100 Days of Nonviolence

The Power of Noncooperation by Shelley Douglass  (PART 1.  PART 2 comes in two days)

            Gandhi used to tell his followers that swaraj, home-rule for India, would come only when every Indian exercised swaraj, self-rule, in his or her own life.  The dependence of India upon the British, he said, was the sum of the dependence of each Indian upon British cloth, British thought, British custom, British government. British rule continued because Indians felt powerless to remove it, and because by their actions they in fact rendered themselves powerless. Gandhi was able to bring about a nonviolent freedom struggle insofar as people were able to see the truth in this insight of his: The imposition of British rule was made possible by Indian cooperation, and could be ended by noncooperation. Indians had to learn to respect themselves, to throw off the limitations of untouchability and of their own reverse racism; Indians had to learn to govern their own desires for wealth and property; Indians had to refuse to surrender to their centuries of conditioning to caste divisions so that they could work together for freedom.

            For the Gandhian movement protest was not enough. One could not stand by shouting objections as a major miscarriage of justice occurred. ...Violence did not recognize the responsibility of Indians for their own problems, and so would not change anything at the deepest level.  What Gandhi called for and sometimes achieved was a struggle within each person’s soul to take responsibility for the evil in which she or he was complicit, and having taken responsibility, to exercise self-control and begin to change. The Salt March to the sea and the magnificent control exhibited by demonstrating Indians grew slowly from humble roots: the scrubbing of latrines in the face of social taboo, the sharing of gold jewelry by the wealthy, living and eating together in defiance of caste regulations, wearing Indian khadi (homespun) to withdraw support from the British economic empire.  These actions and many others were symbolic of the deep change brought about by the Gandhian movement, a change in which people acknowledged their own responsibility for the wrong they sought to change, and thus in changing themselves were able to change their situation.

            When violence broke out during the freedom struggle and later during partition, it happened because that vital insight was lost for a time. People again located the source of evil outside of themselves and tried to eliminate it with force.  Gandhi’s fasts and teachings were then concentrated on taking responsibility for the violence he might have caused, and calling people to take steps to stop their own violence.  He understood that in giving up our own responsibility for evil we also give up the possibility of changing it.  Gandhi’s refusal to see the British as solely responsible for the situation of India was the key to Indian independence.

            I believe that Gandhi’s insistence upon recognizing our cooperation with evil and withdrawing it is essential to the struggle for social change … in which we are engaged today.  So often people feel powerless to create change - the leaders of political parties, the generals, the multinational executives, and such groups and persons are held responsible for our situation, and they do not listen to the voices of the poor and the disenchanted. …. Governments and corporations exist to hold power or make a profit, and they rarely listen to polite words of protest.  If our hope for change rests upon the reasonableness of any government or economic system, then our hope is slim indeed.

            The underlying fact that we tend to overlook is that while systems do not listen to people very well, they are made up of the very people to whom they do not listen.  The existence of a given system depends upon the cooperation of all those who do not benefit from it and all who are hurt by it, as well as upon the smaller number of people who gain status or wealth from it.  If those of us who protest the injustice of our system were instead to withdraw our support from the system, then change would begin.

From Engage: Exploring Nonviolent Living (Session 4: Another Way, page 63-65) Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service.

TO BE CONTINUED... (on Day 44)