In the first half of the 20th century, Mohandas K. Gandhi was
one of the leaders of India’s struggle to gain independence from Britain. To
achieve this goal, he advocated a policy of nonviolent noncooperation with
Britain’s systems and laws. In 1922 the British government arrested Gandhi for
his role in the civil disobedience that was sweeping India. Gandhi pleaded
guilty in Ahmadābād on March 23 but stated that his acts against the unjust
legal authority were the highest duty of a citizen. His statement to the court
follows.
Gandhi: 'Non-Violence Is the First Article of My Faith'
Non-violence is the first article of my faith. It is the
last article of my faith. But I had to make my choice. I had either to submit to
a system which I considered has done an irreparable harm to my country or incur
the risk of the mad fury of my people bursting forth when they understood the
truth from my lips. I know that my people have sometimes gone mad. I am deeply
sorry for it; and I am therefore, here, to submit not to a light penalty but to
the highest penalty. I do not ask for mercy. I do not plead any extenuating act.
I am here, therefore, to invite and submit to the highest penalty that can be
inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate crime and what appears to me
to be the highest duty of a citizen. The only course open to you, Mr Judge, is,
as I am just going to say in my statement, either to resign your post or inflict
on me the severest penalty if you believe that the system and law you are
assisting to administer are good for the people. I do not expect that kind of
conversion. But by the time I have finished with my statement you will, perhaps,
have a glimpse of what is raging within my breast to run this maddest risk which
a sane man can run.
Little do town-dwellers know how the semi-starved masses
of Indians are slowly sinking to lifelessness. Little do they know that their
miserable comfort represents the brokerage they get for the work they do for the
foreign exploiter, that the profits and the brokerage are sucked from the
masses. Little do they realize that the government established by law in British
India is carried on for this exploitation of the masses. No sophistry, no
jugglery in figures can explain away the evidence the skeletons in many villages
present to the naked eye. I have no doubt whatsoever that both England and the
town-dwellers of India will have to answer, if there is a God above, for this
crime against humanity which is perhaps unequalled in history. The law itself in
this country has been used to serve the foreign exploiter. My experience of
political cases in India leads me to the conclusion that in nine out of every
ten the condemned men were totally innocent. Their crime consisted in love of
their country. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, justice has been denied to
Indians as against Europeans in the courts of India. This is not an exaggerated
picture. It is the experience of almost every Indian who has had anything to do
with such cases. In my opinion the administration of the law is thus prostituted
consciously or unconsciously for the benefit of the exploiter.
The greatest misfortune is that Englishmen and their
Indian associates in the administration of the country do not know that they are
engaged in the crime I have attempted to describe. I am satisfied that many
English and Indian officials honestly believe that they are administering one of
the best systems devised in the world and that India is making steady though
slow progress. They do not know that a subtle but effective system of terrorism
and an organized display of force on the one hand and the deprivation of all
powers of retaliation or self-defence on the other have emasculated the people
and induced in them the habit of simulation. This awful habit has added to the
ignorance and the self-deception of the administrators. Section 124-A under
which I am happily charged is perhaps the prince among the political sections of
the Indian Penal Code designed to suppress the liberty of the citizen. Affection
cannot be manufactured or regulated by law. If one has no affection for a person
or thing one should be free to give the fullest expression to his disaffection
so long as he does not contemplate, promote or incite to violence. But the
section under which Mr [Shankarlal] Banker [a volunteer who worked with Gandhi]
and I are charged is one under which mere promotion of disaffection is a crime.
I have studied some of the cases tried under it, and I know that some of the
most loved of India's patriots have been convicted under it. I consider it a
privilege, therefore, to be charged under it. I have endeavoured to give in
their briefest outline the reasons for my disaffection. I have no personal
ill-will against any single administrator, much less can I have any disaffection
towards the King's person. But I hold it to be a virtue to be disaffected
towards a government which in its totality has done more harm to India than any
previous system. India is less manly under the British rule than she ever was
before. Holding such a belief, I consider it to be a sin to have affection for
the system. And it has been a precious privilege for me to be able to write what
I have in the various articles tendered in evidence against me.
In fact I believe that I have rendered a service to
India and England by showing in non-cooperation the way out of the unnatural
state in which both are living. In my humble opinion, non-cooperation with evil
is as much a duty as is cooperation with good. But in the past, non-cooperation
has been deliberately expressed in violence to the evildoer. I am endeavouring
to show to my countrymen that violent non-cooperation only multiplies evil and
that as evil can only be sustained by violence, withdrawal of support of evil
requires complete abstention from violence. Non-violence implies voluntary
submission to the penalty for non-cooperation with evil. I am here, therefore,
to invite and submit cheerfully to the highest penalty that can be inflicted
upon me for what in law is deliberate crime and what appears to me to be the
highest duty of a citizen. The only course open to you, the Judge and the
Assessors, is either to resign your posts and thus dissociate yourselves from
evil if you feel that the law you are called upon to administer is an evil and
that in reality I am innocent, or to inflict on me the severest penalty if you
believe that the system and the law you are assisting to administer are good for
the people of this country and that my activity is therefore injurious to the
public weal.
Source: The Penguin Book of Historic Speeches.
MacArthur, Brian, ed. Penguin Books, 1996.
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