Gandhi’s Religious View of Freedom – March 14th, 2010
Swaraj: What We Americans Can Learn From Gandhi
Swaraj is Gandhi’s term for ‘freedom.’ Swaraj, or freedom, was probably the most important idea animating Gandhi’s life and work. His commitment to nonviolence, his astonishing courage, his almost inhuman discipline, all arose in my opinion from his life-long effort to achieve freedom: freedom from British rule, certainly, but more important, freedom from the fear of the British.
We Americans can connect with Gandhi because we, all of us as a people, hold freedom as a core habit and principle of our society. Like Gandhi, we Americans believe that moral goodness of a society depends upon how free are its citizens. If we read a bit about Gandhi’s political work, we can connect with Gandhi’s revolutionary tendencies; our Founding Fathers, too, sought independence from British rule.
Yet when Gandhi says “I can say without hesitation…that whose who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means,” we suddenly encounter an alien mind. To the American mind, politics only protects and improves freedom when it can banish religion from the public sphere and make religion a private activity. Religion subdues freedom always, American civilization feels, because religion always silences reasonable debate and discussion about the truth. Isn’t this why our Founding Fathers separated church and state?
Today I want to talk about Gandhi’s famous Salt March, which began on March 12th, 1930. What makes the Salt March so famous was that it inspired India, as a whole people, finally to work to rid itself of British rule and – this is the amazing thing - the Salt Marsh did so without the marchers engaging in any kind of violence whatsoever: no shots fired, no fist-fights, not even any angry words. Gandhi’s success with the Salt March proved the political power, yes, the sheer political power, of nonviolent resistance. But here is Gandhi’s deepest insight, I feel, for we Americans: nonviolence is politically powerful because it is religious. If we Americans want a democracy where political parties work together for the common good, and where our presence abroad brings peace and dignity to others, we must reconsider the way we banish religion from politics.
Let me first tell briefly the story of the great Salt March. By the time of the Salt March, Gandhi had already become the leader of the Indian independence movement. Already he had shown the political power non-violent resistance can weld. Study the 1928 Bardoli Tax Resistance movement. So when the Lahore Congress – the organization directing the Indian independence movement – sanctioned a program of civil disobedience for the year 1930, the Congress asked Gandhi to decide the manner of the 1930 civil disobedience campaign.
Gandhi decided on the Salt March. The immediate goal of the march was to protest the British tax on salt. The British enforced a monopoly on salt production in India – only government approved operations could manufacture it – and the British also taxed its sale. It was illegal for the average Indian to collect salt. Gandhi’s point was that salt was a necessity of the poor, and to tax the poor especially constituted a grave injustice. It was his most immediate intent to walk through numerous poor Indian villages, and speak of this injustice, and then engage in civil disobedience by collecting natural salt from the seashore. The broader goal was to inspire a broad movement of non-violent civil disobedience against the British, and to make India politically independent.
He left with 78 carefully picked followers on March 12th, and walked over 200 miles in 24 days to the coast of western India, to the small town of Dandi. By the time Gandhi got to Dandi, on April 5th, the number of marchers had swelled to over 10,000 people. When he would stop at a village and speak, at times over 50,000 people would gather to listen.
On the morning on April 6th, Gandhi broke the law simply by reaching down and picking up natural salt. This simple act sparked revolutionary sentiment throughout India; all classes and groups within Indian society afterwards wanted the British out. Gandhi’s program of nonviolent civil disobedience also set the tone for the Indian independence movement, and India was to achieve her independence largely without violence and anger and mistrust.
Our second reading today – for me, the spirit of Gandhi’s courage fills that letter, but I want to focus on two words Gandhi uses: truth and conversion. It was so important to Gandhi to show that political independence and freedom, or swaraj, were not the same thing. He felt that so many revolutionaries conflated political independence and freedom, and because revolutionaries so often did so, movements for political independence often became violent, and the people of a so-called liberated nation had only substituted domestic tyranny for foreign tyranny.
It was attachment to truth, to seeking truth, that distinguished a movement for mere political independence from a movement seeking freedom or swaraj. Gandhi maintained always that genuine political freedom can only happen when the resisters are free inside themselves first. The term ‘swaraj’ means literally ‘self-rule,’ and Gandhi had in mind the vision of enlightenment found in the Bhagavad-Gita. “Arming himself with discipline, seeing everything with an equal eye, [the enlightened one] sees the self in all creatures and all creatures in the self” (from Dalton, 3). For Gandhi, freedom or swaraj first and foremost meant understanding the true nature of self, that we are all abiding in the One or Brahman.
Genuine political independence, Gandhi argued over and over, only follows from this true knowledge of the self. A people can only be genuinely free when they acknowledge their oneness with one another, and with their adversary. It is this recognition of oneness, of interconnection with one another, that makes violence an impossible solution to anything. For violence by definition violates the unity of things. That’s why truth was so important to Gandhi; non-violent resistance holds fast to the truth of our essential connectedness with one another, whether adversary or friend. Satyagraha, Gandhi’s word for his form of non-violent resistence, means ‘satya’ or truth, and ‘agraha’ or ‘holding firmly.’
By way of example here, during the course of the Salt March, it came to Gandhi’s attention that some of marchers were bringing in vegetables and milk, and burning kerosene at night. In the town of Bhatgam, Gandhi stopped the march and insisted that all marchers live instead like the poorest of India’s people. “to live above the means befitting a poor country is to live on stolen food,” Gandhi told marchers, “if we do not quickly mend our ways, there is no swaraj” (Dalton, 110-111). Swaraj means the discipline of hewing close to the truth, of acknowledging our interconnectedness, and therefore swaraj means above all else, even before political independence, a social responsibility to care for the poor.
To hold closely to the truth means also that non-violent resistance must not harm one’s adversary, but instead the practitioner of satyagraha must love and cherish the adversary, for the adversary, too, abides in the One. Gandhi always distinguished satyagraha from non-violent resistance generally, by insisting that the satyagrahi not use civil disobedience to harm or humiliate one’s adversary. Instead, a campaign of satyagraha always ennobles the adversary and encourages the adversary to see the common humanity of themselves and the resister. This is what Gandhi meant by seeking in the Salt March the ‘conversion’ of the British. Gandhi hoped to convert the British people to the truth of our common unity as human beings, as creatures abiding in the One.
Gandhi’s political life was thoroughly inspired by his religious vision. He was a Hindu. “[The One] is the finest essence of all this world and in that Being every creature has its Self” (chandogya Upanisad). For Gandhi, non-violent resistance was dharma, the right way of being human given the unity of all things.
Gandhi’s example tells me that our American separation of religion from public life rests upon a misunderstanding of religion. Our notion of ‘separation’ arises from the European experience of institutional churches tyrannizing people in their spiritual and political lives. But this experience is the experience of human violence, not the experience of religion. Religion is whatever brings wonder into our lives, whatever inspires us to embrace reality. That’s religion. What we can learn from Gandhi is, if there is violence, if there is oppression, then there is no religion. We cannot embrace reality and feel the wonder of it all, and then commit violence to some part of it. Religion means, whatever teaches us treat all of reality with kindness, whatever teaches us especially to care for the poor, whatever teaches us especially to treat with gentleness those who commit violence against us.
We Americans now struggle with endless war abroad and quarrelsome government at home. We have achieved great power and wealth, but violence and competition haunts our use of it. We need religion, not institutions that claim to know answers, but we need some sense of wonder and unity embracing all of us as people.
The old vision of material prosperity is now killing us. The logic of limitless material prosperity is always exclusive, it always means, material prosperity for some at the expense of others. Limitless material prosperity is a vision of violence; it is not religion, and no religion can honestly justify it.
Martin Luther King, Jr. once offered a vision of God’s love embracing people of all races and cultures. As a freethinker, I believe that this vision might have merit. What I feel more passionate about, as a freethinker, is that whatever our new American vision is to be, it must be one that makes, not God, but us, we people, responsible for the love in the world, we people responsible for the unity of things.
