Shahun Popatia's Gandhi Site
Essay on Gandhi

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Mohandas Gandhi's conduct for Indian independence led the most important and influential movement for national independence from an imperial power in the  twentieth century.  India was the most precious jewel in the British crown.  India was also the most populous of imperial possessions and is the second most populous nation, and the most populous democracy, in the world.  And Gandhi's non-violent struggle influenced the nationalist movements of other colonial peoples and Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights struggle for African Americans.

A good, elaborate, synopsis of Gandhi's conduct for Indian independence exists on M. K. Gandhi (http://www.mkgandhi.org/index.htm).  However, there remains on the web a non-appreciation of the role of the press in Gandhi's success--this is a significant explanatory gap in the historical biographies and critiques of Gandhi found there.  Good defensive criticism of Gandhi exists on M. K. Gandhi and on Mark Shepard's Gandhi Page (http://www.markshep.com/nonviolence/index.html).  The latter is a sophisticated comprehensive defensive critique of Gandhi.  Nevertheless, an incisive offensive critique of Gandhi is lacking on the web.  Such a critique is desirable for students and teachers and for the interested public as it will say, better than any existing positive or negative critique of Gandhi on the web, that non-violent action is not always the most socially just solution in the face of oppression.

A significant thread that runs through Richard Attenborough's movie Gandhi, and that ran through the historical saga of Gandhi, is the coverage of Gandhi's conduct by American journalists.  By focusing on Gandhi's conscience-provoking non-violent struggle against an oppressive rule, these journalists embarrassed and frustrated the British government vis-a-vis Western, especially American but also British, popular opinion.  The movie indicates this through especially a wiring to the U.S. of a report by the New York Times' Vince Walker, on the violent obstructing by police of a non-violent march upon a salt-works, saying that "whatever moral ascendance the West held was lost today".  Such reportage, and Life magazine's Margaret Bourke-White's more personal coverage, had considerably to do with Gandhi's success.  

The British government did not ban such journalism and was amenable to being moved by the resultant change in American and British Popular opinion.  (Conscience-based, and markets and alliance-seeking, American popular opinion led to the American government's applying pressure on the British government to have the latter render self-determination to its colonies as evidenced in a clause in the Atlantic Charter signed between Roosevelt and Churchill during the Second World War.  And the opposition party in Britain became committed to granting independence to India, to granting which Churchill's government was, notwithstanding the Atlantic Charter, not quite amenable.)

A totalitarian government, such as Hitler's Germany, would surely have banned such journalism in the imperial possession and at home. And such a government would have been much less responsive to Western popular opinion and diplomatic pressure than was the democratic and internationally more responsible (intrinsically and due to linkages of  trade and diplomacy and to alliance in war) British government.  Indeed, a Hitlerian regime would surely have been substantially more repressive and brutal than was British rule in India. 

The absence of such journalism that might ultimately sway policy and the brutality surely would make non-violent resistance less effective and unacceptably costly in lives lost or injured and less appealing to (and more difficult to sustain in) the masses.  The masses would either cease their resistance, thereby perpetuating injustice, or turn to violence.¹  Non-violent resistance, though less unjust than acquiescing in injustice (and much less unjust than collaborating with it), might well be more unjust than violent resistance in such a situation. For it may be preferable to die fighting against grave injustice--and perhaps win for the people respect and negotiability from the opponent--than to die, due to non-compliance, with no hope of moving the opponent.²  Non-violence is no panacea against genocidal regimes or against violence-respecting ones.  Thus, one is led to an appreciation of democracy and of the freedom of the press as conditions of the efficacy of Gandhi's advocacy of non-violent resistance. ³

1.  Gandhi's non-violent resistance sometimes degenerated into mass violence due to the inadequate understanding on the parts of the masses of--or their inadequate commitment to--the principled discipline of non-violence in the face of casualties.

2.  Mass non-violent resistance is normally more socially just than violent resistance because of its lesser human cost in lives lost or injured.  And such resistance is likely to leave opponents harmonious.  (Such resistance may also bring about a more just reordering of society along non-military lines.  Even without such reordering, but especially with it, there may follow a directing of resources toward the needs of the masses.)

3. On democracy, the British were also embarrassedly and frustratedly responsive to the demonstrated sentiments of their--indeed Gandhi's--Indian constituency and were thus brought to negotiate with Gandhi. Cf. Mark Shepard, "Mahatma Gandhi and his Myths", on Mark Shepard's Gandhi Page.