ACADEMIC
JOURNAL ARTICLE
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Social Alternatives (Australia)
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Nonviolent Non-Cooperation: An Effective, Noble and Valuable Means for Peaceful Change
Nonviolent Non-Cooperation: An Effective, Noble and Valuable Means for Peaceful Change
By Kumar, Ravindra
Article
excerpt
This article reviews the central principles of the
social and political tactic of nonviolent non-cooperation, particularly in the
tradition of Mahatma Gandhi. It identifies key traditions, values, and
historical practices that frame and demonstrate the meaning and significance of
nonviolent non-cooperation, and explores the potential of these approaches in
the global village.
An Ancient Tradition
Since ancient times social reformers have taken the
path of non-cooperation to remove obstacles from the way of mutual cooperation.
The Indian tradition is long, which besides Gautama Buddha (563-483 BC.) and
Guru Nanak Dev (1469-1539) also includes Vedic scholars like Dayananda
Saraswati (1824-1883) and Vivekananda (1863-1902) who called upon people to
resolve problems and transform conflicts through nonviolent non-cooperation.
They themselves practised it; they discovered its strength and, thus, proved
non-cooperation to be a powerful, noble, exemplary and effective method or means
to accord equal justice and freedom. Victories were achieved through it mainly
due to the following two reasons:
* Leaders of non-cooperation applied effective
methods and techniques in their actions in prevailing circumstances of time and
space; and
* They adopted the supreme human value of Ahimsa
(nonviolence) as the means in their actions, i.e., nonviolence became the basis
of their non-cooperation programmes.
The sources of these methods and values lie in a
millennium-old tradition. Thousands of years ago in the earliest written texts
people had been called to take the path of non-cooperation to end atrocities,
inhumanities and injustices. To fight against wrongdoers, tyrants, oppressors,
exploiters or unjust persons through the method of non-cooperation1
was declared a duty of human beings. Simultaneously, by staying within the
domain of human values and impelling one's whole soul-force, to refuse to obey
an unjust person or a group of persons was considered to be justifiable. It was
recognised as a right of individuals as well as the society.
I refer to a call of non-cooperation in the Vedas,
and particularly in the Rigveda2 when it declares man's
disassociation from the one who is imprudent, jealous, malicious and selfish,
to be his duty. I find it in the other Vedas also, and especially in the
sixteenth Mantra of the first chapter of the Yajurveda, where people have been
called to boycott those who are wicked, vicious or corrupt. It is, undoubtedly,
a call for non-cooperation with the wrongdoers.
In the political sphere, half a century before
Gandhi's practices in South Africa, in the middle of the nineteenth century,
this methodology was used in the Punjab province of India by Ram Singh
(1816-1885), who was the founder of the Namdhari (Sikh) sect and was also known
as the Kuka, with the purpose of making his country, India, free from the yoke
of British impehalism.3The non-cooperation programme of Ram Singh included:
* Boycott of government services;
* Boycott of educational institutions started by
the English;
* Boycott of law-courts started by the British;
* Boycott of foreign-made goods; and
* Boycott to obey and resist against the laws and
orders, which one's own conscience abhors.4
All the above were part of Gandhi's non-cooperation
programme in India in 1920. That is why it is said that the Namdharis' approach
influenced Gandhi's programme of non-cooperation and civil disobedience.
Furthermore, before Gandhi's Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920, Bal Gangadhar
Tilak (1856-1920) along with Aurobindo Ghosh (1872-1950) and Lajpat Rai
(1865-1928) started the Swadeshi Movement in India in the beginning of the
first decade of the 20th Century. It was also a sort of noncooperation.
In other traditions, such as from the Middle East
the teachings and life of Jesus Christ embody nonviolent noncooperation, while
Prophet Muhammad (570-632) refused to cooperate with inequality-based social
structures and all improper practices that prevailed in his time. …
