Living Gandhi and King Today: Unbroken Historic Continuity

The UN has declared October 02, 2008 as International Non-violence Day. This article is written in celebration of the theme “Living Gandhi and King Today� for Gandhi Peace Festival 2008.

Need for peace remains unchanged ever since the conception of Vedas to the age of Mahavira who preached peace as an eternal truth. Last century witnessed Gandhi elaborating on Satyagraha(1), which means firmness of truth as a philosophy of peace. Application of Satyagraha begins with a commitment to personal peace that also brings social life under its folds.

Gandhi perceives personal and political struggles as intertwined. Liberation of one is not complete without the other. Not too long ago, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King struggled against injustice in their respective nations. Their struggle was political but those struggles were also social experiments that provided proof that violent human impulses could be reined in and peace oriented consciousness could be cultivated on mass scale. There were triumphs and tribulations along the way but commitment to non-violence remained unwavering.

In this age, humanity faces unprecedented crises. There are individual and societal crises. There are nuclear hazards and environmental disasters. Environmental degradation is happening fast enough to threaten the very survival of this planet as a living organism. There are wars. There is exploitation and rampant poverty in the world. These global predicaments are various manifestations of violent consciousness. In the course of history, social systems have come to breed violence and exploitation at all levels of human existence.

These are not mere historic conjectures or sociological abstraction. According to Oxfam, tariffs imposed on developing countries are 4 times higher when they export goods to rich countries(2). Cumulative effect of such policies over time is devastating for developing countries. Such policies push the poor into a black-hole of poverty from which they can hardly imagine to escape.

Poor societies are always in grips of violence. It pervades their social and systemic fabric. Ubiquitous violence in poor countries sometimes masquerades in right cause mentals and sometime in shades of righteousness. There are always justifications for violence, even convoluted justifications, which is nothing more than rationalization of violence. Nonetheless, the net result is being at odds with oneself and others. Such conflicts are direct outcome of poverty and they multiply poverty that breaks the back of social systems. It helps perpetuate illiteracy and economic debt with no end in sight. With current economic and social movement towards globalization, the way it is moving, problems with violence will presumably worsen.

Consider the fact that almost 20 percent of the world population lives on one dollar per person per day. This figure rises to more than half of the world population if criterion for poverty is set at 2 dollars per person per day, which is the internationally defined poverty line. It includes 97 percent of population in Uganda, 80 percent in Nicaragua, 66 percent in Pakistan, and 47 percent in China, according to data from the World Bank(3).

At this point, we think it is important to understand what it means to be poor? It means chronic hunger, malnutrition and no chance for eduction. It means there is no possibility for proper treatment in the face of a sickness. It means society is most likely chronically conflict ridden and there is hardly any possibility for sociopolitical breakthrough, which adds an extra dimension to existential problems.

In the current hopeless global situation, Gandhian way has a promise for a better world. Gandhian way promotes consciousness of peace and harmony, which is the foundation stone to build a peaceful society, particularly in the face of adversity.

Mahatma extensively elaborated on his method of peace by personal examples that are well known to everybody. However, he devised methods of political struggle based on peace consciousness; the method of Satyagraha. In this method, need for political struggle is granted but it has to be non-violent. Gandhi’s personal life and Indian national scene at that time provided good insight into the idea and application of non-violence in social struggle and politics. Martin Luther King used this method during his famous struggle for ending racial discrimination and injustice in the US.

Dr. King’s dream of equitable race relations between blacks and whites in America and South Africa’s “Truth and Reconciliation Commission� conceived by Nelson Mandela proved the practicality of method of Satyagraha. It showed that peaceful resolution to long standing conflicts is certainly possible.

Lately, we have noticed that some left leaning intellectuals have also talked about the possibility of non-violent struggle in the context of Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That is a welcome departure from psyche of violent revolutions that the left has been famous for. This is an area that needs further theoretical exploration of Gandhian method for its appropriate application.

Advancing Gandhi’s work Prof. Madan Hanada at University of Toronto conceived of peace paradigm. He has succinctly put together four elements of new paradigm of peace for the world(4):

1. An overall philosophy of human, nature etc.
2. A conception of how society works and where it is going.
3. A vision of a preferred future, if the existing reality is not moving in a desirable direction measured by some criteria, and
4. A conception of ‘what is to be done’ to alter the existing reality.

Gradually, mankind has come to live with increasing complexities. Social perceptions have changed. Social determinism has given way to right-of-determination. Cultures are no longer considered static. Aristocracies are slowly being replaced by democracies, at least in a sense that right of majority to determine the direction of shared fate is well etched as a new social consciousness. This is a new global reality, which is still in the making. The challenge for new social consciousness is to shape itself into a peace reality, which has a broken tract record in the history.

Avant-garde force of history is always challenging. It brings new conflicts to the fore. Conflicts within individual and social psyche are realities of life and so are threats to harmonious coexistence. It is in this context, Gandhi’s method of non-violent struggle blends in with sublime spirituality, which is a shared heritage of all humanity. He focuses on the “Self� for emancipation and enlightenment of society that is free of violence and free from exploitation. But it is worth remembering that Gandhi does not wish to operate in lonely quarters of human psyche. He roots humans in society and seamlessly works on both levels.

Broadly, any society is made up of at least three elements: Values, culture and social structure. Culture and values are not static social entities. Social structure is hard to sustain exclusively on the basis of ideology because there are inherent conflicts with other ideologies. Proponents and practitioners of ideologies create fault line in the fabric of human consciousness and not too infrequently there are confusions and scars of guilt. Gandhi’s method is a holistic method. It is a way of living, an inclusive way of thinking and a conception of interpersonal relations.

The real point here is that Satyagraha is a method to pave way for liberation of individual and social psyche without polarization. It might sound somewhat utopian. In real life one is bound to take positions and make social commitments at a certain juncture of history. Such positions need not create a state of conflict between inner self and the outer world. This unification of individual and social psyche is the essence of Gandhian method. It is a dynamic process of struggle to levitate humans to a different level of consciousness. Consciousness - individual, social and political, is as real as human. It is also one of the agents of movement of material history of humans.

We are cognizant of the fact that there is an opposing view that consciousness is shaped by material realities. This is a valid view. But material history, as such, does not operate in a vacuum to shape a certain type of historic consciousness. Interdependence of these two key elements of human existence poses important questions at any stage of history. However, in this age where perception of civilization has almost become global, it begs for harmony and peace with nature, with oneself and with each other far more than ever before.