Frustration is understandable, but there’s evidence that Gandhian tactics are changing minds in the U. S.
Exactly one century ago, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi made a decision. He had decided that the British would not loosen control of India unless Indians themselves took direct and decisive action. The manner of that action is what set Gandhi, and the movement he subsequently led, apart. He chose to stop cooperating with an unjust state, to disobey unjust laws and throughout to pursue only non-violent means of protest.
Plenty of Indians who agreed with his goals disagreed with his ideas and his tactics. Some of them resorted to violence. The debate that has today broken out in the United States over whether violence is ever acceptable in the fight for change is hardly a new one.
Many justifiably angry Americans point out that multiple forms of non-violent protest — from earlier marches to Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling — have been tried. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. talked about non-violence, but wasn’t he murdered? For that matter, wasn’t Gandhi? With truth and video evidence on their side, they ask: “When we are non-violent, they hit us anyway, so what’s the point?”
That is, in fact, exactly the point. Gandhian protest was not about stopping your oppressors from hitting you: It was about provoking them into doing so publicly and repellently. Non-violent protest could not be chosen by the weak; it was, in Dr. King’s own estimation, the only effective alternative to “cringing and submission.”
When Americans debate non-violent protest in moral terms, they miss the point. It is not a purely moral question; it is about both morality and tactics. Gandhi and King were politicians who recognized that they needed to create demonstrations of will and also of moral superiority if they wanted to change minds.
