Page:Manshardt - The Terrible Meek, An Appreciation of Mohandas K. Gandhi.pdf/17



It was while going to his daily prayers that Mr. Gandhi met his death.

The two ruling principles of Gandhi’s life—Truth and Non-violence—came to significant expression in the movement first known as passive resistance and later designated as Satyagraha. Gandhi’s experiments with passive resistance began in South Africa, where he led the Indian residents in the Transvaal in a protest against discriminatory legislation. But as the struggle advanced it became clear that the phrase ‘passive resistance’ was not an adequate description of its nature. A small prize was offered for a better name, which brought forth the suggestion Sadagraha—firmness in a good cause. Mr. Gandhi amended this suggestion to Satyagraha, as more completely denoting the true nature of the movement. “Truth (Satya),” he says, “implies love, and firmness (Agraha), engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement Satyagraha, that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or Non-violence, and gave up the use of the phrase ‘passive resistance.’”

Mr. Gandhi felt that the term “passive resistance” was not free from the connotation of violence and that in fact it had been used by other groups as a preliminary to violence. Satyagraha, on the other hand, was soul-force pure and simple. Again, passive resistance does not demand love for the person or group resisted, while Satyagraha is founded on love and has no place for hatred. Passive resistance carries with it the idea of harassing the other party. Satyagraha has no desire whatever to injure the opponent. It looks towards the conquest of the opposite party by suffering in one’s own person—in other words, by love. The object of Satyagraha is positive—to effect such a change of heart in the opponent that he becomes a better and stronger person.

Since Satyagraha is based on Truth, it can only be offered in a righteous cause. Gandhiji has referred to Satyagraha as dharma-yuddha—righteous war. Righteous war, in this sense, does not mean the same thing as the traditional holy war, where men killed in the name of religion. It is rather a struggle organized around the principles of religion. And as Truth is all-