GANDHI, POLITICS AND SAT YAGRAHA

Mohandas K. Gandhi was the father of modern nonviolence. He called the forms of struggle without use of firearms as satyagraha. Gandhi distinguished between passive resistance and satyagraha. The basic postulate of satyagraha rested on the belief in the inherent goodness of man, moral power and the capacity to suffer for the opponent. He tried, in difficult times, offering an alternative to war and social policy. On the roots of forms of struggle and popular peasant ancestral (disobedience, non-cooperation, insubordination), he developed the ethical and political union, beyond N. Machiavelli and M. Weber. But his ethical-political struggle could not be understood without other elements of his “constructive program” such as ahimsa (not kill), Sarvodaya (welfare of all), swaraj (self-determination and self-government) and swadeshi (self-sufficiency).