Mahatma Gandhi News Digest, Germany : Issue for August 28 – September 3, 2006
PM to launch centenary celebration of Gandhi’s satyagraha
The Hindu – India – September 3, 2006
New Delhi, Sept. 3 (PTI): Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will kick off a year-long centenary celebration of the launch of ‘Satyagraha’ by Mahatma Gandhi during his visit to South Africa this month end.
The Prime Minister, who is travelling to South Africa on September 30, will stay there till Gandhi Jayanti on October 2, official sources told PTI here today.
Gandhi had launched the satyagraha after being thrown out of a train in Durban by the Britishers because of racism.
He subsequently returned to India in 1915 to spearhead the freedom movement that culminated in Independence 32 years later.
A number of programmes have been chalked out to celebrate the occasion, the sources said.
Besides participating in the celebrations, the Prime Minister will also have discussions with South African President Thabo Mbeki on how to enhance bilateral ties, particularly in the economic field.
This will be the second meeting between Singh and Mbeki in about three weeks as the two leaders would be having an interaction in Brazil under the India-Brazil-South Africa (IBSA) forum.
A large delegation of business leaders will accompany the Prime Minister on the trip.
The visit takes place at a time when TATA group is exploring investment opportunities in South Africa in the mining field.
New Yorkers Poised to Transform September 11 into a Message of Hope and Healing
New Yorkers for a Department of Peace – USA – by Norma Loeb – August 28, 2006
New York City, NY, August 21, 2006 – For New Yorkers and everyone hoping for global peace, September 11, 2006 has a special significance. It marks 100 years to the day that Mohandas K. Gandhi launched the modern nonviolent movement. To honor the extraordinary link between both dates, New Yorkers for a Department of Peace (NY-DOP), in partnership with the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, has organized nationwide screenings of the movie Gandhi including the theatrical re-release of the 1982 Academy Award winning movie to be shown at the Regal Cinema in New York City near the World Trade Center site (102 North End Ave., NYC). A press conference is scheduled for September 11, 2006 at 10:00 am in the theater auditorium prior to the day’s screenings.
Press conference participants will include: Kamran Elahian, founder of the Gandhi Project (part of the Clinton Global Initiative); representatives of September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows; Monica Willard, co-chair of the United Nations International Day of Peace; Marie G. Ukeye, Rwandan genocide survivor and U.S. Congressional Representative, Jerrold Nadler. Celebrity guests include: James Brown III, A Color Purple; Danielle DiVecchio, The Sopranos; Zang Toi, fashion designer and other surprises
A short film featuring Arun Gandhi, Mohandas Gandhi’s grandson, will be debuted at the press conference and copies distributed exclusively to those media in attendance. The film will reveal the power of nonviolence and dispel common myths.
All proceeds for the Gandhi screenings and other 100-year anniversary activities will go to NY-DOP. NY-DOP is part of a national citizen organization working to establish a cabinet-level, federally-funded, United States Department of Peace that would promote nonviolent conflict resolution including: prevention, education and training both domestically and internationally. Visit the NY-DOP web site at www.nyc-dop.com.
Gandhi to visit London for anniversary of 9/11
Spero News – USA – by Ekklesia – September 1, 2006
Gandhi’s far-reaching action is to be commemorated with a short act of commitment to his principles of non-violence at St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in the City of London, which itself was destroyed by a terrorist bomb.
Mahatma Ghandi is to make a surprise visit to the City of London later this month to mark the anniversary of the World Trade Centre disaster.
11 September is not only the 5th anniversary of the terrorist attacks, but also marks 100 years since Gandhi made his famous declaration of non-violent passive resistance (“satyagraha”) in front of 3000 Indians in the Empire Theatre in Johannesburg.
Gandhi’s far-reaching action is to be commemorated with a short act of commitment to his principles of non-violence at St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in the City of London, which itself was destroyed by a terrorist bomb.
The first church of St Ethelburga was built around 1180. But having survived the Great Fire of London (1666) and the Blitz (1941-3), it was devastated by a massive IRA bomb on April 24 1993. However it was then rebuilt in a new form, reinstating its medieval exterior, whilst creating a remarkable new meeting space inside to serve as a Centre for Reconciliation and Peace.
The act of commitment to be held at the Centre will include readings from Gandhi’s writings, a short talk and some prayers. The Centre has also arranged to borrow the life-size image of Gandhi from Madame Tussaud’s waxwork museum.
Mahatma Gandhi lived in South Africa for 21 years. In opposition to a proposed new legislation in 1906 imposing pass laws on the Indian community in South Africa, Mahatma Gandhi and his colleagues in the Congress movement mobilised and convened at the Empire Theatre in Johannesburg on 11th September.
The meeting passed a famous Fourth Resolution by which the Indians solemnly determined not to submit to the Ordinance in the event of its becoming law in the teeth of their opposition, but also to suffer all the penalties attaching to such non-submission. All present took an oath with God as witness.
Since then the use of Satyagraha as a mode of opposition to oppression has been utilised by many leaders through out the length and breadth of the world. It was used by Gandhi to win Indias independence, by Martin Luther King to win civil rights in the United States and by Nelson Mandela to change South Africas liberation.
A similar strategy of non-violent regime change in Iraq was also suggested to Tony Blair by church leaders at a meeting before the invasion.
Peace campaigners around the world suggest that as 9/11 has become synonymous in modern language for the furtherance of hatred, war and terrorism, by celebrating the birth of the Satyagraha peace movement it will serve as an important contrast to messages of hate and war. They also hope that it will demonstrate, as St Ethelburga’s has done in its own recreation following its destruction by terrorists, that there is another response to terror.
SALT WALK, by Bernie Meyer, as the “American Gandhi”
by Bernie Meyer – September 2, 2006
Gandhi spent his adult life “experimenting with truth.” He sought the truth in all matters, not just in leading the independence movement in India. In fact, he believed that it was more important to live with integrity than for India to have independence from the United Kingdom. Integrity included and embraced truth above all. To recognize the truth in others, including those opposed to him, and to express truth through morality, religion and ethics is to live by love. Love is the law of the human species.
The September 10th Salt Walk addresses the two of the basic urgent issues of our time threatening the existence of life on earth, as we know it: global climate change and peak oil. Humans in their anxiety about the threats may use their weapons of mass destruction. We have the potential to embrace a way of love instead of violence.
“Waiting until world conventional oil production peaks before initiating crash program mitigation leaves the world with a significant liquid fuel deficit for two decades or longer.” (Robert L. Hirsch, author of US Department of Energy Study)
For the sake of the environment and for the sake of preventing global wars, our efforts are needed to address these core issues.
Looking at these plus other related issues, such as water, Lester Brown in Plan B Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble (Earth Policy Institute, www.earthpolicy.org) states that humanity needs an urgent mobilization like the United States undertook during World War II to head off catastrophe. Brown, Hirsch, and other analysts state that humanity has never faced a situation like we now face. Some say that we have “Ten Years” to do all we can.
But, a million things can be done to turn this situation around. Like Gandhi, we must assess the situation and act now. While neither individual nor community can change the world alone, every person and every community has responsibilities to do what can be done. We must begin with ourselves. We urgently call others in our community to join us. In fact, others are already acting. The Salt Walk challenges everyone. In so doing, we will challenge the United States government and the world governments through the United Nations.
Courage is fundamental. While our fears, as well as denial and ignorance, work to immobilize us, we need to work to become courageous. As Gandhi went to the ancient insights and his belief in the universal living presence, which he called Truth and God, to overcome his fears, we must discipline ourselves by daily acts and commit ourselves by our beliefs. Like Gandhi we must seek truth through study and investigation. Like Gandhi, we must stand in truth.
Gandhi envisioned an India (and a world) where the individual gives her or himself for the village, the village gives itself for the neighboring villages, all give themselves for the world. We have that potential. We have the potential to organize our communities to face the issues of our times. In this effort we must recognize that in the most basic way these issues are spiritual issues. Are we willing to live by truth with love?
The specialists in human and natural sciences are telling us to act with urgency. Time is of the essence. Gandhi’s ancient and modern wisdom give us the insights in morality, ethics, and religion. People like the Dalai Lama point out a convergence in our understanding of science and spirituality. These are the deeper realities of the human meaning. The urgency is about the immediate realities, which enable the human and non-human species to continue living on earth.
The Salt Walk focus is on the immediate realities in the spirit of the deeper realities. In particular, we will invite our community to begin with the following needs:
> Develop organic agriculture in both the urban and rural areas.
> Develop nonpolluting transportation of all types.
> Develop sustainable human habitat in concert with habitat for all species.
> Develop the power of nonviolence in all human relationships, weaning the world of weapons for mass destruction.
The message must go out that everyone in our community will be fed and supported by the community. The message must go out that everyone in our community has a duty to participate in creating a sustainable environment and way of life. The message must go out that survival and security are community affairs.
To some in the community this message may be new, even incredible. This is very understandable. We invite these members to check and study the evidence. We hold up truth as our guide. Everyone must seek truth in this situation. We will all benefit by sharing insights to achieve deeper understanding and better approaches to making the community sustainable. The message is to create a hopeful, courageous, and determined community. We believe that action now must accompany study and talk.
Peace, salaam, shalom, pais, La Paz.
Offered by Bernie Meyer who portrays Gandhi in the September 10th Salt Walk at Washington, DC.
Contact: Berniemeyer2001@yahoo.com
Mahatma In A Makeover
Outlook – India – September 11, 2006
Gandhi goes glitzy for Gen Y, and the signs are everywhere
Museum muse
> One of the worlds first digital multimedia museums in Delhis Gandhi Smriti has sent footfalls soaring to 2,000 visitors a day.
> A mobile Gandhi museum begins countrywide tour after an extended show in Mumbai.
> Gandhi Smriti goes for makeover in ethnic chic, adding cafeteria, shops, live demo-exhibits of pottery, spinning.
> Becomes hub of activities for schoolkids and underprivileged, including computer classes.
Gandhiana for the kids
> Schoolkids open new version of Gandhis newspaper.
> A Gandhi quiz competition for schoolkids goes national.
> Over one lakh school and college children pay to take an exam on Gandhis life.
> Debating and elocution competitions on Gandhis relevance.
Summer camps, tours, workshops
> Summer camps at Sevagram ashram becoming popular.
> Chennai schoolkids line up for In Gandhis Footsteps tour of four states
> Free radio/newspaper/comicbook workshops on Gandhis principles.
> Kids go as volunteers to work in slums/villages.
> Workshops on non-violent communication.
Bestselling icon
> An audiotape abridging Gandhis autobiography with Shekhar Kapoor and Nandita Das launched in Planet M music stores in five metros.
> Regional translations of My Experiments with Truth in last five years sell in lakhs of copies.
> Publishers/authors applying for rights of Gandhis works doubled in last 2-3 years.
> Between 1,000 and 2,000 new books on Gandhi every year across the worldpublishers here say huge demand for new, attractive, relevant books on Gandhi for young readers. New Gandhi picturebooks coming up.
> A Times Music cassette on Gandhis bhajans climbs to top of music bestseller list.
> Renewed interest in Gandhi seeps into popular cinema; Rakeysh Mehra, director of Rang de Basanti, claims Gandhi is Indias single-largest export; filmmakers and playwrights try to reinvent Gandhi for a new generation.
> Buddhists from across the world begin their pilgrimage to Buddhist holy places with a visit to Gandhi museum.
> A new breed of social activists drawn from young, middle-class urban India start innovative schemes in slums and villages across India, claiming their inspiration is Gandhirecent campaigns include the tribal land struggle campaign in Umariya district of Madhya Pradesh, and the campaign against multinational steel company POSCO in Orissa.
> Universities open centres for Gandhian studies, search begins for postmodern lessons on Gandhi.
Brand Gandhi
> T-shirts with Gandhi quotes
> Car screens with his sayings
> Posters of Gandhi hottest item at museum shops.
> A new fashion collection for satyagraha centenary.
Jailed on return from India, Iranian scholar Ramin Jahanbegloo freed after four months
The Indian Express – India – August 31, 2006
NEW DELHI, AUGUST 30:Ramin Jahanbegloo, a prominent Iranian political philosopher and the current occupant of the prestigious Rajni Kothari chair in Democracy at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in New Delhi, has been set free in Tehran after four months in jail.
Jahanbegloo, who has also written in The Indian Express, was arrested in April, days after he returned from a six-month teaching programme in New Delhi. A Canadian-Iranian, he was later accused of spying.
A Reuters report from Ottawa quoted Canadian officials as confirming his release. The Department of Foreign Affairs is pleased that Professor Ramin Jahanbegloo has been released from detention in Iran, said spokesman Rodney Moore.
Jahanbegloos release was first reported by Iranian news agencies.
Jahanbegloo has authored a work on Mahatma Gandhi. His most recent published work is Talking India: Ashis Nandy in conversation with Ramin Jahanbegloo, (Oxford University Press) which focuses on the global dialogue of cultures. He has worked and lectured on democracy in Iran and how the Islamic Republic can engage with the West. He has also written on the importance of acknowledging the Holocaust. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has questioned the Holocaust.
Civic Power and the Peoples Rights: Nonviolent Action for a New World
Minivan News – Maledive Islands – by Jack DuVall – August 31, 2006
Never Yield Submission
Three months ago, 250,000 immigrants demonstrated in Los Angeles, California, to dramatize the contribution of undocumented workers to the U.S. economy. One newspaper interviewed a 54-year old Guatemalan house painter who was standing on the curb, watching the protest. This is America, he said. This is the first time in my life I have seen something like this. This is why everyone wants to be here.
That Guatemalan man identified the principle that gives democracy its staying power: The right of the people freely to express their minds, openly to seek relief from injustice, and fearlessly to hold government accountable for its action.
Recent immigrant protests in America focused on legislation making illegal immigration a serious crime. In spirit they reminded me of an event a hundred years ago — a mass meeting convened in Johannesburg, South Africa, by Mohandas Gandhi, an Indian lawyer outraged by a new law requiring Indians to carry registration cards. The Old Empire Theatre was packed from floor to ceiling, Gandhi later wrote. One speaker said they must never yield a cowardly submission to such degrading legislation.
During a long campaign of non-cooperation, Indians burned their registration cards, marched across borders, and thousands went to jail, Gandhi himself three times, to disrupt the laws enforcement. In the eighth year of resistance, the laws were withdrawn. One piece of one empire of contempt for peoples rights was erased, starting that night at the Empire Theatre.
Gandhi had said that he had been influenced by the American writer Henry David Thoreau, whose essay, On Civil Disobedience, had been published in 1849. Thoreau had said, All men recognize
the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. That echoed even bolder words spoken one year before by an American congressman who later became president, Abraham Lincoln:
Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right, which we hope and believe is to liberate the world.
To apply this right in India, Gandhi returned home from South Africa and launched a great nonviolent movement against British rule. Millions marched, boycotted state monopolies, and quit state jobs. The scope of resistance sobered the few colonial leaders who understood what was happening. England can hold India only by consent, said Sir Charles Innes, a provincial governor, We cant rule it by the sword.
Gandhis campaigns were the first stories of civic resistance reported worldwide by broadcast media. Ever since, the adoption of nonviolent action has accelerated. The Danes obstructed German occupiers in World War II by strikes and work slow-downs. African-Americans marched and boycotted until racial segregation was dissolved. Polish workers refused to leave their shipyards until theyd won the right to a free trade union.
Filipinos blocked a dictators army units from attacking officers who had switched sides, and his regime was immobilized. Czechs, East Germans, Mongolians and others living under Soviet client regimes choked the streets of their capitals until their rulers called free elections. Black South Africans went on strike, boycotted businesses, and made their country ungovernable, until a new political system was established.
Five months ago, former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic died. The New York Times called him a ruler of exceptional ruthlessness who had created a violence not seen in Europe since 1945. Five years ago, a nonviolent movement to dislodge Milosevic was spurred by a youth group, Otpor, to rally the public to enforce a fair election. A million Serbs converged on Belgrade, the military refused to crack down, and Milosevic had to yield power.
Withholding Consent
These are not exceptional cases. In 50 of 67 transitions from authoritarian rule to democracy in the last 35 years, nonviolent force was pivotal. People power opens the vise of arbitrary rule by disputing its legitimacy, escalating the cost of its operations, and splitting the ranks of its own defenders. Strikes, mass protests, and civil disobedience are among the tactics that prevent the state from monopolizing information and dictating events. Gandhi said that the people, when they become conscious of their power, will have every right to take possession of what belongs to them.
Facing such power, repression often doesnt work. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt explained why. Where commands are no longer obeyed, the means of violence are of no use
The sudden dramatic breakdown of power that ushers in revolutions reveals in a flash how civil obedience to laws, to rulers, to institutions is but the outward manifestation of support and consent. Lincoln had said, No man is good enough to govern another man, without that others consent. Now we know that no one is capable of ruling others without their consent, once they know how to say no.
In 2004, millions of Ukrainians learned how to resist, and did so. Leonid Kuchma, president for ten years, was stepping down. His rule, which began with economic reform, had given way to corruption and curbing dissent. In 2000, Ukraines leading independent journalist was decapitated, and the president was implicated. In the midst of the 2004 campaign to replace Kuchma, the opposition candidate was poisoned. When vote fraud in the election on the scale of 2.8 million rigged ballots was revealed with the help of international observers and favored the ruling partys candidate, a million Ukrainians came to the heart of Kyiv and wouldnt leave until a new vote was ordered. Their planning and discipline impressed the police and military.
One general later observed, Every soldier is also a citizen
Many guys from our office
would leave work in the evening, change their clothes, and go to the Maidan [the main demonstration space] to join the revolution. That was made easier by protesters chanting slogans like, A Ukrainian soldier is a patriot, not a killer. When orders came to crack down, the army and secret service refused. Nonviolent resistance had neutralized the ability to rule by intimidation. A new vote was ordered, the challenger won, and the Orange Revolution succeeded.
Nine months after Viktor Yushchenko became president of Ukraine, Russian president Vladimir Putin was still complaining about how the candidate he preferred had lost. He suggested that the losing side had been cornered by unconstitutional activities and said that civic resistance could turn a country into a banana republic where the one who shouts the loudest is the one who wins, as if too many voices in the public space could spoil the plans of those who hold power. But thats the point: Democracy works when a majority of voices prevails.
When millions of Lebanese took to the streets to demonstrate against Syrian occupation, many said they were inspired by the Orange Revolution. Suddenly autocrats all over the Middle East realized that they werent exempt from people power. In fact, civic resisters today are active in Palestine, Tunisia, West Sahara and elsewhere in that region. In Islamic countries generally, there are many precedents in history for nonviolent movements producing new civic power and making gains for the people:
In 1929, the Pashtun leader Abdul Ghaffar Khan founded his nonviolent Servants of God movement against British rule in what is now Pakistan. He organized hundreds of villages and thousands of people, to boycott state stores and lie down in front of police lines holding the Koran.
In 1985, in Sudan, weeks of nonviolent protests in Khartoum and Omdurman against the repressive rule of a dictator was capped by a general strike that paved the way for a bloodless coup.
In 1987-88, in the first Palestinian Intifada, tens of thousands of civilians boycotted Israeli products, marched in demonstrations, refused to pay fees, and inspired military refuseniks in Israel to split public support for the occupation.
This year in Egypt, opposition parties boycotted parliamentary elections, and civilian dissidents against authoritarian rulers in North Africa are gathering force. The ranks of these campaigns in the Islamic world, to open up closed societies and force governments to observe human rights, are far more numerous than the membership of terrorist networks because they stand for people living freely, now and everywhere.
The Engine of Strategy
Not every nonviolent campaign succeeds, of course. Perhaps the most spectacular failure was in China, in 1989. Charismatic student leaders rallied a half-million Chinese in a weeks-long occupation of Tiananmen Square, demanding free speech and other rights. But they couldnt agree among themselves about the tactics to use next, they didnt recognize that the government might agree to some if not all of their demands and so they lost a chance to bargain for the survival of their movement, and they prepared for repression. It might have helped them to recall the aphorism of Sun Tzu, an ancient Chinese sage: Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. The Tiananmen demonstration was crushed.
Compare that lost opportunity to the strategy of Polish workers in 1980, when strikes in shipyards galvanized the nation and stunned the communist regime. Militant workers had wanted to march on local party headquarters, but Lech Walesa and his organizers realized that would lead to quick repression, so they occupied the shipyards instead. Then the militants wanted to demand full democratic rights, but Walesa knew that would trigger Soviet intervention. Instead the workers bargained for the right to a free trade union, which they won so anxious was the regime to end the strike. With that right, they organized the nation; ten million Poles joined what was called Solidarity, and nine years later Walesa became president of Poland. Opportunity for power emerges from a strategy to build it.
In a nonviolent struggle, the engine of that strategy has three cylinders, and the first is unity. The movement should encompass a wide spectrum of political views and social communities and operate with a consensus about its goals and methods. Without unity, a movement cant claim to represent the people, and its calls for action wont enlist wide participation.
In Poland, Solidarity became the agency through which left intellectuals, conservative Catholics, factory workers, students, and merchants coalesced into an enduring civilian force that kept putting pressure on the government, even during martial law. The movement that roused a majority of Chileans to challenge General Augusto Pinochet included groups of all kinds, and the front ranks of the people power movement that forced the resignation of an autocratic Filipino president featured wage-earners, businessmen, nuns, students, and army and air force officers.
The second cylinder of the strategic engine is planning. No successful nonviolent movement is spontaneous. The vulnerabilities of the opponent have to be assessed and tactics have to be sequenced, to probe, confuse and eventually outpace the decision-making resilience of the state. Meanwhile, activists have to be trained, money has to be raised, and communications have to be maintained.
In the nation of Georgia beginning in 2000, the student group Kmara decided that university reform wasnt possible so long as the same government remained in office, so they joined a nationwide movement to win elections. Kmaras cadres split into four parts: public relations, field work, training and finance. In the words of one of its leaders, Giorgi Kandelaki,
tactical planning occurred on a weekly basis mainly during brainstorming sessions. Once the idea and details for an action were approved during a discussion, activists would compile a detailed budget for the action
once a decision was made Kmara members exerted efforts to retain discipline in its execution.
But whatever plan is adopted, winning is impossible unless the opposition refrains from violence, because just as repression blackens a regime by showing that its lost the ability to persuade, armed attacks criminalize those who strive to replace it. Nonviolent discipline is therefore the third cylinder in the engine of strategy. Without it, a movement cant enlist ordinary people, who wont take the risks of violent resistance.
Nonviolent discipline is also critical in co-opting people within the states apparatus. Defections from the military and police can be the decisive factor in a nonviolent struggle, but soldiers wont switch allegiance to those who shoot at them. Armed defenders come from the same communities as nonviolent resisters, so they know whats at stake: their livelihood and future prospects, in a society that has a chance to escape from capricious misrule.
At the height of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine fourteen months ago, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators were totally nonviolent. We are a force, said one speaker to the crowd, but a peaceful force. Volodymur Filenko, head of mass action for the opposition campaign, said of the soldiers they faced, It was very important that we never, ever provoked them with aggression
And this did have an impact. Did it? One general said he never heard one soldier say hed use his rifle against civilians which is not surprising, since one of the demonstrators slogans was Military with the people!
So unity, planning and nonviolent discipline are the skills that drive a movement forward — so that rights are regained which were stripped away, so that voices can be heard which were silent, so that people can become who they want to be. Their words and action, the commitment of their lives and sacred honor are the fuel for this kind of change. Democratic power is not seized by a few, it is summoned from the many.
Misconceptions about People Power
Unfortunately we live in a world that still so worships the primacy and prerogatives of the state, that the evidence of what citizens can do is disregarded when it stares us in the face. And we live in a time that is so mesmerized by the spectacle of violence used by states or insurrectionists, that seismic change driven by nonviolent action is explained away by reference to indirect acts of states rather than the direct acts of the people who have the greatest incentive to induce change.
Misconceptions about people power are repeated by the world media as if they were facts rather than opinions. The most common is that civic resistance isnt possible unless there is enough public space for protest. But that assumes that resistance is only physical protest even though many civic campaigns are effective because of what they do not do. A strike means not going to work, a boycott means not buying, and withholding fees or taxes means not paying. Danish resistance to Nazi occupation in World War II reached its zenith when strikes and work stay-aways spread to every city.
A second misconception is that nonviolent action isnt possible if rulers are too repressive. But at the height of state violence against dissent in Argentina in the 1970s, a group of mothers of the disappeared surprised everyone by marching every week in the heart of Buenos Aires. The regime realized they couldnt arrest or beat up these women without alienating more people, so they were tolerated and grew in number, and inspired other groups to organize. When fear receded, so did the regimes aura of invincibility. All governments face constraints on how they can act.
A third misconception is that people power wont work if the government doesnt depend on the people for revenue. Last year I heard a panel discussion in Madrid on energy security, chaired by a London oil trader. He flatly declared that what happened in Ukraine couldnt happen in petroleum-producing regimes in Central Asia, because oil wealth made them impervious to whatever the people did. What he failed to notice is that every oil-rich state is also stupendously corrupt, which sows deep popular resentment and economic tactics arent the only way a civic movement can apply pressure for change.
A fourth misconception is that civic forces cant be mobilized without a politically literate middle class, independent media, an election to organize around, and outside training in campaigns and vote-counts. But before Gandhi challenged the British Raj through a mass movement, the political class of Indians who published their own newspapers and petitioned the government had little impact. In contrast, Solidarity fractured the Polish communist partys hold on power, and the apartheid state was crippled by civic action in South Africa, before fair elections came to those countries.
Insisting that civic resistance only works through an electoral model misconstrues it as another form of politics, rather than what it is: neutralizing unjust rulers capacity to govern. People power is not a form of moral suasion, its contentious, it forces states to honor peoples rights, so that their lives can proceed according to their choices rather than the whims or mandates of those who govern.
Means and Ends
For people to defy a government not based on their consent may be the most fateful political transaction in they can engage. About most transactions, Americans have a saying: You get what you pay for. How you buy something can determine if you get to keep it. If you use someone elses credit card, to whom will you owe your future? If, instead of mobilizing the people to produce the kind of government which they want, you delegate the fight to an armed band which pays in blood to get what it wants, you may or may not get a government that listens to you. But history proves you will almost certainly get recrimination, vendettas and civil strife.
For me, Gandhi said, means and ends are practically identical. Instinctively he followed Immanuel Kants categorical imperative: Act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a general law of nature. If Kant and Gandhi were right, what does that suggest about the rationale for violence? Osama bin Laden says that oppression
cannot be demolished except in a hail of bullets. Lenin went further, saying that real, nationwide terror was needed to reinvigorate a country.
But since Lenin wrote those words, there is no instance anywhere in which violent revolution or terror has liberated a people and launched a government based on their consent. Gandhi saw the ineffectuality of violence first-hand. During an eleven-year period in just one Indian province, there were 101 violent incidents involving over a thousand terrorists. But none disturbed British control. Terror wasnt actually a rational means to a political end; Gandhi called it a deep-seated disease, a cult of violence.
In his first message to America after the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden said that his young jihadists have no intention except to enter paradise by killing you. In other words, their motivation had been drained of political content, for if the only reason to kill is to be killed, the killer has discarded any concern for the living. Whatever else it may be, liberation is not about the dead.
So violence circumvents the people. It uses the false assertion of the peoples support without harnessing their action so as to demonstrate that support. It is action by a self-appointed few who subscribe to no standard of judgment not derived from certain fixed ideas. It is the work of the authoritarian mind. Karl Marx called the democratic concept of man false, because it holds that each person has value as a sovereign being, and he called that postulate an illusion. If you do not value another persons life, then of course you are free to take it away.
But how reasonable is it to believe that annihilating lives can enhance life, that destruction opens the door to progress? Violence is not the product of the peoples power, and it almost never yields the peoples rights.
Liberating Minds
Abraham Lincoln said that slavery amounted to one proposition: You work, Ill eat. But injustice breeds conflict, and Lincoln called it a struggle between two principles: One is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle…No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation
or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.
Those who use violent repression and those who tout violent revolution are both attached to that principle, for they would not give the people the opportunity to set the course of history they would reserve that for themselves. This is not a modern attitude. It is more ancient than the pens beneath the Roman Colosseum, where slaves were kept, to be sacrificed in public combat. But history did not end in Rome. The acceptability of the urge to dominate would eventually begin to ebb, once the scientific revolution dawned.
One of its heralds, Francis Bacon, in the 16th century declared that science was not a belief to be held but a work to be done, and he thought of that work as a work for the peoples. Thought had to be liberated from absolute belief before free inquiry and experiment could open up power from new ideas. The anthropologist Loren Eisley said that Bacon knew that these discoveries would come slowly by infinite and continuing effort, out of minds whose dreams must rise superior to the existing world… The scientific challenge, Eisley wrote, was to break with the dead hand of dogmatism, to arrest and touch with hope the popular mind.
We settled on our title for A Force More Powerful (the book, the television series, and now the video game) when we read of Gandhis meeting with African-American ministers in 1937. One of them asked the Indian leader whether nonviolence was active rather than passive. Slightly agitated, Gandhi replied, It is the greatest and the activist force in the world
a force which is more positive than electricity, and more powerful even than ether. It was as if he thought of it, not as religious or even political, but as a kind of science, with laws to be applied and power to be derived.
Those who have amplified Gandhis legacy by consummating nonviolent struggles for rights, democracy and self-rule include Europeans, Asians, Latin Americans, Africans and North Americans, and those who fight this way for rights today include Central Asians and Polynesians, as well as Africans and Asians. Civic power is a global phenomenon, even as its strategies brew in the basements and the barrios of a thousand different villages and cities. Among those who are doing this are:
An Iraqi-born journalist, returned to the country of his birth after long exile in Europe, to edit one of Baghdads uncensored, honest and popular newspapers, in the explosion of free speech happening in that city.
An Egyptian woman raised in Britain and now living in Berlin, working to help local activists throughout the Middle East fight government corruption.
A young Belarusian student, a woman determined to help bring genuine democracy to her country.
When the Egyptian and the Belarusian visited Washington, I took each of them to the Lincoln Memorial. The Belarusian had never heard of Lincoln, the Egyptian only knew he had freed African-American slaves. Neither had read before his words, inscribed on the Memorials walls, rededicating the nation to the proposition that all people are equal, and to the great task of insuring that the idea of government by the people would be preserved for all mankind.
Lincolns insight was that equal rights could only be assured if government were based on the peoples consent. Gandhi saw in that equation a strategy for liberation: The British are ruling us for their own benefit, he told Indians, so why should we help them? They can rule only if we let them.
Take away consent and government withers. Resist oppression, drive up its cost, and you divide those who enforce it. Then power flows away from those who deceive the people to those who represent the truth. Vaclev Havel said that the greatest threat to a system based on lies is living in the truth.
Civic resistance undoes the ability of government to lie successfully. Nonviolent power grows in proportion to the distribution of truth. Therefore it cannot subvert legitimate order, because the struggle it wages must be open. The hearts of those who join the cause will not otherwise be reached.
I believe that everyone now alive is witnessing, whether they know it or not, the pursuit of a very great cause: the formation of a common global civil society, based not on an empire of arms but on individual consent. If this world isnt free and open, we have no chance to save the forests and the oceans, to remove disease and hunger, to release the full potential of every human being, because the old mortal habits of prejudice and avarice, ignorance and savagery — which justify the guns and jails and borders that drive us wide apart will abort this embryonic world. I believe that all of what stifles and divides humanity will eventually disappear. But not until our rights — to speak, to write, to vote, and to resist — are universal.
We have a choice. Would we delegate to those who are in love with violence the task of liberation? Or do we believe, with Lincoln, that the people have the right to overturn any form of domination, and with Gandhi, that they have the opportunity?
Jack DuVall, President, International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, http://www.nonviolent-conflict.org
I feel enriched, says translator of Gandhi’s biography
Yahoo News India – India – September 1, 2006
Tridip Suhrud’s English translation of Narayan Desai’s voluminous biography of Gandhi is slated for release in 2008.
The fact that institutions and universities around the world are introducing Gandhian Studies as a subject, speaks volumes about the universal appeal of the remarkable icon, his philosophies and principles. It also speaks about Gandhi’s relevance when it comes to solving modern-day conflicts. However, some great works on Gandhi, penned in regional languages need to be translated into English so that it can be accessed by the global community.
My Life is My Message, an English translation of Narayan Desai’s famous biography on Gandhi, Maaru Jeevan Ej Maari Vaani, is one such attempt in that direction. Desai’s voluminous and complete biography of Gandhi is being translated and edited by Dr. Tridip Suhrud, a teacher of Gandhian Studies at Ahmedabad’s DA-IICT. The four volumes of the biography will be published by Orient Longman and is expected to hit bookstores in two years, by October 2, 2008.
While the original Gujarati book was released on October 2, 2003, the work on its English version began just two days later. “I am fortunate that Narayanbhai chose me over many others for translating this beautiful book. I think I have emerged out much richer in terms of the knowledge and experience I have gained out of this effort,” says Suhrud, who finds translation “an immensely pleasurable job”. “Most Indians are bilingual, even trilingual. So the process of translation goes on in our lives,” he avers.
A well-planned approach and “generous help” from libraries at Sabarmati Ashram, Gujarat Vidyapeeth, DA-IICT library, National Gandhi Museum, Delhi, that supplied him the reference books mentioned in the original biography, made translation in these three years so far a not-so-difficult job. “I had to take care that if Narayanbhai’s book had used English books as reference, I did not end up re-translating it. Hence I have used the original excerpts referred to in the Gujarati book,” he says.
He also read books written in English by Desai, to make sure he communicated certain words in the same sense in which the author captured it. “For example, Ahimsa. As I observed, in one of Narayanbhai’s earlier books, written in English, Gandhi uses Ahimsa not just as ‘non-violence’, but even as ‘love.’ So while translating the book, I had to understand in what sense has Narayanbhai used the term Ahimsa. And if I have used it right, it is like getting authentication for the book from Gandhi himself,” he says.
In awe of the Mahatma’s ideas and thoughts right from childhood, Suhrud’s study at DA-IICT is a treasure trove of books and essays on Gandhi from across the world. “A crucial figure in the history of world thought, what I find attractive about him is that he was not a pure philosopher. He spanned an entire spectrum of human concern – be it establishing a university, promoting khadi, working for rural upliftment or contributing to politics,” he elaborates.
That scholarship does not come from a university, is the “greatest truth” he has discovered during the work. “Though Narayanbhai never went to school, he spent his entire life in understanding Gandhi and what Gandhi expected from him. No modern-day university will teach you that. Greatest learnings come from life’s experiences,” he says.
Mahatmas family walks in his footsteps
Indian Express – India – by Kamran Sulaimani – August 31, 2006
Ahmedabad, August 31: His mantra on peace and non violence still acts as a guiding principle for many across the globe. And as a way of promoting his crusade for peace, Mahatma Gandhis family is taking the baton of his philosophy across the world by holding rallies and conferences for terror victims and appealing for universal peace.
Bapus grandson Arun will lead a rally in Washington DC to highlight peace and non-violence on September 11, the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in which more than 2,700 people were killed. On the same day in Mumbai, his son Tushar will pay homage to the 200 victims of the July 11 train blasts.
Incidentally, September 11 is also the day on when Bapu, whose 137th birth anniversary will be celebrated next month, started his first non-violent campaign against racial discrimination in South Africa in 1906. His family also wants to draw attention to this peace campaign.
“The terror attacks in America and Mumbai have shown that violence will not take us anywhere. Peace and non-violence are the only solutions. We will hold small gatherings to propogate Gandhian philosphy, said Tushar, speaking to the Indian Express from Delhi.
He added, “We will be paying homage to the people who lost their lives in the Mumbai train blasts. Mahatma believed in peace and non-violence and by gathering at his statue, we will be showing solidarity with the families of those who died due to the act of terrorism or violence.
The day-long gathering will also witness troupes performing street plays on social issues, satyagrahs and other movements like jan andolan. The gathering will bring together peace activists, environmentalists and other civil human rights activists from across the country.
The principles of non-violence have become more relevant in the present World, says Tushar adding, “Be it Iraq or Lebanon, the recent terror strikes have only shown that violence is not the answer to a problem. Peace and change through peace will be the theme of our gathering at Nariman Point, he said.
On the other hand, his father Arun (72), a US citizen who founded the M K Gandhi Institute for Non-Violence there, will hold a conference titled Non-violence in the age of terrorism preceding the September 11 rally.
The objective of the one-day conference is to help devise a curriculum on non-violence and conflict resolution that it wants to make mandatory in public schools in the United States and Canada. The rally from the historic Lincoln Memorial would mark the centenary of Mahatmas first major public non-violent campaign.
Gandhi, A Second Coming
Outlook – India – by Sheela Reddy – September 11, 2006
A 100 years after he conceived the satyagraha, a breed of neo-Gandhians goes beyond the khadi and charkha to coopt Bapu in whole new ways.
“He was vital, witty, caring, inconvenient, a touchstone of a man. One thing he was not: a bore.” Gopal Gandhi, Author, Gandhi’s grandson
“Gandhi was deified, buried in institutions. An irony, given how uneasy he was with institutions.” Mushirul Hasan, Historian
“Khadi, charkha are outdated. We now need to climb on Gandhi’s shoulders and look ahead.” S.K. Dwivedi, Rashtriya Yuva Sangathan
“The youth may not appreciate a dhoti-clad Gandhi. (Till you) say he was a rich barrister who sacrificed all.” A. Annamalai, Gandhi Study Circle
“The art of living and dying” is how Mohandas Gandhi described his unique tool of resistance, perhaps India’s greatest contribution to modern times. But he couldn’t find a name for it until he held a contest. The word thrown up was: satyagraha. A hundred years later, a new breed of Gandhianswho have shed the old, faded icon of the Mahatma along with the khadi and the jholas to attract a new, hi-tech generationis reinventing Gandhian vocabulary by renaming it “9/11”. This, in memory of the day when an impassioned young barrister with blazing eyes gathered 3,000 Indians in the Empire Theatre building in Johannesburg on September 11, 1906, and asked them to take an oath to resist their white colonial oppressors without striking a single blow.
Oddly, while the government has yet to wake up to the significance of this eventapart from setting up one of those inevitable committees that has yet to meetGandhian youth organisations that have sprung up recently across the country are wresting the initiative away from the usual custodians of the Mahatma in a bid to reach the young. Plans are on to launch their year-long centenary celebrations in fresh, new ways that tie contemporary issues to the reawakened interest in a man who has so far been interred in textbooks and in marigold-engulfed statues. The new-age satyagrahisa word that they wish to avoid like the politicians in Gandhi topiswill go on peace runs, bicycle yatras for communal harmony, motorbike rallies for Indo-Pak peace and against female foeticide; take Gandhi films and discussion groups to professional colleges, radio programmes and wall newspapers to slums and villages; hold comicbook workshops and roundtable discussions with leaders of all political hues, including advocates of terrorism, “because everyone deserves to be heard”.
And it’s not just in India. A youthful surge of enthusiasm for Gandhian ideals across the globe is taking aback scholars and teachers who had grown resigned to thinking of him as a “back number”. When, for instance, University of Chicago professor and co-author of Postmodern Gandhi, Lloyd Rudolph, started an optional course on Gandhi a few years ago, he expected less than a dozen students to sign up. Instead, over 75 students, a quarter of them of Indian origin, applied. Many had to be turned away. “These are young people mostly from the science or technical streams, agnostic, not driven by dogma or religion, but by norms,” Lloyd explains. “They are looking for a course that adds meaning in their life, an answer to that eternal question: what shall I do with my life?” And, suddenly, it’s the Mahatma that fits the bill.
Agrees A. Annamalai of Chennai’s Gandhi Study Circle, one of the over 150 Gandhian youth organisations in India. “Young people may not be able to relate to a dhoti-clad Gandhi with his charkha,” he says. “But tell them how he was a millionaire London-returned barrister (Gandhi’s earnings as a barrister were around 5,000 pounds a year in an era when one pound fetched seven grams of gold) who threw away everything to fight for justice and equality, and they begin at once to appreciate him.” As a result, says the 40-year-old Gandhian in shirt and trousers who, unlike the old school of Gandhians, laughs a lot: “We’ve been able to recruit Gandhi enthusiasts from technical and engineering backgrounds, besides software professionals, as volunteers who contribute in many areas such as village industries, eco-friendly products, sensitising policemen and bureaucrats, and helping popularise Gandhi in schools and colleges in ways they can relate to.”
A national survey earlier this month by The Hindu-CNN-IBN bears this out.
The survey of Indians below 30 in 19 states showed that nearly 76 per cent rate Gandhi as their top role model. No one is more surprised by this than a generation that has seen Gandhi “enshrined or vandalised”, as his grandson and author Gopalkrishna Gandhi puts it. “Gandhi was ill-served by everyone, including the Gandhians,” agrees historian Mushirul Hasan. “They deified him and buried him in institutions, which is ironical, considering how uncomfortable Gandhi was with institutions. He was conveniently portrayed as a saint so that they wouldn’t be threatened by his ideology.”
But the worst disservice done to Gandhi, according to Gopal Gandhi, is how “a vital, witty, disturbing, admonitory, inconvenient, caring, touchstone of a man” was turned into the “one thing he was not: a bore”.
Even someone who came to Gandhi through the Marxist route like Aruna Roy is dismayed at how “a very modern, rational, interesting man with a fantastic sense of humour like Gandhi was turned into a fuddy-duddy crashing bore.
By turning him into the Father of the Nation, we could ignore him apart from putting up ugly statues at every crossing and garlanding him on October 2″. Whereas, Roy points out, “anyone who reads him can’t help but engage with him”. For activists, Roy says, Gandhi is “irrevocably and absolutely relevant, especially in these three areas: bringing ethical responsibility into public lifeno public figure anywhere in the world has examined himself so thoroughly in full public view; bringing a moral position into the economic debate; and his position against communalism, about the equality of all religions”.
It is this conviction about Gandhi’s potential to engage a new generation that’s driving attempts to repackage Bapu as their man for the 21st century. “We have to reach out to the young,” says Santosh Kumar Dwivedi, national secretary of the Rashtriya Yuva Sangathan (RYS), a Gandhian youth organisation set up 12 years ago. “If we want to set up a non-violent society, what other option is there before us?” But youth, as Dwivedi is the first to admit, aren’t exactly enamoured with the fusty, faddist lot of old Gandhians.
It is these so-called Gandhians who killed his spirit, says Leeladhar Manik Gada, a former timber merchant who now employs youth to work for social change in the Kutch area of Gujarat.
“They want young people to follow Gandhi with closed eyes. These Gandhians haven’t come out of their compounds and seen the world, nor have they made any attempt to understand today’s problems. They demand that the young follow Gandhi like they do.”
Leeladhar, who says he’s proud to call himself a Gandhian, belongs among the new Gandhians, although he’s 68. “There are plenty of young people who want to contribute to society. Many of them are graduates of rural studies without a job. Their work is worth much more than we can ever pay them. But if you ask them to wear khadi and discard technology, they won’t want to do this kind of work. What does it matter if a young man wears pants-shirt, uses a motorbike rather than walk, so long as he gets the work done?” Agrees Dwivedi, “There is youth power that can be tapped out there, and we weren’t doing it,” pointing out that’s why the RYS has discarded the old Gandhian symbols. Of course, there was resistance from the older lot but, as Dwivedi says, “Khadi and charkha are outdated symbols. We need to now climb on Gandhi’s shoulders and look ahead”.
The new approach worked: the new Gandhian youth movement has now spread across 10 states, with young volunteers involved in issues like promoting communal harmony, agitating for the land rights of dispossessed tribals in Madhya Pradesh and Orissa, and holding camps and workshops for college students and young professionals like themselves.
It’s youth in the cities that is the focus of people like Dwivedi “In the villages people haven’t forgotten their Gandhi Baba,” says the 36-year-old who works in Madhya Pradesh’s Umariya district, organising tribals to fight for their land rights through Gandhi’s methods. But the hardest part, agrees this new breed of Gandhians, is not so much seducing the young into reading Gandhi as disabusing them of the misconceptions that have spread unhindered in the last 50 years. Each of the open sessions in the summer camps that are now a yearly feature in many cities across India throws up the same questions: Gandhi versus Ambedkar, Gandhi versus Bhagat Singh and Gandhi versus the women in his life. It takes a Gandhian of a special kind to respond to this, according to Dwivedi. “The leader at these workshops has to be open-minded enough for these candid discussions, which often get very heated, and at the same time, has to be well-read enough to be able to counter these misconceptions.” At the last summer camp that Dwivedi led in Gandhi’s Sevagram ashram last year, for example, over 550 college students turned up, curious to experience the alternative lifestyle the ashram offers to its young residents. “We had to turn away many because we did not have enough qualified teachers to conduct this kind of workshop.”
But it’s well worth the effort, says Dwivedi, pointing out that the RYS has probably recruited more young volunteers in 12 years than most Gandhian organisations have been able to do over six decades. It’s not hard to understand why. To many, aware that globalisation is “the kiss of death” for many of their ideals, and in search of a way to be socially effective, the package they’re offering seems an irresistible one: a choice of alternative lifestyles, a chance to contribute to society, a challenging learning experience and, more important, no rigid ideology. “We just let everyone coopt Gandhi in their own way,” as an RYS founder, Kumar Prashant, says.
All agree, however, that the efforts to woo the young for the Gandhian cause are still too small and splintered. “A faint voice,” as one young Gandhian activist, Prerna Desai, puts it, “but distinctly beginning to be heard.” Swiss reporter Bernard Imhasly affirms this.Last year, he followed in the footsteps of the Mahatma, searching for his spirit in the usual places. What he saw there changed his mind. The book was to be called Goodbye to GandhiTravels Through India. He ended up putting a question mark after Gandhi. “It (Gandhi’s spirit) is there, but you don’t see it, because India is so obsessed with making it in the world that nothing else is evident.”
The articles of the Mahatma Gandhi News Digest originate from external sources.
They do not represent the views of GandhiServe Foundation.
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