4.3 Gandhi: Theory of Non-Violence and Truth Calling

The texts:Hind Swaraj (1909) and the ashram experiments; the autobiography The Story of MyExperiments with Truth — political theory written in practice: Salt March (1930), Champaran (1917), the 1942 Quit India movement (your Global History Unit 5's independence story).The conceptual core:1. Satya — truth calling: Gandhi's metaphysic — Truth is God (not "God is truth" the reversal is deliberate); truth is sought, never possessed — hence the claim to final truth is the root of violence. Truth-calling (satya-graha: "holding to truth") = the method of politics as experimental truth-seeking.2. Ahimsa — non-violence: the means-end unity — "the means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree" (brief, his own figure): there is no road to a just end through an unjust means; violence corrupts the victor before it defeats the victim; ahimsa is not passivity — it is activesuffering taken on oneself (the satyagrahi courts jail, absorbs lathi blows, refuses hatred): soul-force (satyagraha) vs body-force.3. The discipline of satyagraha: civil disobedience's rules — open and public breach of an unjust law (never secret sabotage); acceptance of the punishment (the law's majesty honoured while its content is refuted — the moral communication to the opponent's conscience); non-possession, fearlessness, willingness to compromise on everything except principle; the fast as self-purification, not coercion (the fine line he policed).4. The political…