Why India’s rulers and protesters alike need to rediscover the moral discipline of satyagraha.
What does the barricading of the national capital on October 10 show? The Indian State is as mighty as ever. No doubt, as was the colonial State. But does that mean that it is impervious to the moral force of satyagraha?
In fact, every takhta palat, change of regime is backed by a moral force. Herein lies the difference between anarchy, violence or chaos and peaceful, principled protest, or, satyagraha.
Insistence on truth is the precondition of every fight for justice, every resistance to oppression, every struggle against curtailment of liberty.
The moot point, however, is whether either the government or those protesting against it recognise this difference.
When invited to deliver the keynote address at the Eternal Gandhi Museum in Houston, Texas just after Gandhi Jayanti, I framed my remarks around three questions. Why is such a museum important? Why is Gandhi being cancelled in the country of his birth? And why does Gandhi persist not merely in India but overseas?
I argued in The Death and Afterlife of Mahatma Gandhi that Gandhi cannot be appropriated. Not by the Congress, not by the BJP, nor any other political party. Because Gandhi was not an ideologue but an exemplar.
On the walls of the Houston museum are emblazoned Gandhi's 11 ashram vows, the ekadash vrata. I asked my audience how many had seriously attempted to practise even one.
The first five were traditional Indian ethical disciplines: satya (truth), ahimsa (non-violence), brahmacharya (self-restraint), asteya (non-stealing) and aparigraha (non-possession). Significantly, Gandhi placed truth, not non-violence, first. The remaining six are sharira-shrama (bread labour), asvada (control of the palate), abhaya (fearlessness), sarva-dharma-samabhava (equal respect for religions), swadeshi (self-reliance) and asprishyata-nivarana (free from untouchability).
I had myself tried to practise just one of these vows: truth. And found even that extraordinarily difficult. In fact, for me that one vow is sufficient, at least for this lifetime.
The point is simple. Gandhi cannot be reduced to a slogan, statue or ritual. To invoke him is to accept a demanding moral responsibility. Unless we are prepared, however imperfectly, to practise even a fraction of what he did.
This brings me to the grammar of protest.
In his celebrated Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr, Gandhi's greatest twentieth-century American disciple, outlined four stages of non-violent resistance: fact-finding, negotiation, self-purification and direct action.
Notice the sequence. Protest was not the first resort but the culmination of a painstaking moral and political process. Before confronting injustice, the protester had to establish the facts, exhaust negotiation avenues and, most importantly, prepare himself or herself to suffer without retaliation.
This is precisely what distinguishes satyagraha from ordinary agitation, much less anarchic or violent disruption.
Does the Cockroach Janta Party, or any contemporary protest movement, measure up to this exacting standard? Are its leaders prepared to submit themselves to the discipline of truth, non-violence and self-purification? Can they demonstrate not merely anger against the government but the moral authority to challenge it?
These are not rhetorical questions. They go to the heart of Gandhi's continuing relevance.
For satyagraha offers civilised societies a third way between enforced submission and retaliatory counter-violence. Where the rule of law prevails, and where governments derive their legitimacy from the consent of the governed, citizens must retain the right to resist injustice peacefully.
Gandhi showed us the possibility of resistance without hatred, confrontation; without cruelty, courage; without aggression.
Which brings me to the second question. Why has Gandhi become increasingly inconvenient in India, particularly since 2014?
My answer may seem provocative. Gandhi is being deliberately diminished not because he is irrelevant, but precisely because he remains dangerous to those who wield power.
Not the Gandhi on currency notes, in official portraits, in cleanliness campaigns or in ceremonial tributes. That Gandhi is harmless enough. Indeed, he can be endlessly applauded. Or reduced to a pair of spectacles.
But the Gandhi who mobilised ordinary people against entrenched authority, who insisted that obedience to conscience might supersede obedience to the State, who demonstrated that legitimate political power ultimately rests upon moral consent?
That Gandhi is decidedly dangerous to all power, especially to State authority.
The systematic denigration of Gandhi, including attempts to rehabilitate his assassin, trivialise his achievements or tarnish his experiments in brahmacharya, cannot be dismissed as harmless historical revisionism. They reflect, I would argue, a deeper design to delegitmate dissent.
Every government prefers a compliant citizenry. Some would even like to emulate China's combination of economic dynamism and political obedience. But India is not China.
Our democratic inheritance includes the right to question, disagree, organise and peacefully resist.
Indeed, what is India without Satyameva jayate, the triumph of truth proclaimed in the Mundaka Upanishad, which is also our national motto? What is our civilisational inheritance without Ahimsa paramo dharma, celebrated in the Shanti Parva of the Mahabharata?
Can we banish Gandhi without also diminishing the very axiological and metaphysical foundations of Sanatana Dharma?
Yet the responsibility is not the government's alone. Protesters, too, must learn that moral legitimacy cannot be manufactured through slogans, social media outrage or theatrical confrontation. It must be earned through discipline, sacrifice and fidelity to truth.
Which finally brings me back to Houston.
Why does the Eternal Gandhi Museum matter?
Because Gandhi belongs not merely to India but to humanity. If we discard him in the land of his birth, he may well return to us from elsewhere. Perhaps even from somewhere as unlikely as Houston, Texas.
Meanwhile, in Delhi, barricades and police cordons confront the urgency of youth protests. But can fortress Delhi indefinitely withstand the moral force of a genuine satyagraha?
The challenge for India's rulers is to recognise that dissent need not be disloyalty. The challenge for protesters is to demonstrate that resistance need not descend into disorder.
Both have much to learn from Gandhi. For the grammar of protest is also, ultimately, the grammar of democracy.
Makarand R Paranjape | RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE | Author and commentator
(Views are personal)
(On X @MakrandParanspe)
