Word: satyagraha
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Gandhi called his version of civil disobedience "Satyagraha," or Soul Force. The word comes from satya, meaning truth, and agraha, meaning firmness. The former implies love, Gandhi wrote, and the latter, force; in other words, Satyagraha is "the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence." "Satyagraha," Gandhi explained, "postulates the conquest of the adversary by suffering in one's own person," and it demands that every civil resister disobey a law that is counter to his own conscience and cheerfully to demand the punishment for breaking the law. This weapon, which was to shake the British...
...large meeting of Indians heard Gandhi describe the consequences of the first pledge to disobey the Black Act. Each man, he said, must be willing to undergo the fight in complete isolation, if necessary, or else the pledge is meaningless. This is one of the basic principles of Satyagraha: success depends not upon numbers but upon individual firmness. The audience responded, Satyagraha was born, and Gandhi and hundreds of others went to jail for the first time...
...Indians to register voluntarily. Why not register, he told them, if we do it freely? Gandhi was the first to register, but he was brutally clubbed by one of his own countrymen who felt registration would sacrifice principle. To Gandhi, this trust in Smuts' word was the essence of Satyagraha, for "the Satyagrahi bids good-bye to fear," he wrote. "Even if the opponent plays him false twenty times, the Satyagrahi is ready to trust him for the twenty-first time, for an implicit trust in human nature is the very essence of his creed...
...Gandhian ideal of satyagraha invoked the power of souls when souls were pure, but today's soul force rioting often stirred up by Communist agitators, is really only mass hooliganism. Addressing a crowd of 200,000 in Bihar, amid unprecedented booing, Nehru told students, "In Russia, I saw tremendous progress through discipline and hard work. But you want only chaos and confusion. You cannot even dream of how you would be dealt with in Russia...
Last week the time had come to assert the ascendancy of police force over soul force. First Nehru ordered that there be no more satyagraha against Goa. "As a government," he said, "we obviously cannot have satyagraha against another government. Governments do not do that sort of thing." Then, exerting all the strength of his prestige and popularity, Nehru compelled the Congress Party executive to reverse its Goa resolution of last July and vote, ruefully but unanimously, to renounce satyagraha as a method of political action, "whether undertaken individually or collectively...