Jacket - front - inside:

MAHATMA

GANDHI

On

Terrorism

And

War

Peter RüheIntroduction by Michael N. Nagler

www.gandhimedia.org

Jacket – front – inside:

Mahatma Gandhi - the Father of the Indian Nation, and the Apostle of Nonviolence. He

worked for India's independence from the British rule. And gave us the awesome power

of nonviolence. A social reformer, he taught the world the eternal values of love and

truth. His fight for human rights, protection of environment and religious tolerance was

mankind's finest hour.

This book introduces the reader to the thoughts and writings of Mahatma Gandhi on

nonviolence, terrorism and war. It also presents a report about Gandhi’s two visits to the

nonviolent army of Abdul Ghaffar Khan at the Afghanistan border. This army, called the

Red Shirts, experimented with nonviolence to pacify this violence-stricken area in the

1940’s.

The texts are supported by rare images of Gandhi from the archives of his family and

associates.

Jacket - back - inside:

Peter Rühe specialized in the collection and conservation of visual material related to

Gandhi. He presented multimedia events on Gandhi in many countries and has contributed

to several TV productions. Rühe is the founder of the GandhiServe Foundation, Berlin and

webmaster of the largest resource on Gandhi on the internet, GandhiServe’s Mahatma

Gandhi Research and Media Service – www.gandhiserve.org

Peter Rühe is the author of the book Gandhi – A Photo Biography, Phaidon Press,

2001.

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The writings by Mahatma Gandhi are published by permission of the Navajivan Trust,

Ahmedabad - 380 014 (India).

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Dedicated to the

Conscience of Humanity

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C o n t e n t s

Contents

Preface

Introduction by Michael N. Nagler

My Writings

Gandhi on:

Violence and Nonviolence

War

Terrorism

Gandhi’s visits to the Afghanistan border

First visit: May 1, 1938 – May 8, 1938

Second visit: October 5, 1938 – November 9, 1938

Glossary

Literature

Index

Photograph Index

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Preface

The world confronts an ever-widening increase of violence and the terrible loss of life in

innumerable smaller and larger armed conflicts around the world. No region of the globe

is exempt from the sourge of violence. The fear of different races, religions,

nationalities, and ethnic identities continues to fan the flames of hatred and violence

allover.

Mahatma Gandhi, known as the father of independent India and the apostle of

nonviolence, offers the twenty-first century a way out. He worked for India’s

independence from the British rule. And gave us the awesome power of nonviolence. A

social reformer, he taught the world the eternal values of love and truth. His fight for

human rights, protection of environment and religious tolerance was mankind’s finest

hour.

This book introduces the reader to the toughts and writings of Mahatma Gandhi on

nonviolence, terrorism and war. The selection of quotes have been carefully made from

original sources. The book also documents Gandhi’s two visits to the nonviolent army of

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan in the then North-West Frontier Provinces of India near the

Afghanistan border. This army of 100.000 Pathans (Pashtuns), called the Red Shirts,

experimented with nonviolence in order to pacify this most violent area of the Khyber

Pass. This is a success story of heroism that comes when born fighters take to

nonviolence. The Red Shirts exploded three myths: that non-violence can be followed

only by those who are gentle; that it cannot work against ruthless repression; and that it

has no place in Islam.

The rare photographs of this visit of Gandhi hail from the archives of Gandhi’s family

and associates and – except a few – are published here for the first time.

May this book help to spread the message of nonviolence and create a better

understanding of the personality of Gandhi about whom late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

said: “If humanity is to progress, Gandhi is inescapable. He lived, thought, and acted,

inspired by the vision of humanity evolving toward a world of peace and harmony. We

may ignore him at our own risk.”

Peter Rühe

Berlin, September 2006

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Introduction

On April 8, 1929, a young man named Bhagat Singh entered the visitor's gallery of the

Lahore assembly where many British and Indian officials were conferring, threw a bomb

and began firing an automatic pistol. Singh, who had assassinated the British assistant

superintendent of police at Lahore the previous December, was captured on this

occasion and hanged in March of 1931.

Gandhi, who had utterly condemned both these "dastardly" acts of violence, warned

after the perpetrator was finally done to death:

Bhagat Singh and his companions have been executed and have become martyrs.

Their death seems to have been a personal loss to many. I join in the tributes paid to

the memory of these young men. And yet I must warn the Youth of the country against

following their example. We should not utilize our energy, our spirit of sacrifice, our

labours and our indomitable courage in the way they have utilized theirs. This country

must not be liberated through bloodshed.

(Footnote: Find in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi under New Delhi, March

23, 1931)

No one loathed terrorism more than Gandhi. He stood to lose everything he had worked

for with a single bomb, for he knew full well how rulers seize on the chance to condemn

non-violent movements for the slightest infraction (as today's media will ignore a highly

disciplined non-violent demonstration for hours, to seize on the odd outbreak of

sabotage). But Gandhi's aversion to terrorism went much deeper. Terrorism is in many

ways the worst form of violence. Indeed, it is often tinged with a kind of cowardice,

which is even worse than violence, if anything can be. As one who dedicated his whole

life to showing weary humanity the way out of violence he could not possibly condone

one of its worst forms.

Yet, as an American writer said recently, "terrorism cannot be condoned, but it can be

understood." And therein lies both the subtlety and the contemporaneity of Gandhi's

position.

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The major difference between Gandhi's views and the prevailing U.S.-led reaction to

terrorism is that no matter how much terrorism sickened him (I am not being hyperbolic;

there are eye-witness accounts of Gandhi being physically revolted by open violence),

he did not hate terrorists. For him, precisely because he was nonviolent, the doer was

never identified with his deed. Thus we find him pleading in vain with the Viceroy for

commutation of the sentence of death for Bhagat Singh and his accomplices in 1930,

and not just because it might make the misguided patriot a martyr: in the Mahatma's

eyes, violence is violence whether handed down by a legally constituted court or hurled

by a lone assassin. All life is sacred; all violence to life is desecration. It was by the

same reasoningthat while he hated "from the bottom of my heart the system of

government that the British have set up in India" and the way they kept it set up, he

"refuse[d] to hate the domineering Englishman," just as he refused to hate the

domineering Hindu.

This refusal to dehumanize made it possible for Gandhi to, as we say, not condone but

understand. He pleaded with the colonial government to listen to the voice, however

hoarse and inarticulate, that was issuing from the deeds of their attackers: "Will you

not see the writing that these terrorists are writing with their blood? Will you not see that

we do not want bread made of wheat, but we want bread of liberty; and without that

liberty there are thousands today who are sworn not to give themselves peace or to give

the country peace." He did not ask that the terrorism be condoned (though he may have

asked that the terrorist be spared); he asked most urgently that it be understood.

Gandhi probably knew that his pleas would not bring concrete results, but acted in the

faith that on some level they must tell on his audience and anyone listening. Any form

of Satyagraha, as he said elsewhere, will eventually “force reason to be free” whether or

not we see that freedom in our own lifetime.

At the same time – this is also highly characteristic of nonviolence – no matter how

strenuously he opposed the British overreaction he tried equally hard to hold back the

overreaction of isolated Indians as youth, pariticularly in Bengal, ignored his advise and

followed Bhagat Singh down the road of despair.

All this could not be more pertinent to our own situation. Condemn terrorism, by all

means, he urges, but condemn it even-handedly. Terror is terror, he would say today,

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whether it comes strapped to the body of a suicide bomber or launched from thousands

of miles out of range onto targets that may just turn out to be civilians.

If we are not to use violence to protect ourselves against such attacks, though, what on

earth are we to use?

The answer is on one level very easy: nonviolence is the only possible alternative.

Otherwise we only add violence to violence, thus making the cycle of destruction

endless, as many have begun to suspect. But most of us still have only a vague idea

what exactly nonviolence is; in the hundred years since Gandhi launched it in South

Africa we have barely begun to exploit the vast power for positive change that it holds.

The situation is oddly similar to the great breakthroughs in physics that occurred at very

much the same time: a handful of theoretical and applied physicists work with the reality

of quantum science while the general public remains unshaken in its literally

superstitious belief that all reality is material and outside the observer. Similarly, a

handful of specialists and a small (but fortunately growing) number of activists operate

in a paradigm of principled nonviolence while the majority of us still try, with increasing

hopelessness, to counter violence with more violence wherever we meet it. We need,

urgently, to think about what exactly nonviolence is and how to apply it in such

desperate conditions as our own.

That is the purpose of this collection. In it, Gandhi holds nothing back in his unstinting

praise for this force which he has experimented with for fifty years, and, as a result of

those tireless experiments, about which he makes two great claims: that nonviolence is

“the greatest power humankind has been endowed with,” and that there is no situation

in which it cannot be successfully applied. Terrorism It was cardinal for him that when

an application of nonviolence seemed to fail, the error was to be sought in the actor (for

example, himself) not in the principle. Just as violence fails when we make a mistake in

how we use it, so nonviolence can seem to fail when we don’t understand the timing,

the target or the exact form in which it should be applied — with the tragic difference

that we never condemn violence itself when it doesn’t work.

While he knew that others might and often did have lower standards, for Gandhi

Nonviolence, "the law of our being," was "not a policy but a creed." It is to be taken as a

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law, not just a matter of convenience, and followed as such if we wish to benefit from its

full power. The distinction between 'policy' and 'creed' is usually referred to today as

strategic and principled nonviolence. The former is the mere abstention from (overt)

violence and is undertaken for pragmatic considerations, often to be dropped as soon

as those considerations no longer apply. Principled nonviolence, which I define as 'the

power released by an inner struggle against destructive drives,' is a struggle which

arises from, and in turn contributes to an attitude of genuine concern for the person or

persons who oppose us (as distinct from their opposition, which we actively resist).

This kind alone has power over bullies, gangsterism, rogue governments - or terrorists.

In it the centrality of human dignity – for which, if necessary, life itself can be sacrificed,

becomes not only a “creed” but an extremely practical tool. Many a conflict can be

resolved when once opponents come to respect each other — and the practice of

courageous nonviolent resistance gains that respect. This and many other features of

‘nonviolence of my conception,’ as he often called it, are intuitively reasonable to most

of us. One statement, however, requires comment. Gandhi does not hesitate to say

that "in the last resort it does not avail those who do not possess a living faith in the God

of Love." This can be a stumbling block for many today, after seven more decades of

immersion in the mass media and the relentless march of materialism. Here is one way

to think about it: Gandhi's God was very personal, the "God of Love." When shot without

warning at point-blank range he would die with the name of his God (Rama) on his lips.

Yet Gandhi would not have dreamed of saying that this was the only right way to

conceive of God. Once, in fact, when he teased his devoted secretary, Nirmal Kumar

Bose, a distinguished Bengali scientist, "Don't you believe in anything, Nirmal" and the

latter answered "I believe in Truth." Gandhi was quick to reply "That will do." For “Truth

is God” was precisely the conception that Gandhi himself reached as the definitive

statement of his faith. In other words, we who may be averse to the notion of an "old

man with a stick" (as a Buddhist writer said recently) ruling us and the rest of the

universe from the sky somewhere are at liberty to interpret Gandhi's "God"

impersonally, as the Supreme Reality. What Gandhi does mean to imply by this rule is

that life has a discoverable meaning, that there is a Power which controls the Universe,

including the human universe, according to a purpose which we flout only at our peril.

That is a faith position from which he never wavered. What does it mean for those of us

who wish to be non-violent today but may not share that position?

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Possibly very little. There are, for example, twenty or so organizations worldwide,

including one that is part of a national government (the German Civil Peace Service),

that are now trying to put into practice various pieces of the old Gandhian dream of a

"Peace Army" (usually called now Third Party Nonviolent Resistance, or TPNI). Some of

these organizations are faith-based: Christian Peacemaker Teams or Michigan Faith

and Resistance, Quaker Peace & Service, Witness for Peace. Others, like Peace

Brigades International, are "secular." But they are doing exactly the same work. Actions

always speak louder than words; and one could argue that in this age, when words

about religion are so confusing, only actions speak. Volunteers who are willing to risk

their lives to protect strangers are, to paraphrase Ben Franklin, "always and everywhere

of the same religion" whether they profess adherence to a particular sect or none at all.

Be that as it may, it is very clear what Gandhi's position would be were he here to help

us deal with the looming menace now facing us. Condemn terrorism, he would say, but

not (except as the law provides) terrorists. We cannot afford to confound the doer and

his deed; not only because it costs us something humanly when we do that, but

because it closes the door to any possibility of changing the minds and hearts of those

who hate us. To put this in modern terms, the worst thing we can do to think about

terrorists is to dehumanize them - exactly what the mass media and political leaders

have done in the wake of September 11 by calling them 'jackals,' 'varmints,' cave-

dwellers and similar metaphors. Seen in this light, even the word "terrorist" is a

dangerous mistake. You can communicate with a person (provided he's still alive) who

has been driven by desperation to commit a heinous act against you; it's much harder to

communicate with a "terrorist" who is cast beyond the pale of reason by that very

designation.

A dozen years after Gandhi's passing, in May of 1960, a remarkable scene unfolded in

one of the most lawless communities of India, the hereditary dacoits (bandits) of

Madhya Pradesh. Vinoba Bhave, a saintly man widely regarded as the Mahatma's

spiritual successor, was passing through the region and was warned that the ravines

were "infested" with dacoits. “No,” he quickly replied, they were “inhabited by human

beings” — and he wanted to visit them. He wanted to visit them "to show affection. I

assured them that they would be treated justly, without brutality, and that their families

would not suffer." Large numbers of dacoits came to him, surrendered their costly

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weapons and turned themselves in to face the punishment duly prescribed under the

law. In many cases they received mild, humane treatment with an emphasis on

rehabilitation and did in fact return to society to lead normal lives. Such is the power of

stripping off labels and seeing the persons beneath them.

There is no reason this approach could not be taken not only by individuals but by

states. Gandhi insisted that "nonviolence can be practiced by masses of mankind"

(Footnote: see p. 00), in fact he declared it nothing short of "blasphemy" to believe that

"nonviolence can only be practiced by individuals and never by nations which are

composed of individuals" (Footnote: Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 74, p.

194). In addition to de-labeling perpetrators we would have to change our view of a

terrorist attack, namely from an act of war to a crime, which is after all more truthful. As

one commentator recently pointed out, terrorism is a technique, not a country; the "war"

against terrorism is only a metaphor – and not one that is helpful. But beyond that step,

if we want to bring up the power of nonviolence, we would also shift our response to this

kind of crime — or any other from what is called a retributive to a restorative justice. In

other words, we would have to regard the perpetrators the way Gandhi regarded Bhagat

Singh: as a seriously misguided human being, but a human being, and hold open the

possibility that they could be won over, or at least won away from their extremely violent

methods, and that even if that failed we could undertake real changes in policy to

remove the worst of their grievances, and thereby most of their support.

Perhaps it bears repetition - such is the level of anxiety surrounding these acts - that no

one, least of all a nonviolent person, is talking about condoning such attacks; nor is

anyone talking about passivity (which is never the response of nonviolence to anything).

We are speaking of responding in a manner that will not perpetuate the very offenses

we're trying to eliminate.

Just as the death penalty slightly increases the rate of homicide in a state that adopts it,

harsh measures of retaliation only show the desperate that their desperation was

justified. Even the mightiest superpower in the world cannot evade the law that violence

begets violence.

Implicit in Gandhi’s response to terrorism in India and, more broadly, in his whole theory

of nonviolence, are the outlines of an approach that would work with, rather than

against, this unbreakable law. A nonviolent response to terrorism begins in an attitude

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of mind, namely a non-dehumanizing, non-labelling of those who use that method to

attack us. Then a state victimized by terrorism would take its grievance to an

international court (as the majority of world opinion, according to a recent poll, would

have preferred that the United States had done). This would be the most realistic and

most effective response, absent someone or some group with the trust and prestige of a

Vinoba Bhave. And given that the 'peace army' concept is still in an early stage of

development.

At the same time, however, it is the height of folly to wait until we have already been

attacked and then react after the fact. Here is where Gandhi pleads, for our own safety,

that we try to understandthe legitimate grievances of those who take to this drastic

method. Repressive conditions in Saudi Arabia, where since 1943 United States

presidents have guaranteed the security of the ruling family against external or internal

threat, the devastation of Iraq, and the grinding hopelessness of Palestine are legitimate

grievances, and they must be addressed. As Gandhi said, "Will you not see the writing

that these terrorists are writing with their blood?"

Not condone their language, but read their message. The present approach means, as

a high-ranking U.S. Army official recently said in Iraq, “We are creating terrorists faster

than we can kill them.” The point is not to “eliminate” them (to use only one modern

euphemism) but to take the wind out of the their sails By reasonably just behavior. We

often hear the compelling objection, 'how can you reason with terrorists, who are no

more rational than Hitler?' Because they are not terrorists but enraged people. We can

change the conditions that give extremists their legitimacy — and the support system

they need to do their ghastly work. Was WWII caused by a single madman, or by the

fact that millions were willing to listen to him? In other words, was it caused by one

demonic person (of whom there will always be some, almost anywhere, or the "Peace

that passeth all understanding," the unscrupulous treaty of Versailles, that so enraged

the German people that they were ready to take his raving seriously? Of course it

requires emotional courage to face up to the legitimacy of grievances against oneself;

but this way, and this way only leads to security.

"Nobody throws away his life without some motive behind," he says about the terrorists

in Bengal; "have we the courage to ask what is that motive?" (Footnote: see p. 00)

Have we?

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If reading that message is emotionally difficult for us, because no one wants to own

responsibility for cruelties, taking the steps to correct them is also a challenge. The fact

is, even to survive we will have to work deep changes in our way of life to support less

cruel policies toward peoples and the planet as a whole. In the case of the United

States, former President Jimmy Carter recently observed that the biggest problem in the

world today is the huge and growing gap between the rich and poor, and if we could

solve that problem "there would be fewer people willing to kill themselves to hurt an

American" or whomever. And that is not all. Even to address changes toward a more

reasonable style of life we in the West will even have to make changes in our culture. If

Gandhi were physically alive today I believe that he would be spending most of his

waking hours warning against, creating substitutes for and weaning people away from

television, and the commercial mass media in general. These media and that worldview

have made violence a way of thought and of life in the modern world. The two boys who

planned a school massacre in Massachusetts recently, like the boys before them who

actually such an act of terror in Colorado, were inspired by the mass media at many

levels. One of the former had written on the wall of his room, "I hate the world,"

"Everyone must die," and "Kill everyone," but neither his parents nor anyone else

noticed anything strange. That is our culture.

The challenge posed by our materialistic, and conswquently violent culture can no

longer be put off, and perhaps in this sense the specter of terrorism is something we

actually needed. Terrorism shows that security can never come from bomb-sniffing

dogs and high-tech spy satellites; it can never be bought by the surrender of civil

liberties. Security comes only from living in well-ordered relationships with other people,

in a culture that does not disrupt such relationships with artificially-encouraged violence.

If it would be folly and cowardice to cave in to an extremist's demands: on this point all

agree But it would equally be folly and cowardice to ignore that there is a in their

hopeless fury. In their misguided way, these extremists are telling us that our way of life

has become a way of death and that it must change if we are ever to enjoy security.

The “war on drugs” being waged particularly in the United States has been, and will

continue to be a huge, expensive failure because the metaphor points us firmly in the

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wrong direction. Any real remedy for the shockingly widespread culture of substance

abuse must address the emptiness of life in a consumerist culture and the way it

alienates us from others, our environment, and ultimately our deeper selves. The "war

on terrorism" is the same mistake made worse. If one could end terrorism by killing

terrorists, as some commentators have pointed out, Israel would be the most secure

country in the world today. Let us learn from the failure of that state and of that policy;

let us think of and work towards a world where no warlord or pathological hater or

religious fanatic will be able to play upon the legitimate grievances of a people and

seduce them into following his mad violence.

On September 11, 1906, Mahatma Gandhi launched what the world would soon come

to know as Satyagraha, the power of ‘clinging to truth,’ in the old Empire Theater in

Johannesburg. A bit under one century later on the same date, ironically, one

spectacular terrorist attack showed us the cost of not following his experiment.

Michael N. Nagler

Berkeley

October, 2006

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PEMG1942085008 - Mahatma Gandhi writing in Birla House, Mumbai, August 1942

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My Writings

I flatter myself with the belief that some of my writings will survive me, and will be of

service to the causes for which they have been written.

Harijan, May 27,1939

I would like to say to the diligent reader of my writings and to others who are interested

in them that I am not at all concerned with appearing to be consistent. In my search

after Truth I have discarded many ideas and learnt many new things. Old as I am in

age, I have no feeling that I have ceased to grow inwardly or that my growth will stop at

the dissolution of the flesh. What I am concerned with is my readiness to obey the call

of Truth, my God, from moment to moment, and, therefore, when anybody finds any

inconsistency between any two writings of mine, if he has still faith in my sanity, he

would do well to choose the later of the two on the same subject.

Harijan, April 29, 1933, p. 2

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Gandhi on Violence and Nonviolence

The means adopted (by India, P.R.) are not violence, not bloodshed, not diplomacy as

one understands it nowadays, but they are purely and simply truth and nonviolence. No

wonder that the attention of the world is directed toward this attempt to lead a

successful bloodless revolution. Hitherto, nations have fought in the manner of the

brute. They have wreaked vengeance upon those whom they have considered to be

their enemies.

We find in searching national anthems adopted by great nations that they contain

imprecations upon the so-called enemy. They have vowed destruction and have not

hesitated to take the name of God and seek Divine assistance for the destruction of the

enemy. We in India have endeavored to reverse the process. We feel that the law that

governs brute creation is not the law that should guide the human race. That law is

inconsistent with human dignity.

Broadcasted message to the United States, September 13,1931

Some of us believe that we can obtain our rights by such acts of terrorization, violence

and arson. Satyagraha, on the contrary, holds that the rights so obtained should be

rejected. I admit that of the two parties using brute force, the one possessing more of it

than the other apparently gains its ends. My 40 years’ experience tells me that objects

so attained do not permanently benefit the winner. There may well be two opinions on

this point. But there can be no difference of opinion on the fact that so far as brute force

is concerned, we are no match for the Government. Our physical force is as nought

before theirs. I would dare say, therefore, that those who advise us to use physical force

are sadly mistaken, and we should never listen to their advice. Expediency tells us that

there is one and only one recourse for us and that is satyagraha or dharmabal (i.e.,

strength that comes from righteousness). Now dharmabal can spring only from

suffering. Oppressing, harassing, or assaulting others cannot add to our spiritual

strength. The events in Ahmedabad would have been impossible, had we but a true

sense of dharma. It is one of our duties to prevent mischief. If the men and women of

Ahmedabad could be brave, all mischief would cease. It is obviously a far greater thing

to overcome mischief by spirit-force, than to do so by brute force. We have seen that

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