And the Like

Unpredictable Mohandas Gandhi last week was full of advice, practical and impractical, violent and nonviolent, for his disciples. Items:

On Moslem-Hindu riots: The army ought "only to be used for maintaining cleanliness, cultivating unused land and the like," the police "only to catch bona fide thieves." The most effective way to stop religious fights, he suggested, "is that one of the parties to mutual slaughter should desist."

On the future of an independent India: "Every village has to be self-sustained and capable of managing its affairs, even to the extent of defending itself against the whole world. . . . In this structure, composed of innumerable villages, there will be ever widening, never ascending circles. Life will not be a pyramid with an apex sustained by the bottom but an oceanic circle whose center will be individually always ready to perish for the village, the latter ready to perish for the circle of villages, till at last the whole becomes one life composed of individuals. . . . In this there is no room for machines . . . that would concentrate power in a few hands."

On crop-raiding monkeys: Rigging up electric lights to scare off the monkeys, said Gandhi, "would be violence in the name of nonviolence." Moreover, it would simply drive the monkeys to the fields of neighbors not rich enough to have electric lights. Then he amazed his followers, who believe it sacrilege to kill a monkey (sacred to the Hindu monkey-god Hanuman), with "if we must save society as well as ourselves from the mischief of monkeys and the like, we have to kill them."

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