The Power to control national life through national representatives is called politial power.
Representatives will become unnecessary if the national life becomes so perfect as to be self-controlled.
It will then be a state of enlightened anarchy in which each person will become his own ruler.
(MK Gandhi)
https://youtu.be/Tgm9Y7aj0pU?feature=shared
May 7th 1924 was the day Alluri Sitarama Raju (4 July 1897 – 7 May 1924), a unique revolutionary involved in the Indian independence movement, was killed by the British armed forces.
He was one of the few Indian revolutionaries, who had developed a
mass base and a mass movement, that culminated in a sustained armed
struggle (1922-24), and adopted guerilla methods and tactics of struggle
in which hundreds of tribals, mostly Koyas, joined and fought like a
rudimentary army.
The S.S. Rajamouli’s blockbuster hit RRR movie is a fictionalised account of the life of two very real revolutionaries, Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem. While the things shown in the movie are pure historical fiction, the real stories of these legendary yet less talked about revolutionaries of the freedom struggle are captivating in their own right.
Alluri Sitarama Raju, Unique Revolutionary, Remembered on His Death Anniversary
This is the story of the epic life of Alluri Sitarama Raju.
Alluri Sitarama Raju was a brilliant guerilla warfare tactician; Image source: Wikimedia Commons
This story begins in colonial India, when the Madras Presidency was under British rule, four decades after the Revolt of 1857. Alluri Sitarama Raju was born, in the family of Venkata Rama Raju. Venkata was a man who was proud of his Indian heritage and had a great love for freedom. When once Alluri saluted a European, as per the then prevalent customs, Venkata Rama Raju scolded him, reminding him to always uphold the Indian pride.
As a teenager, Alluri often contemplated taking sannyasa.
However, his story came to a turning point during his higher studies. During his college years, he would often go exploring in the forest. In these short expeditions, he came across tribals living in the hills and forests and began to spend time with them. As he began to understand more and more about the various tribes, he was dismayed by the continuous oppression they were facing.
Disenchanted with the modern world, he left his schooling in between and took sannyasa at the mere age of 18. However, he understood the importance of education and trained himself in the literature of Telugu, Sanskrit, Hindi and English languages. He began his pilgrimage and went to places across India, like Gangotri and Nasik.
In his travels, he once again witnessed the struggles of different tribes of India. But it was the oppression and the hardship faced by the Koya tribe that shook him.
Moved by his travels and with a spirit of freedom, Alluri decided that he would build a tribal movement, for the independence of tribes from British rule.
A noble but ambitious task. He settled in the dense jungles of the Papi hills, near Godavari district, an area densely populated by different tribes. As he began to live and interact with various tribes and understand their problem, he soon gained a reputation as a leader among them.
Alluri Sitarama Raju began organising and educating tribes about their rights, began preparing them for a rebellion against the oppressive British rule. When the 1882 Madras Act was passed, discontentment with the British rules was at an all-time high, as the act threatened the subsistence of various tribes. Alluri Sitarama Raju organised his forces and began an assault on British rule.
He knew that since his forces used traditional Indian weapons, they lacked the firepower to launch a direct assault. Thus he used his extensive knowledge of the terrain and guerrilla warfare tactics to make up for the difference in their offensive power. His forces would hide in the dense forest, then launch an ambush on British police passing through the area, plundering and killing them.
By 1922, Alluri Sitarama Raju and his forces had grown quite confident, they knew that they had to make up for the difference in their firepower and the simplest way to do that was to take the weapons away from the British forces.
Simple however doesn’t mean easy. The idea was simple but its execution was a daring task. And Alluri Sitarama Raju dared.
Leading a troop of 500 people, he consecutively plundered the police stations of Chintapalle, Krishna Devi Peta and Rajavommangi and from the loot of these plunders, Alluri’s forces were being armed with guns and ammunition. Killing two birds with one stone. And as to mock the British forces, every time he plundered a police station, he would leave a note listing down all the things he took.
In a way, he was challenging the British forces, to stop him if they can.
The British struggled with capturing Alluri. They had zero knowledge of the terrain and the dense forest, while Alluri had mastered the land throughout his life. Secondly, While the locals were hardly ever cooperative with the British forces, they willingly provided Alluri and his troops with shelter and even acted as their informants.
People cordially gave him the title of Manyam Veerdu i.e. Hero of the Jungle.
The British government eventually put a bounty of Rs 10,000 on him. Overall spent a whopping 40 lakhs to catch him. They even called a detachment of Assam Rifles to capture him. Yet, Alluri eluded them for two years, causing damage to their forces simultaneously. He raided even more police stations and continued to make a mockery of the British police.
T.G. Rutherford was eventually employed by the British government to catch Alluri. Rutherford resorted to cruel and destructive methods, like burning villages, torture etc, to find Alluri. After two years, he was finally caught and tragically executed.
But Alluri’s movement left a deep impression on the psyche of both tribal and national leaders alike. While paying tribute to him, Mahatama Gandhi said:
"Though I do not approve of his armed rebellion, I pay my homage to his bravery and sacrifice."
Even the British acknowledged him as a brilliant guerilla warfare tactician.
Today his name is seldom heard in classrooms, but his story needs to be told, just like all the other stories of the tribal movement during India's struggle for independence. Alluri Sitarama Raju symbolises a spirit of self-sacrifice and the belief to fight for something bigger than ourselves.
READ MORE
Alluri Sitarama Raju – A Forgotten Hero and a Great Son of the Soil
Telugu Feature Film ALLURI SITARAMA RAJU
“Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.” ~Cheryl Strayed
Nobody is coming to save you from yourself. No God is coming to ease your death anxiety, no matter how much you want to be placated. No “authority” is coming to guide you through the brambles. Your suffering will always be a thing. It’s your responsibility alone to integrate it. You are the only hero you will ever know.
But the only way to get to know your inner hero is to sharpen yourself against the pain. Sharpen yourself against your suffering. Sharpen yourself against your existential dread. Then use this sharpness to pierce the veil between your cultural conditioning and your innermost darkness. Get down deep. Dig into the muck and mire of your humanness. Penetrate the blinding light. Get your “hands” dirty.
The key to integrating suffering is to give yourself an edge. Preferably a sharpened edge. If you have no edge, then you have no leverage. And leverage is the difference between suffering toward strength or just plain suffering for suffering’s sake.
If you have no leverage, then your suffering will tend to consume you. You will drown in bitterness and resentment. But if you have leverage, you’ll have the potential to subsume your suffering.
So, the question becomes: how do you give yourself an edge? That’s where the shadow comes in.
Look at the shadow like you would a speck of dirt in an oyster. The only way the speck becomes a pearl is through assimilation into the oyster’s environment. Similarly, the only way the shadow becomes an ally is through assimilation into the environment of the self.
In your youth it was necessary to repress the shadow to achieve discipline; in your maturity, it is vital that you integrate it to achieve individuation (enlightenment). The alternative is resentment and bitterness.
Shadow integration is facing the bitter truth within you and then being radically honest about what you discover. When you face the bitter truth within, your capacity for truth outside expands. Your once disoriented Self clicks together because the missing pieces become self-actualized. You become oriented to your suffering. Such orientation becomes a sieve that filters weakness from strength. It separates the wheat from the chaff.
Honoring the shadow births honesty, which gives birth to humility, which gives birth to humor. Such rebirth creates a sharpness, a razor’s edge. Bitterness, weakness, and pettiness fall away because a sense of sharpened wholeness cuts through it all.
You get ahead of the game. You gain a fierceness. You grow teeth. The ability to transform a negative into a positive becomes manifest. You’re able to transform pain into power, wounds into wisdom, setbacks into steppingstones, tragedy into transcendence, loss into laboratory, and shadow work into soul craft.
When you integrate your shadow, you begin the psychological process of individuation. Depth, rootedness, and stability is born. You become more grounded, more secure in your skin, more independent in your moral judgments, more courageous and self-reliant.
Your suffering becomes a wave you surf into greatness rather than a wave that pummels you into meekness. You surf over pain, tragedy, loss, and setbacks. You become the tip of the spear, spearheading adaptability despite mortality, integrating shadow work despite darkness, and transforming suffering into self-overcoming. You become the forerunner of the Truth Quest cutting through the “truth.”
The future opens wide. Your shadow guides you out of the shadows. You become integrated. You become whole. Plato’s Cave becomes nothing more than a shed cocoon behind you. You arrive. You come alive—darkness balanced by dawn; light sharpened by shadow—a force of nature to be reckoned with.
Integrating suffering is mastering the shadow aspect. It’s utilizing pain as a whetstone. As Rumi said, “The cure for the pain is in the pain.” Indeed.
The diamond in the rough is created by the rough. Great character is forged in the furnace of adversity. Pain is mere kindling. The pebble is a mistake to the oyster but a pearl to the master. Likewise, the shadow is a mistake to the uninitiated but gold to the initiated.
Initiate yourself. Strike gold by integrating your shadow. Allow your fortified foundations to crumble away. Dig into your innermost darkness. Discover what makes you tick, what makes you fall apart, what makes you crack. Then glue it all together into a stronger version of yourself.
Making your darkness conscious is self-mastery. Mine the gold from the abyss and then transform it into your magnum opus.
It’s in the fall from grace, in the broken pieces of shattered soul, where vivid, raw, wholesome wisdom lies. It’s where the shadow’s gold glimmers. Where wounds are transformed into wisdom. Where the heart is inverted into a womb. It’s where the ashes give birth to the Phoenix.
As Nikita Gill said, “Heroes are meant to be forged golden from the blaze.”
About the Author:
Gary Z McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide-awake view of the modern world.
NATIONALISM
It is impossible for one to be internationalist without being a nationalist. Internationalism is possible only when nationalism becomes a fact, i.e. when peoples belonging to different countries have organized themselves and are able to act as one man. It is not nationalism that is evil, it is the narrowness, selfishness, exclusiveness which is the bane of modern nations which is evil. Each wants to profit at the expense of, and rise on the ruin of, the other. (MK Gandhi)
https://youtu.be/SG0QflEqAeM?feature=shared
THE INVISIBLE ENEMY
The fourth generation warfare is a war to be fought by policemen, they would have to fight against an invisible enemy and their battleground would be the civil society. This war will be difficult as they (policemen) will have to protect the people too. If you are not able to manage internal security, everything goes. If you win, the country wins and if you lose, the country loses. We will have to tackle issues like cyber security threats and banking frauds. Be guided by Lord Buddha’s last saying, ‘Aatma Deepobhava’, which means, ‘be your own light’. (Ajit Dovel, India on 01 November 2015)
FREEDOM
WHERE THE MIND IS WITHOUT FEAR AND THE HEAD IS HELD HIGH, WHERE KNOWLEDGE IS FREE.
WHERE THE WORLD HAS NOT BEEN BROKEN UP INTO FRAGMENTS BY NARROW DOMESTIC WALLS.
WHERE WORDS COME OUT FROM THE DEPTH OF TRUTH, WHERE TIRELESS STRIVING STRETCHES ITS ARMS TOWARDS PERFECTION...
INTO THAT HEAVEN OF FREEDOM, MY FATHER, LET MY COUNTRY AWAKE! (Tagore)
If you are right, or if you are wrong, it is only your passion that will force either to be discovered. It is your duty to promote the discovery - either way - and therefore it is your duty to speak your truth with whatever passion and courage you can find in your heart. (Ken Wilber)
In A Time Of Universal Deceit, Telling The Truth Becomes A Revolutionary Act. (Orwell)
ALL TRUTH PASSES THROUGH THREE STAGES; FIRST, IT IS RIDICULED, SECOND, IT IS VIOLENTLY OPPOSED, THIRD, IT IS ACCEPTED AS BEING SELF-EVIDENT. (Arthur Schopenhauer)
I WILL TELL YOU ONE THING FOR SURE. ONCE YOU GET TO THE POINT WHERE YOU ARE ACTUALLY DOING THINGS FOR TRUTH'S SAKE, THEN NOBODY CAN EVER TOUCH YOU AGAIN BECAUSE YOU ARE HARMONIZING WITH A GREATER POWER. (George Harrison)
THE WORLD ALWAYS INVISIBLY AND DANGEROUSLY REVOLVES AROUND PHILOSOPHERS. (Nietzsche)
No matter how much we’ve read about our country, it’s never enough. But ours is a generation that likes reading things that are short, quick and informative. Thus, on our Independence Day, https://www.indiatimes.com/ summed up some unknown and undisclosed facts about India’s independence that every Indian should know. Take a look.
Our current national flag had a number of iterations. The version you know today was made by Pingali Venkayya at Bezwada in 1921.
Only Khadi Development and village industries have the license to produce or supply our national flag.
We did not have a national anthem on our first Independence day.
The Bengali version of ‘Jana Gana Mana’ was written in 1911. But it was adopted as our national anthem only in 1950.
It's hard to believe this one, but Mahatama Gandhi was not a part of the first Independence Day celebration.
Gandhiji was fasting in protest against the Hindu-Muslim riots that were taking place in Bengal.
Lord Mountbatten was forced to attend the Independence Day of both India and Pakistan, which is why he brought forward Pakistan’s Independence Day to 14th August.
Lord Mountbatten chose 15th August as India’s Independence Day because it honoured the second anniversary of Japan’s surrender to the Allied forces.
Mahatama Gandhi wanted the Congress Party to disband as its objective to attain freedom had been achieved.
A day before Gandhi’s assassination, he had written a ‘draft constitution of Congress’.
READ MORE
The world has been haunted by human violence since time immemorial. There are untold millions (billions?) of people all over the world who have been scarred by it in all its forms. There are two basic responses: one is to try to return that violence with violence and defeat one’s enemy; the other is, in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words, to “not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding” through a non-violent response. Politicians usually embrace the former, while those who are called dreamers advocate the latter.
Between these two, there are various mixed responses, with sane political leaders calling for mutual respect between countries and an end to aggressive provocations leading to warfare, such has occurred with the United States provoking the war in Ukraine.
We have entered the time when the destruction of all life on earth through nuclear war is imminent unless a radical transformation occurs. If the word imminent sounds extreme, it is worth considering that there will be no announcement. The time to speak up is now. It is always now.
Great literature speaks to the issue of violence at the deepest levels.
Homer’s Odyssey is the classic case of violent revenge. At the end of the story, Odysseus, who was scarred in youth by a wild boar, finally returns home from the Trojan War after ten years of wandering. Doubly scarred now by the horrors of war with its horrendous slaughters (see The Iliad), he arrives at his home disguised in a beggar’s rags. His nursemaid from childhood recognizes him from the scar on his thigh. In his house he finds scores of suitors who are hitting on his wife Penelope. He is enraged and steps onto the threshold, rips off his rags, and systematically massacres every last one of them. Flesh and gore swim in the blood-drenched room, while in the courtyard twelve unfaithful serving maids hang from their necks. This is the quintessential western story of revenge where the wounded hero kills the bad guys and the violent beat goes on and on.
It appeals to our lesser angels, for while Odysseus’s rage is understandable, its consequences leave a toxic legacy.
But there is another response that draws on another tradition that is symbolized by Jesus on the cross, executed by the Roman state as a subversive criminal. He didn’t die on a private cross, for his crime was public. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi are famous exemplars of non-violent resistance in modern times, as they too were executed by the state. Non-violence seems, on the surface at least, to be less effective than violence and contrary to much of human history.
If it is, however, we are doomed. For we have nuclear weapons now, not bows and arrows and spears. We have nuclear weapons hitched to computers. Digital weapons of multiple sorts and mad leaders intent on pushing us to the brink of extinction.
The United States’ instigation of the war in Ukraine against Russia and its push for war with China are current prime examples. They are part of the continuing vast tapestry of lies that Harold Pinter spoke of in his 2005 Nobel Address. He said, in part:
The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven. . . . The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them.
This is still true, as John Pilger has just warned us in a powerful article: “There Is A War Coming Shrouded In Propaganda. It Will Involve Us. Speak Up”
The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or ‘neo-Nazism’ or ‘extreme nationalism,’ as you prefer. Ukraine as modern Europe’s fascist beehive has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who lauded Hitler’s ‘Jewish policy,’ which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. ‘We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,’ a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews.
Today, Bandera is hero-worshipped in western Ukraine and scores of statues of him and his fellow-fascists have been paid for by the EU and the U.S., replacing those of Russian cultural giants and others who liberated Ukraine from the original Nazis.
In 2014, neo Nazis played a key role in an American bankrolled coup against the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was accused of being “pro-Moscow.” The coup regime included prominent “extreme nationalists” — Nazis in all but name.
The U.S. led support for this war must stop. Who will stop it?
Homer told us something quite important once upon a time, as did many poets, artists, and writers in the twentieth-century. They warned us of the monsters we were spawning, as Pilger says: “Arthur Miller, Myra Page, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett warned that fascism was rising, often disguised, and the responsibility lay with writers and journalists to speak out.” He rightly bemoans the absence of such voices now, as writers have disappeared into post-modern silence, a part of the cultural war on dissent.
On a subtler and more personal note than Homer’s tale of revenge, we have the testimony of Albert Camus who was part of the Resistance to the German occupation of France during WW II. At the beginning of his beautiful, posthumous, and autobiographical novel, The First Man, Camus tells us about Jacques Cormery (Camus), who never knew his father, a French soldier killed in World War I – the misnamed grotesque War to End All Wars – when Jacques was eleven months old. Years later, when he is forty years old and horrors of WW II have concluded, Jacques visits the cemetery in France where his father is buried. As he stands over the gravestone in this massive field of the dead, silence engulfs him. Camus writes:
And the wave of tenderness and pity that at once filled his heart was not the stirring of the soul that leads the son to the memory of the vanished father, but the overwhelming passion that a grown man feels for an unjustly murdered child – something here was not in the natural order and, in truth, there was no order but only madness and chaos when the son was older than the father. The course of time was shattering around him while he remained motionless among those tombs he no longer saw, and the years no longer kept to their places in the great river that flows to its end.
The tale continues, as did Camus’s, who always supported the victims of violence despite harsh criticism from many corners, from the left and from the right. He wrote a famous essay, “Reflections on the Guillotine,” against capital punishment, based on his father’s nauseating experience of seeing a man executed by the state. After hearing this story from his grandmother, he would regularly have ”a recurrent nightmare” that “would haunt him, taking many forms, but always having the one theme: they were always coming to take him, Jacques, to be executed.”
Furthermore, Camus warned us not to become murderers and executioners and to create more victims, when he wrote a series of essays shortly after WW II for the French Resistance paper, Combat. – Neither Victims nor Executioners. He wrote that yes, we must raise our voices:
It demands only that we reflect and then decide, clearly, whether humanity’s lot must be made still more miserable in order to achieve far-off and shadowy ends, whether we should accept a world bristling with arms where brother kills brother; or whether, on the contrary, we should avoid bloodshed and misery as much as possible so that we give a chance for survival to later generations better equipped than we are.
Which leads me to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his run for the U.S. presidency in this most dangerous time. He is a man not scared into silence despite all the efforts to censor him.
From a very tender age he was scarred by death; is surely a wounded warrior, not one of those who went to an actual war, but one who had a different war forced upon him when he was nine and fourteen years-old, when his uncle and father were assassinated by the CIA. Some repress the implications of such memories; he has faced them and allowed them to spur him to truth and action.
No boar gored him, nor has he slain suitors in his house, because he has taken, not the road of revenge, but that of reconciliation, despite having lost his father and others to demonic government forces. This is the way of non-violence, a path unfamiliar to most of those seeking political office.
I don’t know his inner thoughts about this, but I read his words and actions to decipher where he is trying to take this very violent country. He is a non-violent warrior in the spirit of Gandhi’s truth force or satyagraha. Not a passive non-action, but an active resistance to evil and violence. Not one seeking revenge on all the warmongers and Covid liars (which does not preclude legal prosecutions for crimes), but one who seeks to reconcile the warring parties. To appeal to our higher angels and not the demons urging us to renounce the good, but to the love that is our only hope.
I am not saying he is a pacifist. Such a term muddies the water. He is clearly committed to the defense of the country if it were ever attacked. But he is emphatically opposed to the endless U.S. attacks on other countries. He knows the vicious history of the CIA. He is a very rare political candidate committed to reconciliation at home and abroad. He is waging peace.
Like his father Senator Robert Kennedy and his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, he is anti-war, committed to ending the endless cycle of overseas wars sustained by the military-industrial complex and the corporations who feed at the trough of war spending. He opposes the policies of those politicians who support such endless carnage, which is most of them, including most emphatically Joe Biden. He realizes the danger of nuclear war. He tells us on his website, Kennedy24:
As President, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will start the process of unwinding empire. We will bring the troops home. We will stop racking up unpayable debt to fight one war after another. The military will return to its proper role of defending our country. We will end the proxy wars, bombing campaigns, covert operations, coups, paramilitaries, and everything else that has become so normal most people don’t know it’s happening. But it is happening, a constant drain on our strength. It’s time to come home and restore this country. . . . We will lead by example. When a warlike imperial nation disarms of its own accord, it sets a template for peace everywhere. It is not too late for us to voluntarily let go of empire and serve peace instead, as a strong and healthy nation.
Those are very strong words and I am sure he means them. But he is opposed by demonic forces within the U.S., what former CIA analyst Ray McGovern aptly calls the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-MEDIA-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MICIMATT). They run the propaganda shit show and will throw lie after lie (have already done so) at Kennedy and exert all their pressure to make sure he can not fulfill his promises. Their propaganda is endless and aims to hypnotize. Pinter described it thus: “I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self-love.”
It is this self-love and American exceptionalism that Bobby Kennedy will have to counteract by emphasizing the humanity of all people and their desire to live in peace. He will have to make it very clear that the U.S. government’s involvement in Ukraine was never humanitarian, but from the start was part of a plan to disable Russia. That is was an effort to continue the Cold War by pushing closer to Russia’s borders.
Only fools think that revenge and violence will lead to a better world. It may feel good – and I know the feeling – to strike back in anger, but it is only a vicious circle as all history has shown. Revenge only brings bitterness, a cycle of recriminations and reactions. Reconciliation is the way forward, but it can only become a reality by an upswelling of resistance of good people everywhere to the lies of the war-loving propagandists who are leading us to annihilation.
RFK, Jr. can not do it alone. He can lead, but we need a vast chorus of millions of voices to resist, in Pilger’s words, “the all-powerful elite of the corporation merged with the state and the demands of ‘identity’.” If not, democracy will remain notional. Kennedy is so right to say that the U.S.A. cannot be an empire abroad and continue to be a democracy at home. Silence must be replaced with resistance and his words made real by millions of people opposing the killers.
Writing in another time of extremity, but writing truly, Camus, said:
At the end of this tunnel of darkness, however, there is inevitably a light, which we already divine and for which we only have to fight to ensure its coming. All of us, among the ruins, are preparing a renaissance beyond the limits of nihilism. But few of us know it.
So let us fight with words and actions. As MLK, Jr. told us about the U.S. war against Vietnam: “There comes a time when silence is betrayal.”
May 03, 2023
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India, the world’s largest democracy, turns 75.
With his special brand of non-violent resistance, Mahatma Gandhi paved the way for the country’s independence. He campaigned for a pluralistic, secular state and equal opportunities for all.
What remains of those ambitions, today? How far has India distanced itself from the ideals of equality and non-violence espoused by Mahatma Gandhi and other founding fathers? How are democracy, human rights and social justice faring today - and where is India headed?
These are the questions that form the basis for this film’s narrative. The film focuses on people still working today to keep Gandhi’s ideals alive - a challenge, as contemporary reality is often a world away from those goals.
Taken together, their stories form a mosaic representing the multi-faceted nation that is India. A nation marked by stark poverty and great wealth. On the one hand blighted by Hindu nationalism, violence against women and overwhelmed by major environmental problems. On the other, India fosters great geopolitical goals and has an ambitious space program.
Although discrimination on the basis of caste is banned by the constitution, the country continues to marginalize certain sections of its population; children continue to be exploited in urban brickyards; and indigenous populations are driven from their land to make way for corporate development.
At the same time, India is a highly spiritual place with a rich cultural history; a nation that comes up with innovative, critical and creative responses to all manner of problems.
Both films in this two-part documentary explore the intersections of these colliding worlds - brought to life through personal stories.
Contemporary accounts of India frequently look to the past, when the foundations were laid for the world’s largest democracy. One person in particular who was able to build a bridge between the past and the present is Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, who was murdered in 1948.
Arun lived with his grandfather for many years and relates personal anecdotes from that time. He captured his grandfather’s ideas in a well-respected book ("The Gift of Anger: And Other Lessons from My Grandfather Mahatma Gandhi”) and draws comparisons between India’s recent history and its current predicament.
The Indian academic and globalization critic Vandana Shiva sees a vast chasm between Gandhi’s ideals and the modern reality. Her stance is unequivocal: civil disobedience is necessary to this day.
https://youtu.be/fO-bgE1pkyQ
https://youtu.be/Z8S9VSlvAOI
Part 2 India: An emerging superpower - Climate, equality, space
“Civil disobedience” evokes a range of reactions when people hear the term. Some instinctively wince, regarding it as anti-social or subversive.
Others, like me, want to know more before we judge. What is prompting someone to engage in it? Who will be affected and how? What does the “disobedient” person hope to accomplish? Are there alternative actions that might be more effective?
One of my earliest memories from childhood was an act of civil disobedience. My family resided near Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, about 11 miles from the Ohio border town of Negley. At the time, Pennsylvania prohibited the unauthorized introduction and sale of milk from Ohio. On many a Saturday in the late 1950s and early 1960s, my father and I would drive over to Negley and fill the back seat of our car with good, cheap milk. During the drive back home, he would caution me to “keep it covered and don’t say anything if the cops pull us over.”
For me, milk smuggling was a thrill ride. It was downright exciting to evade a stupid law while keeping an eye out for a cop who might have nothing better to do than bust a couple of notorious dairy dealers. I know my dad made a few bucks when he re-sold the milk to happy neighbors. We never had any regrets or pangs of conscience for committing this victimless crime. We were simply supporting a cause that even Abraham Lincoln may have endorsed when he said, “The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.”
Government officials hate civil disobedience because it’s a disgruntled citizen’s way of thumbing his nose. If we’re unhappy with laws or policies that are stupid, destructive, corrupt, counterproductive, unconstitutional, or in other ways indefensible, they advise us to do the “democratic” thing—which means hope for the best in a future election, stand in line to be condescended to at some boring public hearing, or just shut up.
My go-to expert on the issue is not a politician or a preacher or an academic. It’s Henry David Thoreau, who famously asked, “Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.”
If the choice is obedience or conscience, I try my best to pick conscience.
Historically, civil disobedience—the refusal to comply with a law or command of a political authority—is exceedingly common. Sometimes it is quiet and largely unnoticeable. Other times it is boisterous and public. For an act to be one of civil disobedience, it must be accompanied by principled or philosophical objections to a law or command (to exclude such acts as simple theft, fraud, and the like).
Some political theorists argue that to qualify as civil disobedience, an act must be peaceful; others allow for violence in their definition of the term. Revolutions are certainly acts of disobedience, though because they tend to be accompanied by violence they often aren’t very “civil.” In any event, the indefensible violence this week in Washington should not blind us to the very honorable history of genuine civil disobedience and its loftier motivations.
Here’s a short list of what I call “great moments in civil disobedience.” There’s no particular order other than chronological, and I wouldn’t even claim these are all among the “top” examples in history. They are, at the least, interesting food for thought. See how many of them you could endorse.
Chapter One of the Old Testament’s Book of Exodus provides what is probably the oldest recorded instance of civil disobedience. It dates to about 3,500 years ago. Two midwives in Egypt, named Shiphrah and Puah, disobeyed an order from the Pharaoh to kill all male Hebrew babies at birth. When they were called to account, they lied to cover their tracks. The Exodus account says their defiance pleased God, who rewarded them for it. So, anyone who says God is always on the side of the politicians must wrestle with that example, as well as the next one.
The playwright Sophocles wrote numerous literary tragedies, one of which (though fictional) tells the tale of Antigone. Creon, the King of Thebes, attempts to prevent her from giving her brother Polynices a proper burial. Antigone declared her conscience to be more important than any royal decree. She was sentenced to death for her defiance but never recanted.
The Book of Matthew in the New Testament reveals that when told that a Jewish Messiah had been born in Bethlehem, King Herod felt personally threatened. He ordered the Magi (the three visiting wise men) to go to the city, find the baby, and then report back to him. As we all know, the Magi did indeed go to Bethlehem where they presented Joseph, Mary, and the baby Jesus with gifts, but then they disobeyed Herod and vanished. In a fit of anger, the King then ordered the execution of all male children under two years old in the vicinity of Bethlehem. If Joseph and Mary and others who assisted them had not refused to comply, the story of Christianity would be quite different.
In 1317, the Pope demanded that King Robert I of Scotland (better known as Robert the Bruce) embrace a truce with the English in the First War of Scottish Independence. For his refusal to follow the Pope’s orders, Robert was excommunicated. Scottish nobles took their King’s defiance to the next level in 1320 in a letter known as the Declaration of Arbroath. It was the first time in history that an organized group of people asserted it was the duty of a King to rule by the consent of the governed and the duty of the governed to get rid of him if he didn’t. “It is not for honors or glory or wealth that we fight,” they declared, “but for freedom alone, which no good man gives up except with his life.” See Seven Centuries Since William Wallace.
Governor Peter Stuyvesant of the Dutch colonies in North America did not like Quakers. In 1656, he commenced persecution of them and demanded local authorities participate. The following year, the citizens of Flushing (present-day Queens, New York City) drafted and signed a document known as the Flushing Remonstrance. As I recently wrote, those brave people essentially told Stuyvesant, “You are commanding us to persecute Quakers. We will not. So take your intolerance and stick it where the sun doesn’t shine.” The Governor shut down the town council of Flushing and arrested some of the document’s signers but was eventually ordered by the Dutch West India Company to rescind his policy of persecution.
Nobody does tea parties like disgruntled colonists from Beantown. In 1773, the British parliament conferred upon the British East India Company a commercial monopoly on the tea trade. That and “taxation without representation” provoked the Sons of Liberty to stage the famous Boston Tea Party, an event organized by Samuel Adams and other American patriots. Under the cover of night, colonials boarded a British ship and tossed its cargo of tea into Boston’s harbor. Three years later, civil disobedience evolved into a Declaration of Independence and open warfare between Britain and its American colonies.
Robert Smalls was born a slave in South Carolina in 1839. Twenty-three years later, in a daring escape, he and other slave friends commandeered a Confederate transport ship in Charleston harbor. They sailed it right past Confederate guns and into the embrace of the Union blockade. I share this example as emblematic of the historic civil disobedience of all runaway slaves, as well as the courageous support they received from others who defied fugitive slave laws and provided them life-saving assistance. The fight for the freedom of black Americans did not end with the Civil War. Let’s not forget those who resisted Jim Crow laws, such as Rosa Parks. She committed civil disobedience when she refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama.
From 1920 to 1933, America engaged in the nationwide, quixotic crusade against the importation, manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages known as Prohibition. People drank anyway. Women, who previously almost never showed up in bars, now guzzled in speakeasies and back alleys all over the country. Men built their own illegal stills and shot each other to gain market share. Crime rates soared. Juries often refused to convict obvious offenders, and at least one jury drank the evidence before declaring the accused to be innocent. When Woodrow Wilson departed the White House in January 1921, he took his stash of booze with him. His successor, Warren Harding, brought another one in. By the time the whole thing was abolished, people really needed the good, stiff drink they were imbibing all along. (See Prohibition’s Foes.)
In British-ruled India, British companies enjoyed monopoly privileges. In 1882, the Salt Act forbade Indians from collecting or selling salt, a dietary staple. Resentment against the law and British rule in general eventually prompted Mohandas Gandhi’s famous Salt March in 1930. Huge numbers of Indians followed Gandhi in a peaceful protest for 240 miles to the Arabian Sea. More than 55,000 were arrested, but India eventually gained its independence in 1947.
Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans were students at the University of Munich when, at the height of Hitler’s power in 1942, they formed the White Rose Movement. By the thousands, they printed and distributed leaflets denouncing Nazi rule and atrocities against Jews. They never engaged in violence as they worked to undermine support for the regime. They were eventually found out, arrested, put on show trial, and beheaded. Their story is sadly but beautifully recounted in the 2005 film, Sophie Scholl: The Final Days.
The Soviet Union’s “Evil Empire” unraveled in the pivotal year of 1989 but leading up to it, citizens from the Baltic states to Romania made life miserable for communist overlords. In Estonia, the “Singing Revolution” put widespread civil disobedience to music. In Poland, a flourishing underground produced massive black markets until the communist regime declared the country “ungovernable” and scheduled free elections. When Romania’s dictator Nicolae Ceausescu sent troops to arrest a pastor in Timisoara, unarmed congregants ringed the church to defend him. The soldiers refused to fire on them, and the Romanian Revolution was underway; the dictator was dead within a month.
Now I ask you, dear reader, where do you stand on each of these historic occasions of civil disobedience? Personally, I can say I applaud every one of them, wholeheartedly and without qualification. But then, as a former milk smuggler, maybe I’m biased.
The sermons of the American colonial preacher, Rev. Jonathan Mayhew (1720-1766), are credited as the inspiration for the Revolutionary motto, “Resistance to Tyrants is Obedience to God.”
I would vote for Mayhew in an instant—twice, if I could.
Lawrence W. Reed, FEE
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Today is the birth anniversary of two prominent people who shaped up India:
Father of the nation: Mahatma Gandhi.
Farmer of the nation: Lal Bahadur Shastri.
Wishing you Happy Gandhi and Shastri Jayanti.
An article written as a tribute to Lal Bahadur Shastri can be read here:
http://guruprasad.net/posts/lal-bahadur-shastri-farmers-pm-epitome-of-ethics-integrity-honesty-hard-work-simplicity-austerity/
Childhood anecdotes of Gandhi and Shastri:
http://guruprasad.net/posts/happy-gandhi-and-shastri-jayanti/
References:
http://www.milligazette.com/news/082-conversion-is-crime-in-modis-gujarat-india
http://www.stephen-knapp.com/mahatma_gandhi_on_conversion1.htm
http://www.mkgandhi.org/momgandhi/chap17.htm
