Aheli Moitra
“Gandhi was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale. Love, for Gandhi, was a potent instrument for social and collective transformation. It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and nonviolence that I discovered the method for social reform that I had been seeking for so many months.”
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote this of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in his 1960 essay ‘Pilgrimage to Nonviolence’ that traversed the intellectual journey King took to eventually arrive at his methods of nonviolent direct action, informing the civil rights movement in the United States of America. To King, Gandhi’s idea of ‘Satyagraha’ or ‘truth force’/ ‘love force’ was “profoundly significant.”
This love, as defined and practiced by both Gandhi and King, was not affectionate or sentimental love. King uses the term ‘Agape love’ or ‘disinterested love’ in his essay and informs us that “the best way to assure oneself that love is disinterested is to have love for the enemy-neighbor from whom you can expect no good in return, but only hostility and persecution.” It is also the “willingness to go to any length to restore community... to resist injustice.”
This kind of ‘loving’ entails a great amount of courage in the face of violence and injustice; to actively resist injustice without deploying violent methods.
On his 150th birth centenary, the entire set up of the government of India is celebrating the life and work of the Mahatma—in the government’s interpretation, Gandhi’s entire body of work has been reduced to cleanliness. In the interpretation of the great politicians of this country, even this token gesture is further reduced to a broom-toting photo-op, otherwise delegating the burden of their cleanliness to ill paid, and most often ill treated, ‘servants.’
Living in India, we have been unable to grasp the true meaning of Gandhi’s work in the meaningful way that Martin Luther King, Jr. had. It is rather ironic, and laughable, when politicians who are active subscribers of violent ideologies—some of which led to the murder of Gandhi—profess to the public the means and methods, philosophies and teachings, of the nonviolence practitioner even as they show today’s nonviolent protestors of injustice the true violent power of the state (and its non-state agents).
In invoking Gandhi frivolously, the state does great disrespect to the memory and methods of the Mahatma. The greatest respect to Gandhi has been paid by the nonviolent people’s movements—peasants, women, workers, indigenous peoples—that have been a feature of the Indian public space. It is in these movements of social, political or economic transformation where Gandhi, and his dedication towards a just society, is imbibed and truly respected. Yet many of these movements have never seen justice. By continually attempting to destroy these, the state has only shown that Gandhi is a mere caricature to be invoked for popularity, his ‘truth force’ and love ethic reduced to a force for politicking. In the next two years of commemorating Gandhi, let us hope this begins to change.
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