E-Book - Mahatma Gandhi

Gandhi and Contemporary… 99of integration beyond settlement. In terms of stages of conflictprogression, it envisages steps such as conscientisation,nonviolent mobilization and transformation. Values of trust,separation of persons from their acts, not exploiting theweaknesses of the opponent are key ingredients of thisapproach. Nonviolent action becomes a kind of truthcontestation or moral jiu jitsu where the relative truth held byone party engages with that of the other party with convictionand humility.In contrast, there is the narrower application ofnonviolent action, primarily as a strategy or technique purelybecause of its superiority in terms of costs and benefits. Thosewho subscribe to this view need not have a deep commitmentto nonviolence as such, but a commitment to the techniqueonly. They are not averse to seeing nonviolent action as almostlike a battle short of use of weapons, and the intention is oftento defeat the opponents and exploit their weaknesses. GeneSharp who subscribes to this view calls it “strategy forimperfect people in an imperfect world”. 3 There is greaterspace for expressing anger. The effectiveness of a strategy isjudged in terms of its ability to bring maximum pressure on theopponent as well as on his resources. Like Sharp most westernscholars define nonviolence as not doing intentional physicalharm to other people and employing nonviolent action as acost-effective or pragmatic way of challenging oppression. Butthe problem with such narrow notion of nonviolence is that itdoes not take account of structural and cultural violence. I alsosee a third group, a sort of middle path, which, although iscommitted to nonviolence as a principle, is equally concernedwith the consequences of nonviolent action or theireffectiveness. I would place Johan Galtung in this category. 4In real life, it is not often easy to make such cleardistinctions. As far as the adversary is concerned, one form of