The Essential Gandhi (27 page)

God has been abundantly kind to me. He has warned me … that there is not yet in India that truthful and non-violent atmosphere which and which alone can justify mass disobedience, which can be at all described as civil which means gentle, truthful, humble, knowing, willful yet loving yet never criminal and hateful.

 … No provocation can possibly justify the brutal murder of men who had been rendered defenceless and had virtually thrown themselves on the mercy of the mob.… Suppose the “non-violent” disobedience of Bardoli was permitted by God to succeed, the Government had abdicated in favor of the victors of Bardoli, who would control the unruly elements that must be expected to perpetrate inhumanity upon due provocation? Non-violent attainment of self-government presupposes a non-violent control over the violent elements in the country. Non-violent Non-coöperators can
succeed only when they have succeeded in attaining control over the hooligans of India.…
²⁷

[Gandhi was not sure he could. He accordingly suspended the civil disobedience campaign in Bardoli and canceled any defiance of the Government anywhere in India.]

Let the opponent glory in our humiliation or so-called defeat. It is better to be charged with cowardice and weakness than to be guilty of denial of our oath [of truth and non-violence]. It is a million times better to
appear
untrue before the world than to
be
untrue to ourselves.
²⁸

I hope … that whether the Government arrest me or whether they stop by direct or indirect means the publication of the three [Gandhi-edited nationalist] journals [
Young India
, Gujarati
Nava Jivan
and Hindi
Nava Jivan
] the public will remain unmoved. It is a matter of no pride or pleasure to me but one of humiliation that the Government refrain from arresting me for fear of an outbreak of universal violence and awful slaughter.… It would be a sad commentary upon my preaching of … non-violence if my incarceration was to be a signal for a storm all over the country.…

 … I would regard the observance of perfect peace on my arrest as a mark of high honor paid to me by my countrymen.…

I do not know that my removal from their midst will not be a benefit to the people. In the first instance, the superstition about the possession of supernatural powers by me will be demolished. Secondly, the belief that people have accepted the Non-coöperation program only under my influence and that they have no independent faith in it will be disproved. Thirdly, our capacity for Swaraj will be proved by our ability to conduct our activities in spite of the withdrawal even of the originator of the current program. Fourthly and selfishly, it will give me a quiet and physical rest which perhaps I deserve.
²⁹

[Lord Reading ordered Gandhi’s arrest, and it took place March 10, 1922 at 10:30 in the evening. Standing surrounded by a dozen or
more Ashramites, Gandhi offered up a prayer and joined in the singing of a hymn. Then, in a gay mood, he walked to the police car and was taken to Sabarmati prison. The next morning, Kasturbai sent clothes, goat’s milk and grapes to her husband.

The charge was writing three seditious articles in
Young India
.

The first “seditious article” was “Tampering with Loyalty,” which appeared September 19, 1921.]

 … Non-coöperation, though a religious and strictly moral movement, deliberately aims at the overthrow of the Government and is therefore legally seditious in terms of the Indian Penal Code.…

[The] duty of the Congress [Party] and Khilafat workers is clear. We ask for no quarter, we expect none from the Government. We did not solicit the promise of immunity from prison so long as we remained nonviolent. We may not now complain if we are imprisoned for sedition. Therefore our self-respect and our pledge require us to remain calm, unperturbed and nonviolent.…
³⁰

[The government case was made easy. The second article, “A Puzzle and Its Solution,” printed December 15, 1921, was even more explicit.]

 … We are challenging the might of this Government because we consider its activity to be wholly evil. We want to overthrow the Government. We want to
compel
its submission to the people’s will. We desire to show that the Government exists to serve the people, not the people the Government.… Whether we are one or many we must refuse to purchase freedom at the cost of our cherished convictions.…

It would be a thousand times better for us to be ruled by a military dictator than to have the dictatorship concealed under sham councils and assemblies. They prolong the agony and increase the expenditure. If we are so anxious to live it would be more honorable to face the truth and submit to unabashed dictation than to pretend we are slowly becoming free. There is no such thing as slow freedom. Freedom is like a birth. Till we are fully free we are slaves. All birth takes place in a moment.
³¹

[“How can there be any compromise when the British lion continues to shake his gory claws in our faces?” challenged the third seditious article, “Shaking the Manes,” in
Young India
of February 23, 1922.]

 … No empire intoxicated with the red wine of power and plunder of weaker races has yet lived long in this world. [It] is high time the British people were made to realize that the fight that was commenced in 1920 is a fight to the finish, whether it lasts one month or one year or many months or many years, and whether the representatives of Britain re-enact all the indescribable orgies of the Mutiny days with redoubled force or whether they do not. I shall only hope and pray that God will give India sufficient humility and sufficient strength to remain non-violent to the end.…
³²

[“The Great Trial,” as it came to be known, was held in Ahmedabad on March 18, 1922. After the indictment was read and the Advocate-General had stated the case against Gandhi, the judge asked the Mahatma whether he wished to make a statement. Gandhi had a written statement ready, which he introduced with some extemporaneous remarks.]

 … Non-violence is the first article of my faith [and] the last article of my creed. I had either to submit to a system which I considered had done an irreparable harm to my country or incur the risk of the mad fury of my people bursting forth when they understood the truth from my lips. I know my people have sometimes gone mad. I am deeply sorry for it and I am therefore here to submit not to a light penalty but to the highest penalty. I do not ask for mercy.…

Statement

My public life began in 1893 in South Africa in troubled weather. My first contact with British authority in that country was not of a happy character. I discovered that as a man and an Indian I had no rights. More correctly, I discovered that I had no rights as a man because I was an Indian.

But I was not baffled. I thought this treatment of Indians was an excrescence upon a system that was intrinsically and mainly good.…

I came reluctantly to the conclusion that the British connection had made India more helpless than she ever was before, politically and economically. A disarmed India has no power of resistance against any aggressor if she wanted to engage in an armed conflict with him.… She has become so poor that she has little power of resisting famines. Before the British advent India spun and wove in her millions of cottages just the supplement she needed for adding to her meager agricultural resources. This cottage industry … has been ruined.… Little do town-dwellers know how the semi-starved masses of India are slowly sinking to lifelessness.… The law itself in this country has been used to serve the foreign exploiter.…

 … I am satisfied that many Englishmen and Indian officials honestly believe they are administering one of the best systems yet devised in the world and that India is making steady though slow progress. They do not know that a subtle but effective system of terrorism and an organized display of force on the one hand and the deprivation of all powers of retaliation or self-defence on the other have emasculated the people and induced in them the habit of simulation.… Section 12-A under which I am happily charged is perhaps the prince among the political sections of the Indian Penal Code designed to suppress the liberty of the citizen. Affection cannot be manufactured or regulated by law.… I have no personal ill-will against any single administrator.… But I hold it to be a virtue to be disaffected towards a Government which in its totality has done more harm to India than any previous system. India is less manly under the British rule than she ever was before.…

In fact, I believe I have rendered a service to India and England by showing in Non-coöperation the way out of the unnatural state in which both are living.…
³³

[When Gandhi sat down, Mr. Justice Broomfield bowed to the prisoner and pronounced sentence. “The determination of a just sentence,” the judge declared, “is perhaps as difficult a proposition
as a judge in this country could have to face. The law is no respecter of persons. Nevertheless, it would be impossible to ignore the fact that you are in a different category from any person I have ever tried or am likely to have to try. It would be impossible to ignore the fact that, in the eyes of millions of your countrymen, you are a great patriot and a great leader. Even those who differ from you in politics look upon you as a man of high ideals and of noble and even saintly life.”

The judge then announced that Gandhi must undergo imprisonment for six years, and added that if the Government later saw fit to reduce the term “no one would be better pleased than I.”

When the court was adjourned, most of the spectators in the room fell at Gandhi’s feet. Many wept. Gandhi wore a benign smile as he was led away to jail.
³⁴

[Gandhi had no grievance. He knew when he entered Indian politics that it involved going to prison, for him and for others. That fall, the Government had begun to round up political leaders and their followers. Hundreds were arrested, including Motilal Nehru, father of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. By December, 1921, twenty thousand Indians had been jailed for Civil Disobedience and sedition. During December and January, 1922, ten thousand more were thrown into prisons for political offenses. Whenever Gandhi heard of a friend or colleague who had been arrested he telegraphed congratulations.]

 … We have an excessive dread of prisons. I have not a shadow of a doubt that society would be much cleaner and healthier if there was less resort to law courts than there is.… It is not right to beggar ourselves [with legal expenses] by fighting against odds. It is hardly manful to be over-anxious about the result of political trials that involve no disgrace.
³⁵

 … Imprisonments … are courted because we consider it to be wrong to be free under a government we hold to be wholly bad.…
³⁶

 … A Government that is evil has no room for good men and women except in its prisons.
³⁷

What is … the difference between those who find themselves in jails for being in the right and those who are there for being in the wrong? Both wear … the same dress, eat the same food and are subject outwardly to the same discipline. But whilst the latter submit to discipline most unwillingly and would commit a breach of it secretly and even openly if they could, the former will willingly and to the best of their ability conform to the jail discipline and prove worthier and more serviceable to the cause than when they are outside.…
³⁸

 … Self-purification is the main consideration in seeking the prison. Embarrassment of the Government is a secondary consideration. It is my unalterable conviction that even though the Government may not feel embarrassed in any way whatsoever by the incarceration or even execution of an innocent, unknown but a purified person, such incarceration will be the end of that Government. Even a single lamp dispels the deepest darkness.…
³⁹

 … For me solitary confinement in a prison cell without any breach on my part of the code of Non-coöperation or private or public morals will be freedom. For me the whole of India is a prison even as the master’s house is to his slave. A slave to be free must continuously rise against his slavery and be locked up in his master’s cell for his rebellion. The cell door is the door to freedom.…
⁴⁰

 … Our discipline [in jail] must not take the form of humiliation. Discomfort must not be torture and respect must not take the form of crawling on one’s belly. And therefore, on pain of being put in irons, in solitary confinement or of being shot, Non-coöperating prisoners must decline … to stand naked before the jailer, must decline in the name of discomfort to wear stinking clothes or eat food that is unclean or indigestible and must similarly decline even
in the name of respect to open out their palms or to sit in a crouching position.…
⁴¹

 … One finds a readiness to suffer imprisonment and assaults but not loss of goods. The anomaly is at first sight difficult to understand but it is really easy to appreciate. We are so much tied down to our goods and other possessions that when no disgrace attaches to imprisonment we prefer the inconvenience to loss of property.… This struggle … can give us victory only if we become indifferent to everything through which the state can press us into subjection to its will. We must be prepared, therefore, to let our goods and our land be taken away from us and rejoice over the dispossession even as we rejoice today over imprisonments. We must rest assured that the Government will be more quickly tired of selling our chattels than it is already of taking charge of our bodies.… We must voluntarily, though temporarily, embrace poverty if we will banish pauperism and pariahdom from the land. The sacrifice of ease by a few of us is nothing compared to the reward which is in store for us—the restoration of the honor and prosperity of this holy land.
⁴²