What Gandhi Says by Norman G. Finkelstein

Author:Norman G. Finkelstein
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781935928805
Publisher: OR Books
Published: 2013-10-08T23:00:00+00:00

4/ PEOPLE’S MAN

What did satyagraha look like in action?

I will examine Gandhi’s key political interventions during the period 1930–1947, when his ideas were put to their severest tests.

Discrimination and immorality. Gandhi launched his satyagraha campaigns to reform Indian society on the premise that a real or latent majority of Indians supported his social agenda. The point of each campaign was not to create a constituency ex nihilo, but through self-suffering to quicken the people’s conscience on the basis of an already existing or incipient consensus. He aimed at “cultivating and ascertaining the opinion” of this preexisting constituency, and thus bring to bear the “force of public opinion” by awakening it from its slumber and “rous[ing]” it to a “sense of . . . duty.”1

The target audience of Gandhi’s campaigns was not the implacable opponents of reform but the actual or potential supporters of it, whom he wanted to goad into action. “The impending fast is against those who have faith in me,” he declared on one such occasion.

Therefore, it is not against the English official world, but it is against those Englishmen and women who, in spite of the contrary teaching of the official world, believe in me and the justice of the cause I represent. Nor is it against those of my countrymen who have no faith in me, whether they be Hindus or others; but it is against those countless Indians . . . who believe that I represent a just cause. Above all, it is intended to sting the Hindu conscience into right religious action.2

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