Gandhi’s Ahimsa: A timeless boon

“In bidding farewell to the reader, I ask him to join me in prayer to the God of Truth that He may grant me the boon of Ahimsa in mind, word and deed.” These are the humble words with which Gandhi ends his autobiography, The story of my experiments with truth. In his selfless service to our country, it can be surely said that God had indeed granted him this boon — the boon of Ahimsa, or non-violence in his thinking, speech and action. This boon that he had employed successfully in his fight for freedom against colonial rule remains a timeless weapon to fight the continued evils of oppression and injustice in our times.

Gandhi’s belief in non-violence as a means to justice did not come as a sudden, eureka moment. Rather, it evolved as a concept over many years of his life and after some bitter experiences of domination, oppression and injustice inflicted on him and others around him. Perhaps the seed of the notion was laid first in South Africa in a moving train in 1893, when a White passenger took objection to Gandhi travelling with him in the same compartment. He was asked to leave and when Gandhi, holding a valid ticket, refused, he was forcibly thrown out. He was enraged as he fell to the ground, humiliated because of the colour of his skin. With no means to fight back at that moment, he felt helpless. Yet, slowly and steadily, he sought the right means to fight. Over the course of several years, he would conceive and use the philosophy of Ahimsa as one of the significant tools in his fight for justice.

Upon entering active public life, Gandhi would realise that revolution called for rebellion, and in order to correct a wrong, the law had to be defied. He often had to disregard the law, as he put it, “not for want of respect for lawful authority but in obedience to the higher law of our being, the voice of conscience.”

To this end, he often found himself in a conflict of duties — disobeying the law of the ruling authority while being bound by the duty to fight injustice. Yet, he knew that neither he, nor his followers, could resort to violence. He had to arm himself, and others, with peaceful weapons in their quest for justice. Ahimsa was one such weapon.

Whether it was the victory that he gained for the indigo peasants at Champaran, which would kickstart his mission to redeem the oppressed from the oppressors, or the historic Dandi March against the salt tax imposed by the British that set the tone for the country’s freedom movement, it was mainly with the weapon of Ahimsa that Gandhi won the justice he sought.

Ahimsa, as Gandhi conceived and promoted it in his fight for freedom, was a mix of peaceful activities such as protests, persuasion, marches and vigils against discriminatory laws and domination by the colonialists. Oftentimes, it took the form of non-cooperation and non-violent intervention. Termed ‘civil disobedience’, it turned out to be more powerful than forceful or violent agitation. Eventually, it won for us both our freedom and our dignity from a foreign bully. No wonder, Gandhi promoted Ahimsa as the supreme tool available to mankind to fight injustice. To put it in his words, “Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.”

Years after Gandhi’s lifetime, Ahimsa was recognised and hailed universally. In a move to honour the Mahatma, on June 15, 2007, the UN declared Gandhi’s birth date (October 2) as the ‘International Day of Non-Violence’. Before that, in the mid-1900s, Martin Luther King Jr., the American social activist fighting for equality for his fellow African-Americans, had also used the philosophy of Ahimsa in his fight against segregation and oppression, describing it as “the guiding light of our technique of non-violent social change.”

The quintessence of Ahimsa is stern resistance to exploitation, injustice, and degradation of human beings, albeit by peaceful means. Thus, it is active resistance, not passive opposition. As Martin Luther King Jr. testified, “I am more convinced than ever before that the method of non-violent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity. In a real sense, Mahatma Gandhi embodied in his life certain universal principles that are inherent in the moral structure of the universe, and these principles are as inescapable as the law of gravitation.”

The essence of his sentiments echo in Gandhi’s own words, “I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and non-violence are as old as the hills.” And perhaps a timeless boon from God himself!