Snippets: Ahimsa Conversation # 72 Ramachandra Guha
Channel: Ahimsa Conversations
Date: 16/07/2021

Equating nonviolence with cowardice is a macho view which is also short-sighted because sustainable change requires institutional change which can only be brought about through nonviolence. While Ramachandra Guha, historian and public intellectual, believes this he also argues that it is in more open societies, with less brutal regimes, that nonviolence has tended to succeed.  Here Ram reflects on the role of both armed and nonviolent struggles in India’s freedom movement and about the nature of differences, between Subhas Chandra Bose and Gandhi, on the issue of violence. Ram describes the anti-CAA protests, of 2019-20, where many students held posters of Gandhi and Ambedkar together – which he found deeply moving. These protests, and more recently the farmers protests, have revived the idea of collective, principled, nonviolent protests as an affirmation of elementary human values of decency, humanity and justice.  
#RamGuha #Nonviolence #Gandhi #Bose