Arundhati Roy:
…So the first message I would have to peace activists is — I don’t know what that means, anyway. What does “peace” mean? You know, we may not need peace in this unjust society, because that’s a way of accepting injustice, you know? So what you need is people who are prepared to resist, but not just on a weekend, not peace but not just on the weekend. In countries like India, now just saying, “OK, we’ll march on Saturday, and maybe they’ll stop the war in Iraq.” But in countries like India, now people are really paying with their lives, with their freedom, with everything. I mean, it’s resistance with consequences now. You know, it cannot be — it cannot be something that has no consequences. You know? It may not have, but you’ve got to understand that in order to change something, you’ve got to take some risks now. You’ve got to come out and lay those dreams on the line now, because things have come to a very, very bad place there.
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Once upon a time, from 1930 to 1947, there was a non-violent army. It had up to 100,000 soldiers and a women’s auxiliary. It consisted of Moslems, Hindus, and Sikhs and was centered in the Northwest Frontier Province of what is now Pakistan. It was organized by Abdul Ghaffar Khan also known as Badshah Khan, a Pashtun leader and friend of Gandhi’s. Badshah Khan’s non-violence was based upon the Islamic principle of sadr, patience, and the Pashtun tradition of melmastia, hospitality.
The Khudai Khidmatgar or Servants of God consisted of enlisted men and a full officer corps. They drilled as a military unit and also worked on Gandhi’s Constructive Programme providing sanitation and security in villages. They were crushed in 1947 by the new state of Pakistan and Badshah Khan was jailed. He served as much time in prisons under Pakistani rule as under the British Raj.
I have written more about this forgotten example at http://www.dailykos.com/storyo…
Gandhian economics is another under-utilized tool and you can read my extensive notes about this subject at http://globalswadeshi.net