THE writings and interviews of Martin Luther King that reflect his understanding of non-violence present ample evidence of the fact that he was inspired by Gandhi and his work. In an influential essay titled, ‘Gandhi in the Mind of America’, political scientists Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph argue that Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. with John Haynes Holmes, were mainly responsible for bringing Gandhi and his ideas to America, though Gandhi never put foot on American soil, despite multiple invitations from prominent people. Apparently, it was John H. Holmes, who Gandhi often consulted to take a call on his decision to visit America which was invariably turned down. According to the Rudolphs, John Holmes was the ‘earliest, longest serving, and arguably the most loyal of Gandhi’s followers in the US.’¹ Commenting on the relationship between Dr King, Jr and Gandhi, they wrote, ‘Gandhi’s greatest and most enduring success as a guru in America was the basic influence he had on Martin Luther King, Jr.’²

But the context of American race relations, as opposed to the anti-colonial context in which Gandhi mainly practiced his celebrated method, presented a unique challenge to the application of non-violent methods. As part of a thought experiment, we may very well ask how Gandhi would have dealt with the racial injustice and discrimination were he in Dr King’s shoes, or vice versa. Any narrative arising out of such a thought experiment should shed some light on this question. However, what is crucial are the possibilities of core features drawn out of our understanding of non-violence as practiced by two of its great proponents, and how to make sense of their relevance in our time.

Indeed, there is a distinct strand to King’s notion of non-violence, ‘particularly arising from its application to race politics and race violence in America. It is necessary to make sense of those particularities to understand the concept of non-violence practiced during his lifetime. This paper makes a modest attempt to address this crucial question, and hopes to provide some insights.

What is the nature of our time, and the place of violence in it? These questions present the political and intellectual context for my analysis. There is a growing belief that various forms of violence arising out of state, non-state, identity or gender, have multiplied. In our time, the political nature of society is violence ridden. That appears to be a dominant characteristic. This, I argue, is not entirely new; instead violence has been very much part of the continuum of human history. But continuity does not imply similarity, and distinct patterns of violence can be observed in each generation. Nevertheless, a belief that our times are more violent than the past is commonly held by many scholars and observers, more so among the urban, educated and newspaper reading public.

An alternative argument challenging this view claims that what has grown in our time is not violence per se, but its reporting in the media both in India and elsewhere. The advent of social media is cited as a new game in town that has fundamentally transformed the way violence, or any other issue, is reported. These perceptions or arguments might or might not be true. It is difficult to take a definite position because validation requires a comparative study of media reporting of various eras which is not easy to undertake.

 

What is noteworthy is that scholarship on the subject of violence has grown as well. I would like to preface my discussion with some comments on a fascinating book titled, Violence: A Modern Obsession by Richard Bessel.³ According to historian Bessel, most scholars from different disciplines have argued that the 20th century was the most violent in the history of human civilization. Tim Bastian argues in his book, The Century of Death, that the 20th century was the bloodiest era in human history, which sounds persuasive in the context of European history, particularly German history of Nazism and the holocaust.

Having taken into account the various elements of violence, its causes and consequences, Bessel argues that the attitude to violence in western society during the second half of the 20th century had changed significantly. Similarly, while the unprecedented spurt of violence in the first half of the 20th century might not be an outcome of modernity, but sensitivity towards it clearly was. He attributes the growing sensitivity to (i) shock of eruptions of violence in the first half of the 20th century; (ii) an unprecedented economic boom that the West enjoyed after the war; (iii) state structures became more stable and capable of maintaining civil peace; (iv) changes in life expectancy and demographic profile resulting from vast improvements in public hygene and medical provisions over the past century; (v) transformation of the role of women in society and the increased presence of women in the public sphere; (vi) civil society in the West has become more distant from war and from the military; and finally, (vii) increased reporting of violence in the media.

Interestingly Bessel barely recognizes the contributions made by Martin Luther King, Jr or his followers. Even if one considers race violence as only a subset of the larger story of violence, King’s contribution to enhancing sensitivity towards violence was enormous.

 

What is King’s notion of non-violence? In 1957, an American magazine, Christian Century (6 February 1957) edited by Harold Fey, published a lead essay titled, ‘Nonviolence and Racial Justice’ by Dr Martin Luther King Jr, which contained a detailed elaboration of his notion of non-violence for the first time. In this essay, King cited five points to explain how his concept of non-violence could be employed to improve race relations. First, non-violence is not a method for cowards, but for genuinely brave people. It is not about physical aggressiveness – instead it seeks to persuade the wrongdoer or opponent to realize that he/she is mistaken. It is spiritually active though appearing physically passive. Second, non-violent resistance does not seek to humiliate or defeat the opponent, but rather is directed to win the friendship of his rival. Third, non-violent resistance is against the forces of evil or people who are caught in the trap. Fourth, non-violence is both about the absence of physical violence as also against internal violence of the spirit.

At the heart of non-violence is the notion of love. We also need to pay attention to King’s Christian upbringing; thus his understanding of human relations was also shaped by Christian theology. There emerges a distinct perspective in this analysis of non-violence, which is about raising the need and practice of humanitarian relations to a superior level.

 

What precisely was the context of American race relations? A powerful letter by Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’, presents a poignant portrait of American race relations. He writes:

‘I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait". But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to coloured children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat coloured people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "coloured"; when your first name becomes "nigger", your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John", and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" – then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.’⁴

 

In this letter, Dr King sensitizes us to various forms of violence owing to lynching or violence of the kind that made black people ‘harried by day and hunted by night’, afflicted by the degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’ – each of these descriptions contained a particular form of violence that race relations in America represented and experienced.

How can we make sense of King’s notion of non-violence? Broadly, it has to be result oriented, and also based on a particular understanding of human nature. Some scholars would argue that Gandhi and King did not share a common understanding of human nature, though there is a broad similarity. According to Ramin Jahanbegloo, ‘King came to read, understand and apply Gandhi as a logical outcome of his philosophical and theological proximity with the doctrine of Jesus. However, what King found interesting in the Gandhian philosophy of non-violence was its practical and strategic dimensions. He dedicated himself to the Gandhian principle of satyagraha as a philosophy of praxis. That is to say, most of King’s non-violent strategies practised during the American civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s cannot be understood apart from his encounter with the Gandhian philosophy of action.’⁵

 

The context and application of non-violence was quite different for the two. Some discussion on Gandhi and his notion of non-violence is required at this point. There is considerable dispute over the relevance of this Gandhian notion, particularly in the modern era, among scholars of varied disciplines. Some view Gandhi’s position as absolute, that he was completely against any form of aggression even in the face of provocation. Gandhi wrote, ‘If there is a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity – war against Germany to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race would be completely justified.’⁶ He further added that he did not believe in war and advised Britain to give up the fight against Hitler and Mussolini.

He explained his position in the following words, ‘Let them take possession of your beautiful island… allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered… but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.’⁷ In fact, he advised Jews in Germany to offer passive resistance to Nazi Germany and to offer their lives as sacrifices. He told the Jew to pray for Adolf Hitler: ‘Even if one Jew acted thus’, he wrote, ‘he would salve his self-respect and leave an example which, if it became infectious, would save the whole Jewry and leave a rich heritage to mankind besides.’⁸

In 1946, when Louis Fischer raised this matter with him, Gandhiji explained, ‘Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the buchter’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.’⁹

 

I am not sure how King would have reacted to such formulations or Gandhi’s grandstanding on non-violence. If, for instance, we replace Jews with African Americans and the Nazi state with the white American state, would King have accepted formulations such as ‘mass sacrifice’ by African Americans in order to leave a rich heritage for humanity in the line of counsel Gandhi had for Jews? My sense is that King would not have been receptive to such counsels of Gandhi. Therein lies the difference between King’s approach and Gandhi’s view of non-violence. Such an interpretation of Gandhi’s notion of non-violence could, for good reasons, be seen as a somewhat limited understanding or even viewed as a selective interpretation. It would be entirely wrong to present Gandhi as forgiving towards the Nazi’s or Hitler. I would say he clearly understood that Nazis or Hitler represented evil of the worst kind. Thus, the challenge was to make sense of how to confront such evil or evil of inhuman racism in America with non-violent methods. It is not easy to anticipate.

Clearly, for King, non-violence as a moral weapon has its limits. Dignity and the rights of African Americans need to be respected, and there are plenty of historical, theological and legal arguments for the defence of this dignity. I would say there is a difference between Gandhi and King in their approach to non-violence and what it could and must achieve. That difference is, however, not big enough to suggest that there is no overlap. We come across the evidence of overlapping in the following claim by King, Jr. ‘I came to see [King wrote] that Christian doctrine of love operating through the Gandhian method of non-violence was one of the most potential weapons available to the Negro in his struggle for freedom… Prior to reading Gandhi, I had all but concluded that the ethics of Jesus were only effective in individual relationships... Gandhi was probably the first person in history to live the love ethic of Jesus and enable mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale.’¹⁰

 

If we consider King’s view on non-violence from his Letter from Birmingham, it should be amply clear that he was unwilling to accept humiliation and suffering of African Americans forever; nor to be just a glorious example for humanity by surrendering before the forces of human depravity and beastly tendencies that inspired lynchings and violence of different kinds. Endless suffering in order to stand for an ideal at the cost of human dignity was clearly not what King was fighting for.

Gandhi led a very distinguished public life. Like all distinguished figures of history, he is controversial in many ways. Writers like Arundhati Roy accuse him of being racist,¹¹ There are even efforts to remove his statue from some university campuses. Given that Gandhi wrote extensively, it is not fair to pick and choose some of his writings just to make a point.

 

Violence in both India and America has not only grown but assumed new shapes and forms. India has a long history of violence. The history of India, we need to argue, is indeed a history of violence. In her recent work, historian Upinder Singh has shown that political violence was prevalent in ancient India.¹² In recent years, we have seen various forms of violence such as violence against women or religious minorities, political violence such as killings during elections, ideological violence as seen in the killings of political activists or leaders by Maoists or Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) particularly in Kerala, or killing of political activists in various places or terrorism related violence.

Let me limit my discussion only to two particular kinds of violence: violence against women, and against religious minorities. The Kathua rape in which an eight year old girl was gang raped and murdered, and the Nirbhaya case, signal a hidden side to violence against women that we do not often recognize, till sensational cases like these take place. It would nevertheless be naïve to treat them as exceptions; rather, they need to be viewed as part of a pattern. Just as cow vigilantism should not be seen as something that has abruptly emerged but is in fact a result of decades long campaigns for cow protection that presented Muslims as beef eaters – people who violate Hinduism.

This campaign is unwilling to recognize the freedom of an individual or community to live a life of its own. In both instances we need to recognize the huge relevance of non-violence as a working principle to restore communal harmony and help build a society with a healthy social fabric. King’s understanding of non-violence as a method, not to humiliate but win the hearts of adversaries, or non-violence against the forces of evil, could be immensely useful. But such ideas and strategies need to be advanced from some political or social platform.

 

In America, there is an ongoing debate on the rise of violence against African Americans, and some of it is state related. This led to the Black Lives Matter movement, ironical because America had a black president not long ago. Some argue that the very success of Barak Obama as a political figure is the reason for this rise because it has made the white population fear that their golden days of domination and power are over, and that the rules of democracy have reduced them to being equal if not subservient. One wonders how King would have addressed this issue. The mere assertion that that there is a dream, as echoed in his famous speech, I have a dream, is not enough any more. The context has changed; the messaging of non-violence too has to change to bring the desired results.

The noted political scientist Paul Brass has argued that Gandhi advocated non-violence because he well understood India’s potential for enormous violence. The same could be said about America. Frequent incidents of gun violence represent such a trend. In my view, the relevance of Martin Luther King’s notion of non-violence is relevant today and there is a growing need for frequent discussions and dialogues both in America and India because of its universal appeal.

 

Footnotes:

1. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, Post-modern Gandhi and Other Essays: Gandhi in the World and at Home. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2018, p. 99.

2. Ibid., p. 109.

3. Richard Bessel, Violence: A Modern Obsession. Simon and Schuster, New York, 2015.

4. Martin Luther, King, Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches. HarperOne; Reprint edition, 2003 (1986), pp. 292-293.

5. Ramin Jahanbegloo, The Revolution of Values: The Origins of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Moral and Political Philosophy. Lexington Books, 2018, p. 52.

6. Quoted in Alex von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire. Simon and Schuster, UK, 2008, p. 107.

7. Ibid., p. 107.

8. Ibid., p. 107.

9. Ibid., p. 108.

10. Martin Luther King Jr, Stride Toward Freedom: The Mantogemery Story. Harper, New York, 1958, pp. 85, 97.

11. See the Introduction by Arundhati Roy, The Doctor and The Saint: Caste, Race and Annihilation of Caste: The Debate Between Ambedkar and M.K. Gandhi. Heymarket Books, 2017.

12. Upinder Singh, Political Violence in Ancient India. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2018.