Activism – at least in the progressive sense – is about answering three core issues and a host of events and phenomena around these issues. The first issue is that of equality metaphorized by questions of getting food, or education to every child or human conditions of life to every one on earth. It has to do with distribution of resources and the politics around distribution and control of resources. A related issue is that of justice – or the perception of equality. It has to do with how each of us perceives equality. Is my equal more than your equal? Do I have a right to a greater share than you? This leads to conflicts and the second core issue is that of conflict resolution. How do we settle conflicts? Is might right? Do I hurt you as much as I can or intimidate you so that you back off from raising questions about what you perceive as inequality to protect your basic survival needs? The third issue is also related to distribution of resources and a sense of justice but it is even more contentious and abstract. It is the issue of sustainability. Questions of sustainability are questions about the future. Are we living in a way that future generations will not be able to live life at all? Are we consuming resources in a fashion that our grandchildren will have nothing to live with? How do we decide what the needs of the future generations are? What are we willing to give up so that an unseen people – the future – can have a chance to live as well as we are? This is perhaps even more difficult to answer for there is no future generation existing today to fight for what they will need.

The role of activism has been about questioning norms in society and forcing them to review our way of life that we are at least cognizant of these issues and incrementally try and become a more just society. Being a process of incremental change, the goal of an activist can never be about reaching utopia in his/her lifetime. Dr. Zia Mian, a professor in Princeton and a spearhead of the anti-nuclear campaign in Pakistan, was speaking to us about the campaign and how it was always known that the campaign would fail in that Pakistan would obtain nuclear weapons. However, they went on fighting anyways because the campaign was about providing the future a better chance to renegotiate. To me, that is perhaps the epitome of activism. The fights that the activists were fighting fifty years ago – human rights, land and water distribution issues, racist, ethnic and gender issues, environmental issues, anti-war and anti-nuclear initiatives – have not been solved. They are the same issues that are being fought today. What has changed has been the degree to which the society has become cognizant to these issues. Though the issues have remained the same, the arguments have changed. For example, the discussion has changed from whether conservation of the environment is a question worth bothering about or not to how can we conserve it and what patterns of resource use needs to change, how are interactions with nature have to be different and who will make those changes. Similarly, society has nominally recognized the pervading inequalities on the basis of race, ethnicity or gender and now the discussions have moved to what the inequalities are.

What is perhaps most disconcerting is that after about two thousand years of historically documented civilization and a few hundred thousands of undocumented societies, we still have not solved problems of distribution and of conflict resolution. We know how to get to the moon but we do not know how to share and how to resolve the arguments. Does it not seem that we are standing on our heads? Among the first things we teach our children are how to share things with their siblings and how to resolve conflicts. We teach these things a while before we teach them the first equation of physics or even how to add and subtract. And yet, we as a civilization have not learnt how to share what we have and how to resolve our conflicts. This in a large part reflects who makes the decisions of what we shall solve, what questions our civilization will attempt to answer. Since these decisions are usually made by those who have significant control of resources and perceive things to be equally distributed to their advantage, they feel that these are not important problems and we must answer questions of how to get to Mars. And so, the human race continues to stand on its head.

Activists – in some part – have chosen to raise these questions, bring them to the public focus and try and get the human race to resolve them. For the rest of this essay, I would like to focus on the issues of conflict resolution and the importance of non-violence in activism. The first argument for non-violence was made popular by Gandhi. He said that non-violence is not about cowardice, or about moderation in stakes one is willing to put on changing the system. He was willing to die but not willing to kill for his beliefs. He said that he would rather be violent than a coward. He had no respect, nor did he propose that non-violence be the basis for not resisting injustice. Though he never condoned violence and had suspended a number of his own campaigns midway because violence had occurred, he constantly argued that the violence the British used in perpetrating injustice was of a different nature than those resisting injustice. His arguments for non-violence were based on the premise that no human is perfect, neither is any human’s belief system or his/her arguments. No one understands the truth perfectly. One only has a fleeting glimpse of the truth, understanding part of it, if at all. Hence, there can be no basis in using violence to force another human to accept ones set of beliefs or ones understanding of the truth.

The second argument can be related to the first though it is not very apparent. Any use of violence presupposes that the truth in ones arguments can be established by ones might. It is the very ideology that we hope to end in a more just world. Hence, the use of this technique – even as a strategy – weakens what we set out to achieve. When we set out to create a world that is more just, we have to ask ourselves how we resolve difference in opinions in justice and equality. If we use violence to fight for ‘our’ version of justice and equality, we are endorsing violence as an option in a just world. Let us consider an example. As an activist, one is not only saying that this system is unjust but also exploring alternative possibilities. When one uses violence to achieve ones sense of justice, one is not providing any alternative to conflict resolution. I reiterate that by using violence, one is endorsing that as a valid method to change. Hence, ‘might’ becomes a valid mechanism for resolution of discussions or decision on choices. That is exactly the situation today. How then can an activist claim that s/he envisions a different world, a more just world? Say a community of three hundred people are resisting injustice and have used violent methods to achieve their goals. It can be argued that they did achieve justice and the means do not matter. For one it was a justice based on might and hence was not different from the justice and equality that the powerful in any society claim to have achieved. Second, it has not provided any framework for the community to resolve conflict. Usually communities – just like people – use strategies that have been successful over and over again. Suppose, now, that there is a difference in ideology within the group. The resolution of conflict will tend to occur – if not initially, but eventually – by violent means. Thus the community has not succeeded in decimating itself – a solution no different than if it had been decimated by the ‘unjust’ forces it was resisting earlier.

An interesting illustration – ironically from the blockbuster Star Wars series – that comes to mind in this context is that Luke cannot use anger to fight Darth Vader – the dark side – for anger will turn Luke himself into the dark side. Similarly, we cannot use violence to resist injustice for violence will turn us into the same cogs of inequality.

Even from a perspective of logistics and planning, use of violence as a strategy has its own problems. Justification of violence (when to use it and when not to) creates a hierarchy. As activists trying to create a just society with equality, this clearly is not the path that one takes. In fact, hierarchies are just the things one wants to prevent rather than cement. It creates power structures that are created to control violence and hence need violence for their existence. Thus, one can see a large number of examples of movements that started out for social justice, turned to the use of violence as a strategy, set up hierarchies to strategize and control the violence and subsequent became feudal structures that today survive to perpetrate violence rather than further social justice and equality.

As I mentioned earlier, we do not hope to achieve an ideal world of justice and equality in our lifetimes. All we are trying to do is make the world a place where the future generations have a better chance to resist injustice and fight for equality. By using violence, we are making it worse for them.