Part VI: The Power of the Powerless

When revolution learned to refuse violence

The twentieth century's most enduring insight about revolution may be that violence is not just morally problematic but strategically counterproductive. Nonviolent revolution — from Gandhi to King to Solidarity to the Velvet Revolution — has a significantly better track record than violent revolution in producing durable democratic transitions. This is not idealism. It is evidence. Erica Chenoweth's data shows that nonviolent campaigns succeed about twice as often as violent ones and are far more likely to produce democratic outcomes. The coherentism explanation: nonviolent revolution preserves the feedback loops that violent revolution severs. You cannot build a listening society through gunfire.

Chapter 15: Gandhi's Experiment

On March 12, 1930, a sixty-year-old man in a loincloth walked out of an ashram near Ahmedabad with seventy-eight followers and began walking to the sea.

The distance was 387 kilometers. The pace was ten to fifteen miles per day. The logistics were simple: donated goat's milk, fruits, cooked grains, and spinning wheels carried alongside walking sticks. Scouts had been sent to each village along the route to plan talks at each resting place. The Working Committee had contacted American, European, and Indian news media to ensure coverage. Gandhi had written to Viceroy Lord Irwin on March 2, offering to cancel the march if eleven demands were met — reduction of land revenue, cutting military spending by fifty percent, abolishing the salt tax, releasing political prisoners. The demands were so sweeping that rejection was certain. Gandhi was not negotiating. He was constructing a moral narrative in which the British would be seen as having refused reasonable terms.

By the time the marchers reached Dandi on April 5, the crowd had grown to tens of thousands. On April 6, Gandhi picked up a lump of natural salt from the mud. The act was symbolic — and also illegal. The British salt tax affected every Indian regardless of caste, class, or religion. Gandhi had selected it precisely because it united all Indians against a single, comprehensible injustice.

An estimated sixty to a hundred thousand arrests followed. Women engaged en masse, sitting openly in markets selling and buying salt. The Salt March achieved less in concrete policy than its symbolic power would suggest — the salt tax was not abolished. But as a demonstration that mass nonviolent resistance could function at scale and command global attention, it was transformative. It proved the method.

The method had a name: satyagraha. Literally "truth-force" or "soul-force." It was not pacifism in the Western sense. Gandhi conceived it as active confrontation — a means of forcing moral crisis on the opponent by absorbing suffering without retaliation. He distinguished satyagraha sharply from "passive resistance," which he associated with weakness. The satyagrahi must be capable of violence but choose a different weapon. The moral power depended on this capacity being visibly renounced.

The ashram system made it operational. Gandhi's ashrams functioned as something between a monastery and a revolutionary cell — residential institutions that produced disciplined cadres. Residents practiced celibacy, avoided accumulation of wealth, cultivated fearlessness, and spun khadi cloth daily. Before campaigns, villagers took formal oaths pledging to withhold compliance and "gladly suffer the consequences." Without this training infrastructure, satyagraha would have been a theory. The ashrams made it a practice.

At Dharasana Salt Works on May 21, 1930, the logic of that practice became visible to the world. After Gandhi's arrest, the poet Sarojini Naidu led twenty-five hundred marchers toward the salt works. She had warned them: "You must not use any violence under any circumstances. You will be beaten, but you must not resist: you must not even raise a hand to ward off blows."

Webb Miller, a United Press journalist, watched what happened next. "Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows. They went down like ten-pins. From where I stood I heard the sickening whacks of the clubs on unprotected skulls." He counted 320 injured at the hospital, "many still insensible with fractured skulls, others writhing in agony." Two had died.

British telegraph operators in India censored Miller's dispatch. Only after he threatened to expose the censorship was his story transmitted. It appeared in 1,350 newspapers worldwide and was read into the record of the United States Senate.

Dharasana is satyagraha's tactical logic made visible. The nonviolent body absorbs violence, and the witness — the journalist, the global audience — becomes the instrument of political change. The British won the physical encounter and lost the moral one. This is not pacifism. It is a form of combat in which the battlefield is public opinion.

But it is also something more precise. Satyagraha — truth-force — is, at its structural core, a feedback mechanism. The British Raj operated through a coherence gap: it claimed to govern India for India's benefit while extracting wealth and enforcing obedience through violence. That gap existed, but it was invisible — suppressed by distance, by censorship, by the daily complicity of a colonial apparatus that insulated London from Dharasana. What the nonviolent body did, lying on the ground absorbing blows, was force the system to see itself. The violence was not new. The visibility was. Satyagraha did not create the incoherence between British liberal values and British colonial practice. It made the incoherence impossible to ignore — routing the signal around the censors, past the telegraph operators, into 1,350 newspapers and the floor of the United States Senate. The method's genius was not moral. It was informational: it restored feedback to a system that had been designed to suppress it.

The Quit India movement of 1942 revealed the method's limits — and the gap between theory and mass action.

On August 8, Gandhi delivered his "Do or Die" speech. Within hours, the British arrested the entire Congress leadership. Over a hundred thousand people were detained. The Congress was declared unlawful.

What followed was not organized nonviolent resistance but widespread, often violent popular revolt. Five hundred and fifty post offices were attacked. Two hundred and fifty railway stations were damaged. Seventy police stations were wrecked. The Viceroy compared it to "the most serious rebellion since 1857." In Ballia, people overthrew the district administration, broke open the jail, and established their own rule. In Midnapore, a parallel government functioned until Gandhi personally requested its dissolution in 1944.

Quit India exposed a paradox at the heart of Gandhian strategy. When the leadership that maintained nonviolent discipline was removed, the masses did not follow the playbook. The movement became violent precisely because the training infrastructure — the ashrams, the personal example, the patient organization — was decapitated at the outset. The British strategy of mass arrest inadvertently demonstrated that nonviolent discipline, at scale, depends on sustained leadership in ways that armed insurgency does not.

And yet. Quit India shattered the pretense of legitimate British governance. It proved that India was ungovernable without perpetual repression. The revolution exceeded its revolutionary — but the purpose it served was devastating to the Raj regardless.

B.R. Ambedkar, born into the Mahar caste classified as "untouchable," saw something in Gandhi's revolution that its admirers could not see.

The disagreement was not tactical. It was philosophical. Gandhi accepted the varna system — the fourfold division of society — as a legitimate framework of equal duties, while opposing untouchability as a distortion of it. Ambedkar rejected this distinction entirely. Caste was not the "division of labor" but the "division of laborers" — a hierarchy that assigned human worth at birth. For Ambedkar, a dignified future required "the annihilation of caste" — not reform, but abolition.

The Poona Pact of 1932 brought the conflict to a crisis. The British had granted separate electorates to untouchables — allowing them to vote in their own constituencies to elect their own representatives. Ambedkar had argued for this at the Round Table Conferences, contending that upper-caste reformers could not represent the depressed classes. Gandhi, imprisoned at Yerwada, announced a fast unto death. He argued that separate electorates would divide Hinduism.

The fast was understood by Ambedkar as coercion — moral blackmail that forced him to choose between the political empowerment of his people and the life of the most popular man in India. The Pact replaced separate electorates with joint electorates and reserved seats. The number of seats nearly doubled, from 71 to 148. But the principle of independent political representation — which Ambedkar considered the critical mechanism — was surrendered. "The Congress sucked the juice out of the Poona Pact," Ambedkar wrote, "and threw the rind in the face of the Untouchables."

In 1936, Ambedkar published Annihilation of Caste — a speech that was never delivered because its intended hosts found it too radical. Its central argument: caste makes democracy structurally impossible, because a society divided into ranked endogamous groups cannot generate the mutual obligation that democratic governance requires. Political revolution without social revolution is incomplete.

The coherentism lens sharpens Ambedkar's point. Caste is not merely an injustice. It is a feedback suppressor — a system that prevents the governed from transmitting their experience to the governing by sorting human beings into ranks where the suffering of those below is architecturally invisible to those above. Gandhi's satyagraha restored feedback between India and Britain. Ambedkar was asking why it could not restore feedback within India itself — between the Brahmin and the Dalit, between the reformer who spoke for the untouchable and the untouchable who was never handed the microphone. If the revolution's purpose was to close the gap between a system's claims and its reality, caste was a gap that satyagraha, directed outward at the colonizer, was structurally unable to address.

Gandhi responded in his journal Harijan, defending the varna system as properly understood. Ambedkar rebutted him in a second edition. In 1956, Ambedkar publicly converted to Buddhism along with approximately 600,000 followers — a final, irrevocable rupture with the Hindu social order.

The tension between Gandhi and Ambedkar maps onto a recurring pattern: the conflict between those who seek to redeem a tradition and those who seek to escape it. Gandhi wanted moral transformation within existing categories. Ambedkar wanted the categories destroyed. Seventy-five years of post-independence history suggest Ambedkar was closer to right. Caste persists despite constitutional abolition and despite moral appeals.

Was nonviolent resistance the decisive factor in British withdrawal? The honest answer is: no single factor was.

Britain emerged from the Second World War economically shattered — the war economy had consumed fifty-five percent of GDP by 1944. The Anglo-American Loan of 1946, required to keep Britain solvent, effectively demanded the dismantling of imperial preference. The Indian National Army's military campaign under Subhas Chandra Bose had failed in the field, but the Red Fort Trials of 1945, where the British put INA officers on trial for treason, provoked massive protests that exposed a critical fact: the loyalty of Indian armed forces could no longer be assumed. The Royal Indian Navy mutiny of February 1946, when ten thousand sailors across fifty-six ships demanded independence, confirmed it.

When the soldiers who enforce your rule begin to identify with those they are supposed to suppress, the game is over regardless of economic calculations or moral arguments.

Yet the women who organized, marched, and were beaten — Sarojini Naidu at Dharasana, Kasturba Gandhi imprisoned until her death in 1944, Aruna Asaf Ali hoisting the Congress flag to launch Quit India, Usha Mehta running an underground radio station, Captain Lakshmi Sahgal commanding the Rani of Jhansi Regiment in combat against the British — these were not footnotes. They were the revolution's backbone. And the post-independence order erased them anyway. The Constitution guaranteed equality. It also described women as a "weaker section" requiring assistance. The revolutionary movement needed women as participants. The post-revolutionary state relegated them to beneficiaries of male protection.

The deepest question about Gandhi's experiment is not whether it worked but what it could not do.

Independence came — but with Partition, with communal violence, and with a democratic republic that preserved almost every colonial institution intact. The Indian Civil Service became the Indian Administrative Service. The police structure, designed by the British after the 1857 Rebellion and modeled on the Royal Irish Constabulary — a paramilitary force for controlling hostile populations — continued unchanged. The Indian Penal Code, drafted by Lord Macaulay in 1860, governed Indian criminal law for over 160 years. Section 124A, the sedition law — created specifically to suppress Indian nationalists, used against Tilak and Gandhi himself — was retained by independent India and used against its own citizens until the Supreme Court suspended it in 2022.

A law designed by the colonizer to suppress the colonized, retained by the formerly colonized to suppress their own citizens. This is not irony. It is the structural logic of inheriting a state apparatus designed for control.

Sardar Patel, arguing for retaining the colonial bureaucracy, said the country would have collapsed without it. He was probably right. You cannot simultaneously run a country and rebuild its institutional foundations from scratch. But the consequence was a revolution that changed who occupied the offices while leaving the architecture of the offices themselves intact. The flesh changed. The bones remained.

Gandhi's experiment proved that nonviolent revolution could mobilize millions, generate global moral authority, and create a political culture capable of democratic transition. No other revolutionary method in this chronicle achieved all three. But it could not dismantle colonial institutions. It could not resolve the contradiction between national unity and social justice — the Ambedkarite critique remains unanswered. And it could not, by itself, force British withdrawal.

The honest historical record is multicausal and unsatisfying to partisans of any single explanation. Nonviolent resistance made India ungovernable without perpetual repression. The war destroyed Britain's economic capacity to sustain empire. Armed resistance shattered British confidence in their military. Changed global norms delegitimized colonialism. American pressure opened markets that empire had closed.

What nonviolence achieved that other methods could not was a political culture capable of self-governance. Unlike most revolutionary movements, Gandhi's produced a post-independence state that was democratic from its founding. The habits of broad coalition, collective decision-making, and nonviolent conflict resolution — imperfect, incomplete, and constantly tested — created conditions for democratic governance that most post-colonial states did not achieve.

That is what the method could do. What it could not do was change the value system. The revolution changed the flag. It did not change the bones.