He came to UW-Madison in 1961 and taught here
for over 50 years.
During his time at UW he started a certificate program
in LGBT Studies, directed a year abroad in India program,
and produced dozens of documentaries and articles
about India, Gandhi, and other topics.
He has been a guest lecturer on Gandhi in my
UW Odyssey Project for the last 12 years,
reaching adults at the poverty level.
He was honored in 2009
with a Lifetime Achievement Award for Peacemaking
from the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice.
It's my great honor to introduce for a talk entitled
"Is Gandhi Relevant Today?"
the absolutely inspirational Professor Joe Elder.
(applause)
- Thank you, Emily.
And thank all of you for coming.
As Emily said, you sort of know the answer before
I start (chuckling), and so I could say,
well, yeah, Gandhi's relevant.
Have a good afternoon.
But it's a little more complicated than that because
I must say my initial experience with Gandhi
and Gandhianism was pretty pessimistic.
So I will start from there and then we'll go
on to where we are today.
I never met Gandhi.
I was a freshman in Oberlin College
on January 30th, 1948, when Gandhi was killed.
A little man with spectacles and a loincloth whom
I'd read about and who was reported to have led
India's to independence from Great Britain.
Within hours of Gandhi's death, India's Prime Minister,
Jawaharlal Nehru, spoke to the nation on All India Radio:
"Friends and Comrades, the light has gone out of our
lives and there is darkness everywhere.
Our beloved leader, Bapu,
is no more and that is a terrible blow not only to me...
but to millions and millions in this country."
Then Nehru went on to say:
" 'The light has gone out,' I said and yet I was wrong.
For the light that shone in this country was
no ordinary light.
A thousand years later the world will still see it
and it will give solace to innumerable hearts."
Three years later, I myself was in India as an English
teacher with a fellowship from Oberlin College.
Four years later, I visited Gandhi's ashram in
the center of India.
It was pretty disillusioning.
No one was farming.
The irrigation Persian wheel had broken and no one
knew how to fix it.
The ashram inhabitants were mostly trying to recover
everything Gandhi had ever written for what turned out
to be the 99-volume Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi.
Gandhi may have led India to independence,
but that was over.
This certainly looked like the end of the road.
I joined the UW faculty in 1961 in two departments,
Sociology and Indian Studies.
I found many students were interested in Gandhi.
Within a decade I created a course called
Thought of Gandhi .
I had to learn a lot about Gandhi.
Every year one or two more books were
published about Gandhi.
The 99-volume Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi
were already on the UW Memorial Library shelves.
I never read them all.
I had one PhD student who did.
It took her a year and a half.
In the end she wrote her dissertation on
Gandhi and ecology.
From teaching the Thought of Gandhi course over
several decades, what did I learn about Gandhi?
Well, we're going to go over a quick review:
1869, He was born on October 2.
That is now a national holiday in India.
When Joann and I arrived in Bombay harbor in 1951,
India was celebrating Gandhi's birthday,
almost for the first time.
And they were getting a kick out of the fact
this was their holiday, this was not a British holiday.
1882, Gandhi went through an arranged marriage
at the age of 13 to a girl from his same Nodh-Bania
caste somewhere in the Vaisya varna.
And he accepted the way in which India
had these hierarchical arrangements.
In 1888 his uncle convinced him that the only
way he would get ahead would be to go to England
and become a lawyer.
So that year he sailed from Bombay to England,
leaving behind him a wife and a small son.
In Britain he was, what I would call, a cultural Hindu.
He was a vegetarian, he would not drink alcohol.
He recognized he was from the Nodh-Bania caste
because they had out-casted him when he left
and they had to in-caste him when he came back,
In England he read the Bhagavad-Gita for the first time.
His major companions were in a British vegetarian society.
It was in Britain that he learned about the law of karma,
which is the basic metaphysical premise of Buddhism,
Jainism, and Hinduism.
It's a faith that believes you've been born many
times before and you will be born many times again until,
perhaps, you are released.
When Gandhi spoke about this he said maybe in a
future life he would be reborn as an untouchable.
To try to find words where Gandhi expressed this
notion of the metaphysical reality of the law of karma,
he made a statement at the age of 59, which I am
going to quote, which sort of captures in his words what
he felt was sort of the moral undergirding of society.
"Whilst everything around me is ever-changing,
ever-dying, there is underlying all that change a
living power that is changeless, that holds all together,
that creates, dissolves, and re-creates;
and is this power benevolent or malevolent?
I see it as purely benevolent, for I can see that in...
the midst of death life persists, in the midst
of untruth truth persists, in the midst
of darkness, light persists."
Now you capture Gandhi's notion of the law of karma,
this law where every virtue is rewarded and every
evil is punished, because of moral order that works
something like the law of gravity.
So, to that extent he was a cultural Hindu.
He didn't understand a lot about it but he
accepted himself as a Hindu.
He also was a cultural Jain. Jainism is not a faith with
which most of us in America are familiar.
The founder of Jainism, Lord Mahavir, walked in India
about the same time Buddha did.
They probably actually knew each other.
And they were wrestling with the question
of "If we are reborn again and again and again,
how do we get off the cycle of reincarnation?"
Kind of the opposite to the question here of
"How does one have eternal life?" is
"How can I stop eternal life because I've
got more of it than I want?"
He was exposed to Jainism largely through his mother,
who had accepted a particular Jain mystic as her guru,
and also a younger man, a successful jewelry
merchant who was a Jain.
And I don't think Gandhi realized how much his
version of what Hinduism was was colored by
his connection with Jainism, because in Jainism
the basic premise is, the most important thing is,
to take no life.
That to harm a living creature is an ultimate sin for
which one will pay for ever and ever.
Gandhi sort of merged this into Hinduism
and kept using the central Jain concept of ahimsa
as a Hindu feature.
It's not that it's not, but ahimsa, "himsa" is violence;
"a" is the negation of violence, that is very
much Jain concept.
And so throughout his life when he kept referring
to ahimsa as a Hindu doctrine, it really technically
was much more a Jain doctrine.
Gandhi spent 2 1/2 years in Britain.
He got his degree as a barrister.
And he returned to India expecting to become
an economically successful lawyer in Gujarat.
His first cases were dismal; he did not do well as a lawyer.
He finally found a job that meant he had to leave
India and go to South Africa to work out a case
between two Muslim merchants.
What happened to Gandhi in South Africa
was totally dramatic.
He describes it in his autobiography.
He bought a first-class train ticket.
He got, by the middle of the night, to the train
station at Maritzburg.
And a white South African told him he was not
eligible to ride in a train because he was brown,
he was an Indian.
Gandhi insisted he'd purchased the ticket,
it was valid, he was a barrister from England.
And the conductor simply tossed Gandhi
and his luggage off the train at Maritzburg.
Gandhi describes that night at Maritzburg as the event
that changed his life.
He could have gotten on the train and returned to Durban
and sailed back to India, realizing that South Africa
was extremely inhospitable, not only to Africans but
to Indians and people of other races.
Or he could forge ahead and see what would happen.
And this is what he did.
Before the end of that year he had founded
the Natal Indian Congress for the Indian community in Natal.
They were insisting that they were members of
the British Empire and they were entitled to the rights
of white members of the British Empire.
For the next several years he became sort of a champion
spokesperson for the Indian community in
Natal and Transvaal.
The white South Africans were passing increasing
ordinances to separate and punish the brown
or black South Africans.
There was finally something called the Asiatic Ordinance
where every Indian had to carry an identity card so that
if he were stopped he could show that he was a legitimate,
discriminated-against Asian living in South Africa.
At that point Gandhi noticed that oppressors depend
upon the cooperation of the oppressed if they're
going to oppress.
So, the way to stop oppression...
was not to cooperate.
So he coined the term "non-cooperation."
This meant that you simply did not carry the pass.
They couldn't make you do it.
They could imprison you, but in the end you had
the power to resist.
And as Gandhi worked with this notion of just
collectively refusing to obey the law, he developed
this notion of pro-active, non-violent, collective action.
Pro-active, non-violent, collective action.
He felt there was no English word for this,
and certainly the terms I put together are very clumsy.
It was not simple terms like not cooperating.
That didn't have a lot of drama to it.
It wasn't passive resistance.
It was not conscientious objection.
It was something more powerful.
It was something that required force,
and he wanted a word that captured that element of force.
So he had a competition.
And the term that was coined for this had not
existed in any language before.
It was "satyagraha."
"Sat" is the word for truth, and "agraha" is force.
The notion that there is something that truth
has that carries force.
The idea that when one is engaged in conflict,
one has one's notion of one's own position that
it is true and probably feels that the opposition
has only untruths.
But the world is much more complicated.
I might think I have the truth, but in my position there
must be untruth because I am a human being.
And in my opponent's position there must be
some truth even though I think most of him is untrue.
So the task in confrontation is to seek the truth
from both of our sides until we come out with
something which has the truth of both sides.
From this all, the notion that you work on this with
the notion that there is a notion of force to this
and once you come out with a consolidated truth
then you are obliged to force change.
So, there was no English term for this, and the term
"satyagraha" became the term that he used.
There are several debates that come up with this.
If you engage in pro-active, non-violent, collective action,
do you do it because it is morally correct?
Or do you do it because it is instrumental?
And this is the kind of ethical debate
that can go on forever.
Do you do this even if it seems to fail?
Or do you do it only if it seems to work?
And in Gandhi's view of the world both features were true.
It was principled, you should do it.
It also was instrumental, the notion of the ends
and the means are so closely linked that only by
this non-violent, collective action would you get
to a non-violent, collective solution.
Up until now, Gandhi had not linked his effort to come
up with definitions with literature of which
we are familiar, but in 1907 Gandhi read David Thoreau's
"Civil Disobedience" and found a lot in that essay
that resonated.
He translated it into Gujarati,
feeling that people who read Gujarati should see
that somebody in New England was wrestling
with the same issues.
Gandhi took the lesson of "Civil Disobedience" as
any citizen has a moral obligation to disobey his or her
government if it requires you to implement injustice.
In other words, one obeys the law until one sees
one is being required to implement injustice.
And at that time one has a moral responsibility to say no.
So Gandhi wove into satyagraha David Thoreau's
"Civil Disobedience."
A year later he read some essays by Tolstoy.
Tolstoy is known for his famous classical novels,
but he also wrote toward the end of his life
semi-mystical stories.
They were included in a collection called
"The Kingdom of God Is Within You."
And in these short stories Tolstoy kept indicating that
if there was a core Christian principle,
it was non-violence.
And in each of his stories you could not be a
serious Christian unless you refused
to engage in violence.
Gandhi found this very attractive and he began
to correspond with Tolstoy.
We have several letters that went between Gandhi
and Tolstoy on this notion of where is the moral
obligation to be non-violent.
The thesis of both Tolstoy and Gandhi was violence
itself generates violence.
And when one generates violence one is generating
untruth, one is forcing people to do things they
would not do otherwise, and there will be either
an actual or potential blowback.
It simply will not work.
In 1909 Gandhi went to London to present
the case for fair treatment of Indians.
He was profoundly disillusioned by his trip to England.
He was a barrister, he was a leader of the Indian
community in South Africa.
He found he was simply put off time and again,
transferred to committees, not taken seriously.
And on his return voyage he wrote a book which
had a profound effect on him.
It was called "Hind Swaraj."
"Swaraj" meaning self-rule.
In it he enunciated a concept that ancient India
had the key answers to life's questions.
That simple living, self-denial, acceptance of one's
position and birth all had moral benefits that
the West had lost.
The West had become competitive.
It began manufacturing products.
Capitalism was inherently unequal, and if one were
seriously interested in a moral life, one should
establish a simple communal life.
So for the rest of his life Gandhi had communal ashrams.
These were communities, intentional communities,
where they practiced various forms of shared income
earning and shared work.
In 1913 Gandhi organized what he called the Great March.
This was an effort where he had 2000 miners who
were in the Natal section of South Africa to walk across
the border into Transvaal and violate the laws
and get themselves arrested to indicate how unfair
it was that in one part of South Africa you had to
have a passbook and in another you didn't.
That was probably the notion of building up on
the idea of large numbers of people engaging in
these types of activity.
In the end, Gandhi was arrested three times in four days,
which was something of a record.
They'd arrest him and he did get signed in
and get out and he'd get arrested again.
And the pressure of these 2000 miners crossing
finally got General Smuts to sign what he called
the Indian Relief Act, which yielded to many of
the claims of these miners and Gandhi.
So Gandhi left South Africa in 1914 for the final time.
He spent 21 years there, one would say probably
his most youthful years, from ages 23 to 44.
So it's sort of from the lab school of South Africa
that he got to India.
And now he began to experiment seriously with
his pro-active, non-violent, collective
action called satyagraha.
In 1919 the British in India past something
they called the Rowlatt Bills.
The Indians had been hoping that after World War II
and after Indians had served at the British Army,
Indians would move a little bit more toward self-rule.
And the Rowlatt Bills reversed the process.
They said we will continue to deal with India as
though they are dangerous terrorists,
and we will make it harder for them to be
treated equally in the legal system.
Gandhi and others felt this was unacceptable,
and so they were going to resist the Rowlatt Bills.
He tried something, he called for one day the whole
nation would strike.
Nobody would go to work, nobody would shop,
nobody would go to teach, nobody would go to
the post office.
It was a disaster.
There was violence that broke out in the Punjab,
an English bank manager was killed,
an English woman school teacher was killed.
There was a British push-back.
General Dyer went into a park and fired into a
crowd of civilians and the Jallianwala Bagh
massacre occurred.
Gandhi was horrified.
This was the worst possible thing that
could have happened.
He announced to the world that he had made
a Himalayan miscalculation,
and he called off collective action.
And its credibility was certainly under question.
While he was pausing in what he should do next,
the idea came up of boycotting English products.
This was a little less risky because it meant simply
not buying British products.
So, the slogan "Boycott British Goods"
began to become the word of the day.
And Gandhi himself stopped wearing European
clothing and wore the cloth, cotton garments
of farmers in India.
He fitted this into a large-scale economic effort
to undercut the British Raj, for the British economy
depended heavily on cotton from India
and then India purchasing finished cloth
products from Britain.
And when you neither sold the cotton to Britain or
you did not buy the British manufactured products,
you began to dig into the economic advantage
that Britain had.
The boycotting of British goods
continued from that time on.
Then came 1921 and Gandhi decided once
again to try a major movement.
He announced that there would be a movement
for Indian self-rule within one year,
and he called for mass civil disobedience.
He hoped that people had learned from the one
two years earlier that you had to be very,
very careful in letting people loose.
It also was a disaster.
On February 15th word came that in a village in
Uttar Pradesh, Chauri Chaura, a group of Indian citizens
had turned upon their policemen and hacked them,
literally, to death.
And Gandhi felt that the murder of those policemen
was his responsibility.
So he called off that campaign.
The first two campaigns were disasters,
and he said that India was a long way away from
being ready for self-rule.
Gandhi spent jail time from 1921 to 1924.
He was serving a sentence that was initially six years;
he got time off for good behavior.
It wasn't until 1930 that he decided once again to try
this sort of massive movement of people against the British.
This time he chose a particular target.
It was the salt tax.
The British monopoly was that the only salt you
could buy in India was processed by the British,
and the money that was gained by the salt tax
went to the British treasury.
It was a tax that every citizen in India had to pay
every time he bought salt.
At this point, Gandhi began to get other people
supporting him, and probably the most important
for the moment was a Muslim.
This was a Muslim from the North-West Frontier Province,
six-foot-something tall.
Gandhi was about my height.
And Abdul Ghaffar Khan was a leader of the Muslims.
And he concluded that Gandhi's notion of non-violent
activism was inherent in the Islamic creed in the Koran.
If you look at Mohammed and Mohammed's behavior,
there was a tradition of courage where you would
not bear arms against your enemies.
So he began a group of Muslims up in the North-West
Frontier Province called the Red Shirts,
which was a kind of color they colored their shirts.
And when the Salt March began on the coast of India,
the Red Shirts up in the North-West Frontier Province
began to take over the ruling of some of the communities
in the area.
They actually managed to control Peshawar.
The British reacted very violently.
The Red Shirts, many of them were killed,
and Abdul Ghaffar Khan himself was imprisoned.
From this, one of the most shocking things,
when the British told their Indian troops to fire
on the Muslims, the Garhwal Rifles refused to do so.
They said these are our people.
It was a total breakdown of British control.
And for this brief period of time the Red Shirts
and Abdul Ghaffar Khan actually ran the town
of Peshawar until the British came back in.
The end of the Salt March probably was the only event
that really came fairly close to what Gandhi had
said satyagraha should be because he sat down
with Viceroy Irwin and worked out a compromise
so that people were released from prison;
the British still got revenue from the salt tax;
people living on the coast of India were able to make
their own salt.
It was a way in which, one could say, the British needed
some things, the Indians needed some things.
We can work these things out.
The drama was that here was a British viceroy talking
to a man in a loincloth with sandals who had
no political power.
And if there was anybody who was really disturbed
by that it was Winston Churchill.
It galled him to see the representative of the
King of England talking to a person dressed like
a peasant and coming out with this treaty at the end.
From 1932 to 1940, Gandhi was less active in this sort
of massive effort.
He was concerned about the relations between
Hindus and Muslims in India.
And very concerned about the caste system.
He was aware of the fact that untouchability was
a stigma on the notion of fair treatment of people,
and so he went to all kinds of efforts to rebuild
Hindu-Muslim friendship and to eliminate the most
severe discrimination against the untouchables.
Then came World War II.
In World War II there was a Quit India Movement.
The Indians said the British should simply leave;
the British said that wasn't going to happen.
And so for most of the rest of the War, Gandhi and the other
members of the Congress Party were imprisoned.
And then the War ended.
Then the major event in terms of British history in India
was the election in Britain which sent Chuchill
and his party out and Clement Attlee and
the Labour government in.
And then the decision was made by the Labour Party
for an early realization of self-government in India.
So, that was a critical decision.
It was made by English voters rather than
somebody in India itself.
August 15, 1947, two nations (inaudible),
India and Pakistan.
Gandhi was sorely distressed.
He felt he had failed; there were two countries
instead of one.
A massive exodus of Hindus from Pakistan,
Muslims from India, and who knows how many
lost their lives.
He felt he had failed.
He was assassinated four months later.
So that brings us sort of up to the question,
what is Gandhi's relevance today?
I would say that probably as it's turned out to be,
and this was not clear when I was at the ashram in 1953,
that the idea of pro-active, non-violent collective action
acquired traction; this concept of satyagraha.
It was a time when many nations were trying
to get rid of their colonial masters.
There were violent struggles for national independence
against the Dutch, the French, and the British.
You saw this in Indonesia, Malaysia, Laos, Vietnam.
You saw it in Africa with the French trying to
hold the Algerians.
A very bloody period.
But also there were more and more countries that
received their independence from their masters because
the masters realized the time was up,
there was no point in staying more as the outside colonies.
Then you begin to have, what seems to me,
this sort of flow of this idea into a variety
of different directions.
The Civil Rights Movement and Dr. Martin Luther King.
His own awareness of Gandhi was interesting because
he was sort of essentially an undergraduate when
he heard a sermon by a Baptist minister describing
Gandhi as doing truly Christian things.
And at that time just Martin Luther King,
it wasn't Dr. Martin Luther King, began to get
interested in this process over in India.
When he had become a clergyman in Montgomery, Alabama,
and was working with the NAACP and Rosa Parks,
the idea of the bus boycott came onto the agenda.
The notion of how you do a non-violent boycott led
him once again to look at what Gandhi
had been involved with.
After Gandhi's death, King went to India from
February to March in 1959.
And there he really sort of said there's some principles
here that Gandhi had worked on that I did not see earlier,
as a Christian clergyman.
And the notion of collective, non-violent action began
to emerge as a principle that could be, and eventually was,
adopted in the Civil Rights Movement.
An addition to what was already on the agenda was
the notion of training satyagrahans, satyagrahis,
those who engage in satyagraha.
Aware that when you get a lot of people moving,
people can get out of control,
people are in tense situations,
and aware of the notion that you should,
if you are going to engage in these campaigns you should
go through the physical, emotional practice of what
happens when you are spat upon, when you are insulted,
when you're physically harmed.
And that was probably one of the additions that was
brought into the Civil Rights Movement;
training for those participating in these
kinds of activities.
Another American figure who picked up on
the notion that Gandhi had was Cesar Chavez.
And if one wants to see the usefulness of a boycott,
we think back to the years from 1970 to 1975
when there was a grape boycott.
It was a moral boycott by Cesar Chavez and his colleagues,
who were trying to get recognition for
the United Farm Workers.
There is much of Gandhi in the symbolism that
Cesar Chavez used, including, for a period,
some fasting that Cesar Chavez engaged in.
The consumer boycott was effective.
There was a 15% drop in grape consumption,
and the United Farm Workers were ultimately accepted.
I still remember the summer after the boycott ended
being in our home with a young boy who lived in
California and we were serving grapes.
(chuckling) He looked at the grapes like they were
some sort of poison.
He said, "Can we touch those grapes?"
And his mother said, "Yes, you can touch those grapes.
The boycott's over."
I hadn't realized how deeply this refusal to use
grapes because of Cesar Chavez had reached into
even the American home.
Another figure that wrestled with these same issues
was Nelson Mandela and in many of the same
sort of categories.
Nelson Mandela adopted the principles from Gandhi
and from Dr. Martin Luther King, the notion that
non-violence was the way to go.
And he found it so extraordinarily difficult to achieve
anything with the African government that he finally
concluded that this will not work,
non-violence is not going to do it.
And he joined the armed struggle of the
African National Congress against the government.
The price he paid was being found guilty of terrorism
and serving 27 years on Robben Island.
It was interesting when South Africa was on the brink
of acknowledging the end of apartheid that
Nelson Mandela was allowed off Robben Island,
but only on condition that he renounced violence,
that even at that point technically he was still
committed to using violence.
And the South African government felt they couldn't
release him if that was still part of his philosophy.
Key things had happened.
The boycott of international agencies had been effective.
Internal boycotts in South Africa itself was important,
where black communities refused to buy products
from their white communities.
There was a Jack Mkhuseli, who in the town of
Port Elizabeth led a boycott for two or three years
where it simply made it clear to the white store
owners in Port Elizabeth that until apartheid
ended they would not be able to sell things
to the African community.
The end of apartheid came when President Botha resigned,
President de Klerk replaced him, Nelson Mandela did
say that he was renouncing violence,
and he was freed from prison.
And there were elections, and Nelson Mandela was elected.
And we've seen the impressive role he played in
terms of forgiving those been so harsh on him.
One might look at all of these that we just looked
at and say there's kind of a continuity.
These were people in sort of a Christian Western heritage.
They were watching these kinds of things.
It was the surprise success of this non-violent act
of cooperation that I've been particularly impressed by.
1979, Iranians wanted to overthrow the Shah.
When one looks at the statements of the
Ayatollah Khomeini made, urging the Iranians not
to use violence, it could almost have been said by Gandhi.
Let me give a quote from Ayatollah Khomeini on
the brink of driving the Shah out of Iran.
"Oh, brave Iranian nation, my aim is to solve the problem
of Iran and bring about the downfall of the Shah's
regime non-violently.
If anybody wants to engage in violence or to kill people
you must prevent them."
The Ayatollah was aware that when things get tough,
the temptation is to kill.
And he said, "We will win this battle against the Shah.
We will do it non-violently."
1980, in Poland at the Gdansk shipyards there was
the victory of the Solidarity union with Lech Walesa.
Kind of unexpected, but by adopting persistent
non-cooperation, the union was formed despite
the resistance by the government.
In 1989 there was the Velvet Revolution
that overthrew the Communist government in
what was then Czechoslovakia.
In 1986 "Cory" Aquino in the Philippines carried
out a non-violent restoration of power.
1999, the fall of the Berlin Wall.
This was one of those sort of mysteries that didn't
seem predictable, then suddenly it happened.
And yet as the story is spelled out of what went into
the way in which the Wall collapsed, there were
many people working carefully to set the groundwork
for that wall to go.
2004, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine,
where there had been a rigged election and it
was quite clear that the rigging meant that
the election was not valid.
People took to the streets and there
was another election that was recognized as authentic.
All of these efforts were not successful.
When asked if any technique the one uses,
one has to be a little bit cautious about
the way they work out.
Probably the one I'm saddest about because it failed
so completely was from Gandhi's colleague
Abdul Ghaffar Khan.
He was a tall six-foot-something Pathan who worked
with Gandhi and who, at the time of the Salt March,
lead his Red Shirts to acquire sort of non-violent
control of Peshawar and other cities in
the North-West Frontier Province.
Abdul Ghaffar Khan wanted a separate state of
the North-West Frontier Province.
He felt the language was one, the people were one,
they had a heritage, and they should be allowed
to have a separate state.
So as India became India, he was opposed initially to
any partition, India and Pakistan should remain
the same, and then if Pakistan came into existence,
there should be a separate country, which would
be the North-West Frontier Province.
The Pakistan government was firmly opposed to this.
They imprisoned him, they would let him out,
he would go right back and urge the establishment
of the North-West Frontier Province,
and he'd go back to prison.
He spent the entire rest of his life in prisons in Pakistan.
A year before his death at the age of 98,
he was allowed to come out.
He went to India, and India honored him
with the honors that India could.
But he did die in prison, a person whose plan
never was achieved.
So this is not a guaranteed path for success.
There are other current situations that are kind of
under consideration.
One looks at the Dalai Lama and here is a case
where the pattern is much the same.
Dalai Lama began by asking for an autonomous Tibet.
That was not to be achieved.
Then he asked for greater participation
of Tibetans in the government.
He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.
And as the years passed it seemed even less
and less likely that there ever would be something like
either an independent Tibet or an autonomous
region for Tibet.
The honors that he received were for his persistence.
But will that ever happen or not?
We still have to wait.
That's an unanswered question.
In the meantime it's interesting to watch what's
happening to the concept of the Dalai Lama.
There is the suggestion that maybe the time has come
for even the institution to disappear because
perhaps it has served its time.
Another ongoing situation is in Burma, or Myanmar,
where Aung San Suu Kyi for years persisted in her
effort to create democracy in what was then Burma,
or Myanmar.
That's kind of halfway there, but it's still
not fully resolved.
She received the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize when she
was still in prison.
At the moment she has a position in Parliament,
but Myanmar is not yet the democracy that she wants.
Other ongoing situations.
In 2005 the Palestinians called for boycotts,
divestments, and sanctions, the BDS,
against things that were manufactured
in the West Bank, feeling that so long as that happens
their lack of statehood continues to be unacceptable.
European countries have adopted the Boycott Divestment
and Sanctions much more than the United States has,
but it is on the agenda as a way in which one could
bring pressure for the continued effort to
have a Palestinian state.
2011, the Arab Spring brought big hopes
and also big disappointments.
Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, each one for a short time
appeared to be moving in the direction they want
to be in favor of.
And the disappointments there
have been serious and, especially in
the case of Syria, tragic.
Other similar events that have drawn upon this
tradition of active, non-violent movements include
even the Occupy Wall Street Movement,
which for a period of time held the attention of the US.
And still there are concerns about the massive
inequalities between the richest in the United States
and those who are so far underprivileged
with so little money.
The Hong Kong student protests in 2014,
the Umbrella Movement, was a similar case where
people decided to use these strategies.
This again was an effort to introduce greater
democracy into Hong Kong.
I want to touch on one event which seems a little
bit off of the margin.
But this has to do with the US Supreme Court ruling
on marriage equality.
If one goes back 30 years, one would say the notion
that in 2015 there would be a decision that would say
gays and lesbians could marry.
It would seem totally absurd.
Over the 20 years, the notion that people of all variations
are entitled to select the partner they want to marry
has become the law of the land.
A figure here who has played a part that, if one has
been in the movement one would notice it,
is Reverend Mel White.
Reverend Mel White was a clergyman.
He was very critical of homosexuality.
He lent his support to those who were attacking it until
he realized that he himself was gay.
And then how does one remain a Christian
and how does one remain in the church when
one is a gay Christian?
The book he wrote, called "Stranger at the Gate:
To Be Gay and Christian in America",
1994, sort of raised the dialogue in the United States
that was not yet in 1994 particularly open to these
kinds of things.
He established a movement called Soulforce and it was
a direct copy of satyagraha.
On the stationery that they used there was a picture of
Gandhi and a picture of Martin Luther King.
And then Mel White said we are using this notion
of seeking truth together to come out with
something which is fair for everybody.
The Soulforce Movement set up programs where they
would typically confront churches that were particularly
reluctant to accept gays, lesbians, and transgenders
and get into dialogue with them.
Sometimes these would result in imprisonment,
often a great deal of tension.
But the notion that just as satyagraha says this is a force,
and just as Martin Luther King said we want to keep
pressure going, so Mel White in his
Soulforce Movement said this is an issue
we need to keep moving.
To think about winding up this lecture
Where Does Gandhi Stand Today?,
again going back to my visit to his ashram in 1953,
at that time it looked like it sort of died
there in the ashram.
But I think this notion of a strategy for bringing
people into action, looking for forcing change using
non-violence has a kind of resonance in a world
with so many different groups and so many different needs.
Along this line there are academic reactions to this.
The beginning of research groups and school
programs that address peace studies.
In Norway there's the International
Peace Research Associates who have been looking
at how does one address these conflict situations.
And there are branches of that in
Ann Arbor and Philadelphia.
Law schools have introduced courses in mediation
and arbitration.
And in the world we've seen the International
Criminal Court and efforts to define crimes
against humanity, so these things actually
could be used in court cases.
When one looks at the canon of text used in these
courses it's interesting that there already is sort of
a series of books, almost all of them dealing with Gandhi.
The first one in the canon is Joan Bondurant's book,
called "Conquest of Violence:
The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict."
Virtually every one of these courses lists her book.
Then there's Gene Sharp's book, 1975,
called "Politics of Nonviolent Action" in which in
hundreds of pages he lists a whole variety of
ways in which, historically, non-violent activities
have been used to try to implement change.
A very well-known book is the Roger Fisher,
William Ury, Bruce Patton, "Getting to Yes:
Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In."
It was published first in 1981.
It's now in at least its third edition;
sold 8 million copies, been translated
into 30 languages.
You read that book and it essentially sort of elaborates
on Gandhi's notion of untruth on both sides,
truth on both sides, and how do you negotiate something
where you have a common truth.
For those who are impressed with encyclopedia,
there is now an "Encyclopedia of Violence,
Peace, and Conflict".
Each volume is about that thick.
There are three of them, came out in 1999.
And the listing of topics is fascinating.
There are this many ways that one can look at violence,
peace, and conflict.
The one that interested me as much as anything
was the chapter on structural violence.
How does one identify societies which built into them
just the nature of the economy and politics works
is generating violence.
In 2006 there was another version of this.
There are directories of peace studies.
The one that I have came out in 2006,
it was a seventh edition, and it shows literally dozens
and dozens of courses taught in Europe,
the United States, and Canada on dimensions of peace
studies and conflict resolution.
And throughout each of these there is some version
of satyagraha and some reference to Gandhi.
So, is Gandhi relevant today?
Pro-active non-violent collective action,
which could be called satyagraha campaigns or boycotts,
have at times effectively achieved desirable goals
and at times they have failed.
Probably one of the important things Gandhi did was
to show that it could be effective.
The notion that you could have the British Raj leave
India largely because of this collective non-violent action,
is a testimony to the way in which history can move.
When one looks at the scene today, one looks
for situations in which this policy might be used.
Are there situations now that we could think of
in which pro-active, non-violent collective action
might be effective?
Or in which satyagraha can be effective?
And the follow-up question is, if so how do we do it?
We look around and I simply pulled a few sort
of off the newspaper.
How about protecting tribal lands in northern Wisconsin?
How about preventing the pollution of air and water in
the nation and the planet?
How about ending the use of drones to kill human
targets anywhere in the world?
The unprecedented principles of the violation
of human rights and the appalling implications
of drones if all nations started using drones?
So the windup is that there are plenty of contemporary
issues for which Gandhi's pro-active, non-violent
collective action might be relevant.
Just look around.
Thank you.
[applause]