WHAT AHIMSA IS ‘NOT’ DEMYSTIFYING GANDHI’S PHILOSOPHY OF AHIMSA

Abstract

The perceived irrelevance of Ahimsa or ‘non violence’, the philosophy that lay that the heart of Gandhi’s whole approach to morality and politics owes largely to certain misconceptions about what it really means. These misconceptions inform and affect the practice of Ahimsa. In fact, even for all our yearning for sustainable peace, it remains a great challenge to eliminate these misconceptions because they do not merely reflect ignorance but rather exist as the off shoots of quite a hegemonic worldview that rationalises and legitimises use of brute force and violence. The purpose of this article is to identify some of these misconceptions and thereby help demystify the Gandhian philosophy of Ahimsa and Satyagraha with which it is essentially bound up. Doing so, the author hopes to contribute towards promoting and encouraging resort to this tremendously potent technique of securing peaceful social change in contemporary times, thereby ending the utterly mistaken notion that Ahimsa or ‘non-violence’ has become redundant.