Gandhi's Ideas Against Use of Violence to Achieve Political Objectives Ring True Today https://thewire.in/politics/mahatma-gandhi-violence-protest-rally Neera Chandhoke: 2 Feb 2021
..All states are inherently coercive; all states are embodiments of violence. State sponsored violence has to be fought. Resistance to state power is legitimate provided that the strategy of the resistors does not mirror the violence of the state. Violence stamps the body politic with its cloven hoof, it reduces isolated acts of resistance to spectacle, it diminishes the political public to an audience, and it systematically erodes public ethics. If states cannot uphold a system of public ethics, the people must do so. They must take up the task of defending public ethics. In the process, we might conquer our own fatal tendency to inflict violence on each other.
Disavowing Violence: The Gandhian Way https://centreforpeacestudies.com/disavowing-violence-the-gandhian-way/ Gandhi’s rejection of violence moves to a negation of violence, a transcendence of violence, and the adoption of non-violence. Gandhi negated violence, because he saw it as incapable of bringing about substantive freedom, because it presupposes a flawed conception of the truth, and because it ultimately harms the perpetrator. The alternative to violence is, therefore, non-violence, which is a companion concept to Gandhi’s theory of the truth and swaraj.
We have to learn from Gandhi because we have been confronted with violence against our own people. Violence not only stalks relations between citizens and the state, but also relationships between citizens. How do we deal with this? It is time to reflect on what these everyday incidents of violence do to us. It is time to reclaim the space of non-violence that has been under relentless attack by mobs bent on lynching. They take the name of God Ram to kill, photograph, disseminate photographs of inhumanity on social media, and celebrate killings. Violence is spectacle, we are the consumers of these nauseating acts even if we do not want to.
GANDHI FOR STUDENT MOVEMENTS TODAY Ruchira Gupta https://centreforpeacestudies.com/gandhi-for-student-movements-today/ The first thing that a deeper reading of Gandhi teaches is that non-violence is not just civil disobedience or peaceful protest. It has to go hand in hand with constructive action. Gandhi matched each populist call for a negative action with a call for a positive action. It was what he called “constructive programming.”..
Every time students and women protest what happens at the top, there could also be a call for constructive action at the bottom... North-east Delhi, where there was targeted violence against Muslims, is also one of the dirtiest places to live in. What if students got together to clean one dirty stretch, recycle the garbage and create a park for little children? Shelters for the homeless are often so dirty and dangerous that the street is preferable.Neighborhoods or corporations or colleges could organized their members to clean and monitor a shelter for a few hours each week. During Covid, children were cut off from education, with no access to online education. What if each student began to look for one such child in their neighborhood and start teaching them?
Or take this example" http://ccf.brmworld.org/