Judith Brown examines Gandhi's nonviolence in Yoder Dialogues

“Gandhi’s vision of non-violence was a religious one,” said Judith Brown, Beit Professor of Commonwealth History at the University of Oxford. “Nonviolence was part of an encompassing spiritual vision of the meaning of human life in relation to ultimate reality.” As a result, Gandhi did not countenance the suggestion that non-violence could fail and attributed any apparent failures to the misapplication by its activists rather than the realities of practical politics.

Brown examined “Gandhi’s Non-Violence: The Political Dilemmas of a Religious Vision” in the Fourth Annual John Howard Yoder Dialogues on Nonviolence, Religion and Peace, held on April 25. To illustrate the political dilemmas posed by non-violence, Brown compared the results of Gandhi’s local protests with the all- India campaigns.

The local movements achieved “major and measurable successes in terms of the goals set,” Brown argued. She noted that the goals of local campaigns, such as the 1917 Champaran campaign on the cultivation of indigo or the 1918 Ahmedabad campaign on wages for millworkers, were clearly defined and small scale, and the participants were cohesive and homogenous groups that demonstrated a high level of discipline. In addition, nonviolence at a local level played into the vulnerabilities of a multi-tiered system of imperial government in which a district or provincial administration could be pressured by a higher level of authority into concessions.

However, “if we turn to the all-India campaigns we find almost the mirror image of this situation,” she said. The goals were rarely defined with precision and often sought to build cohesion within the Congress party or gain leverage for it as the authentic voice of India. Participants in the campaigns came from all parts of Indian society, each bringing their own distinctive goals and intentions. As a result, discipline was difficult to maintain.

After calling off the first all-India campaign against the British in 1922 in the face of actual and potential violence, Gandhi continually experimented to find ways to increase discipline, such as by limiting participation in the Salt March of 1930. By the time of the Noakhali campaign in 1946-47, he avoided a mass campaign altogether, and effectively took refuge in the belief that a single individual committed to nonviolence could transform a violent situation.

In addition, the imperial regime was much less vulnerable to nonviolent actions than local authorities. While Gandhi’s campaigns are sometimes viewed as the reason for the British withdrawal, “when the British did eventually decide to leave India it was for much more complex and deeper reasons, having more to do with the shifting economic relationship of Britain to India, the worth of the imperial relationship to Britain, and the impact of World War II,” asserted Brown.

Gandhi’s nonviolence has much to contribute to peace and the management of conflicts, Brown concluded, but theorists and activists must engage the political dilemmas it creates, especially when applied to large-scale conflicts.

A specialist on nineteenth and twentieth-century Indian history and politics, Brown has authored numerous publications on Gandhi, including Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope (Yale University Press, 1989).

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