Gandhi Concept of Civil Disobedience

Mahatma Gandhi is considered to be the leading theorist in the history of civil disobediencmovement. The Gandhian concept of civil disobedience and satyagraha is the greatest contributionto mankind in our times. Albert Einstein said, “It is my belief that the problem of bringing peaceto the world on a supranational basis will be solved only by employing Gandhi’s method on alarge scale.” Martin Luther King Jr. said, “From my background I gained my regulating Christianideals, from Gandhi, I learned my operational technique.”Gandhi called his concept of civil disobedience as the doctrine of ‘Satyagraha’ or ‘Truth Force’.For 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 thefull implications of the concept of ‘satyagraha’. He said that one must not only resist passivelythe injustice and arbitrariness of the government, but also must do so without any feeling ofanimosity.In the earlier phase, Gandhi had spoken of passive resistance as an ‘all-sided sword’. He said,“…it blesses him who uses it and him against whom it is used. Without draining a drop of blood,it produces far-reaching results….Given a just cause, capacity for endless suffering and avoidanceof violence, victory is a certainty.”Subsequently, Gandhi abandoned the term ‘passive resistance’, and chose the term ‘satyagraha’.The concept of satyagraha is devoid of any feelings of hatred and violent means. It is basedon spiritual purity. Like Tolstoy, Gandhi was opposed to all forms of violence in his commitmentsto political actions. Arne Naess, a leading theoretician on Gandhi has stressed Gandhi’s“constructive imagination and uncommon ingenuity in finding and applying morally acceptableforms of political action.” Satyagraha, the unique system of non-violent resistance to thegovernment’s arbitrary methods and actions is, indeed, his greatest gift to mankind.
For Gandhi,