The Essential Gandhi (29 page)

[First, Hindu-Moslem friendship, the firm rock on which Gandhi hoped to build a united, free India, had been all but submerged in an angry tide of hostility between the two communities.]

 … I regard myself as a friend of the Moslems. They are my blood brothers. Their wrongs are my wrongs. I share their sorrows and their joys. Any evil deed done by a Moslem hurts me just as much as that done by a Hindu.… We may not gloat over the errors of the least of our fellows.
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 … My strength lies in my asking people to do nothing that I have not tried repeatedly in my own life. I am then asking my countrymen today to adopt Non-violence as their final creed.… Hindus and Moslems, Christians, Sikhs and Parsis must not settle their differences by … violence.… Again, a nation of three hundred million people should be ashamed to have to resort to force to bring to book one hundred thousand Englishmen.… [We] need not force of arms, but force of will.…

Acceptance of Non-violence … will teach us to husband our strength for a better purpose, instead of dissipating it, as now, in a useless fratricidal strife.…
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My Gita tells me that evil can never result from a good action. Therefore I must help the Moslems from a pure sense of duty—without making any terms with them.… The Moslem is a fellow-sufferer in slavery. We can therefore speak to him as a friend and a comrade.…
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…
What can be more natural than that Hindus and Moslems born and bred in India, having the same adversities, the same hopes, should be permanent friends, brothers born of the same Mother India? The surprise is that we should fight, not that we should unite.…
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[Cleanse] your hearts and have charity. Make your hearts as broad as the ocean. That is the teaching of the Koran and of the Gita.… Why should we say [the] politics [of the enemy] are corrupt?… So long as the world lasts, so long will there be so many differences of opinion … I shall not hate even a traitor.… You have no right to harbor ill-will against anyone or say a single word against him.… A nobler prescription I cannot give you.…
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 … To surrender is not to confer favor. Justice that love gives is a surrender, justice that law gives is a punishment. What a lover gives transcends justice. And yet it is always less than he wishes to give because he is anxious to give more and frets that he has nothing left.…
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 … Before [Hindus and Moslems] dare think of freedom, they must be brave enough to love one another, to tolerate one another’s religion, even prejudices and superstitions, and to trust one another. This requires faith in oneself.…
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 … Love never claims, it ever gives. Love ever suffers, never resents, never revenges itself.…
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…
Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization.
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A man is but the product of his thoughts; what he thinks, he becomes.
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[Gandhi, always the champion of Civil Disobedience, still—after imprisonment—believed in non-coöperation with the British Government of India. Logically, therefore, he would have pressed for a boycott of the courts, schools and government jobs and titles. But the Gandhians had grown discouraged during his absence in jail. Boycotts involved tremendous personal sacrifice which few could bear. Gandhi accordingly withdrew from Indian politics for several years. Self-Rule, he believed, depended on how good India was, not how bad the British were.]

 … I contemplate a mental and therefore a moral opposition to immoralities. I seek entirely to blunt the edge of the tyrant’s sword not by putting up against it a sharper-edged weapon, but by disappointing his expectation that I would be offering physical resistance. The resistance of the soul that I should offer instead would elude him. It would at first dazzle him and at last compel recognition … which … would not humiliate him but uplift him. It may be urged that this … is an ideal state. And so it is.…
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 … My method is conversion, not coercion, it is self-suffering, not the suffering of a tyrant. I know that method to be infallible. I know that a whole people can adopt it without accepting it as its creed and without understanding its philosophy. People generally do not understand the philosophy of all their acts. My ambition is much higher than independence. Through the deliverance of India I seek to deliver the so-called weaker races of the earth from the crushing heels of Western exploitation in which England is the greatest partner. If India converts, as it can convert, Englishmen, it
can become the predominant partner in a world commonwealth of which England can have the privilege of becoming a partner if she chooses.… In no case do I want to reconcile myself to a state lower than the best for fear of consequences. It is therefore not out of expedience that I propose independence as my goal.… India’s coming into her own will mean every nation doing likewise.…
²

[A] friend begs the question when he says a revolutionary is one who “does the good and dies.” That is precisely what I question. In my opinion he does the evil and dies. I do not regard killing or assassination or terrorism as good in any circumstances whatsoever.…

 … If the revolutionaries succeed in attracting, not “dragging” the masses to them, they will find the murderous campaign is totally unnecessary.…

 … I have not the qualifications for teaching my philosophy of life. I have barely qualifications for practising the philosophy I believe. I am but a poor struggling soul yearning to be … wholly truthful and wholly non-violent in thought, word and deed, but ever failing to reach the ideal.… I admit and assure my revolutionary friends it is a painful climb, but the pain of it is a positive pleasure for me. Each step upward makes me feel stronger and fit for the next.… [Revolutionary] activity is suicidal at this stage of the country’s life, at any rate, if not for all time, in a country so vast, so hopelessly divided and with the masses so deeply sunk in pauperism and so fearfully terror-struck.
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 … The outward freedom … that we shall attain, will be only in exact proportion to the inward freedom to which we may have grown at a given moment.
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Self-government depends entirely upon our own internal strength, upon our ability to fight against the heaviest odds. Indeed, self-government which does not require that continuous striving to attain it and to sustain it is not worth the name. I have therefore endeavored to show both in word and deed that political self-government … is no better than individual self-government and
therefore is to be attained by precisely the same means that are required for individual self-government or self-rule.
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The law of love governs the world. Life persists in the face of death. The universe continues in spite of destruction incessantly going on. Truth triumphs over untruth. Love conquers hate.…
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 … Means and end are convertible terms in my philosophy of life.…
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[One] man cannot do right in one department of life whilst he is occupied in doing wrong in any other department. Life is one indivisible whole.
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To me political power is not an end but one of the means of enabling people to better their condition in every department of life. Political power means the capacity to regulate national life through national representatives.…
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 … I live for India’s freedom and would die for it because it is a part of Truth. Only a free India can worship the true God. I work for India’s freedom because my Swadeshi [love of things belonging to India] teaches me that having been born in it and having inherited her culture I am fittest to serve her and she has a prior claim to my service.…
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I am not interested in freeing India merely from the English yoke. I am bent upon freeing India from any yoke whatsoever.… Hence for me the movement of swaraj is a movement of self-purification.
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 … What we want, I hope, is a government not based on coercion even of a minority but on its conversion. If it is a change from white military rule to a brown, we hardly need make any fuss.…
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 … If India succeeds in making British
Rule
impossible without matching the British bayonet with another bayonet, she will rule herself too with the same means.…
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My mission is not merely brotherhood of Indian humanity. My mission is not merely freedom of India, though today it undoubtedly engrosses practically the whole of my life and the whole of my time. But through realization of freedom of India I hope to realize and carry on the mission of the brotherhood of man.…
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 … I want India’s rise so the whole world may benefit. I do not want India to rise on the ruin of other nations. If therefore India was strong and able, India would send out to the world her treasures of art and health-giving spices, but she would refuse to send out opium or intoxicating liquors although the traffic may bring much material benefit.…
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India’s greatest glory will consist not in regarding Englishmen as her implacable enemies fit only to be turned out of India at the first available opportunity but in turning them into friends and partners in a new commonwealth of nations in the place of an Empire based upon exploitation of the weaker or underdeveloped nations and races of the earth.…
¹⁶

My attitude towards the English is one of utter friendliness and respect. I claim to be their friend, because it is contrary to my nature to distrust a single human being or to believe that any nation on earth is incapable of redemption. I have respect for Englishmen because I recognize their bravery, their spirit of sacrifice for what they believe to be good for themselves, their cohesion and their powers of vast organization.… I have hope of England because I have hope of India. We will not forever remain disorganized and imitative. Beneath the present disorganization, demoralization and lack of initiative I can discover organization, moral strength and initiative forming themselves. A time is coming when England will be glad of India’s friendship, and India will disdain to reject the proffered hand because it has once despoiled her.…
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 … By a long course of prayerful discipline I have ceased for over forty years to hate anybody. I know this is a big claim.… But I can and do hate evil wherever it exists. I hate the system of Government
the British people have set up in India. I hate the domineering manner of Englishmen as a class in India. I hate the ruthless exploitation of India even as I hate from the bottom of my heart the hideous system of untouchability for which millions of Hindus have made themselves responsible. But I do not hate the domineering Englishmen as I refuse to hate the domineering Hindus. I seek to reform them in all the loving ways that are open to me. My Non-coöperation has its root not in hatred, but in love.…

Mine is not an exclusive love. I cannot love Moslems or Hindus and hate Englishmen. For if I love merely Hindus and Moslems because their ways are on the whole pleasing to me, I shall soon begin to hate them when their ways displease me, as they may well do any moment. A love that is based on the goodness of those whom you love is a mercenary affair.…
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 … We all are bound by the ties of love.… Scientists tell us that without the presence of the cohesive force amongst the atoms that comprise this globe of ours it would crumble to pieces and we would cease to exist, and even as there is cohesive force in blind matter so much must there be in all things animate and the name for that cohesive force among animate beings is Love. We notice it between father and son, between brother and sister, friend and friend.… Where there is love there is life, hatred leads to destruction.…
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