Gandhi on assassinations
September 11, 2025
September 11 is an important day in the history of nonviolent action, and you can read why in last year’s post. But today, prompted by yesterday’s killing of Charlie Kirk, I want to write about a topic I’ve been kicking around mentally since last December, when the CEO of UnitedHealth, Brian Thompson, was assassinated.
Gandhi’s feelings on assassination seem clear. In 1909, he met with anarchists in London who were celebrating the murder of Sir William Curzon-Wyllie by an Indian-born zealot. On the voyage home, he penned Hind Swaraj, in which an advocate of assassination is persuaded that killing is not the best path for political change. Nonviolence is superior, because the desired ends must determine the means. To succeed at installing murders in power is no real victory.
However, Gandhi thoughts on nonviolence did not rule out killing when inaction would cause greater harm. In 1926, he endorsed the shooting of dog packs terrorizing people at a well, which outraged many Hindus. Feeling compelled to explain himself in the press, Gandhi offered a hypothetical:1
Taking a life may be a duty. … Suppose a man runs am[o]k and goes furiously about sword in hand, and killing anyone that comes his way, and no one dares to capture him alive. Anyone who dispatches this lunatic will earn the gratitude of the community and be regarded a benevolent man. From the point of view of ahimsa [nonviolence] it is the plain duty of everyone to kill such a man.
Does it matter that UnitedHealth killed people, not with a sword, but through willful actions carried out with a misguided sense of duty to the corporation’s shareholders? On reflection, Gandhi’s logic rests on an assumption that assassinations are fundamentally an attempt to seize political power. This is incorrect in the case of the UnitedHealth CEO, and Gandhi’s prediction was confirmed—the killer “earn[ed] the gratitude of the community,” or at least a fraction of it.
It is a troubling line of thinking, but is it more troubling than passively accepting the status quo of corporate dominance in people’s lives? “Frankly, these parasites,” the killer wrote, “have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit. …. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”2
And if the status quo changes to make assassinations acceptable—Minnesota legislators, a Blackstone CEO, Charlie Kirk—how does it end? Gandhi would say, and I would agree, that these killings are symptoms of deeper societal problems which need healing. America is at a tipping point; time will tell what we do with this opportunity.
Today’s discussion question: Gandhi’s assassin did not flee afterward—is accepting the consequences an essential component for arguing the act was done for the public good?
Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Is This Humanity? - IV, October 31, 1926) p. 17,678