11],"tags":[1088,650,1195,838,122,720],"class_list":["post-43012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-india","category-quotations","category-religion","tag-castesystem","tag-civilwar","tag-gandhi","tag-hinduism","tag-movies","tag-protest"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-bbK","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43012"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43012\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43013,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43012\/revisions\/43013"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}