Satyagraha

Civil Disobedience means an act or process of public defiance of a law or policy, duly formulated and created by a governmental authority, which an individual or a group considers to be unjust or unconstitutional. The defiance of the government law or policies must be a pre-meditated act and the movement has to be announced in advance. The defiance of the law might take either a violent or non-violent form. It may be either active or passive. As the basic spirit of the civil disobedience movement is to arouse the public conscience, the individual or the group must be prepared to accept punishment for the violation of law or policies. The action or non-action of civil disobedience has to be openly insisted on in order to be qualified as civil disobedience. The mere non-compliance of legal provisions does not itself constitute civil disobedience. 

Gandhi called his concept of civil disobedience as the doctrine of ‘Satyagraha’ or ‘Truth Force’. According to him, the adjective ‘civil’ in the phrase ‘ civil disobedience’ referred to peaceful, courteous, and a ‘civilised’ resistance. To him, the concept of passive resistance is inadequate to grasp the full implications of the concept of ‘Satyagraha’. He said that one must not only resist passively the injustice and arbitrariness of the government but also must do so without any feeling of animosity.  

According to Gandhi, Satyagraha in the sense is not criminal activity. The lawbreaker openly and civilly breaks unjust laws and quietly suffers the penalty for their breach. And in order to register his protest against the action of the lawgivers, it is open to him to withdraw his cooperation from the state by disobeying such other laws whose breach does not constitute moral turpitude. For Gandhi, Ahimsa (non-violence) and Truth were inseparable. He said that “Ahimsa is the means; Truth is the end.” Gandhi used satyagraha as a lever for social movements. 

In the concept of ‘civil disobedience and satyagraha’ both ‘civil disobedience’ and ‘Satyagraha’ are deeply interlinked as a theory of conflict resolution. Gandhi said, “Experience has taught me that civility is the most difficult part of satyagraha. Civility does not here mean the more outward gentleness of speech, cultivated for the occasion but an inborn gentleness and desire to do the opponent well. These should show themselves in every act of satyagraha.” 

Gandhi's basic aim of every political system is to create a social, political and economic climate in which the individuals can fulfil inner requirements of their continuous moral growth. The Gandhian method of civil disobedience and satyagraha alone helps in creating conditions in civil society whereby all spiritual values and methods could be appreciated in the state system as a vital necessity for progress and prosperity. His new orientation of the concept has provided a visionary dimension to the very approaches to conflict resolution in statecraft. The present threat, indeed, to the very existence of mankind could only be removed by the Gandhian approach of a revolutionary change of heart in individual human beings. 

Civil Disobedience is not inconsistent with democracy. When traditional channels of meeting public grievances are incapable of fulfilling legitimate demands, civil disobedience becomes a strategy for the attainment of goods and social justice. Amid the fury of communalism, genocide and the market-oriented process of social injustice, the Gandhian method of civil disobedience and satyagraha is becoming more and more popular in contemporary society.