Satyagraha Explained
April 6, 2008
Community Minister Paul Thorson

On September 11, 1906, a meeting was held in Transvaal (translated as ‘beyond the pale river’), a region in northern South Africa.  As secretary of the British Indian Association in South Africa, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi—who’d later be given the name Mahatma, or “Great Soul”—was well aware that resolutions would be brought forth in this meeting whereby some 3,000 people who were considered British Indians would cast votes regarding their opposition to a Draft Ordinance.  If passed, the Ordinance required every Indian man, woman, and child above the age of eight years old to register with the Registrar of Asiatics.  As a part of the registration process, impressions of their fingers and thumbs would be taken and unique characteristics about their appearance documented.  Registration documents would have to be produced anytime, anywhere, simply on the demand of a police officer.  Failure to register or produce the documents would result in fines, imprisonment, and possibly deportation.  Does this not sound hauntingly familiar?

What Gandhi didn’t know, however, was that at this meeting an impassioned speech by Sheth Haji Habib would invoke the name of God into a resolution.  The fourth resolution, which solemnly stated that Indians would not submit to the Ordinance if it became law, but rather accept full punishment in their non-submission, was by far the most famous among the resolutions passed at the meeting.  Discomfort took over Gandhi as the magnitude with which this oath, this pledge, this vow to God revealed his responsibility to explain the enormous difference between this resolution and all others passed before.  His discomfort would eventually meld into enthusiasm, and this only made clearer the necessity to inform people what they were agreeing to.  The very existence in South Africa of those to whom he was speaking depended on observance of the pledge.  To Gandhi, anyone who took this oath and violated it became guilty in the presence of God and humanity.  While he imparted the seriousness of taking such an oath, at the same time he could imagine no more appropriate time to do so.  If there was a crisis so worthy, here it was presented before them.  He went on to say that a simple majority does not pass resolutions of this character.  Only those who take the pledge are bound to it.

But what to call such a movement?  Gandhi had previously used the term ‘passive resistance’ but this held many implications, not the least of which involved the name being English in a struggle against Britain.  In bizarre fashion, a contest was announced in the Indian Opinion and a small award would be given to the person who came up with the most fitting name.  That winning entry yielded the name Sadagraha, meaning firmness in a good cause, which Gandhi altered slightly to more wholly represent his idea.  Satyagraha.  “Truth (Satya) implies love, and firmness (Agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force.”

Is Satyagraha applicable today, and if so, for whom?  It is no less and probably much more applicable today.  Satyagraha postulates conquest of the adversary by suffering in one’s own person.  This makes it a bit more challenging for a place like Judson.  How are we suffering?  Clearly we are not suffering in the same way that Jean is suffering.  Our suffering is vicariously through and with Jean, and to believe we feel it the same as he and so many other people considered undocumented is misleading.  Nonviolence is integral to Satyagraha.  Nonviolence is never a method of coercion; it is a method of conversion.  Our world reveals news quickly and rarely is it truth in the sense Gandhi sought.  Today truth force requires not simply revealing truth but uncovering it from the sludge of mainstream media in such a way that compels action.

Arundhati Roy states in her book Peace is War that, “Governments have learned to wait out crises because they know that crises by definition must be short-lived.  Like business needs a cash turnover, media needs a crisis turnover.  Crisis reportage…isolates the crisis, unmoors it from the particularities of history, the geography, and the culture that produced it.”  As Satyagrahi immersed in a crisis-reporting world, we frequently find ourselves going from crisis to crisis (at the pace determined by the media as commodity) to reveal the particularities, the truth that led to the crisis.  What’s more, if you don’t have a crisis, you’re not in the news.  If you’re not in the news, it’s as if you don’t exist.  “One way to cut loose—from crisis reportage―” says Roy, “is to understand that for most people in the world, peace is war—a daily battle against hunger, thirst, and the violation of their dignity.”  The truth we need today is revelation of flaws in our perception of peace.  Normalcy is not peace when so many people are deprived of essentials: food, water, and shelter.

Roy recommends creating a space for civil disobedience.  This is not easy.  Today, it seems, the moment one empowers oneself as anything other than a victim, one becomes a terrorist.  Satyagraha is a form of civil disobedience.  Gandhi says it well: “… [it] refuses to be party to wrong,” to the intolerable.  Every citizen is responsible for the acts of its government.  When those acts are considered unbearable, the government can no longer be supported.

Satyagraha is not a short-term fix.  It often requires enduring a long struggle.  It cannot be used by those who consider themselves to be or to know what is best for others.