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Tonya
Regular Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 27
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, September 09, 2006 - 03:22 am: | 
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Gandhi is not history
September 8, 2006
It is the 100th anniversary of one of the most significant events of recent history. In 1906, an India-born lawyer in South Africa, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, encountered the draft Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance proposed by the Transvaal Government in the August 22nd issue of the government gazette, and at once decided that this legislation would have to be opposed. He saw, Gandhi later wrote, nothing "except hatred of Indians" in the proposed legislation, which, if passed, "would spell absolute ruin for the Indians in South Africa".
The ordinance required all Indians, eight years and older, living in the Transvaal, to report to the Registrar of Asiatics and obtain, upon the submission of a complete set of fingerprints, a certificate that would then have to be produced upon demand. The ordinance proposed stiff penalties, including deportation, for Indians who failed to comply with its terms.
Fingerprints were then demanded only from criminals, and the subjection of women to such a requirement had no other objective but the humiliation of Indians. Gandhi understood that the ordinance effectively criminalised the entire community. He mobilised the Indians, who had first arrived in South Africa as indentured labourers in 1860, to put up resistance.
At a meeting in Johannesburg, 3,000 Indians took an oath not to submit to the legislation, and Gandhi spoke at length on the obligation to never repudiate a pledge. Thus was born satyagraha - non-violent resistance - and over the next four decades, in South Africa and in India, Gandhi endeavoured to perfect it, offering satyagraha not only to the British but to the world as a form of ethical politics and a consummate lifestyle.
Many in Gandhi’s own lifetime doubted its efficacy, and some claimed that satyagraha could only have succeeded against a purportedly gentlemanly opponent such as the British. Many more have since claimed that the unspeakable cruelties of the 20th century render non-violent resistance an effete, if noble, idea.
India’s resounding experiment with democracy, for all its shortcomings and the one major relapse of the mid-Seventies, when an internal Emergency was imposed and constitutional safeguards suspended, may owe much more to Gandhi than is commonly conceded.
However, South Africa, which Gandhi claimed as his second home and which he left for good in 1914, may present a more complex case of the assessment of his legacy. The most pressing charge is that he did little to improve the situation of Black Africans and did not draw them into the struggle against racism. By what right Gandhi could have spoken for Black and Coloured Africans is not adequately explained.
The Natal Indian Congress, in the founding of which in 1894 Gandhi had a hand, became the model for the African National Congress. Black South African nationalists have been forthright in crediting Gandhi with having exercised an incalculable influence on their thinking and on the moral tenor of the struggle against apartheid.
The word satyagraha is derived from satya (truth) and agraha (firmness), and it is not implausible that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was not only post-apartheid South Africa’s homage to Gandhi but a way of extending satyagraha into the 21st century.
If one of the first principles of Gandhian thinking is that a moral politics rests upon consideration of means rather than ends, then we are not even called upon to assess the efficacy of satyagraha. The advocates of non-violent resistance who are dismissed as woolly-headed idealists, should, on the contrary, ask the proponents of violence to demonstrate that violence can produce enduring good.
How far we have travelled in the last 100 years is evident from the ease with which fingerprinting, once demanded only of criminals, has been normalised in most societies as part of the surveillance regime of the Nation-State. There was some indignation when the US, shortly after 9/11, began to require fingerprints from every adult visitor. But this has now become a routine activity. One of the least appreciated aspects of Gandhi’s worldview is his construing of deception, secrecy and perpetration of falsehoods as forms of violence.
The advocate of satyagraha may no more resort to secrecy than to violence, and it is remarkable that, before undertaking his famous salt satyagraha of 1930, Gandhi addressed a letter to the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, informing him of his plans to resist an iniquitous piece of legislation and inviting Irwin to have him arrested.
Gandhi would have seen the common thread that runs through the surveillance of US residents, the US aggression in Iraq, and the brutal culture of violence amidst which we live, which also ties terrorists and their antagonists in nefarious secrecy and violence. On the 100th anniversary of satyagraha, a modicum of reflection on the debased state of our politics might help recover a place for non-violent resistance.
The writer is Associate Professor, UCLA Department of History, & Chair of South Asia Interdepartmental Program
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1790087,00120002.htm |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 2736
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, September 09, 2006 - 09:16 am: |
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Americans are materialistic and violent. Satyagraha will not work in America.
For those who will trumpet Dr. King I will repeat that he got his brains blown out and his movement was scattered. Gandhi himself was assasinated by members of his own faith, some Hindu extremists.
I will submit that the shellacking the British got in Malaya, Burma, along the Indian frontier from the Japanese, and in North Africa from the Germans during WWII was more instrumental in freeing India than Mohandas was.
Particularly the way The Empire was humiliated by the Japanese robbed the British of the main thing that they used to rule the millions of subject people, their prestige.
America can take heed.
In order for your hoodoo to work the people you want to work it on must believe in it. Your enemy stresses Satyagraha because they know they need never give in--look at how they handle non violent resisters and protesters so well today.
Gandhis strategy was the strategy of the weak in mind. The Indians in India outnumbered the British well over one hundred to one. They could have tossed them out any time they wished, but they were not unified. There never had been a nation on the Indian subcontinent in history before what 1948?
In a way, the Indians have the British to thank for unifying them to the point they could make a nation.
The people who believe in Satyagraha want to make an omelet without breaking eggs. |
Abdi85
Veteran Poster
Username: Abdi85
Post Number: 74
Registered: 04-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, September 10, 2006 - 07:44 am: |
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Chrishayden: They could have tossed them out any time they wished, but they were not unified. There never had been a nation on the Indian subcontinent in history before what 1948?
Abdi85: Well technically the Magdha Empire counts which united the entire sub continet, for a time at least around 2000yrs ago. Other than that, there really was no time besides the British Raj that the entire subcontinet had one ruler, I really wouldn't call that unification though.
Chrishayden:In a way, the Indians have the British to thank for unifying them to the point they could make a nation.
Abdi85: Honestly the British did more to seperate Indians then to unite them, that's how they managed to rule India for almost 2 centuries. Thier biggest fear was Indian unification based on Indianess rather than the communal ideology that is so rampant in the subcontinet today which is mainly thanks to the British. They played the 2 major groups against each other (Muslims and Hindus). They used the sheer numbers of the Hindu majority to intimedate the Muslim population, while at the same time rewriting history and making India a strictly Hindu land from time immemorial untill the invasion of the "evil" foriengers (Muslims), rather than the continuous civilization it has been for the past 5000yrs, with different groups;the Harrappan civilzation, the Vedic aryans, Muslims and later on Parsi's and many other communities. They did all of this and much more, while at the same time working with the elites of each community. Through things like the education system, Indians were made to believe first in thier inferiority and submissiveness (Hindus)and inate agressiveness (Muslims). Both groups then were made to believe that the other was a road block in gaining rights for thier community.
Lets not even mention the other groups in India who were utterly marginlized or forced to take sides. I mean look at the Partition of India in 1948 into Pakistan and India purely a communal struggle brought on by the colonial policies of the British. Even the second Partition in 1972 I think it was of West and East Pakistan into Pakistan and Bangladesh is another example.
I know that's a crazy rant but nothing in History is really as simple as it seems. And no the British did not unite Indians, they might have been seperated into different polities but there was always a shared sense of Indianess and believe it or not co-operation espically during Muslim rule, not to say they didn't kill eachother over good o'l things like profit and land. Romila Thapar's "Early India: From Origins to 1300AD" is a good place to start for anyone interested in ancient Indian History and "Modern South Asia" by Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal if you want to look at the the colonial period up to Partition. |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 2742
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, September 10, 2006 - 11:49 am: |
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They united the Indians in their opposition to their being there.
You see what happened after they left--Muslims and Hindus turned on each other like mad dogs. |
Abdi85
Veteran Poster
Username: Abdi85
Post Number: 75
Registered: 04-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, September 10, 2006 - 02:31 pm: |
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They never united anyone, besides certian communities. I don't think your connecting the historical dots here. British policy is the reason they "turned on each other like mad dogs". That term itself implies as if they had united previously to get rid of the British which they didn't. Hindus had thier own social movements and Muslims thiers, there was no uniting. I think that's what your missing, the whole affair of Indian Independence happend on two fronts, the so called Hindu struggle and the less known Muslim one. If there was this shared sense of being Indian, communal violence that still goes on would probably have never happpend. The British not only had a hand in creating today's system of communal ideology (hell even excaserbating the caste system), they maintained it through education and economics and probably other forms I can't remeber now. |
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