The Meaning of Non-resistance

133. Hitherto the word ‘revolution’ has been connected with violence and has as such been condemned by established authority. But the movement of Non-co-operation, if it may be considered a revolution, is not an armed revolt; it is an evolutionary revolution, it is a bloodless revolution. The movement is a revolution of thought, of spirit. Non-co-operation is a process of purification, and, as such it constitutes a revolution in one’s ideas. Its suppression, therefore, would amount to co-operation by coercion. Orders to kill the movement will be orders to destroy, or interfere with, the introduction of the spinning wheel, to prohibit the campaign of temperance, and an incitement, therefore, to violence. For any attempt to compel people by indirect methods to war foreign clothes, to patronize drink-shops would certainly exasperate them. But our success will be assured when we stand even this exasperation and incitement. We must not retort. Inaction on our part will kill Government madness. For violence flourishes on response, either by submission to the will of the violator, or by counter violence. My strong advice to every worker is to segregate this evil Government by strict non-co-operation, not even to talk or speak about it, but having recognized the evil, to cease to pay homage to it by co-operation.-YI, 30-3-21, 97.

134. Passive resistance is a method of securing rights by personal suffering; it is the reverse of resistance by arms. When I refuse to do a thing that is repugnant to my conscience, I use soul-force. For instance, the Government of the day has passed a law, which is applicable to me. I do not like it. If by using violence I force the Government to repeal the law, I am employing what may be termed body-force. If I do not obey the law and accept the penalty for is breach, I use soul-force. It involves sacrifice of self.

Everybody admits that sacrifice self is infinitely superior to sacrifice of other. Moreover, if this kind of force is used in a cause that is just, only the person using it suffers. He does not make others suffers for his mistakes. Men have before now done many things which were subsequently found to have been wrong. No man can claim that he is absolutely in the right or that a particular thing is wrong because h thinks so, but it is wrong for him so long as that is his deliberate judgment. It is therefore meet that he should not do that which he knows to be wrong, and suffer the consequence whatever it may be. This is the key to the use of soul-force. –IHR, 45.

135. The method of passive resistance adopted to combat the clearest and safest, because, if the cause is not true, it is the resisters, and they alone, who suffer. –Nat, 305.

136. That is the way of Satyagraha or the way of non-resistance top evil. It is the aseptic method in which the physician allows the poison to work itself out by setting in motion all the natural forces and letting them have full play. * -H, 9-7-38, I73.

137. I accept the interpretation of ahimsa, namely, that it is not merely a negative state of harmlessness but it is a positive state of love, of doing good even to the evil-doer. But it does not mean helping the evil-doer to continue the wrong or tolerating it by passive acquiescence. On the contrary, love the active state of ahimsa, requires you to resist the wrongdoer by dissociation yourself from him even though it may offend him or injure him physically. –YI, 25-8-20, Tagore, 322.

138. In its negative form, it (ahimsa) means not injuring any living being whether by body or mind. It may not, therefore, hurt the person of any wrongdoer or bear any ill-will to him and so cause him mental suffering. The statement does not cover suffering caused to the wrongdoer by natural acts of mine which do not proceed from ill-will. It, therefore, does not prevent me from withdrawing from his presence a child whom he, we shall imagine, is about to strike. Indeed, the proper practice of ahimsa requires me to withdraw the intended victim from the wrongdoer, if I am in any way the guardian of such a child. It was therefore most proper for the passive resisters of South Africa to have resisted the evil that the Union Government sought to do to them. They bore no ill-will to it. They showed this by helping the Government whenever it needed their help. "Their resistance Consisted of disobedience of the orders of the Government even to the extent of suffering death at their hands." Ahimsa requires deliberate self-suffering, not a deliberate injury of the supposed wrongdoer. –Nat, 346 (from MR, Oct. 1916).

139. If a man abused him, it would never do for him to return the abuse. An evil returned by another evil only succeeded in multiplying it, instead of leading to its reduction. It was a universal law that violence would never be quenched by superior violence but could only be quenched by non-violence or non-resistance. But the true meaning of non-resistance had often been misunderstood or even distorted. It never implied that a nonviolent man should bend before the violence of an aggressor. While not returning the latter’s violence by violence, he should refuse to submit to the latter’s illegitimate demand even to the point of death. That was the true meaning of non-resistance. –H, 30-3-47, 85.