IT does not seem like very long ago, but it has been exactly fifty years since Rev. Martin Luther King was shot dead. Time can ease pain but memories go on. Such is the case with Martin Luther King. After his assassination, King’s life continued to inspire countless numbers and today it is the stuff that legends are made of.

In India, we have a special relationship with King’s legacy because it so parallels Mahatma Gandhi’s life and work. That the two met with identical ends leads one to believe that the practice of non-violence threatens some people deeply, especially those whose principal armament is violence. The assassins who shot these great men had plotted their deeds, nursed their hate, and pulled the trigger.

Regardless of time and place, those who practice non-violence lead very similar lives, with near identical trajectories. A rude awakening starts this journey, followed by several experiments with alternatives, till the final realization suddenly lights up the path. The conviction that truth and non-violence are the only means to an honest life arrives with a certitude that parallels religious faith, but is not religion.

Though Gandhi was a devout Hindu and King a devout Christian, in fact a priest by profession, they were spiritual first and religious afterwards. It was this sublime virtue, and not religious dogmatism, that characterized the godliness of both Gandhi and King. Just as Gandhi found an equivalence between Ram and Rahim, King often appealed to all the Gods that Americans worshipped, though he was a Christian Minister himself. He reached out to those of Jewish faith with his arms as wide open as they were when he welcomed Christians to his movement. It was, after all, not black versus white, in the ultimate analysis. The struggle was between good and bad, between justice and injustice. Their fight was not against people, but against bigotry and cruelty; not against individuals, but what they sometime represented. As Martin Luther King said: ‘Never succumb to the temptation of bitterness.’

Gandhi once remarked that people often thought he was a Christian in disguise as he frequently recalled the Gospel. What Gandhi found particularly appealing was Jesus Christ’s love for the poor; they may not be favoured by Mammon but, by the same token, were closer to God. Why, Gandhi even asked an American visitor to his ashram to sing the hymn, ‘Where were you when they crucified my Lord?’ It is this spiritualism that helped Gandhi and King transcend group and sectarian partisanship. King refused to hate white people, just as Gandhi bore no ill will to the British. What touched the hearts of Gandhi and King was the suffering and pain of others, and this is why they shared the same spiritual denomination.

Time and space separated the two men. Gandhi was born 60 years before King and died when King was just a boy. Yet, when we got the news of King’s assassination in India, it seemed almost like we had been through this sorrow just the other day. It was a replay of Gandhi’s brutal murder; another apostle of peace succumbing quietly to a violent death, upholding an identical cause.

It is not as if Martin Luther King was Gandhian from the start, just as Gandhi was not Gandhian in the beginning. From one angle of vision, one might say that King turned to Gandhi quite by chance. From another point of view, maybe it was just waiting to happen; a ripe fruit ready to fall. Julliette Morgan, a white librarian in America’s South, was impressed by the way King handled himself during the 1955 epic Montgomery bus boycott. She felt that King was instinctively a Gandhian and advised him to go the distance and become a self-conscious one.

 

King had till then just a passing acquaintance with Gandhi, and this might seem strange in retrospect as the two had such similar temperaments. King had read Gandhi in school, but that was a long time ago. A passing fascination is hardly enough to spend a lifetime dedicating oneself to a cause and a calling. After Ms Morgan’s intervention, King began a careful study of satyagraha and, in his own Christian way, soon became a practiced catechist of non-violence.

Gandhi and King were both victims of racism, one in South Africa and the other in Southern United States. Gandhi’s moment of reckoning came when he was thrown out of a train compartment reserved for ‘whites’ only. If Gandhi’s turning point came when he was forced off a train, King’s moment of reckoning involved another mode of transportation, this time, the bus. On 1 December 1955, a 42 year old black lady, Rosa Parks, in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat in the bus to white people. As the segregation law was then in force in this southern state of USA, she was charged by the police for committing a crime. This led to the famous Montgomery movement where Martin Luther King distinguished himself.

 

We all know about Gandhi’s swadeshi movement and how he advocated the boycott of British goods. The impact of this iconic intervention lingers even today and surfaces from time to time in a number of contexts. However, very little is known about the fact that King also pressed for a boycott of products made by companies owned and operated by white people. This is not as often commented upon, but Coca Cola was on King’s banned list of goods and so were Sealtest Milk and Wonderbread.

Just as Gandhi believed that boycotting Lancashire cloth would help spur Indian industry, King too felt that boycotting such everyday consumables made by white owned companies would encourage black enterprise. It was not as if Gandhi was against industry in general, something that many exegetes of the great man misunderstood. It is just that Gandhi felt that if British made commodities were restricted to India, it would give a fillip to Indian business and enterprise. Charkha was a symbol of that quest, and not a fetish to be worshipped.

It would be wrong to see this as an instance of spite, but rather one of encouragement to make people equal. Gandhi was not against foreign cloth as much as he was in favour of cloth made in India. King was not hostile to white enterprise as much as he wanted black enterprise to also flourish and come out of hiding. That Indians should be respected at home was Gandhi’s drive and for King he was intent to make black lives matter in USA. It was not negativity in either case as much as it was the positive thrust towards equality and justice.

 

It was mentioned at the start that non-violence, when accepted in its totality, has a grip which is akin to religion. For both Gandhi and King, non-violence was never a clever political ‘tactic’, but an unshakeable moral conviction that stayed with them all their lives. There were many occasions when Gandhi could have yielded to the passion of the moment and overlooked acts of violence, but that was never to be.

The most dramatic instance of this was perhaps when Gandhi halted the 1922 Non-Cooperation movement. This was because the agitations had turned violent in Chauri Chaura and Gandhi would have none of it. By then Congress was in full stride and had galvanized millions, but Gandhi was adamant leaving many deeply upset, including those closest to him. This was a very difficult phase for the Congress and it led many to question the wisdom of Gandhi’s non-violence.

Quite in the Gandhian mould, King too discontinued the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery as the situation had become dangerously bloody. He was unsure of the restraint his people would be able to exercise as the aggravation was really quite extreme. The temptation to respond to violence with violence hung heavy, but King persevered and called off the movement. He too was criticized by many for backing off when they thought they had the initiative on their side.

Non-violence is nothing if it is not an absolute moral force which is non-negotiable to the last. It can never survive if it is resorted to opportunistically or cynically. By occasionally abandoning it one could earn short-term gains, but that would never be good enough. For both Gandhi and King, non-violence was a comprehensive whole, not one that could be bartered away in parts. Whenever they felt there was a whiff of violence their immediate reaction was to cease activity, take stock and retreat, if need be. As King once said: ‘In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds.’

Those closest to Gandhi and King often resented this total submission to non-violence. Jawaharlal Nehru never left Gandhi’s side, he believed in Gandhi, but was no Gandhi himself. While he admired the Mahatma, he could not help but feel frustrated and disillusioned by the unflinching allegiance that Gandhi demonstrated towards non-violence. For Nehru, non-violence was a laudable end, but one that could be practiced with exceptions. For him, ahimsa was a tactic to be employed with deliberate craft and not so much with total devotion.

 

This was much the same in the case of James Lawson too. Just as Nehru was close to Gandhi, James Lawson, a cleric, was one of King’s dearest associates. But, like Nehru before, for Lawson, non-violence was primarily a tactic that could be occasionally set aside. This is why Gandhi and King were never always fully assured that their followers would be with them to the last. Yet, both these leaders held strong to their vows of non-violence.

Gandhi consistently held that there was ‘no short cut to success’. For him, violence was taking that ‘short cut’ whose effects would be negative in the not-too-long-run. For this reason, Gandhi was against communism for, he believed, that the idea of class struggle inherently justified violence. He also opposed communism for, in his opinion, it went against the basic spirituality of Hinduism and depended instead on selfishness and materialism. King held a similar view on this subject. They both believed, in different words, but with the same conviction, that communists had little time to devote to the divine. This is why Gandhi and King concluded in like fashion that communists enslaved the human soul. Further, as communism could only be forwarded by violence, as recent experience demonstrated, Gandhi was revolted by it. For him no policy was acceptable if it was done at the ‘point of a bayonet’.

It was not just their commitment to non-violence that had a religious quality about it, they also practiced it as if it was a religion, but with a difference. Their religious faith never opposed the beliefs of others and they appealed to all humanity. True, Gandhi and King fell back on the religion they knew most intimately when they were in times of trouble, seeking a way out of a setback. Gandhi went on a five day fast as penance for Chauri Chaura, and King, in like manner, knelt and prayed when he abandoned the Montgomery march. These measures were emblematic of their specific cultural formats, but at the same time, Gandhi and King always gave full respect to all faiths.

 

There was no task too difficult, or too humbling for both Gandhi and King. Gandhi’s fight against untouchability was not of the sermonizing variety, carried out from a safe and sanitized distance. On the contrary, he immersed himself fully into the most humiliating aspects of an untouchable’s life, identifying with them completely. Instead of skirting the periphery, Gandhi identified himself with those at the extreme bottom of the caste hierarchy: the tanners and the scavengers. At that time, they were classified as ‘untouchables’ and had little legal recourse. Their traditional work was revolting, vile and involved the most wretched kind of labour. It was to these castes that Gandhi committed his utmost.

One might think this to be coincidental, but it was not all that surprising when it happened. The last major struggle that Martin Luther King led was in 1968 when he campaigned for the cause of sanitary workers in Memphis, Tennessee. The injustices heaped on them by the city authorities, and the general disdain they faced from the public to their fate, moved Martin Luther King. Once again, like Gandhi, his identification with the sanitary workers was complete and not a pat-from-afar affair. Quite in keeping with this, when King came to India in 1959, he was introduced in a Trivandrum school as an ‘untouchable’ from America. King later remarked that he was at first ‘peeved’ at the tag, but later wore it like a badge of honour.

 

It may seem at a quick glance that non-violence was an end in itself, without clear consequential dimensions. This was far from true for both Gandhi and King. As we just saw, non-violence spreads out across the entire spectrum of society if consistently applied. We must remember that Gandhi and King were people of action who wanted to change society and not stay aloof from it. By staying close and fast to the tenets of satyagraha, that is, by weaponizing truth force, Gandhi and King exalted debate over all other forms of political interaction. Or, as King put it: ‘Non-violence is a powerful and just weapon... it cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it.’

Non-violence was not just for fighting political violence, but social violence (such as caste injustices) too. In this connection one must note that non-violence forms the kernel of democracy, and is not just a moral refuge. Non-violence centralizes debate for what good is democracy without it. Once we see the point of this, we realize that non-violence must extend to the verbal level as well. In Gandhi’s view, angry voices conceal a weak argument and an unwillingness to communicate. If one is on the winning side, and if one is willing to learn, then shouting slogans and hurling invectives is hardly democracy at work.

Indian parliamentarians may not heed this advice, but King did. When he visited Cornell College in 1962, King said: ‘Men often hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don’t know each other; they don’t know each other because they cannot communicate…’ Therefore, no communication, no debates, no democracy! When one has an open attitude towards debate, there is always an easy acceptance of debt to others for one’s intellectual and moral development. Gandhi handsomely acknowledged Tolstoy, Ruskin and Gokhale, just as King unhesitatingly paid homage to Gandhi. There is little ego involved when doing the right thing.

 

Indeed, learning is to be garnered, sourced and had from a variety of founts, but for this to happen, the willingness to debate must forever be present. Education, predictably, was an issue that both Gandhi and King felt were of great significance as they built the moral and intellectual character of a person. They also instruct one to discipline oneself. Gandhi said that ‘education teaches us to think intensively’ and echoing this, King said in an address, ‘The function of education... is to teach one to think intensively…’ These are not just a chance coincidence of words. If they were so similar it only reflects the overlap in the way Gandhi and King thought.

It is indeed a loss to social theory, in its established form, that it does not truly integrate the lives and works of Gandhi and King. If it were to do that, then there would have been a tremendous advance in the analytical understanding of the principles of democracy. Scholars like Jurgen Habermas have toiled with the idea of debate and public space, but set certain rational criteria for validating such exercises. What the practitioners of non-violence put forward, instead, is that the truth force of satyagraha is important, and not so much rationality. Some may come to a debate with religious ideals and others with empirical evidence, but the two need not clash and one may learn from the other. This is possible only if there is non-violence in both word and deed.

 

Little knowing that they were approaching the last few moments of their lives, Gandhi and King went about their work without breaking a step. Gandhi, when felled by a bullet, barely whispered ‘Hey Ram’. King, just seconds before a bullet pierced him asked the famous saxophonist, Ben Branch, to play ‘real pretty’ his favourite hymn, ‘Take my hand, precious Lord.’ Once again, in life as in death, they both went the same way; with the name of God on their lips. Knowing how the two men thought, one can be certain they were praying to the same God.

The religiosity of Gandhi and King should not take our attention away from the fact that it is through non-violence that they crusaded for citizenship. This only goes to show that it is not as if democracy, in its highest form, need ever contradict spiritualism and faith. What is most significant is that one should grant space to the other as well, and this is what non-violence does most eminently. This fact denotes, once again, that at the fundamental level, regardless of differences in ascriptive identities, human beings are one as citizens. Gandhi and King, in their own ways, gave expression to this belief, time and time again. Whether it be their spirituality, their respect for education, their partisanship with the suffering, at bottom they stood for citizenship. Once we internalize this truth it will become crystal clear that the key is, and will always be, non-violence, never in retreat, but forever in the quest for consensus.

 

Gandhi and King were not ‘other worldly’ in their religious outlook, but very ‘this worldly’. Further, they were not only wedded to the practical, pulsating life around them, but to the idea of democracy that is at the heart of modernity. One can see the impress of Gandhi in our Constitution; from the abolition of untouchability to the abolition of landlordism, to the acceptance of minorities and secularism. Likewise, one finds the stamp of King in the constitutional and civic life in America today, especially in the civil rights advances the country has made.

Two people, separated by time and continents and yet leading such parallel lives. It is the practice of non-violence that brought the two together and it is the practice of non-violence that can bring humanity together too – across time and continents. Without Gandhi, India may have won Independence and, who knows, it may have even come earlier. But this much can be said, if Gandhi had dithered on Chauri Chaura and on other occasions too, India would certainly not have been a democracy. It is non-violence that forces citizenship to the top, a truth that so many find difficult to appreciate.

Without Martin Luther King, America may still have been wrestling with its troubled conscience and racism may still have had official sanction. Doubtlessly, bigotry is still alive, both in USA and India, but Gandhi and King have taught us what it means to be ‘citizens’ in the true sense of the term. It is indeed a pity that we have not learnt this lesson more fulsomely.