From: bala@iastate.edu (M.K.Balasubramanya)
Subject: Narayan Desai on Gandhi,non-violence and the Indian nuclear program
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames, IA
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1992 05:06:43 GMT

This article is forwarded from misc.activism.progressive - b a l a
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A couple of weeks ago a Mr. Narayan Desai gave a very impressive
and inspiring talk about Gandhi, nonviolence, and the anti-nuclear
movement in India.

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      SPEECH BY NARAYAN DESAI
   AUGUST 6 (HIROSHIMA DAY) 1992
GRACE METHODIST CHURCH, SANTA CRUZ, CA

Transcribed by Don Fong from a tape
provided by the Resource Center for Nonviolence.

NOTES:
	??phonetic transcription for words or names i don't know??
	<sounds on tape>
	[editorial notes]

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SCOTT KENNEDY:
[unclear]
we're really privileged to have Narayan Desai speak with us this
evening.  Our relationship with Narayan and the Resource Center goes
back, I think it's fair to say, several decades, through his work with
Peace Brigades International, which is an attempt to apply Gandhian
principles to the international situations, and national situations of
conflict.  And also through the War Resisters, the War Resisters League
and War Resisters International.

[unclear]
Probably most of you heard today, the Senate passed a resolution to
abolish nuclear testing, to at least suspend it for 9 months starting in
October.  An unprecedented act by the United States Senate.  This came
on Hiroshima Day.  Maybe it's some small sign that our culture is
finally able to look at some of the conflicts in which we live and work.

When I stopped at the Resource Center this afternoon there was a
message, in the message book that said, ``Please tell Narayan that he's
not able to be here tonight because of an urgent meeting, but that Cesar
Chavez had planned to come this evening to hear Narayan speak, and he
regrets that he's not able to be with us tonight.''  So of course, we
regret that too.  It's quite a testimony to Narayan that Chavez had
planned to join us this evening.

If you let your imagination run --- I let mine run --- it's hard to run
far enough to imagine growing up in Gandhi's ashram.  And Narayan's
father for 25 years was Gandhi's chief scribe and secretary.  And
Narayan grew up on an ashram with Gandhi, he knew him as a young boy
growing up, and I think it's fair to say, has tried to live the rest of
his life in the principles and ways that made sense to that early
upbringing.

And if you look at Narayan's biography, it has this kind of full scope
of Gandhian nonviolence: he's been working on issues of basic education;
how to educate young people, in the culture that involves work, right
livelihood, proper leisure and so on, to ??shantisenda?? the Gandhi
peace army, how can nonviolent activists really deal with internal
communal strife, and international situations and conflicts, monitoring
the Indian government, as it drifted towards fascism, even, how to build
people's communities, and people's committees that would be some kind of
antidote to the centralization of power in the states, to the
experiments with Peace Brigades International, opposing India's nuclear
power program.  I mean, he's seen it all.  And it's a real privilege for
him to be able to speak with us tonight, and for us to benefit from him.

Currently Narayan is the founder and director of the Institute for Total
Revolution, which supports the fundamental Gandhian core principles.
And Narayan will speak [unclear] and there will be an opportunity for
questions and answers and feedback.  [unclear]

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NARAYAN DESAI:
Good friends: When Scott Kennedy was introducing me, I was thinking all
the while, what person he was talking about? <laughter> ...

To me this day is the day for turning the searchlight within.  Not to
feel guilty... not to feel any hatred...  but to pledge or commit
ourselves not to make same kinds of blunders that we did 47 years ago.
And I say "we" because partly all of us are responsible for Hiroshima.

I lived with a man who made many mistakes in his life.  But he had the
courage to announce them to the world, and he had the perseverance to
try to not to make those mistakes again.  That was perhaps the only
difference between him and us.  We also commit mistakes, but we try to
hide them, and if our mistakes are known, we hardly try to ... to improve.

I'm going to share with you some of my reflections, beginning with a
mistake that we made early in the 50s and beginning of 60s.  We in India
were thinking about "atoms for peace".  This is a slogan which is still
very current in many parts of the world.  And we thought that India will
never have a bomb, but India can use the nuclear technology for peaceful
purposes like making electricity and using it for industrialization.  We
have now come to realize that it was a mistake, perhaps a blunder
greater than Hiroshima.  Hiroshima was a blunder which was obvious.
People could see that.

But 6 years ago, when we bicycled from my place --- which is a small
village on the western coast of India --- to ??ravapata??, a place about
a thousand kilometers north of us in ??rajasthan?? where there are
nuclear power plants constructed with the help of Canadian technology.

When we were going there, just before we could reach that place, every
day we used to meet people in the villages.  And that day it was a turn
of my daughter --- who is a medical doctor --- to explain to the
villagers about the hazards of radiation.  After the meeting was over,
she was asked to address a separate, private meeting of women of that
village and we were taken to a well which was some distance away from
the village, and a completely illiterate person was showing me the way
to the well.  And this man said to me, very seriously --- he did not
know that the person who spoke at the meeting was my daughter; he had
never heard anything about the power plant before, which was about 4 or
5 miles away from his place; he had not heard about the hazards til
then; but in a very straightforward way he said --- ``Sir, what the lady
was saying is right.''  It was almost like giving a certificate: ``What
the lady was saying is right.''  So I was a bit surprised.  I said,
``What did she say, and what was right in what she said?''  He said that
she was saying, that the radiation is going to affect the small animals
first.  ``And I am a witness to the fact that before this nuclear power
plant was built we had 5000 goats in our village and we do not have even
a hundred goats living in our village anymore.  And there has not been
any butchering.  It's just because of reasons we did not understand.
But she is right.''  He was convinced of it.  So when I met my daughter,
I said, please keep your eyes open and you might find things which we
did not expect.  We were just speaking from what we had read in the books.

And it was between 115 to 120 degrees of heat.  We were going on a
bicycle, and we stopped at one place to drink some fresh water.
These students of our institute, which is a training institute for
nonviolent workers --- I sometimes find Americans are scared by the word
"revolution", they were not scared 300 years ago ... <laughter>
[unclear] --- but it's an institution for nonviolent volunteers.  And
they were also in the cycle march, and they had their packs which had
a symbol which says "liberation from everything nuclear", and they had
fancy dresses which had slogans.  Anti-nuclear slogans [unclear] all
about on their clothes.  And so that attracted many people from that
village where we were drinking the water.

About 50 people just surrounded us only to have a look at these queer
sort of fellows with these dresses which they had never seen before.
And they were watching while my daughter was trying to see them closely.
And the first thing that she noticed was that in this crowd of about 50,
about 12 or 13 men, women, and children had big tumors over the body.
Some had very clearly on the head, some had on the feet, and then she
started asking questions.  They gave different replies, but one reply
was common among them all: that every one had this tumor at least 7
years after the nuclear power plant was established.  Very critical,
only after that.  None of them had any such disease before that.  So we
thought, this is something serious.

So we talked about that when we went to the actual place where the
nuclear power plant is situated.  And there one of them said, ``You must
visit another village, and visit a family, that's the family of the
washer man who washes the clothes of the workers who are engaged in the
nuclear power plant.''  So she went there and these clothes are only
low-level nuclear radiation if at all.  She went there, and there the
wife of this washer man had given birth to a child who was crippled.
So my daughter examined her, and she said, ``Well, I'm very sorry about
you, but this sometimes happens, This is not absolutely new, sometimes
it happens.''  So this woman who had just delivered a child 3 or 4 days
ago, she said, ``Yes, that is true, my neighbor also had had similar
[unclear] delivery.  and that was a neighbor just 3 houses away from
her.  And when she visited that house, that woman said, ``No, there is
one more in this same street.''  And the streets of villages are not
very long.  Three cases of abnormal childbirth in a space of some 12 or
15 houses.  And this ... shocked us.

And the only thing we said to the public through news media was, --- it
was an appeal from my daughter, as a doctor --- that this place should
be surveyed, just for the health purposes.  But the successors of the
bomb-burst of Hiroshima, are afraid of one thing, and that one thing is
truth.  They would never like truth to come out.

We went to another power plant in the south, which is the oldest power
plant.  which was prepared with the help of U.S. aid, at Tarapur.  And
they need about 250 workers to work on that.  And on the whole through
all these years they have employed 10 thousand laborers, because after
certain period, those who were working inside the plant were just
dismissed.  And people did not know what happened to them.  We asked for
a very simple thing.  In fact we were invited by these people in order
to prove that "atoms for peace" were actually peaceful.  And we just
asked them to show us the health records of their workers.  And their
answer was a typical answer: ``Sir, we can't give you these records
because it is classified information.''  That's the word that they have
borrowed from the defense department.

Classified information... something to be hidden from your enemies.
Not from your own people, Not from the parents of those workers who
were working there or their relatives...  but classified information.
Truth is classified.

The nuclear energy commission in India is not responsible to the
parliament.  The budget of the nuclear commission is not passed by the
parliament.  It is only the prime minister who is responsible for that.
It's easy either to convince or to deceive one person rather than 525
persons.  So that is how the law has been made.  We do not have the law
which gives information to every citizen of India, to find facts about it.

So what I was trying to tell you is, truth is something which the
producers of both nuclear energy and nuclear weapons --- and I think
they are two sides of the same coin; they are hands in gloves working
together.  The money that is spent on the research for nuclear energy
--- and it is almost equivalent to 80% of the total money spent on
research spent by the central government --- is classified as spent on
defense, and so it is not counted when the price of the electricity
would be fixed later on, it is not counted in that.  And when people say
we do not want nuclear weapons, it's easy to say in parliament, ``No, we
are doing it only for peace.''  So both these 2 different things help
each other.  And that's why I say --- well, I can talk about this for
long periods but that's not my subject --- but they are parts of the
same coin.  And they fear truth.

So I think truth is the weapon with which Hiroshima can be fought, with
which nuclear power plants or nuclear "testing" can be banned.  The
president can still ban the resolution [unclear] that has been passed.
He can do it.  But if the people come out with the truth, it may not be
so easy for him to veto it especially having in view the elections
coming in November.

I have to some extent tasted that strength of the people's truth.
If you go to the eastern coast of India --- and I am going to tell you
stories only from India.  I am a stranger to your situation, first of
all, and I don't feel myself competent to talk about your problems, at
least not in details.  And I would also like to share some of my
experiences as a citizen who sometimes feels he's entrapped in this
system which thrives on untruth and violence, and that this system is
not restricted to one country alone.  But still I'm going to restrict
myself to experiences in India.

If you go to the eastern coast of India, there's a state called
??orissa?? which is one of the smaller states of India.  Well, it is
about 350 million people, but it's still one of the smaller states of
India...  And there the government of India --- I don't know who had
this original idea, but he must be something more than a poet to have
that original idea --- to construct a ballistic missiles base on land
which is very fertile and to have a ballistic missile base on the
eastern coast of India.  It would need some time to find out which is
the enemy which they are facing, unless of course they are thinking of
Bangladesh as the potential enemy, which is both smaller in size and
smaller in weapons...  much smaller, no comparison with India.  But the
base which goes on for miles together, on very fertile land, that is
what was envisaged.  And the people of ??orissa?? --- men, women, and
children --- like one man decided that we are not going to allow them to
construct this missile base at ??baliapal??.  We'll just say no to them.

And I think the only lesson that Gandhi taught us was to say no: no to
injustice; no to exploitation; no to colonization.  These people said:
no to missile base.

Fortunately for them, there is only one road leading to this place, and
they blocked it.  Blocked it just with one ... bar.  But then there were
living bars behind her.  Thousands of people just stood there for the
first few days.  And then they later on said, we will keep a day and
night vigilance, and they organized their own method of communication,
and that was using what we call ??shank?? or conch, the shell.  When
they saw a government jeep coming from a distance, they would just blow
a shell.  And people in the surrounding parts and then surrounding
villages and then from distance villages would reciprocate by blowing
more conchs and all of them would come back together.

For 7 and a half hears not one representative of the government has been
able to put his or her step on that land.  And it is this year, early
this year, that the government of India declared that they had finally
abandoned the idea of creating a missile base there, after 7 and a half
years. <applause>

This happened because of the power of the people.  And we were witnesses
to the fact that the power of the people can only be nonviolent power.
Because we know for certain with our own experience that those who hold
the power of the state, or power of money are far better equipped about
violence than the people.  They have more weapons, far superior than
perhaps the stones that the people can use, or sometimes the sticks that
they can use, but they have much superior weapons.  They have much
better training.  Although I happen to be a nonviolent trainer, I know
their training is much better in their own line.  And they have far more
experience of violence than we people have.  So I am convinced that the
power of the people can be only that of nonviolence.  Violence can not
be the power of the people.  If it is the power of the people, then
perhaps they would kill each other.

So what I was trying to say, was that thinking about how to overcome ---
if I can say, the forces of Hiroshima, or forces of death, or forces of
violence --- it is the forces of life which have to come together and
which have to try to say no to violence, no to injustice, and not stop
with that.

I really often say, when there is sometimes discussions --- and I find
that there is much more of that kind of discussion in the west, than in
the east --- whether nonviolence is a way of life, or nonviolence is
a technique of life.  And I think it's both.  Because if we have
nonviolence only as a philosophy, without the technique, nonviolence
will be diminished.  And if we have nonviolence only as a technique,
without the philosophy, the nonviolence will be misguided.  One is
like the steering wheel in a car, and the other is like the gas in it.
One gives it strength, the other gives it direction.  We need both.
So nonviolence has to be comprehensive.  It has to be the technique as well
as the philosophy of life that goes behind nonviolence.  I cannot think
of both these two things separated.  But there are sometimes these debates.

But when he [previous speaker?] was talking to you about death, I was
going to get back to one small statement of mine.  [unclear] At the
conference of the War Resisters' League that they had last week in
[unclear ... Eugene ?],  I said, ``Nonviolence or nonviolent revolution
begins at home.''  But then immediately I followed that by saying, ``But
it does not stop at home.''  It has to reach wider horizons until it can
reach the horizons of the planet.  Because I see that the violence which
has been committed between men in Hiroshima, was not violence only on
human beings, but it was also violence on the planet.  And to me, the
very definition of nonviolence is harmony.  Harmony within oneself;
harmony with fellow human beings; and harmony with mother nature.

I'm saying "mother nature" because that's the Hindi term.  When in Hindi
we use the word, we do not say ??pretipi?? but we say ??pretipi-mata??
which means "mother nature".  When we say "earth" we do not say "earth",
we say "mother earth".  This applies even to rivers.  Well, but the
rivers have one more adjective.  They say ??loto-mata?? which means
mother of the people.  So in that sense, the rivers are even more
venerated.

But what I was trying to say, that the violence is much more extensive
than we usually think when we are thinking about wars.  The violence
begins with ourselves, when we suppress or sometimes oppress ourselves.
So we have to get over that, and that can be achieved only through some
kind of creative --- and I think even there Gandhi had something to give
as a message.

In his idea about of education, I think the 3 focal points were: first
of all, freedom in schools, many were talking about praying in schools;
freedom to love; and self-expression.  These were the 3 focal points of
Gandhi's way of education.  And I think self-expression not only good
for the children --- and it is definitely good for the children --- but
also for us adults who sometimes have to fight a struggle within
ourselves, an ongoing fight very often.

So we have to fight that nonviolent struggle by some kind of ...
creative activity.  It is an activity where you try to put, instead of
the 2 incentives which are always being used by us, those incentives
which can change, or which can move things.  Instead of 2 old
incentives, Gandhi tried to put 2 new incentives.  The old incentives
are very well known.  Very often we practice it at home.  [unclear]
Those are very much practiced in the society at large.

The first incentive, the old incentive, is that of fear; and the other
is that of greed.  It is on these 2 incentives that people think the
world can move.  Whole of the capitalist society is built on the
incentive of greed.  The whole of the dictatorial structures were built
on fear.  And Gandhi tried to give 2 new incentives instead of these 2
incentives.  Instead of the mother saying to the child, if you do such
and such thing which she pleases, I will give you an ice cream or
chocolate or something, that's greed; and if the child does not agree
with that, oh let papa come, he will give you a big thrashing, that is
fear.  So it's there very much in the family.  It can be there in the
large human family of nations.  We have seen enough of that.

Instead of that, Gandhi gave those 2 incentives which sound to be very
simple, but can be quite difficult...  The 2 incentives of sharing and
caring.  Instead of greed, share; instead of fear, or instead of
threaten, [unclear] care.  Sharing and caring.  So these 2 incentives
come as 2 alternatives suggested by Gandhi.

And when we think about this present situation, and when I was
reflecting on what was being read [earlier in service], I thought I
should share with you some of the thoughts that came to my mind, instead
of going through this note that I had prepared, I thought I should think
aloud with you and with his [one of the organizers?] permission, I want
to end with a song.

You said, no music, don't consider it to be a music, just part of my
prayers.  But I'm going to sing to you a song which was written the day
after Hiroshima day, on hearing the news of Hiroshima, by a friend of
mine.  The song is in ??guyurat??, my language, Gandhi's language.  But
I think it's quite expressive.  And ... I think I will be permitted if I
don't translate.  I'll just sing it.  And that's how I would like to
close my talk.

One word I should translate for you, That's the crucial word:
??shan-ti??.  ??shan-ti?? is peace.  Many of you know the word.  But
here in this song the refrain is ??shan-ti carew??: let there be peace,
let there be peace, let there be peace.  That's the refrain.  And the
prayer is to the lord of life, ??jivanana??

[several mins of singing]

[end of tape]



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