He Called Off A Revolution Because Of A Fire In A Police Station
Gandhi's one unbreakable rule was that the means and the end are the same thing. It cost him more than any other position he held
Then, in a small town in the United Provinces, a crowd of protesters was fired on by police. The crowd turned, chased the policemen into their station, and set it alight. Twenty-two of them, perhaps more, burned to death.
Gandhi called off the movement. Not the protest at that town. The entire movement. Nationally. At its peak, over the actions of a few hundred people in one place, against the advice of almost everyone around him. Men who had gone to prison for him were furious. Some never forgave him. Within weeks he was arrested anyway, and the momentum that had been built over two years was gone.
He wrote afterwards that he would do it again. This is the part of Gandhi that people admire in the abstract and abandon in practice, usually within about forty minutes of a real argument.
His position was that there is no wall between how you do a thing and what you end up with. He used the image of a seed and a tree. You do not plant one thing and harvest another. The means are not a route to the end; they are the end, in an earlier form.
Everyone agrees with this until it costs them something. Then the reasoning starts, and it is always the same reasoning, and it is always persuasive. The other side does not play fair. The stakes are too high this time. We can be scrupulous later, once the danger has passed. The thing we are trying to protect is more important than the manner in which we protect it.
That argument has been made by every faction in every country in every generation, usually with complete sincerity, and it has an unbroken record of producing exactly what it was deployed to prevent.
Gandhi's objection to it was not that it was impure. It was that it did not work.
A thing taken by force has to be held by force, and the holding goes on forever. An argument won by humiliation produces someone who is quiet and waiting. A rule imposed by trickery requires more trickery to maintain, and then more. You do not arrive somewhere decent by an indecent road and then put the road away. You will be using that road for the rest of your life, because it is the only one you have built.
He thought the people who said means and ends could be separated were simply bad at arithmetic. Which is why Chauri Chaura mattered so much to him, and so little to his critics. The twenty-two men in that station were nothing to the scale of what the empire had done and would do. Everyone around him said so, and they were not wrong about the proportion.
He was not making a point about proportion. He was making a point about what was being built. A movement that burned policemen alive when it got angry would, if it succeeded, become a government that burned people alive when it got angry. The empire would be gone and the thing that replaced it would be made of the same material. He would rather lose two years than find that out later.
Nobody thanked him for it. It is not an error to say that the decision damaged him permanently with a generation of nationalists.
The ordinary version of this problem has nothing to do with revolutions. It is the shortcut in the accounts that nobody will notice. The slightly dishonest answer in the interview, for a job you would be good at. The colleague undermined quietly because they are blocking something that genuinely should happen. The rule bent because the cause is obviously right and the rule is obviously stupid.
Every one of these is defensible on its own. That is their nature. They are each, individually, the small reasonable exception.
And a person who has made two hundred small reasonable exceptions is not a person with a slightly compromised record. They are a different person, and they did not notice the change happening, because it never happened all at once.
What Gandhi understood, and what makes him genuinely difficult rather than merely admirable, is that there is no ledger. You do not get to run a deficit in means and settle it later with a good outcome. The outcome is made of the means. There is nothing else for it to be made of.
He gave up a national movement at its height to make the point. Most of us will not be asked for anything remotely that large. We will only be asked, repeatedly, in small matters, where nobody is watching and the shortcut is right there. Which is harder, in its way. A revolution you call off once. The small thing comes back on Tuesday.