One hundred years ago, on March 18, 1922, Mohandas Gandhi began serving a six-year sentence imposed by the British Empire — then ruler of what is now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
The punishment, the longest applied to the Indian, was motivated by his protests against colonial rule, marked by what remained as his main legacy: non-violent civil disobedience.
Systematized by Gandhi in the philosophy entitled satyagraha (“the idea of the force of truth”), this form of manifestation was characterized by peaceful resistance to violence. That is, adherents of the tactic did not actively react to attacks, arrests and aggressions perpetrated by the colonial power.
Despite appearing passive, the method was effective enough for Gandhi to be convicted and imprisoned — more than once — and for India to gain independence in 1947.
“Civil disobedience is the modern name of the tactic of resistance, generally peaceful, to legislation or institution. It was used by many social movements, and here in Brazil by the movement for the abolition of slavery”, says the sociologist and columnist for sheet Angela Alonso.
History professor Mirian Oliveira, from Unila (Federal University of Latin American Integration), says that Gandhi is seen and represented as one of the fathers of the Indian nation. “In public offices there will always be an image of him, he is always remembered in official ceremonies.”
Non-violence is also part of the Indian soft power project, which sells abroad an image of a tolerant and peaceful country – despite its strong social inequalities and ethnic conflicts, such as territorial disputes with neighboring Pakistan and China, with the right to military and internal tensions in Punjab, marked by Sikh separatism.
With all the contradictions, the history of Indian independence is inseparable from the image of Gandhi, “whether to praise and deify or to reject — although it is difficult to reject”, says Vinicius Tavares, an expert on India who teaches international relations at PUC Minas.
The model of civil disobedience was exported even before the Indian diplomatic onslaught. Alonso cites anti-Vietnam peace activists, and another illustrious adept was Pastor Martin Luther King Jr., a central name in the black movement for civil rights in the US, who even made a trip to India in 1959.
Like the pastor, Gandhi grew up in a religious environment. His mother, Putlibai, was a devout Hindu, and the state they lived in was heavily influenced by Jainism. Mirian Oliveira emphasizes that this religion very strictly observes non-violence. “His followers cannot, for example, be farmers, because they would have to kill insects. It’s an extreme conception.”
Religious rigidity accompanied Gandhi when he went to England to study law in 1888. He joined the vegetarian society and vowed to his mother that he would not give in to the Western way of life: meat consumption, alcohol and relationships with women.
In 1891, having graduated, he returned to India, but would soon travel again, in 1893, to South Africa, another British colony at the time. There he would mature anti-colonial positions and suffer from racist policies, which classified Asians and blacks as second-class citizens – Gandhi was arrested a few times for resisting the constant demand to present documents.
His position, however, was not free from contradictions. Still in Africa, he made comments in which he considered Asian peoples superior to blacks and even referred to them as “kaffirs”, a racist term used in South African apartheid.
Biographers point out that, little by little, the Indian’s position softened, and the defense of colonial liberation became unrestricted. In 1910 he founded the ashram (a kind of community retreat) Tolstoy Farm, near Johannesburg, from where he spread the ideals of non-violence.
The name of the place honors the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), who was a kind of guru to Gandhi. After serving in the Crimean War (1853-1856), Tolstoy took an anarchist and pacifist worldview, saying he would never serve “any government, anywhere.”
“[Gandhi] takes the civil disobedience that already existed in other places, of western inspiration, and goes to dialogue with the local cultures to develop a particular method”, says Oliveira.
In 1914, Mohandas would become “mahatma”, honorific title translatable as “venerable”. The following year, he would return to India for good, dedicating his militancy to building an independence movement. “He inspires a huge amount of people and wins election after election”, recalls Tavares.
The Congress Party, which he led, now opposes Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist compared to Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro (PL).
Rahul Gandhi, grandson of the first woman to head the Indian government, Indira, and great-grandson of the first post-independence prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, is the leading figure in the party (despite his surname, Rahul is not related to Mohandas; his grandfather Feroze Gandhy changed the spelling of the name in honor of the mahatma).
Oliveira recalls that the tactic of non-violence was not free from contestation, and that Gandhi had strong disagreements with ethnic leaders — while appealing to the masses and betting on self-identification as an instrument of mobilization.
In 1921, he adopted the raw cotton robes. “He becomes a model of conduct, embodies the proposal of personal transformation, of eliminating from himself the domination of the British yoke through his clothes, his food, his daily behavior”, says the expert. “He thought of independence not only as political, but also from a cultural and individual point of view.”
Eliminating the influence of colonialism, however, did not undermine the adoption of a Magna Carta that envisaged India as a secular state — but that admits “the tolerance of religious symbols and ideas in the public sphere”.
Independence from the British in 1947 also meant the painful process of partition into two states on the subcontinent: a Hindu (India) and a Muslim (Pakistan). “With the two-state obligation, one could ask: what is this Muslim doing in my Hindu state? It’s an incentive to create second-class citizens, and Gandhi knew that this problem would be created,” says Tavares.
The day after the declaration of independence, Gandhi went on a hunger strike to protest the division. Less than a year later, he would be murdered in an ashram by a Hindu nationalist who believed the leader had been overly generous to Muslim groups.
The philosophy and practice systematized by him, however, find echoes to this day. Mirian Oliveira cites among the heirs of the mahatma the ecofeminist activist Vandana Shiva. Palestinian residents of territories occupied by the State of Israel, according to Angela Alonso, would be another example of Gandhi’s legacy. “Any resistance to an unjust law or institution constitutes the use of the tactic of civil disobedience.”
