Looking Back: Mahatma Gandhi

From April 1943

Mahatma Gandhi by the Rev Nicol Macnicol, D.Litt., DD

(Extract from a longer piece)

Has any man, however great and well-intentioned, the right to impose by his own will “non-violence” on an unwilling people, even to the ‘killing of the last Indian’?

Mr Gandhi is brave enough to put his own life to that hazard in a cause so noble, but has he any right to go further? The Peace Army that not long ago was formed with a similar ideal of non-violence did not propose to do more than offer their own lives a willing and unarmed sacrifice to the aggressor. Mr Gandhi has the faith to believe that ‘a sufficiency of non-violent heat will melt the hardest heart’ and he is ready to test his faith by his own action and face the risk involved. But is he justified in leading unwilling sheep to the slaughter? It is no doubt the case that by this faith of his Mr Gandhi is bringing nearer the day when that faith will prevail over men’s hard hearts and swords will be beaten into ploughshares. But that end will not be achieved by the imposition of one man’s will but through slow persuasion and the creation of a general will for peace.

Who can sum up in a sentence such a man as this? And who among us is qualified to judge him or to pass sentence upon him? But to recognise his greatness and even the quality of saintliness that is in him does not require of us that we should accept his judgement and submit ourselves and others to his will. Our part may be, as so often is the case in this unhappy and imperfect world that our human wrong-doing has created, to recognise, and do honour to, his greatness, and to seek by every means to persuade him and his people to take the road which we believe to be at the present fateful hour the road that both duty towards India and India’s safety require of us and of him as well.

Mr Gandhi’s strength lies in the fact that by what he has done for India in the past he has become the representative of India before the world and as such he is to be honoured and listened to but not necessarily obeyed.

Three great qualities have brought him to that eminence among his people, his unfaltering courage, his compassion for all who are oppressed, and – on the whole – his love of truth and loyalty to it. It is true that along with these qualities of greatness he shares with the rest of us certain frailties. One of the greatest of Indians, worthy to take his place even by Mahatma’s side, said of him on one occasion that he reveals at times, in spite of his love of truth, what he called ‘the vakil mind.’ That could almost be translated as the pettifogging mind. I would prefer to say of this man, who, as I have said already, has some of the qualities of the saint, what Francis Thompson says of another lover of the Indian people, St Francis Xavier, that he has ‘his divinely unprincipled sleights, his heavenly cunning’.

Yet with all deductions it remains true that this little wisp of a man in a loin cloth to-day bestrides India like a Colossus and faces us as the representative and spokesman of that great people. We must for our own honour find some way of peace towards him and his nation, some relationship with him and them that shall not be that of gaoler and prisoner.

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