Satyagraha in India Today

On his recent visit to the United States, Narendra Modi was reminded of Gandhi’s teachings by Joe Biden. Did Biden know that for almost a year braving adverse weather, the pandemic and state brutality, Indian farmers have stood protesting laws that would tilt agriculture in favour of large corporations?

In the inimitable style of other illiberal regimes, the Hindu nationalist regime with the silent consent of its corporate backers pounced on the pandemic opportunity to ram through a slew of rules for labour and agriculture. For many groups these changes remove the last protections from capitalism. The way they were passed by Parliament without discussion mirrors the curbing of civil society and the media to control any challenge to the regime.

As these rules were being passed, opposition parties and civil society groups resorted to a mode of resistance pioneered by Gandhi, a satyagraha within and outside Parliament House, and on the streets and online.

Satyagraha was a term coined by Gandhi for a form of resistance that oppressed and powerless groups could use to demand justice from dominant groups without resorting to violence. Gandhi had an incredible capacity to distil ideas and transform them. Satyagraha is one result of his powers of alchemy.

An inspiration for satyagraha was the American anti-slavery activist Henry David Thoreau’s justification of civil disobedience. In 1846, Thoreau refused to pay taxes citing state support for slavery and war. He said: “What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.”

Thoreau used the analogy of a machine for the state and friction for injustice. If this friction is integral to its operations, the machine wears itself out eventually. There is nothing anyone should do. But if injustice has a separate mechanism, “of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another”, citizens should “break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine”.

Gandhi rearticulated this idea in a grammar reflecting his own inclination for non-violence. Though nothing in civil disobedience precludes violence, the defining feature of satyagraha is your commitment to nonviolence. This is the force that Gandhi called soul force or truth force - to challenge unjust regimes. Protestors demonstrate their ability to suffer brutality, triggering the conscience of supporters of the regime.

Satyagraha is at its core a public performance. The audience is a crucial part of it. The performance subjects the resistors to suffering. A public act, drawing the regime into brutality on nonviolent protestors, it is expected to force the regime’s supporters to acknowledge that violence is being committed in their name.

Satyagraha invites the coercive apparatus of the regime to brutalise unarmed protestors, in a ploy to unmask its brutality. The nakedness of the brutality is expected to shame the audience into questioning their support for a brutal regime. And those in the upper echelons are asked how they can live with themselves.

Yet every step in the hegemonic rise of Hindu nationalism since 2014 has involved the dismantling of secular democratic institutions and the heaping of indignities on minorities and dissenters. These actions have not gone unnoticed. Each move was met by hyper-vigilant progressive groups with various forms of peaceful resistance, i.e. satyagraha.

To no avail. Almost none of these discriminatory and anti-poor policies have been reversed. Instead, re-election with an even greater majority in 2019 has made the regime bolder. As elsewhere, the pandemic has given it the opportunity to further curtail avenues of protest and push through unpopular policies and tighten its hold on power.

As in other far-right regimes, there is no role for an opposition in the Hindu nationalist political imagination. The procedures of liberal democracy, its checks and balances, are hated precisely for stalling the swift imposition of totalitarian visions on the public. The impact of “truth force” – a key tenet of satyagraha – is also an anathema to regimes that use misinformation and distortions of reality almost as an art.

Authoritarians across the world rely on their power to “compel people to say the ridiculous and to avow the absurd”, and to behave “as if” their myths and claims are beyond scrutiny. As a result, crude methods of oppression (lathis, water-cannons, guns, tax authorities, trumped up charges) do not temper the sectarian fervour of the supporters of Hindu nationalism (bhakts). On the contrary, supporters lined up on their balconies to applaud the brutalities and blunders of their regime.

State sponsored and vigilante violence against people deemed “internal enemies” is considered a necessary step in their purging or subjugation – the violence is felt as chivalrous and redemptive. This makes the key premise of satyagraha, the triggering of conscience, work in reverse, turning brutality against minorities and violations of democracy into acts worthy of appreciation.

It is unlikely that the numerous appeals for humanity will pierce the conscience of the Hindu nationalists. The anguish of progressive groups might instead serve as a signal to reaffirm their blind faith in the regime – “anti-sanatanis are whining against a policy, so we must support it”. Satyagraha, rather than acting as the counter-friction envisaged by Thoreau, lubricates the unjust machine.

As noted in the American context, “The cruelty is the point”. The Hindu nationalists in power understand better than their opponents that the resilience of public support for them is because of, not despite, their brutality.

Yet despite its ineffectiveness for the past seven years, enthusiasm for satyagraha has not dimmed in India. As Hannah Arendt noted in On Violence:

“If Gandhi's enormously powerful and successful strategy of nonviolent resistance had met with a different enemy – Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, even pre-war Japan, instead of England – the outcome would not have been decolonization, but massacre and submission”.

A week ago, vehicles owned by a senior minister in the Hindu nationalist regime mowed down protesting farmers resulting in the deaths of four. The voluble prime minister has not uttered a word of condolence; the minister remains in his position; his son witnessed inside one of the cars remains free. It is time to ask whether the key assumptions of satyagraha work for resistance to a regime that looks up to the same fascist regimes of the early 20th century as worthy of emulation.

Perhaps the limits of satyagraha when encountering authoritarian regimes were evident even to Gandhi. He did, after all recognise that generating effective ‘counter-frictions’ requires a diversity of strategies, including seriously disruptive methods such as non-cooperation, economic boycotts, and non-payment of taxes.

However, Gandhi bizarrely held on to a belief in the omnipotence of satyagraha, even arguing that it could transform Hitler’s attitude towards Jews. This typically Gandhian obstinacy seems to have trapped the resistance to Hindu nationalism in India – but without his courage, other direct confrontations and disruptions might also become less possible, as they involve sacrifice of comfort and even danger.

Wringing one’s hands in despair over the destruction of democracy and secularism and expecting the public to reconsider its support for the regime’s atrocities through satyagraha seems futile. It appears the Hindu nationalist juggernaut, cheered on by delirious bhakts, crushing everyone in its path, will continue to gather speed.

Prabhir Vishnu Poruthiyil teaches at the Centre for Policy Studies, IIT Bombay

Photograph: A farmers’ march underway from Champaran to Varanasi