SIGNIFICANCE TODAY
Because neither the Salt Campaign nor any of Gandhi’s other civil disobedience campaigns brought about the immediate liberation of India, scholars argue about the weight to give Gandhi’s contribution to the struggle for independence. Some give Gandhi the lion’s share of the credit, while others severely discount his role. In some respects the criticism is quite unfair because immediate liberation was not always Gandhi’s goal. His most successful campaign, the Salt Campaign, had the more limited goal of raising India’s stature in the eyes of Britain and the world and of providing Indians with a sense of their own considerable power. The Salt Campaign achieved these goals and more by engaging the dynamic that connects suffering to social and political change.
In other instances the criticism is more justified. Judith Brown observes that the failure of Gandhi’s civil disobedience during World War II casts “doubt on the viability of non-violence as a political mode except in very restricted, small-scale situations, where its exponents could be carefully disciplined and deployed.”15
Professor Brown is correct to emphasize the need for nonviolent discipline. The history of civil disobedience movements is littered with the debris from campaigns that foundered on lack of discipline. Campaigns lacking nonviolent discipline play right into the hands of the oppressor, who wants the disobedients to use violence. The use of violence delegitimizes the resistance in the world’s eyes, practically eliminates the possibility of sympathy for the disobedients, and places the contest directly on grounds where the oppressor invariably has an overwhelming advantage.
The leadership of the American civil rights movement understood this reality when it imported Gandhi’s thinking in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. James Lawson, a colleague of Martin Luther King, Jr., who had spent time in India, helped introduce Gandhian thinking and tactics into the movement at large and the lunch counter sit-ins in particular. The sit-ins were extremely successful in desegregating southern lunch counters in the early 1960s in no small part because of the stress Lawson put on nonviolent discipline when he prepared sit-in participants for their disobedience. Lawson’s influence also extended to the Freedom Rides, another campaign that relied on strict nonviolent discipline and one that succeeded in desegregating bus depots throughout the American South.
The leading civil rights figure of his time, King more than once acknowledged Gandhi’s influence on his thinking. In a radio broadcast during his 1959 visit to India, he said: “Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever . . . that . . . nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice. . . . Mahatma Gandhi embodied in his life certain universal principles that are inherent in the moral structure of the universe, and these principles are as inescapable as the law of gravitation.”16
At the point of the American civil rights movement in the evolving history of nonviolent civil disobedience, the argument could still be made that Gandhian civil disobedience could succeed only when it embraced nonviolent discipline and that nonviolent discipline was possible only in very controlled situations. What no one could foresee was the programmatic application of Gandhian disobedience to such a broad range of controlled situations—some involving very large numbers of participants—that it could serve as an extremely powerful and fairly reliable tool for bringing down repressive, autocratic regimes.
No one, that is, except for Gene Sharp.
For more than fifty years, it has been the mission of nonviolence scholar Gene Sharp to demonstrate that nonviolence works better than violence in toppling oppressive, nondemocratic regimes. (As used here, “nonviolence” includes civil disobedience as one of its primary manifestations.) Sharp’s claim is that “all governments can rule only as long as they receive replenishment of the needed sources of their power from the cooperation, submission, and obedience of the population and the institutions of the society.” He goes on to argue that nonviolence “is uniquely suited to severing those sources of power.”
Sharp’s inspiration came from Gandhi. His first book, published in 1960 by India’s Navajivan Publishing House, was a study of Gandhi. Today Sharp and those who are carrying on his work are careful not to promote nonviolence as a morally superior path to self-reform and freedom, as Gandhi often did. Rather, their argument is straightforwardly pragmatic: nonviolence in general and civil disobedience in particular, when properly used, are tools that work better than any other in liberating oppressed populations and paving the way for functioning democracies.
And work well they have.17 Sharp’s book From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation is changing the world. Translated into more than thirty languages, it serves as a virtual handbook for nonviolent revolution. This is the book that was put in the hands of the young people of Serbia that helped them throw the dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, out of office in 2000. Their nonviolent resistance movement, known as Otpor (Resistance), was heavily influenced by Sharp. After Otpor defeated Milosevic, the movement praised Sharp’s approach as “an astoundingly effective blueprint for confronting a brutal regime.”
The Otpor lesson was not lost on young activists in Tunisia and Egypt. They studied Otpor—and they took to Sharp. Egypt’s April 6 Movement created a symbol to resemble Otpor’s clenched fist, and elements of the movement went to Serbia to meet with Otpor. Another Egyptian group, the Academy of Change, also relied on Sharp’s work.18 It is no exaggeration to say that Sharp was an intellectual father of the Arab Spring—and Gandhi a grandfather.
Gandhi would feel quite comfortable with King’s understanding of Gandhian nonviolence as having a foundation in morality, and at least somewhat uncomfortable with Sharp’s promotion of nonviolence on purely pragmatic lines. But despite this fissure among devotees of nonviolence, this much is true: Gandhi’s technique of nonviolence lives on and has made a material difference in freedom movements all around the globe, from bus stations in the American South to public squares in Cairo, Egypt.
Gandhi may not have become a practitioner and theorist of nonviolence had he not been a lawyer in South Africa. Admittedly, there is a risk of oversimplification associated with seeing Gandhi’s world primarily through his life in the law and the civil disobedience to which it led. In that vein, I recognize that Gandhi’s motivations were always complex. To understand them, scholars over the years have isolated them. Some have written about his religious motivations, some about his philosophical motivations, some about his political motivations, some about his cultural motivations, and still others about his psychological motivations. A fair criticism of what I have done here is that my work is in that tradition. To this, I plead guilty. I will leave the legitimate and important task of broadly contextualizing Gandhi’s time in the law to other scholars at other times. My object is clear—and different. One of the last great unexplored areas in the Gandhi story deals with the two decades he spent practicing law. My mission here is to demonstrate how the law played a critical role in bringing Gandhi into a position from which he was forced to invent his philosophy and practice of nonviolent civil disobedience—a signal development the consequences of which threaten oppressive regimes even to this day.
It is my hope that this book illuminates Gandhi’s path to disobedience and, along the way, permits him to teach us by example what it means to have a life that brings into near-perfect unity one’s public behavior with one’s mostly deeply held spiritual beliefs.
ONE
Dispatched to London
It seems strange that any man should take one of the most important steps of his life, and one on which his future happiness largely depends, without duly weighing what it means beforehand. Yet, in the case of many Barristers, this is so.
BALL, The Student’s Guide to the Bar (1879)
IT
