Gandhi and the meaning of dharma and violence

But his desire to beat that other man to a pulp remained strong. For most of the half-hour that I was a passenger in his taxi, the driver ranted on about why the offending driver should be beaten. He even made vague allusions to the offending driver’s whole jat (group) deserving a trashing. There was no point in asking him for any demographic details of which group was the target of his wrath. This man’s rage was clearly more to do with his own temperament and the daily misery of struggling with aggressive, noisy traffic just to earn a living.

By the end of the journey, he had only moderately calmed down. But, as I got out of his cab, the driver did say: “You saved that man today, if you had not stopped me, I would have beaten him.”

Where does this everyday rage fit into the larger issue of which violence is dharma (righteous) and which violence is adharma (wrong)?

Often, these two phenomena are treated separately. This is largely because the taxi-driver’s rage, the raw desire to vent his frustration by beating the other man, would not fall into the category of justified violence in any tradition. But this is the rage that gets mobilised for what is deemed to be justified or dharmic violence. This raises a challenge for advocates of justified violence. Where does philosophy meet reality on the ground?

For instance, Suresh Bhaiyyaji Joshi, a senior leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) recently made headlines when he invoked the Mahabharata to explain how sometimes violence helped protect the essence of non-violence. He was alluding to one of the oldest questions that human beings have been struggling with. Namely, when is violence dharma and when is it adharma? The idea of a just war has taken many forms in different cultures for at least three millennia. The Mahabharata is indeed the definitive text where this ancient question has been reflected upon with exquisite subtlety, complexity and sophistication.

India’s most recent practitioner par excellence in this domain is Mahatma Gandhi. He not only delved deep into the philosophical complexities of the text, he attempted to practice what he learnt in his own life — which, in turn, informed his political actions. In a quixotic way, this is what got him killed. Gandhi fell to bullets fired by Nathuram Godse, but he was killed by a mindset. This mindset saw Gandhi’s non-violence as a form of weakness that threatened to undermine Hindu society. This mindset misrepresented Gandhi’s ahimsa as a form of pacifism.

For those fully preoccupied with conflict in the world it must have been maddening that Gandhi repeatedly insisted that the real Kurukshetra is inside our own mind and heart. This is why, for Gandhi, swaraj primarily meant command over our own impulses and emotions. Being free of British rule was to be a side effect of this inner-self-control, this conquest of our own anger and fears. At the same time, Gandhi had a sharp understanding of conflicts in the worldly domain. But he saw the conflicts through the lens of morality, not identity.

So, there is a two-fold challenge for those advocating justified or dharmic violence.

Firstly, when such violence is justified on the basis of identity, of us versus them, there is a huge risk of violating the fundamentals of dharma-as-righteousness, most notably karuna/compassion and rudimentary decency.

Secondly, there is a profound moral contradiction when rage and anger, generated by the frustrations of everyday life struggles, are mobilised in support of a dharmic struggle. Large numbers of people who share the temperament of that taxi driver are, in the heat of the moment, unable to distinguish which violence is dharmic and which is adharmic. The brutality, thus unleashed, pulls down not just any one group but samaj (society) as a whole. This kind of “justified violence” is inevitably self-destructive.

Instinctively most of us know this. That taxi driver did not quite thank me for preventing him from beating the other fellow. But as he waved and drove off in search of his next passenger there was something in his smile which allowed me to imagine that he knew he was better off by not giving in to that vengeful rage.

Rajni Bakshi is the founder of Ahimsa Conversations, a YouTube channel.The views expressed are personal