How to fight like Gandhi

 

The book I’m now reading is Eric Weiner’s The Socrates Express. [Waiting in line next is Rutger Bregman’s Hopeful History of Humankind, suggested by blogger-friend Yamini MacLean.] Weiner has taken pretty much of my time already. An attack of Covid-19 kept me in bed for nearly a week and I couldn’t read anything serious, much as I longed to. Moreover, you can’t just skim through Weiner in spite of his apparently light style. The lightness is only apparent. He demands serious reading.

The book is a collection of essays on philosophers from Marcus Aurelius to Simone de Beauvoir. I loved each one of them. Each one begins with a title How to… ‘How to wonder like Socrates,’ for example. ‘How to fight like Gandhi’ lies exactly in the centre of the book, 8^th out of 14 chapters. Appropriate place, I thought. Gandhi deserves the centre-stage especially these days when his country is driven by the opposite of all that he stood for, lived for, and died for.

Gandhi was a fighter. Injustice of any kind aroused his indignation. He wouldn’t let it pass. He would look at it with his penetrating eyes. Even the mighty British empire couldn’t withstand the power of that look. That was the Gandhian way of fighting.

It was the power of truth that drove Gandhian fights. The power of personal convictions. Gandhi didn’t need any other power. Not political power. Not the power of weapons. Or violence.

Violence isn’t any power anyway. Violence is cowardice, Gandhi said again and again. “All violence represents a failure of imagination,” as Weiner interprets Gandhi. Violence is the easiest, most unimaginative, and even the laziest solution to problems. It’s so easy to strike down your enemy if you possess the strength for that. Any brute can do that. The animals do that, in fact. But to look into the eyes of your enemy, to understand what he is trying to say, understand his differences – that requires a lot of things like patience and imagination. Gandhi demanded that patience and imagination from his followers. His was a superior way.

By an ironic and cruel twist of fate, Gandhi’s nation today stands at the wrong end of the continuum that stretches from violence to nonviolence, from truth to falsehood.

Gandhi wouldn’t ever have questioned conflicts. Conflicts are natural. Without them, there wouldn’t be any life. Surrender to the rival is not Gandhi’s way. Nor is compromise. Surrender and compromise belong to cowards. We should fight where a good fight is required. The evil has to be resisted. But how?

The means are as important as the ends, Gandhi said. You can’t use falsehood merely to win the war at hand. The bulk of falsehood that dominates current Indian polity would have been Gandhi’s primary rival had he been living today. Rival, I said. Not enemy. Gandhi had no enemies, as Weiner points out. Only rivals who need to be shown the right lights. That was Gandhi’s way of fighting: show the right light.

That light has been replaced today by a resplendence whose brightness blinds and deafens us at once. We need to relearn how to fight like Gandhi.