Gandhi On Satyagraha (Truth Force)

From a statement made by Mahatma Gandhi to the Hunter Committee in 1920.

For the past 30 years I have been preaching and practicing Satyagraha. The principles of Satyagraha, as I know it today, constitute a gradual evolution.

Satyagraha differs from Passive Resistance as the North Pole from the South. The later has been conceived as a weapon of the weak and does not exclude the use of force or physical violence for the purpose of gaining one's end, whereas the former has been conceived as a weapon of the strongest and excludes the use of violence in any shape or form.

The term Satyagraha was coined by me in South Africa to express the force that the Indians used there for a full eight years and it was coined in order to distinguish it from the movement then going on in the U.K. and South Africa under the name of Passive Resistance.

It's root meaning is holding on to Truth, hence Truth-Force. I have also called it Love-Force or Soul-Force. In the application of Satyagraha I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of Truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one's opponent but that he must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy. For what appears to be truth to the one may appear to be error to the other. And patience means self-suffering. So the doctrine came to mean the vindication of truth not by infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on one's self (self-sacrifice rather than sacrificing one's opponent).

But on the political field the struggle on behalf of the people consists in opposing error in the shape of unjust laws. When you have failed to bring the error home to the lawgiver by way of petitions and the like, the only remedy open to you, if you do not wish to submitt to error, is to compel him by physical force to yield to you or by suffering in your own person by inviting the penalty for the breach of the law. Hence Satyagraha largely appears to the public as Civil Disobedience or Civil Resistance.