Smash Pacifism - Warrior Publications

urged the Indians to fight on the side of the British.”
(Gandhi: A Life, p. 109)
While Gandhians assert that these views
underwent a drastic change from 1906 onward, he
continued to advocate violence when it was politically
expedient to do so.
During World War 1, several years after
formulating his satyagraha doctrine, far from promoting
nonviolent resistance to imperial war,
Gandhi urged Indians to join the
British Army and to fight alongside
them, famously articulated in his
1918 “Appeal for Enlistment”,
although he noted that he "personally
will not kill or injure anybody, friend
or foe":
“In April 1918, after
attending the Viceroy's War
Conference in Delhi, [Gandhi]
undertook to assist the British in their
drive to recruit more soldiers for the
Indian Army. This, moreover, was at a
time when recruitment had become
intensely unpopular and when
nationalist criticism of the British had
reached unprecedented levels... For a
dedicated believer in nonviolence to assist in sending
Indian soldiers to fight, and quite likely die, far from home
in the service of the imperial power must seem inconsistent,
if not hypocritical...”
(Gandhi, p. 108)
Ghosh was more harsh in his assessment:
“The mahatma who denounced the 'crimes of
Chauri-Chaura' [when police were killed] and discontinued
the non-cooperation movement in early 1922 for the sake of
his creed of non-violence, did not hesitate in 1918 to call
for 'twenty recruits from each village' to serve as cannonfodder
to defend the empire.”
(India and the Raj, p. 124)
This number of recruits was promoted in Gandhi's
macabre recruitment flyer:
“There are 600 villages in Kheda district... If every
village gave at least twenty men, Kheda... would be able to
raise an army of 12,000 men. The population of the whole
district is 700,000 and this number will then work out at 1.7
percent, a rate which is lower than the death rate.”
(Gandhi: A Life, p. 230)
Many of Gandhi's followers could not understand
why he was now actively recruiting for the British Empire,
both in regards to the independence struggle and his
professed pacifism. Both of these beliefs were abandoned
as Gandhi invoked charges of 'womanly' cowardice and the
need to defend the empire in recruiting speeches:
“'There can be no friendship between the brave and
the effeminate,' he asserted. 'We are regarded as a cowardly
people. If we want to become free from that reproach, we
should learn the use of arms.'
“His oft-repeated plea was that the easiest and
straightest way to win swaraj [home rule] was to participate
in the defence of the empire. 'If the empire perished, with it
perishes our cherished aspirations.'”
(Gandhi: A Life, pp. 230-
32)
Incredibly, Gandhi
asserted that the 'easiest' way to
gain 'home rule' was to send
Indians to fight and die in a
foreign land on behalf of their
colonial oppressor. Because if
the empire was destroyed they
would never achieve home
rule! Ghosh observes that,
“It is perfectly clear that
Gandhi was consistent in
insisting on strict observance of
non-violence in thought, word
and deed in the struggles of the
people against the British Raj
and against the native landlords, princes, and capitalists.
But when the interests of British imperialism and of the
domestic exploiting classes were threatened, he was never
squeamish about the use of violence to defend their
interests and never hesitated to reject his creed of nonviolence...”
(India and the Raj, p. 122)
Gandhi in uniform in S. Africa, serving the British.
36
Ultimately, Gandhi's concept of satyagraha itself
relied on some level of violent repression by the state in
order to show the moral superiority of pacifism in practise:
“One of the profound ironies of Gandhi's
nonviolent tactics was this essential and symbiotic
relationship with violence. Non-violence in a non-violent
world might achieve little, but in a society ruled through
sporadic violence... its impact could be immense. Whether
Gandhi ever fully recognized the satyagrahi's paradoxical
reliance upon violence is hard to say...”
(Gandhi, p. 112)
While calling himself an anarchist and a pacifist,
Gandhi promoted the state's monopoly on the use of
violence and the necessity of soldiers remaining loyal to the
government in order for that violence to be effective.
During the campaign arising from the Salt March,
Indian soldiers in Peshawar refused orders by British
officers to fire on protesters in April 1930. After their court
martial, the soldiers received long prison sentences.
As part of the 1931 Gandhi-Irwin Pact, which