I  

And there we have it: the paradox that moral good sometimes requires peace and sometimes war as the means to achieve it. The pacifist wants to resolve this paradox in favour of peace, and the militant in favour of war. This paradox acquired clear champions to represent each side in 1948, when Nathuram Godse assassinated the pacifist Mahatma Gandhi. Both claimed to stand where they did in the name of Hinduism. Both claimed to act in the interest of the moral good and the good of their land, India. Both even claimed to act in the spirit of the same sacred text -- the .[2] Although the two did not know each other personally, both claimed to act in a spirit of chivalry: Godse bowed in reverence before taking aim at Gandhi, and Gandhi raised his hand to bless his assassin as he fell. Both wanted India to be a modern nation, but had different concepts of modernity -- for Godse it meant having arms, while for Gandhi it meant doing away with them.[3]

More than half a century later the passage of time has only intensified the paradox. History has become geography. The very city from which Mahatma Gandhi set out on his famous nonviolent Salt March on March 12, 1930, was gripped with violence on an unprecedented scale in 2002. During last year's Hindu-Muslim disturbances in Gujarat, a peace meeting was violently disrupted in the same Sabarmati Ashram from which Mahatma Gandhi commenced his march.

  II  

One should not imagine that the contrast between violence and nonviolence is one between shedding blood in one situation and not shedding blood in the other. Blood, it seems, can get shed in both types of struggle. The point may be illustrated graphically. During the nonviolent Salt March the unarmed volunteers were methodically struck down by the police. As Robert Payne described it in his biography of Gandhi, "For two hours the satyagrahis marched against the compound and were knocked to the ground, trampled upon, thrown into ditches. The blankets of the stretcher-bearers had turned crimson, and the earth was laced with blood stains."[4] Mahatma Gandhi's point was not that blood will not be shed or lives will not be lost in a nonviolent struggle. Any attempt to disturb the status quo will be met with resistance, any attempt to overcome that resistance will lead to struggle and any such prolonged struggle will most likely lead to bloodshed and loss of life. So the great question is not whether blood will be shed or not -- the question is whose blood is going to be shed.

Pacifists would rather shed their own blood than that of the enemy; militants would shed the blood of the enemy as willingly as their own. Perhaps the point can be refined even further. In a struggle blood is perhaps going to be shed by both sides anyway. The real moral divide, then, lies in the following: whose blood does one not set out to shed, one's own or another's?

Viewed in this light the element of the paradox is lessened, although it is not erased. It now becomes a choice between a superior and an inferior method. Even Mahatma Gandhi was quite explicit in his assertion that, although nonviolence was to be preferred to violence, violence was to be preferred to cowardice. In other words, one is duty-bound to respond to acts of injustice: to this extent, violence and nonviolence are on par. But between the two, nonviolence is superior to violence. This is where they part company.

Another way of viewing the situation would be that what is basic to the situation is modifying the behaviour of one's opponent. The opponent is not necessarily an enemy. To call an opponent an enemy is to essentialize evil. But from a Gandhian perspective no person as such is evil, although he or she may perform evil acts. If one identifies behaviour modification as the key element in the situation, then the question becomes: how is the opponent's behaviour to be modified?

There are essentially only two ways of achieving this end -- either by making the opponent suffer the consequence of his or her deed, or by suffering voluntarily so that the opponent undergoes a change of heart and modifies his or her behaviour. The first option represents violent action (or coercion) and the second nonviolent action (or persuasion). The degree of suffering involved is also a factor. Thus, in trying to modify someone else's behaviour through coercion, degrees of coercion are employed. The person may be first verbally reprimanded, then fined, then physically arrested and finally severely punished. In other words, sufficient suffering will have to be inflicted on the opponent to modify his or her behaviour, and the degree of coercion involved will depend on the circumstances and the person. Note that there is a turning point involved, when the pressure of coercion becomes so intense that the person is compelled to modify his or her behaviour.

Mahatma Gandhi maintained that the situation was no different in the case of persuasion: sufficient suffering needed to be undergone to modify the other person's behaviour. The question boiled down to one of who undergoes the suffering.

Gandhi's further point was that although humanity has enormous experience of coercion as a form of behaviour modification on account of its frequent exercise, this was not the case with persuasion, so that its transformative powers were not fully known. In one respect, however, it was similar to coercion -- a turning point had to be reached. This involved ratcheting up the level of pressure or suffering inflicted. But while it was suffering inflicted on the other person in the case of coercion, in the case of persuasion it consisted of the amount of sacrifice one was prepared to undergo nonviolently, the amount of suffering one was prepared to inflict, Christlike, on oneself, to bring about the change of heart in the other person.

This is where the fundamental difference lies between Gandhi's approach and Godse's. Gandhi thought that Muslims could be brought around to living peacefully with Hindus, if the Hindus were prepared to undergo the necessary measure of sacrifice towards that end. He embarked on a series of such steps. He even proposed that the Indian National Congress, the organization that Gandhi led in its nonviolent struggle against the British Raj, allow Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the head of the Muslim League, to become prime minister of independent India and appoint his own ministers. The Congress rejected the proposal. After partition he insisted that the Indian government release assets to the Pakistani government even though India was at war with Pakistan in Kashmir. He undertook a fast for the release of these assets and he succeeded. So Gandhi was still looking for the turning point to occur -- for the change of heart to take place. Godse, however, thought that the behaviour of Muslims could not be modified in this way, and that Gandhi was as wrong as he was sincere. In his view, by forcing the Hindus to sacrifice more and more to bring about a change in the Muslim heart, Gandhi was merely playing into the Muslims' hands and increasing their coercive power over the Hindus, not increasing the Hindus' persuasive power over the Muslims. He therefore assassinated Gandhi, although with genuine reluctance.

  III  

• Every human being can be made to change his or her violent behaviour into a peaceful one, by virtue of human nature itself which possesses an inherent partiality for peace.
• This turning point can be reached in any human being if one is oneself willing to undergo sufficient voluntary suffering to do so.
• This process may take time.

In the Gandhian tradition, she decided not to eat until Moslems returned a sacrificial sword which during the October upheaval had been looted from a Hindu home. Now, a fast concentrates very heavy social pressure on its objects, as Indians have long since learned. The sword was never found. Possibly it had been dropped into a pond. Whatever had happened, the nervous Moslem residents were almost ready to agree to anything when Gandhi arrived in that village on the twenty-fifth day of Miss Salam's fast. Her doctor reported that life was ebbing. After hours of discussion (which... Gandhi took as seriously as the Cabinet Delegation negotiations) Gandhi persuaded the village leaders to sign a pledge that they would never molest Hindus again.[5]

  IV  

• The majority of his followers in South Africa, where he practised law and organized nonviolent resistance against discrimination between 1893 and 1914, were Muslims. That Muslims should allow themselves to be led by a Hindu in a moral and political struggle is nothing less than a miracle.
• In the 1920s, during the Khilafat movement, he was successful at least in temporarily uniting Hindus and Muslims to such a degree that even such a sober source as The Oxford History of India acknowledges the miracle: "The Muslims... joined forces with the Hindus in a joint national movement before the incredulous eyes of the British."[6]
• During the 1930s Hindu soldiers were brought in by the British in Peshawar to suppress protests by the Muslims, but the Hindus refused to fire on the Muslims. In Payne's description, "Two platoons of the second Battalion of the 18th Royal Garhwali Rifles were sent in to establish order, but they refused to fire on the crowds of Muslims and broke ranks. All the soldiers of the Garhwali Rifles were Hindus. From April 25 to May 4 [1930] the city was in the hands of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his Red Shirts."[7] This involved two miracles: breaking down Hindu-Muslim animosity and British military discipline.

The response of Pakistan to Gandhiji's fast exceeded everybody's expectation. In the twinkling of an eye, the Muslim League's enemy Number One of pre-partition days was transfigured into their "greatest friend", and became the object of their anxious concern. The first indication of it was a wire from the indefatigable Mridula Sarabhai. She had been engaging in God's good work of rescue and recovery of abducted women. Her wire to Gandhiji from Lahore ran: "Everybody here wants to know what they can do to save Gandhiji's life." Prayers were offered both in India and Pakistan -- prayers in public, prayers in private, prayers by Muslim women in the seclusion of their purda -- that God might spare him.[8]