Civil Disobedience in Indian Tradition, with Some Early Nineteenth Century Documents c5.s3.36

c5.s3.36

It must also be admitted that non-cooperation and civil disobedience, like everything else, do not solve everything. There are social and political situations when they may not at all be applicable. As said earlier, to be successful non-cooperation and civil disobedience seem to require a certain commonality of values between the opposed parties. Such parties must share, even if temporarily, certain common socio-political or religious values. This however does not seem to happen in all situations. The late eighteenth and nineteenth century India provides one such instance when the rulers and the ruled had little in common. Similar situations seem to have obtained when most of Europe faced Hitler’s power, or Northern India faced Timur centuries ago. It was due to Mahatma Gandhi’s genius, indomitable courage and unmatched organisational capacity that he could visualise and make effective use of instrumentalities (originally fashioned for internal situations), to deal with an alien power. Circumstances (the British having become relatively mellowed by the early twentieth century being one such), and much more his personality, enabled him to make the British see at least at certain moments, the rightness and justice of the Indian stand. Step by step (from the issue of land revenue to the boycott of foreign goods to the abrogation of salt tax to the banning of liquor shops to the protests against India being forced into war), he led to the ultimate demand that the British ‘Quit India’. He even recommended these methods to the Czechs and to the Poles against Hitler. But such use or its advocacy against an alien power in no way implied the irrelevance of non-cooperation and civil disobedience against rulers or authorities who get elected or are appointed by the ruled themselves.