Originally published at: On this day, May 8th, 1933, Mahatma Gandhi started a hunger strike | Boing Boing
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I wonder how he’d handle the intense religious hatred and draconian anti-non-Hindu religion laws being imposed by the current government there and the multiple wars with Pakistan.
Or India’s nuclear weapons.
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Given that he was shot by an ultra-hindu nationalist because he was anti-partian and believed that Hindus and Muslims could live in peace, I think we have a pretty good idea about what he’d think about the current wave of anti-Islamic bullshit in India. He would not like it, and probably agree with Arundhati Roy on much of her views on these issues…
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To add to @Mindysan33’s comment, while Gandhi was not an anarcho-pacifist, he was heavily influenced by Leo Tolstoy’s anarcho-pacifist Christian writings (the ones that got Tolstoy excommunicated from the Orthodox Church). There are even letters between the two, before Tolstoy’s death.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/tolstoy/1910/gandi-letters.html
I think it is safe to say that Gandhi would not approve of nuclear weapons.
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Absolutely!
You know… a bit off-topic here, but when I think of Gandhi, I think of a 20th century person (even though he was born in the 1869 and died in the 1940s) and I think of Tolstoy as being a 19th century person (born in the 1820s and died in 1910). Even though I’m a historian and know better, it feels like they are people from two different eras that wouldn’t overlap at all… but they do!
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