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PREFACE
Today the environment of man-over-crowding on the global
I scale, increasing contact with other peoples and cultures, the widening gulf between the rich and the poor, ideological differences—is productive of increasing friction, aggression and violence. In modern times, this has taken a destructive and violent form.
Sages and prophets taught us to observe non-violence, but we paid only lip service to this principle. In the name of religion, we indulged in violence rather than non-violence; those who did so, thought they were earning a place for themselves in heaven.
Non-violence, not as an end but a means, has been used in India under the guidance and inspiration of Gandhi. So long as a Satyagraha struggle remained non-violent, it succeeded in attaining its objective.
But now-a-days no body practises Satyagraha. What is practised now in the name of Satyagraha is merely Duragraha-- not a victory over the situation but over the opponent, through coercion and pressurizing. No one seems to understand-no one is willing to understand-Satyagraha as conceived and practised by Gandhi.
In our present-day world of conflict and violence, Satyagraha is a unique and faultless tool to bring about social justice; but today there is no individual or nation, willing to make use of it. Perhaps, like Buddhism, some day it will also flourish, not in the land of its birth, but away from it.
Is there, then, anything that we can do just now to lessen the violence around us? Yes, by trying to understand the basis of violence in man. What makes an individual violent? What makes a group of individuals violent?
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