In the 1930s, Mohandas K. Gandhi recognized that the only way to oust the British was to mobilize all of India’s population. In this, he drew upon Henry David Thoreau and his idea of civil disobedience. Gandhi recognized that if he used civil disobedience, he could paralyze the British, because the British were interested in social control, not in genocide. They did not want to wipe out the Indians, but rather to keep the Indians in their place. Gandhi’s contribution to civil disobedience is that it must be done in a non-violent fashion and with a willingness to suffer the consequences. In this way, Gandhi became an exemplar of the importance of the rule of law. That is, if you break the law, you must suffer the consequences, however unjust you might deem that law to be. Gandhi managed to mobilize the peasantry, to give them an understanding that this was an unjust law and must be broken. But he was also prepared, along with his carefully chosen followers, to face police batons and go to prison. In this fashion, Gandhi helped the peasantry understand the power of civil disobedience; how to stand up against an unjust law, and the necessity to do so. This in part explains India’s political culture after independence. The agitational politics that one sees in India—the strikes, the demonstrations, the public unrest, that so characterizes Indian life, in many ways has a direct lineage back to Gandhi. This is the idea that you have a right to go out into the public sphere and protest, even though the police unfortunately remain very colonial in their mentality, and still beat people to a pulp with batons. Nevertheless, people brave this routinely in India, and none more than the Indian poor. ( Passages above taken from The Story of Indian Democracy by Sumit Ganguly ) I believe this is very relevant to HKnese in understanding what they are actually doing right now. Of course, some probably know this, but too many are merely caught up in revolutionary romanticism, supporting the Occupy Movement with scarcely any notion of what civil disobedience is all about. Please understand that the current movement is no revolution. HK can hardly afford, not to mention ill prepared for, a full scale revolution against the might of communist China. The powerful rulers in Beijing will not hesitate to take drastic actions against such a move. They have said it before, they are willing to go to war, if need be, just to take back Taiwan. This is a regime known for its often violently heavy handed suppression of any form of unrest. The quest for true universal suffrage is not a revolution to oust the communist rulers. Parallel but never the same.
Posted on: Mon, 06 Oct 2014 13:06:18 +0000
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