Ask Metta

Question:

I’m a senior at St. Paul Open School, in St. Paul Minnesota, whom you granted an interview a couple months ago. You were very kind and helpful. My History Day partner and I have started working on Satyagraha for our History Day project, and we have a clarifying question. In our project we talk about how Satyagraha is used with two groups of people with unequal power, where one of them is more powerful than the other, but that Satyagraha has not been proved successful with two equally powerful groups. Can you disprove our theory? Is there any time in history where this has been proved wrong?
 
Answer:

Your question is a bit hard to answer, because in the study of nonviolence we recognize that there are different kinds of power. One group — the state, let’s say — might have a lot of military and financial power, while an opposing group — satyagrahis — have ’soul force’ or ‘people power.’ Gandhi offered Satyagraha with success toward the British (who had military and political power over him), toward his fellow Indians (to get them to stop persecuting ‘lower’ castes), and toward the Harijans (low or outcastes) themselves. In other words, Gandhi was successful with nonviolence in all directions of power relationship: ‘up’, ‘across,’ and ‘down.’ Usually when two groups feel they have about equal power they don’t feel they need recourse to Satyagraha, so of course you won’t find many examples of that; but there’s no reason in the world that it would not be applicable between equals — or for that matter between any two groups. (Incidentally, there’s a climactic scene in the film SOUTH CENTRAL in which two characters are facing each other with loaded guns. One of them slowly puts his weapon down on the floor and faces the other calmly and bravely, who then puts HIS gun away. That’s Satyagraha between equals!)