Gandhi wants a gun
August 21, 2024
Can nonviolence include violence? On August 21, 1928, Gandhi faced this question, and determined it could. Needless to say, the answer was controversial.
The situation involved a maimed calf at the ashram in Ahmedabad. A broken leg had incapacitated the animal; sores accumulated across its hide. The veterinarian who was summoned proclaimed that the creature was beyond help. Volunteers offered to wave away the flies harassing the dying calf and to try and feed it, but after consulting with ashram’s managers, Gandhi dashed off a quick note to his friend Ambalal Sarabhai. (Ambalal owned textile mills in the city, and had negotiated with Gandhi ten years earlier during a mill workers strike.) After explaining about the calf, he concluded:
I have therefore decided to have it shot. Please send one of your guards with a gun if possible. We have people … who can use a gun but we have not kept a gun here.1
By the time a response came—but no gun—Gandhi had decided lethal injection was better a better option. Since cows are sacred within Hinduism, a Parsi doctor was found. As the needle delivered its deadly payload, Gandhi knelt and held the calf’s front leg.2 "In these circumstances,” he wrote, “I felt that ahimsa demanded that the agony should be ended by ending life itself.”3
What is ahimsa? Generally translated as nonviolence, the Metta Center for Nonviolence further explains:
Ahimsa is derived from the Sanskrit verb root san, which means to kill. The form hims means “desirous to kill”; the prefix a- is a negation. So a-himsa means literally “lacking any desire to kill.”
This is the critical point: intent matters. “Violence and nonviolence are mental attitudes, they concern the feelings in our heart,” Gandhi explained, contrasting a slap delivered in anger to a slap delivered to keep an injured patient awake.4 He hadn’t sought a gun because he desired to inflict a violent death upon the calf. Instead, it was his interpretation of the duty of nonviolence to minimize unnecessary suffering.
There was loud disagreement from some; he reportedly received death threats. But Gandhi’s moral compass was not swayed by public opinion. Duty demanded he act according to his conscience, and he did.
Do you support “death with dignity” legislation, allowing a terminally ill person to be legally prescribed a lethal dose of drugs?
Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Letter to Ambalal Sarabhai, August 21, 1928) p. 20,619
Gandhi: The Man, His People, and the Empire (Rajmohan Gandhi, 2008) p. 292
Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (The Fiery Ordeal, September 30, 1928) p. 20,755
Ibid. (Letter to Bhogilal, September 22, 1928) p. 20,741