On this day 77 years ago Mohandas Gandhi was assassinated: Today we initiate a Season of Nonviolence

"Terrorism and deception are weapons not of the strong but of the weak." - Mohandas K. Gandhi

"We are ruthless and ask no quarter from you. When our turn comes we shall not disguise our terrorism." - Karl Marx, Marx-Engels Gesamt-Ausgabe, vol. vi pp 503-5 (The final issue of Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 18 May 1849)

 “In politics you cannot follow nonviolence. You cannot follow honesty. Every moment you have to give a lie. Every moment you have to take a bullet in hand and kill someone.” -  Gopal Godse,  co-conspirator in Gandhi's assassination, Time Magazine, February 2000.

Seventy seven years ago Mohandas Gandhi was shot three times in the chest and killed by Hindu nationalist Nathuram Godse at 5:17pm. Godse was part of a team of assassins that had tried 10 days earlier to bomb and kill Gandhi.

Mohandas K. Gandhi and his assassin Nathuram Godse.

Gandhi, despite his successful struggle for independence and the establishment of the largest democracy on the planet was felled, after repeated assassination attempts, gunned down as he went to worship. 

The assassins murdered the independence leader because they did not believe that India could survive with Gandhi promoting Satyagraha and a Muslim state next door. Gopal Godse, a co-conspirator and brother of the assassin Nathuram Godse, argued as late as February 2000 in a Time magazine interview that: “In politics you cannot follow nonviolence. You cannot follow honesty. Every moment you have to give a lie. Every moment you have to take a bullet in hand and kill someone.”

Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi lies in state at Birla House in New Delhi.

 

Communists view nationalists as a threat to their revolutionary project, and nationalists often have a critical view of Marxist-Leninists, but they both agreed in their hostility to Mohandas Gandhi. 

The nationalists were open and transparent about their evil intent, but the communists had more guile, and their reasons for rejecting him more complex. 

 

"The Class Essence of Gandhism" by S.M. Vakar critiques Gandhi

 

 

The Soviet press published an article written by S.M. Vakar in 1948 following Gandhi's assassination on January 30, 1948 titled "The Class Nature of the Gandhi Doctrine" subtitled "Gandhi as a Reactionary Utopian" in the Soviet philosophy journal Voprosy filosofii (Questions of Philosophy). The Marxist Leninist argument was outlined as follows:

Although Gandhi regarded the union and independence of the Indian peoples as his goal, his reactionary-Utopian social theory and the reformist methods of struggle connected with it caused his activity to fail in facilitating overthrow of the colonial yoke [...] The social essence of the Gandhi doctrine and its fundamentally reactionary role in the history of India's national liberation movement has hardly been treated in Marxist literature. Yet this doctrine still retards the development of class awareness among the Indian masses.

What was this social essence of Gandhian thought that so troubled the Marxist-Leninists in the Soviet Union? 

 

First, the "reformist methods" of struggle referred to in the above quote were means of nonviolent resistance and secondly his social theory rejected class struggle as another manifestation of destructive violence. 

 

On September 11, 1906 a new word came into existence that gave a more precise understanding of Gandhi's social theory and method of struggle which he described as follows.

'Satyagraha.' Truth (Satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement 'Satyagraha,' that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence, and gave up the use of the phrase 'passive resistance,' in connection with it, so much so that even in English writing we often avoided it and used instead the word 'Satyagraha' itself or some other equivalent English phrase.

The Marxist-Leninists embrace revolutionary violence and a movement led by a small vanguard of professional revolutionaries that carry out the changes by whatever means necessary and reject nonviolence as naive. They follow the doctrine of  Vladimir Lenin as presented in his 1902 revolutionary tract "What is to be done."  

 

This did not change once the Bolsheviks took power in 1917.

 

On October 2, 1920, the first leader of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin, stated in a speech to Russian communist youth.

 "The class struggle is continuing and it is our task to subordinate all interests to that struggle. Our communist morality is also subordinated to that task. We say: morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the proletariat, which is building up a new, communist society."

According to Lenin, "To speak the truth is a petite-bourgeois habit. To lie, on the contrary, is often justified by the lie's aim."

 

This doctrine embraces both the lie and hatred of the class enemy as necessities to achieve revolution. Gandhian Satyagraha is its philosophical anti-thesis.

Over a century has passed since both sets of ideas have been set out and applied around the world. An analysis done by Maria J. Stephen and Erica Chenoweth systematically explores the strategic effectiveness of both violent and nonviolent campaigns using data on 323 campaigns carried out between 1900 and 2006.[1] Their findings demonstrate that major non-violent campaigns were successful 53% of the time versus only 26% for major violent campaigns and terrorist campaigns had a dismal 7% success rate.

Today, India with all its flaws is the world's largest democracy with a growing economy that presents new competitive challenges to the developed world and Communism has amassed a body count of 100 million dead and counting. It would appear that Gandhi's criticisms of the communists were prescient:

"The socialists and communists say, they can do nothing to bring about economic equality today. They will just carry on propaganda in its favor and to that end they believe in generating and accentuating hatred. They say, when they get control over the State, they will enforce equality. Under my plan the State will be there to carry out the will of the people, not to dictate to them or force them to do its will." - Mohandas Gandhi

"It is my firm conviction that if the State suppressed capitalism by violence, it will be caught in the coils of violence itself, and will fail to develop non-violence at any time. The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence." - Mohandas Gandhi

It is Satyagraha that is relevant today in 2025 and offers an alternative to the conflagrations suffered in the past century and the wars that plague the world now. 

Gandhi's Satyagraha is a call to principled non-violence but even pragmatists and realists looking over the historical record cannot fail to be influenced by the fact that non-violent civic resistance works and offers a better chance of a better life for more people.

Others have embraced nonviolence based in adherence to the truth. They have achieved much, but in too many cases paid with their lives.

Like Gandhi, they also rejected communist ideology. 

 

One was a Southern Baptist minister who transformed the United States, but did not live to see his 40th birthday. He was assassinated by a white racist in 1968. A radical critique of American society was held by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. He consistently pushed for reforms to end segregation and guarantee African Americans' right to vote through democratic norms and nonviolent action, and he urged the United States to live up to its own aspirational ideals. 

The best way to characterize Reverend King's political philosophy is as belonging to what is known as Christian democracy. This political school is centered on a Christian understanding of humanity, where "every individual is considered unique and must be treated with dignity." It includes both center-left and center-right parties. 

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. sought to end racial segregation in the United States, and build the beloved community. However, he rejected communism as the means to achieve it.

"Since for the Communist there is no divine government, no absolute moral order, there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently almost anything—force, violence, murder, lying—is a justifiable means to the “millennial” end.⁵ This type of relativism was abhorrent to me." - Martin Luther King Jr. Stride to Freedom (1958)

 "Constructive ends can never give absolute moral justification to destructive means, because in the final analysis the end is pre-existent in the mean."  - Martin Luther King Jr. Stride to Freedom (1958)

Another was an engineer, and a Catholic layman who founded the Christian Liberation Movement, and nonviolently changed Cuba, but did no live to see his 61st birthday. He was assassinated by Cuban government agents, together with his movement's youth leader Harold Cepero in 2012.

Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas presented a radical critique of the communist dictatorship, and sought nonviolent means within the existing system to achieve a transition to democracy in Cuba based in the rule of law. In the two years prior to his untimely death, Oswaldo worked on the book "The Night is Not Eternal" in which he gave an assessment of the fraudulent change of the Cuban dictatorship that, while recognizing class differences, rejected class hatred.

"Let us remember that the Revolution here was made in the name of the poor, but after using them to suppress the rich and leave everyone who had something with nothing, the right of expression was taken away from everyone and from the poor themselves, who long ago lost their voice and cannot even say that they are poor. In this current situation of inequality sustained by oppression, if these changes are implemented, inequality will only deepen. We have always said this without class hatred or hatred of any kind, but everything indicates that this re-conversion of privilege is not implemented in a transition but in an inheritance in which the oligarchy leaves its successors with other styles and other content of inequality."

In 2002, when Oswaldo received the European Union's Sakharov Prize, and addressed the EU parliament in Brussels he spoke of the dangers of globalization, in terms that both Gandhi, and King would have appreciated and shared.

"The talk today is of globalization, but we must state that unless there is global solidarity, not only human rights but also the right to remain human will be jeopardized. If there is no solidarity between people we will be unable to preserve a fair world in which it is possible to continue living as human beings." 

The critique made by Payá, King and Gandhi is against a "thing-oriented" society or a government as a "soulless machine" that looks to the person or the individual as an "economic automaton", or " the masses" that constitute an economic class because either is a dystopian system. They argue that the focus should be on the human person and policies that recognize and respect the uniqueness of each human being and their fundamental dignity.

 

Let us initiate a season of nonviolence, and examine these and other nonviolent thinkers, and exemplars, on January 30th, following up on April 4th, and July 22nd to coincide with the death anniversaries of these three nonviolent icons.

 

We are living in times where their example is more needed than ever to inspire truth and firmness in defiance of evil practices.