Satyagraha:Ghandi Offers A Murderer A Way Out of Hell

In a scene during Richard Attenborough's fine 1982 movie, Ghandi, a wild-eyed Hindu stands before Mahatma Ghandi. He is desperate, this man, and has just come from the fighting. His head is sweaty, his hands restless. There is rioting in the streets, Hindu against Muslim, Muslim against Hindu. Whole houses have been put to the torch by both sides. Overwrought, unable to contain himself, he cries at Ghandi,

"I'm going to Hell! I killed a child! I smashed his head against a wall."

Ghandi, looks at the man, and tries to sooth him.

"Why?," Ghandi asks.

"Because they killed my son! The Muslims killed my son!"

The man holds his hand up to show the boy's height, only about eight or nine years old. He puts his head in his hands.

Ghandi says softly, "I know a way out of Hell."

The man looks at him, waiting.

Ghandi continues. "Find a child, a child whose mother and father were killed and raise him as your own."

The man's face registers immense relief. Then he hears Ghandi's next comment.

"Only be sure that he is a Muslim and that you raise him as one."

To raise the child as Muslim, the man had to be tolerant. He had to respect and understand Muslims. In such understanding, we start down the road to peace. He had to exercise justice, treating a non-Hindu fairly. In such treatment, we tell one another, not my religion, not my country, but what we share. He had to free himself from his own hatreds, his own prejudices.

That was Ghandi's satyagraha. He called Satyagraha a universal force, one that could change the world. He said it is "a relentless search for Truth and a determination to search for Truth. Satyagraha is an attribute of the spirit within. Satyagraha can be described as an effective substitute for violence." He said “In the application of Satyagraha . . .one’s opponent must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy.” Unlike the Old Testament "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth," Ghandi’s was a New Testament turn the other cheek.

Unlike Jesus, though, his "turn the other cheek" became downright cheekiness. His cheeky response was a stiff, non-violent militant resistance. He organized and demonstrated.

There is in Ghandi's satyagraha, a universality of appeal. It affirms our moral bonds to one another, rather than our scorn and hatred.

Born in India in 1869, Ghandi studied law in England, graduating at University College, London, and was admitted to the English Bar in 1889. He was assassinated in 1948 and survives as both a martyr for his people and a saint to the world. Through Satyagraha, he led his country to independence from British rule.

Thrown from a South African train for refusing to move to the colored compartment, he became active in South African civil rights. In South Africa he developed his approach to civil disobedience, Satyagraha. After the South African government made many concessions to relieve anti-Indian discrimination, Ghandi took his satyagraha to India in 1915.

Ghandi had read Thoreau's Civil Disobedience.  In it we find the seeds of Ghandi's satyagraha. If the state is wrong, then the citizen can and should confront it--except not with weapons, but with civil disobedience. He studied the entire essay. He called it a "masterly treatise."

Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax, because it supported the Mexican-American war and he was jailed. In a Concord, Massachusetts jail he wrote this: "As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body . . . I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it."

Ghandi returned to India in 1915 and discovered that his ideology was well received. He soon found himself with many followers who themselves regularly practiced passive resistance. In 1947 he and his movement won independence for India. In January 1948 he was assassinated in New Delhi by a Hindu who believed Ghandi had gone too far in Muslim appeasement.

At Ghandi's funeral Edward R. Murrow said the man "died as he had always lived--a private man without wealth, without property, without official title or office. Mahatma Gandhi was not a commander of great armies nor ruler of vast lands. He could boast no scientific achievements or artistic gift. Yet men, governments and dignitaries from all over the world have joined hands today to pay homage to this little brown man in the loincloth who led his country to freedom."

Dignitaries at his funeral included Pope Pius, the Archbishop of Canterbury, President Truman, Chiang Kai-shek, the Foreign Minister of Russia and the President of France.  George C. Marshall, US Secretary of State, said "Mahatma Gandhi had become the spokesman for the conscience of mankind, a man who made humility and simple truth more powerful than empires." Albert Einstein said, "Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth."

He had his inconsistencies and though not a saint he was indeed a great man.

The world has tried everything else but a Satyagraha with entire peoples united. It may be our last resort. On the outbreak of war in Europe, in his poem “September 1, 1939” W.H. Auden wrote “We must learn to love one another or die.”