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Updated: May 19, 2025
This Government has been instrumental in degrading this great nation in various ways, and it is impossible to be free from it without co-operation amongst ourselves which is in turn impossible without a national medium of expression. But I am not here to day to plead for the medium. I am to plead for the acceptance by the country of the programme of non-violent, progressive non-co-operation.
Having allowed Government to do everything for us, we have gradually become incapable of doing anything for ourselves. Even if we had no grievance against this Government, non-co-operation with it for a time would be desirable so far as it would perforce lead us to trusting and working with one another and thereby strengthen the bonds of national unity.
I suggest to my Mahomedan countrymen that if they fail in this primary duty they will certainly fail in non-co-operation unless the masses themselves reject the classes and take up non-co-operation in their own hands and are able to fight that battle even as the men of the French Revolution were able to take the reins of Government in their own hands leaving aside the leaders and marched to the banner of victory.
And if we have only developed national consciousness, if we have developed sufficient regard for our religion, we shall have developed power of suffering in the national and religious field. Considered in these terms the first stage in Non-co-operation is the simplest and the easiest state.
For the voice of Mahatma Ghandi saint, fanatic, revolutionary, which you will had gone forth, proclaiming the sixth of April a day of universal mourning and non-co-operation, by way of protest against the Rowlatt Act. For that sane measure framed to safeguard India from her wilder elements had been twisted, by skilled weavers of words, into a plot against the liberty of the individual.
I venture to think that His Excellency by his pronouncement on the Punjab has strengthened the nation in its efforts to seek a remedy to compel redress of the two wrongs before it can make anything of the so-called Reforms. It will be admitted that non-co-operation has passed the stage ridicule. Whether it will now be met by repression or respect remains to be seen.
August 4, 1920. The following letter has been addressed by Mr. Gandhi to his Royal Highness the Duke of Connaught; Sir, Your Royal Highness must have heard a great deal about non-co-operation, non-co-operationists and their methods and incidentally of me its humble author. I fear that the information given to Your Royal Highness must have been in its nature one-sided.
But non-co-operation means independence of outside help, it means effort from within. It would not be non-co-operation to insist on visiting prohibited areas. That may be civil disobedience if it is peacefully carried out. But I have found to my cost that civil disobedience requires far greater preliminary training and self-control.
I have been told, and I believe it myself from what I have seen, that the Andhrus are a brave, courageous and spiritually-inclined people. I venture therefore to ask my Andhra brethren whether they have understood the spirituality of this beautiful doctrine of Non-co-operation. If they have, I hope they will not wait for a single moment for a mandate from the Congress or the Moslem League.
Law courts are one of the greatest symbols of power and in the battle of non-co-operation, you may not leave law courts untouched and claim to offer non-co-operation, but if you will read that objection carefully, you will find in that objection the great fear that the lawyers will not respond to the call that the country makes upon them, and it is just there that the beauty of non-co-operation comes in.
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