Non Violence in the Age of Terrorism

Thank you very much. It’s a great pleasure and a great honour to be here in this campus to share with you some of my understanding of the philosophy of nonviolence. I have been asked to speak to you today about nonviolence in the age of terrorism and I think this (what happened to us on 9/11) makes nonviolence all the more important for us to understand, because what happened on 9/11 has taken violence to a new level, to a level that is unimaginable. It has brought war to our doorsteps and nothing is sacrosanct anymore. We will have to throw all the conventions, the Geneva Conventions and all the rules of engagement and all that overboard and now it’s going to be free for all kind of war there and that is what my grandfather was afraid of. In 1945 after the atom bomb was thrown on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a correspondent asked grandfather what do you think the future of the world is going to be. And his response was that we no longer have the luxury of choosing between violence and nonviolence. Now the option before us is nonviolence or non existence. And I think we are coming to that stage of non existence very quickly. It may not be the total annihilation but certainly in terms of annihilating our humanity.

We are destroying our humanity and becoming inhuman because of the culture of violence that dominates every aspect of our life—our language, sports, entertainment, business, religion, government and even education to name just a few have been tainted by the culture of violence.

Now we have to ask ourselves, what caused this terrorist act against us, what was it that happened. It wasn’t just that on 9/11 morning these people got up and decided that they were going to hijack some planes and crash into the WTC towers. It was planned for a long time and we need to find out what were the issues that made these people do such things. Just as we have to ask ourselves what caused Hitler to emerge and do what he did in World War II. Hitler didn’t drop from the sky and he didn’t perform this atrocious act of holocaust spontaneously.

It was the cumulative effect of our greed after World War I that caused Hitler to emerge and lead the world into World War II and all the atrocities that we experienced. And in the same way it is again our greed and our thoughtlessness that has given rise to terrorism against us. We were so keen on finishing off communism that we got the Islamic Jihadists trained in Afghanistan; internationalized the conflict and told the Muslim nations that communism is a threat to Islam all over the world and you’ve got to fight it and destroy it. We gave them the weapons to do this and then when they were able to destroy communism in Afghanistan, we just walked away leaving the Jihadists high and dry with all the weapons that we gave them.

And these terrorists coming from poor and illiterate background became easy prey for fundamentalists preachers. If the Jihadists had nothing to gain from the war in Afghanistan, they had nothing to lose from the war against the United States. They felt abandoned and concluded that if communism was a threat to Islam so is the United States. Young Jihadists have been whipped into a frenzy and taught to fight giving rise to terrorism against us and we are today faced with the challenge of dealing with this. When 9/11 happened, I still remember the day vividly as I am sure all of you do and when this happened for almost the whole day, I was paralyzed just as all of you were paralyzed. It was difficult to imagine that this kind of thing happened and what should be our response and from the next day I was flooded with telephone calls from all over the country—people wanting to know what could be a nonviolent response to this situation. I decided to write an article and offered it to various newspapers and media. But none of them were prepared to publish it because they all said, ‘This is not the time to talk about peace.’ I asked: ‘if this is not the time, when do you talk about peace.’

But since they were not willing to publish it, I put it up on the website and printed it in our newsletter. The gist of the article was that declaring war on terrorism is not the answer. We need to do some introspection to find out why the Jihadists hate us so much.

I wrote: The United States has already demonstrated to the world that we are a super power in terms of our military strength; now it is time for us to demonstrate to the world that we can also be a super power in terms of our moral strength. And that we are not going to respond to this kind of senseless violence, by more violence, but we are going to take a moral position on this and do what is right for the world. We need to find out why our relations with the rest of the world are so bad that people were motivated to attack us and cause such distress and harm to innocent people. And then repair our relationships with foreign countries.

It is obvious that our relations are not ideal because, like all other countries, our policy is based on what is good for the United States. Each country thinks only about themselves and what is good for themselves. And that is a very selfish way of looking at relationships whether between individuals or between nations. Such selfish attitudes can only lead to conflict. I think that we have reached the stage in the United States, when we can look at what is good for the world and do the right thing for the world.

Had we taken these steps I think we would have been able to deal with terrorism much better than what we are doing now with the war that we have declared on terrorism because in this war we are killing more innocent people than terrorists and for every innocent person that is killed we are giving rise to at least a hundred other terrorists against us. So, our sacrifice of human lives and money has not put an end to terrorism but has increased the danger.

For the last few years, ever since 9/11, the Government made it a point to print a report on International Terrorism to show us how International Terrorism has subsided because of the war. But this year they have found that International Terrorism has increased substantially and so the Government decided not to print the report. Clearly, war and violence will not solve any problem. It only suppresses the problem. Gandhi realized this and decided to find an alternative way of dealing with conflict and that is through nonviolence.

Just as we cannot use a weapon effectively if we do not know how to use it, we cannot use non-violence without knowing the philosophy. I have found in my travels around this country and even around the world that people have very limited understanding of the philosophy of nonviolence. They only understand it in terms of the absence of physical violence or anti war. But I want to prove to you tonight that nonviolence is much more than that and all of us, each one of us, even though we do not fight and even though we are against all kinds of violence, that we are still contributing to violence in society. I learnt this from grandfather.

It is important to know that grandfather had no special influence that made him better understand the philosophy of nonviolence. He was, as he says in his autobiography, a very simple person, from a very simple family that had no special inclinations towards nonviolence. But he admits that the first lesson in nonviolence came from his wife, my grandmother. This happened at the age of 13. In those days it was common to marry young. At the age of 13 grandfather did not know what the role of the husband should be, who should lay down the rules and who should enforce the rules. He went to the library and read books on marital relationships and, obviously, those books were written by male chauvinist because all of them talked about how the husband should lay down the rules and enforce the rules strictly. After reading these books grandfather came home one evening and told grandmother: ‘from today you are not going to step out of the house without my permission. I want no arguments about it. This is the law and you will have to obey.’

Grandmother did not say anything nor did she retort in anger. She quietly went to bed, got up the next day and she continued to do whatever she was always doing, continued to go out and visit and never bothered to take grandfather’s permission. A few days later grandfather realized that she was not obeying him and so he confronted her again and he said in a harsh tone how dare you disobey me. Grandmother very quietly, without raising her voice in anger she said ‘I was brought up to belief that we must always obey the elders in the house and I believe the elders in this house are your parents. Now if you are trying to tell me that I should not obey your mother but obey you instead let me know so that I can tell your mother I am not going to obey you anymore. Of course grandfather could not tell her to do that and so the whole matter was settled without anyone feeling hurt.

Grandfather acknowledged this was the first and the most profound lesson in non violence that he learnt. We have been told by experts that anger motivates almost 80 per cent of the violence that we experience either in our personal lives or in lives of our nation. Anger leads to conflict and conflict to violence. Learning how to use the powerful energy of anger intelligently and effectively became the foundation of his philosophy of nonviolence.

At the age of 24, Gandhi went to South Africa and there within a week of his arrival in that country he became a victim of prejudices and he was beaten up and thrown out of the train because of the colour of his skin. It surely drove him to anger and perhaps wanted to retort with anger but, I am sure, he remembered grandmother’s way of dealing with conflict and he said ‘No, I am not going to give in to anger. He sat on the platform all night wondering how to get justice and by the next morning it dawned on him that non violence is the only way he can make the people understand that this is wrong, that prejudices are wrong.

It is only through reforming the wrong-doer that transformation will take place and that event marked the birth of the philosophy of nonviolence and practiced it for 22 years in South Africa.

We need to understand that nonviolence is not only profound in depth and breadth but to be able to practice it successfully it requires personal transformation—from being vengeful to being forgiving, from being hateful to being loving and respectful. While violence brings out the worst in human beings, nonviolence brings out the best in human beings.

I learnt about anger when I went to live with grandfather at the age of 12. Like grandfather I was a victim of hate and prejudice in South Africa. But, unlike him I wanted eye-for-an-eye justice. Grandfather taught me that anger is like electricity. It is just as powerful and just as useful but only when we use it intelligently. However, when abused, anger can be just as deadly and destructive.

We need to learn to channel anger as intelligently as we channel electric power and learn to use it for the good of humanity. He taught me to write an anger journal. He said every time you feel angry about something do not pour it on somebody or something but pour it out in your journal but write the journal with the intention of finding a solution to the problem and then commit yourself to finding a solution. Now that is very important because a lot of people today do write an anger journal but it has not really helped them because they simply pour their anger into the journal. Consequently, when they go back and read the journal they are reminded of the incident and get angry all over again. Ideally, we want the journal to help us find an equitable solution and put the conflict behind us.

After learning this profound lesson I decided to test grandfather and see if he himself had learnt the lesson or not. During the last years of his life Grandfather was concerned about India’s independence from British rule and the emancipation of Indian women, the so-called untouchables and the education of children. He had programmes in all these different fields and all the programmes had to be funded. He decided the easiest way for him to raise the money and make the common people a part of the solution was to sell his autograph. So, when hundreds of people assembled for his twice daily prayer services, most of them would seek his autograph and while I was living with him it was my duty to go out into the audience and collect the autograph book and the money and bring it to him for his signature.

One day I decided: if everybody could get his autograph, why not me? After all I am his grandson and I deserve an autograph too and so I got myself a little autograph book and I slipped it into the pile because I did not have any money to pay him. But he was very shrewd and when he came to my book he said ‘why is there no money for this autograph? I said ‘because it is my book.’

Well, he said, you should know that I will not make an exception even for my grandson. So, if you want an autograph, you will not only have to pay me for it but you will have to earn the money and pay me. Do not ask your parents for it. I said ‘You are my grandfather and I am going to make you give me this autograph free. He laughed and said ‘Alright, lets see who wins’. And from that day, everyday when he was in political discussions with Indian politicians and British politicians, I would rush into the room with my autograph book and demand an autograph.

My logic was to pester him while he was busy so that just to get rid of me he would sign my book but, instead when I became too boisterous all he did was put his hands across my mouth and pressed my head against his chest and went on talking politics. I do not remember his ever telling me to get out of the room and leave him alone. In fact on many occasions the other politicians used to get exasperated and tell grandfather ‘why dont you give him the autograph and send him away. He keeps disturbing our meeting’ and grandfather would only laugh and say ‘this is a private joke between the two of us and you do not have to get involved in it.’

The long and short is that he never did give me the autograph and he never ever told me to get out of the room and I realized then that if he was able to control his anger to that extent, if we are able to achieve 50 per cent of it, we would be able to make a tremendous difference in the violence that we experience today. So it is very important for us to learn about how to deal with anger positively rather than denying anger altogether and not doing anything about it.

I also learnt about the depth of the philosophy of nonviolence when, one day grandfather made me look for a little three inch butt of a pencil that I discarded on my way home from tuition. Grandfather wouldn’t accept the fact that the pencil was too small. I had to spend about two hours searching for it and when I found it I brought it jubilantly to him thinking he would agree that it was too small. Instead, he said now sit here besides me and I want to teach you two very important lessons.

The first lesson is that even in the making of a pencil we use a lot of the world’s natural resources and when we throw them away we are throwing away the world’s natural resources and that is violence against nature. And the second lesson is that because in an affluent society we can buy all these things in bulk, we over consume the resources of the world and because we over consume them, we are depriving people elsewhere of these resources and they have to live in poverty and that is violence against humanity. That was the first time I realized that all of these little things that we do everyday, consciously or unconsciously, add to the violence that we are experiencing in world today. To drive home this message grandfather made me build a family tree of violence just as we would a family tree. Violence was the grandparent with two branches—one was Physical and the other Passive. Every day I had to examine and analyze everything that happened during the day and put it all down on the tree. If it was the kind of violence where physical force is used it would go under the physical section but if it was the kind of violence where we do not use any physical force yet we hurt people directly or indirectly that would go under Passive violence. To determine what is passive violence I had to ask myself the question: If someone were to do this to me would I feel hurt by it or helped by it. If the incident would hurt me then it was passive violence.

Now physical violence is something that we understand. It is all the wars and killings and beatings and murders and rapes and all kinds of violence, where we use physical force against people but passive violence is something that we tend to ignore. It is the kind of violence where we do not use any physical force but nevertheless we hurt people consciously and unconsciously, directly or indirectly and that is in the form of discrimination, oppression, suppression, economic, political, social, cultural, religious all of these things. In fact grandfather wrote down the seven sins of the world which he said were responsible for all the violence that we experience today and they were—wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice and politics without principles and I added the eighth one recently and that is rights without responsibility.

When I started doing this self-examination I was amazed to see how rapidly the Passive violence side grew. That is when grandfather explained that we commit passive violence, knowingly and unknowingly all the time and that causes hurt to the victim and the victim then resorts to physical violence to get justice. So, it is passive violence that fuels the fire of physical violence and since the fuel comes from each one of us, we must become the change that we wish to see in the world. It has to begin with us.

While humankind has progressed over centuries in every way we have remained backward in the way we resolve conflicts. We have created a Culture of Violence that permeates every aspect of human life. Our language, sports, entertainment, relationships everything is violent.

Because we believe in the culture of violence even our parenting has become violent. The first seeds of violence are planted in the minds of children when parents punish them for misbehaviour. The Culture of Violence that is based on the precept of controlling through fear appears easy and quick way of resolving a conflict but in reality we do not resolve anything. We simply suppress the conflict through force and it emerges again and again to haunt us.

In a nonviolent society children are taught the right way by penance and not by punishment. It is also true of adults. We punish people who do criminal acts. Instead of reforming, most of the times they come out hardened criminals. We need to change our mindset. Instead of seeking to punish criminals if the prisons we build focus on reforming them they would come out of prisons better human beings instead of stronger criminals.

Materialism has become the ambition of every individual and every country in the world and materialism has the tendency to make us selfish and self-centered. Success is measured in terms of possessions and we seek to be successful by any means possible. It is this mindset that creates disparities in society and when those who are marginalized are treated as slaves or even worse they resort to violence to simply survive. Thus the only hope for humankind is to adopt a Culture of Nonviolence which makes us compassionate, loving, respectful and more inclusive. In a Culture of Nonviolence, grandfather said, ‘Relationships between people and between nations must be built on the four principles of respect, understanding, acceptance and appreciation. We have to respect ourselves and respect each other and respect our connection with all of creation and then we will understand who we are and what we are and why are we here on earth. We are not born just to wait until death takes us away. We are born for a purpose. Many of us have not even bothered to look at what is the purpose of our life and what are we contributing to this country or the nation or the society we live in. So we just pass the time of the day. We have a purpose and we need to find that purpose and when we understand that we will be able to accept each other as human being.

Identifying people by labels keeps them apart. Unfortunately we have many labels to classify people. There are religious labels, economic labels, social labels, race labels, gender labels and so many more. Every time we place a label to identify someone we are building a wall between the person and ourselves and every time we do that we are creating the potential for conflict. In a nonviolent society we would remove those labels and learn to see each other as human beings and when are able to do that then we will appreciate our own humanity. I do not agree with many scholars who say that non violence is a strategy, that can be used when convenient and discarded when not. In Gandhi’s words: Nonviolence is not a jacket that you put on when you need it and take off when you don’t. Nonviolence to be successfully practiced has to become a part of your life and thought.

Many people also say that nonviolence is a very negative philosophy because it is the opposite of violence and we put the hyphen in the word to differentiate nonviolence as the opposite of violence. I have taken the liberty to remove the hyphen and make it a word that stands on its own. This simple action changes ones’ perception completely.

While nonviolence brings out the good in people violence does just the opposite. This is why in today’s world there is more hate, prejudice and all forms of inhumanity because we want our opponents to cower with fear. In other words violence brings out the worst in human nature.

In a beautiful passage grandfather captures the essence of his philosophy of nonviolence. He writes

Keep your thoughts positive because your thoughts become your words, keep your words positive because your words become your behaviour, keep your behaviour positive because your behaviour becomes your habit, keep your habits positive because your habits become your values, keep your values positive because your values become your destiny.

So just keeping positive thoughts will lead to positive destiny. So conversely having negative thoughts will lead to negative destiny. So it is important that we maintain positive thoughts and keep positive attitude so that we can understand nonviolence and practice it effectively. It is important to remember that grandfather was not the only one who was concerned at the culture of violence. There were many others equally concerned as he was. I want to share with you the words of two very important American people who said violence is evil. One of them is General Omar Bradley, a hero of World War II, who saw the worst aspects of violence in World War II and he was so disgusted that in 1948 he made the statement: ‘The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical midgets. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living’.

The other person who made a very profound statement was President Eisenhower, who also saw the worst aspects of violence in World War II and he also was disgusted with violence and three months after his inauguration as president of this country he made this statement,

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hope of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war it is humanity hanging on the cross of iron.

Now these are powerful words of warning to us, to mend our ways, to get out of this kind of culture that we have created around us and to became more giving and more positive and more nonviolent.

I want to share with you a story. I take a group of people from United States on a Gandhi Legacy tour to see how inspired young people are bringing about a change in India. On one of these trips we had a group of students from Wellesley College in Massachusetts. This is a liberal women’s college. There were 18 young women and two professors. The tour is modest and we travel by trains and buses to villages and city slums. After about six days in villages and dusty roads the women were longing for luxuries that are common in the US. They were dreaming of a hot shower, soft beds and shampoo to wash their hair.

On the seventh day we reached Ahmedabad where a new five star hotel had just opened and they offered us accommodation at half the price. While the group waited in the lobby for the rooms to be assigned the women were joyously bubbling with excitement because they finally saw the comforts and luxuries they were accustomed to. They were animatedly talking about sleeping in a comfortable bed and having a hot shower etc. until they went up to their rooms.

They quickly came back looking for me and said ‘Mr. Gandhi, we have to leave this hotel’.

I said— ‘Why? What happened? You were so enthusiastic and so excited minutes ago. What happened suddenly to change your mind.’

‘We looked out of the window of our rooms and we saw people living in awful conditions and we feel guilty. Those people do not have anything at all and we are enjoying all these luxuries here.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘this will be a good lesson for you. We will stay here because this is the reality of the world. ‘Half of the world lives in the luxury we are enjoying and the other half lives in the misery you see out of your window. In the United States we do not have a window to the other half of the world so we can ignore them but here you do have a window and I hope this experience will bring reality to your doorstep and teach you what your responsibilities should be.’

This selfish mind-set has come about because of the stress on nationalism and patriotism which has made us believe that countries, just as people, must think only about themselves and their needs and welfare. Just as individually our destinies are tied together so also with nations. No nation on this earth, however rich and powerful, can preserve its stability and security if the rest of the world is going down the drain. Humankind continues to spend trillions of dollars on building defense systems and weapons of mass destruction in the name of security and the result is we still live in fear of our shadows.

As Gandhi said, it is only when we are able to see this entire world as one global family and are willing to ensure that everyone enjoys a decent life-style that we will have true security and stability and peace.

I wish to conclude now with a story that my grandfather was fond of telling us. It is the story of a King who was curious about the meaning of peace. He invited all the intellects to explain the meaning of peace but no one could really satisfy him. One day an intellectual from another town came on a visit and the King asked him if he could give a cogent explanation of the meaning of peace.

The intellectual said: ‘The only person who can give you a satisfactory answer is an old sage who lives outside your kingdom. However, he is too old to come to you so you will have to go to him and find out.’

The next day the King went to the home of this sage and asked him the perplexing question. The sage said nothing. He simply got up and went into the kitchen and returned with one grain of wheat and placed it on the King’s palm and said: ‘Here is the answer to your question.’

Of course the King did not know what a grain of wheat had to do with peace, yet he was too proud to show his ignorance so he went back to the palace, found a little gold box and placed the wheat inside. Every morning he would open the box to see if he could find an answer but for several days nothing happened.

Soon, the intellectual came back on a return visit and the King asked him to explain. The King said you sent me to the sage and he gave me this grain of wheat and I don’t understand what has wheat got to do with peace?

It is very simple, sire, said the intellectual. As long as you keep this grain of wheat in this box nothing will happen. It will soon rot and perish and that will be the end of the story. However, if you had planted this grain of wheat in the soil it would sprout and multiply and soon you could have a whole field of wheat. That is the true meaning of peace. If someone has found peace and if that person keeps it selfishly for himself that peace will perish with him. But if that person shares it with others the knowledge will enlighten the world and soon we could all live in peace.

So I have come here tonight with the grain of wheat given to me by my grandfather. I am sharing it with you in the hope that you will not let it rot and perish but let it interact with all the elements so that together we can transform this world and make it a better place for future generations. Thank you.