The choice before Krishna is between lesser evil and greater evil. It is not a simple choice between good and evil. The fighting tactics which Krishna uses are nothing compared to those used in the war of Mahabharat by the other side, who are capable of doing anything. The Kauravas are no ordinary evil-doers – they are extraordinarily evil. Gandhi would be no match for them; they could crush him in moments. Ordinary good cannot defeat an evil that is colossal. Gandhi would know what it is to fight with a colossus of evil if he had fought against a government run by Adolph Hitler. Fortunately for him, India was ruled by a very liberal community – the British – not by Hitler. Even among the British – if Churchill had been in power and Gandhi had to deal with him, it would have been very difficult to win India’s independence. The coming of Atlee into power in Britain after the war made a big difference.
The question of right means, which Gandhi
talks about so much, deserves careful consideration. It is fine to say
that right ends cannot be achieved without right means. However, in this
world, there is nothing like an absolutely right end or absolutely
right means. It is not a question of right versus wrong; it is always a
question of greater wrong versus lesser wrong. There is no one who is
completely healthy or completely sick; it is always a matter of being
more sick or less sick.
Life does not consist of two
distinct colors – white and black, life is just gray, a mixture of white
and black. In this context men like Gandhi are just utopians. dreamers,
idealists who are completely divorced from reality. Krishna is in
direct contact with life; he is not a utopian. For him life’s work
begins with accepting it as it is.
What Gandhi calls ”pure
means” are not re ally pure, cannot be. Maybe pure ends and pure means
are available in what the Hindus call moksha, or the space of freedom.
But in this mundane world every, thing is alloyed with dirt. Not even
gold is unalloyed. What we call diamond is nothing but old, aged coal.
Gandhi’s purity of ends and means is sheer imagination.
For
example, Gandhi thinks fasting is a kind of right means to a right end.
And he resorts to fasting – fast unto death every now and then. But I
can never accept fasting as a right means, nor will Krishna agree with
Gandhi. If a threat to kill another person is wrong, how can a
threat to kill oneself be right? If it is wrong of me to make you accept
what I say by pointing a gun at you, how can it become right if I make
you accept the same thing by turning the gun to point it at myself? A
wrong does not cease to be a wrong just by turning the point of a gun.
In a sense it would be a greater wrong on my part if I ask you to accept
my views with the threat that if you don’t I am going to kill myself.
If I threaten to kill you, you have an option, a moral opportunity to
die and refuse to yield to my pressure. But if I threaten to kill
myself, I make you very helpless, because you may not like to take the
responsibility of my death on yourself.
Gandhi once
undertook such a fast unto death to put pressure on Ambedkar, leader of
the millions of India’s untouchables. And Ambedkar had to yield, not
because he agreed that the cause for which Gandhi fasted was right, but
because he did not want to let Gandhi die for it. Ambedkar was not ready
to do even this much violence to Gandhi. Ambedkar said later that
Gandhi would be wrong to think that he had changed his heart. He still
believed he was right and Gandhi was wrong, but he was not prepared to
take the responsibility for the violence that Gandhi was insisting on
doing to himself.
In this context it is necessary to ask
if Ambedkar used the right means, or Gandhi? Of the two, who is really
non-violent? In my view Gandhi’s way was utterly violent, and Ambedkar
proved to he non-violent. Gandhi was determined till the last moment to
pressure Ambedkar with his threat to kill himself.
It
makes no difference whether I threaten to kill you or to kill myself to
make you accept my view. In either case, I am using pressure and
violence. In fact, when I threaten to kill you I give you a choice to
die with dignity, to tell me you would rather die than yield to my view
which is wrong. But when I threaten you with my own death, then I
deprive you of the option to die with dignity; I put you in a real
dilemma. Either you have to yield and accept that you are in the wrong,
or you take the responsibility of my death on you. You are going to
suffer guilt in every way.
In spite of his insistence on
right means for right ends, the means that Gandhi himself uses are never
right. And I am bold enough to say that whatever Krishna did was right.
In a relative sense, taking his opponents into consideration, Krishna
could not have done otherwise.
From:
Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy, Osho
CHAPTER 10. SPIRITUALISM, RELIGION AND POLITICS
Page:176,177
