Blog #6

 Question:

Gandhi argued that Satyagraha, a non-violent confrontation with the opponent, was always the right solution. In his book on Gandhi, Bikhu Parekh argues that this was a mistake in Gandhi's theory

Hayim Greenberg, editor of The Jewish Frontier and an admirer of Gandhi, wrote to him, ‘a Jewish Gandhi in Germany, should one arise,could function for about five minutes and would be promptly taken to the guillotine’. Gandhi replied that Hitler too was a human being, that the Jews, who were going to be slaughtered anyway, should have asserted their dignity and freely chosen their way of death, and that such an action was bound to have an effect on ordinary Germans, if not immediately at least a little later (lxviii. 137–41). His reply had a point,but it rested on an uncritical faith in the power of non-violence, and showed little understanding of the complex ways in which totalitarian systems brutalized the community, demoralized the victims, distorted public discourse, and undermined the basic preconditions of satyagraha. (Bikhu Parekh, Gandhi, A short Introduction, p.75)

What are your thoughts on this question? Is satyagraha always the right solution, as Gandhi maintained?

Answer: Honestly his plan of satyagraha was basically to emphasised the power of truth and the demand to search or truth. In that case, it was suggested that if the cause was true, if the struggle was against injustice, then the physical force was not even necessary to fight the oppressor. According to Gandhi, he main purpose of Satyagraha was to eliminate the evil or to improve the enemy.