Gandhi, nonviolence and India

I’ve never heard you talk about Gandhi. Orwell wrote of him that,
“Compared to other leading political figures of our times, how clean
a smell he has managed to leave behind.” What are your views on
the Mahatma?
I’d hesitate to say without analyzing more closely what he did and
what he achieved. T here were some positive things—for example,
his emphasis on village development, self-help and communal
projects. T hat would have been very healthy for India. Implicitly, he
was suggesting a model of development that could have been more
successful and humane than the Stalinist model that was adopted
(which emphasized the development of heavy industry, etc.).
But you really have to think through the talk about nonviolence.
Sure, everybody’s in favor of nonviolence rather than violence, but
under what conditions and when? Is it an absolute principle?
You know what he said to Lewis Fisher in 1938 about the Jews in
Germany—that German Jews ought to commit collective suicide,
which would “have aroused the world and the people of Germany to
Hitler’s violence.”
He was making a tactical proposal, not a principled one. He
wasn’t saying that they should have walked cheerfully into the gas
chambers because that’s what nonviolence dictates. He was saying,
If you do it, you may be better off.
If you divorce his proposal from any principled concern other
than how many people’s lives can be saved, it’s conceivable that it
would have aroused world concern in a way that the Nazi slaughter
didn’t. I don’t believe it, but it’s not literally impossible. On the other
hand, there’s nothing much that the European Jews could have done
anyway under the prevailing circumstances, which were shameful
everywhere.
Orwell adds that after the war Gandhi justified his position, saying,
The Jews had been killed anyway and might as well have died
significantly.
Again, he was making a tactical, not a principled, statement. One
has to ask what the consequences of the actions he recommended
would have been. T hat’s speculation based on little evidence. But
for him to have made that recommendation at the time would have