After a delightful lunch of pooris with curries, dhokla, and butter milk in a nearby canteen, we returned to the Ashram. I was asked to make a few comments, and I gathered my courage. Nothing was recorded and all I had left the next day were two pages of hand-scrawled notes, but I attempt here on my 17-hour flight home to reconstruct my effort to connect violence in our world to the concept of the rule of law.
In 1963, John F. Kennedy was addressing a group of Latin American diplomats, and he told them “if we make the peaceful means of revolution impossible, the violent means of revolution are inevitable.”
John F. Kennedy was killed by the violent act of a madman, but his words were invoked five years later by Martin Luther King when he spoke against the Vietnam War. King said that the Vietnam War was a shocking act of violence against the Vietnamese people.
He also said it was a shocking act of violence against the American boys and girls who were drafted to fight a war they did not understand or support. King stressed there was another kind of violence rampant in the American state, violence against black men and women in the United States.
King said we had cut off these means that Kennedy had spoke of, he called for a “radical revolution in values.” He said we must “move from a thing oriented society to a person oriented society” if we were to address the root causes of our society. King was saying we must redesign our world.
The only way we address these kinds of structural situations we find ourselves in our world today is by changing how we govern ourselves. We do this by invoking the rule of law. Slavery only began to come to an end in the United States with the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.
The purported formal end of slavery, of course, was quickly replaced with the struggle against sharecropping in the US. In India, there was the sharecropping of indigo farmers at home and the system of overseas indenture that Gandhi fought in South Africa. That form of involuntary servitude only came to an end in India when the cruel system know as girmiti was finally outlawed with the Indian Emigration Act of 1917.
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