South Asian Spring? What does history teach us about violent rebellions?

The writer is a journalist and writer associated with The Express Tribune

“Non-violence is the weapon of the strong. With the weak, it might easily be hypocrisy.”

In this quote from Gandhi, he is claiming that truthful nonviolence comes from a place of fearlessness, as opposed to passive nonviolence that stems from fear. This is more relevant today than in his time. In a society where we believe that beating our children will “fix” their behaviour, and that beating the donkey will make it productive, it is no surprise that people believe that burning and killing those in power will fix the system. Bad habits take hold early on in our lives. Despite this, all noble traditions, religions, and philosophies of history uphold the virtues of restraint, patience, and love as supreme moral values. These values are essential to hold the social fabric together.

Our primal political instincts and self-righteousness tempt us to celebrate what we think of as “just violence.” The hope for a better world through violent overthrows of regimes all over South Asia is but a mirage. In Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina’s saree blouse was put up on a stick, proudly waved by a Gen Z man. Is this the kind of man the progressives look up to? In Nepal, the parliament was set on fire, along with the ex-Prime Minister’s wife, as Gen Z protesters made TikToks over the ashes of chaos. These events are not moments of inspiration but reflection. It is in times like this that we must pause and read history.

Erica Chenoweth, a political academic and researcher at Harvard, along with renowned scholar Maria J. Stephan, published the first definitive study on the past 100 years of social movements that sought regime change. In their book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Resistance, they compare and contrast the effectiveness of nonviolent and violent movements. The prevailing wisdom in their field prior to the study was that violence is more effective than nonviolence in bringing about societal and regime change. What they discovered was the opposite of this conventional wisdom that persists to this day. From a dataset that includes large-scale regime-change movements from 1900 to 2019, they learned that a nonviolent movement has a success rate of 55% after reaching the “critical mass” of mobilizing 3.5% of the population, whereas a violent movement only had a success rate of 25% upon reaching critical mass. More crucially, they discovered that even when a violent movement succeeds, 90% of the time it degenerates into civil war or violent tyranny—examples include the Russian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, and many more—whereas nonviolent movements mostly succeed in creating a prosocial and democratic transition, like the revolutions against the Eastern European Communist dictatorships.

Why is this?

One doesn’t need anything other than common sense to understand why. When you open the door to violence, and violence becomes acceptable as a means of resolving conflicts, then you cannot close that door once you gain power. There is nothing stopping anyone else from using violence to remove you from power. However, if you respect the idea of state power, then a nonviolent transition is likely to maintain a prosocial culture, and therefore: order, peace, and democratic rights and freedoms. Secondly, a violent rebellion rarely includes people from all sections of society. Nonviolence is more accessible to a broad cross-section of demographics, but if you choose violence, you immediately alienate several groups, including most women and most elderly people. What you are left with, then, are angry young men—which always works out well, right?

Khan was a devout Muslim, Gandhi was a devout Hindu, Tolstoy (another champion of nonviolence) a devout Christian, and Martin Luther King Jr. also a devout traditional Protestant. They all believed, in an honest effort to practice their faith as they saw it, that nonviolence is the ultimate embodiment of their faith. These people are giants of history, each in their own right, and their wisdom can be disagreed with but it cannot be dismissed out of hand.

Russian, Indian, Pashtun, and American cultures are on the surface separate, but what brings all of these cultures together is the deep interconnectedness through the practice of nonviolence, within their separate cultural contexts.

Tolstoy, Gandhi, and King did not know about the Chenoweth and Stephan research since half of the century was still ahead of them. However, these men would not have cared about the research; to these deeply religious men, nonviolence was a matter of absolute duty, irrespective of the result.

Breaking the Monopoly of Extremists over Tradition

All across South Asia, the mantle of tradition and heritage has been held by the most extreme elements of society. This monopoly is not challenged by the moderates and the open-minded but reinforced by associating open-mindedness and moderation with the Western world, and associating traditionalism with the East. In a place like Pakistan, this is often symbolized by people with more liberal leanings dressing in Western clothing, and people with conservative leanings dressing in traditional clothes. This wasn’t always the case, as exemplified in the traditionalist language and dressing deployed by Khan, Gandhi, and later by King, in communicating the doctrine of nonviolence and pride in one’s traditions, adapted to fit the modern world to a mass audience—and often an apolitical mass audience.

A few quotes that demonstrate this:

Mohandas Gandhi
“I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.” Gandhi was a good example of a leader who would not scapegoat the British. Gandhi believed that people must learn from what is good in the British and acknowledge their positive contributions, while resisting their unjust actions and illegitimate rule over the region. He was always seen wearing handspun khadi.

Bacha Khan (Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan)
The first organization he spearheaded was called “Anjuman Islah-e-Afghania” or “Committee for Social Reforms of the Afghans.” Today, one can’t imagine a social movement anywhere being named in that formula. Only from a place of moral self-correcting can we claim to know better, for it is we who harm ourselves more than any enemy. Khan once said, “There is nothing surprising in a Muslim or a Pathan like me subscribing to the creed of nonviolence. It is not a new creed.” Bacha Khan’s Khudai Khitmatgar were the leading example of nonviolence in practice. Even when machine guns were fired upon them, they were a shining example of moral restraint in the subcontinent, ultimately tearing down the veneer of British moral supremacy. Khan, too, was always seen wearing a humble shalwar kameez.

Martin Luther King Jr.
“If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values—that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.” King makes a profound observation: all just laws, social contracts, and prosocial norms are, in theory, passed and adopted with the assumption that they reflect higher moral laws. Murder, for example, is not simply illegal because a law says so; even if a law did not exist, it would still be immoral. The law simply reflects higher, unwritten moral laws. A refined conscience and a well-tuned and rational moral compass, therefore, is the bedrock of a just society. King was visually indistinguishable from a typical pastor, and he would use the same religious symbols, yet he deployed them to serve the cause of truth.

A striking contrast with present movements

Bangladesh (anti-quota student uprising)
“Since August 5, the attacks on minorities, places of worship of Hindus, Christians and Buddhists have been rampant. We condemn it. The Jamaat and terrorists are having a free run under the new regime.” This was a statement by ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, as reported by Mint. According to India Today, Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus expressed similar concerns: “Are they not the people of this country? You have been able to save the country; can’t you save some families?... You must say—no one can harm them. They are my brothers; we fought together, and we will stay together.”
Since the ousted PM was considered close to India by the protestors, the same suspicion extended to Hindus. This is just one example of how scapegoating cannot be constrained; once societies begin to scapegoat someone, they become dependent on the need to scapegoat, avoiding reflection on their own shortcomings and crimes.

Nepal (“Gen-Z” anti-corruption protests)
According to Al Jazeera, a protester shouted, “We need to kick these old leaders out of power. We are tired of the same old faces.” History tells us that not much changes even following these events, where the boogeyman is removed from power. One is reminded of Robespierre’s proclamation during the French Revolution: “Louis must die so that France can live.” Of course, it didn’t end there, and thousands more died after the execution of the king. They believed that killing the king would allow France to prosper and thrive, but it did not—so they concluded they must now kill more people, for France to live on—the result was mass slaughter in Paris.

To a great extent, these pitfalls can be avoided without any harm to a just movement. The debate is more or less settled, as shown by the research on social movements.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

It is difficult for people to rise above their emotions and see empirical reality for what it is. Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan shed light on that counterintuitive truth with their research, exploring the historical effectiveness of nonviolence versus violence, especially in the second half of the 20th century. The research contains key graphs from their dataset that settle the matter once and for all.

History speaks for itself, but only if it is not muzzled. Too often, ideological, political, and nationalistic priorities incentivize us to hide the empirical truth of nonviolence. Our popular culture glorifies violent rebellions in movies like V for Vendetta, Rang de Basanti, Che, and many more, quenching our thirst for a release from repressed anger at injustices. But all good things come with patience. An upright moral compass and the courage to resist injustice without resorting to violence are needed, rather than cheap murder and violence at the altar of algorithms.

Not an Absolution of the Wrongdoings of the “Elite”

Many might interpret this as an absolution for the “nepo kids” in Nepal, or the discriminatory quota system of Bangladesh under Hasina. It is important to remember that throughout history, regimes that exist before a revolution are often genuinely unjust and require resistance—as seen in Russia under the Tsars, in Cuba under Batista, and countless others; yet, what replaced them was often equally bad or worse. The rare examples where tyrannies were replaced with democracies came about through nonviolent resistance.

According to historian Yuval Noah Harari, “Elite” is not a bad word, or at least it should not be, but the irresponsibility and corruption among elites has given it a bad connotation. In an ideal world, being an “elite” should be an honor. The finest cricketers, educators, scientists, accomplished writers, inspiring artists—all this counts as the “elite.” Today, however, being an elite is synonymous with being a thief. The same goes for politicians: in an ideal democracy, a politician is a humble public servant who excels in service to the public, thus being honored with election to parliament. In these scenarios, being an elite would be an honor and not a curse.

To succeed as a society, or as a movement, we must take responsibility for our own actions first and foremost and refrain from scapegoating others, whether the “other” is a foreign power or even our own rulers. Today, we find that the tendency to scapegoat exists on both ends of the political spectrum. The far Right may scapegoat “immigrants,” while the far Left may scapegoat the “capitalist.” We have seen the consequences of both logics taken to their extremes in the 20th century, with Soviet and Nazi totalitarianisms. In our country, we like to scapegoat America or the West more generally. If these critics were put in power tomorrow, the fundamental problems would remain unresolved, as most of their time would be spent punishing the preordained scapegoat, instead of addressing structural deficiencies.

The challenge lies in the lack of willpower and bravery available today. Violence is easy, and therefore a weapon of the weak, whereas nonviolence requires discipline, restraint, and the wisdom to stay steadfast on the path of truth, without fear of what may happen to us. Whether one sees it morally or empirically, fantasizing about violent rebellion is either a grave error or a grave sin—and we must strive to avoid both. If not, are we to resign ourselves to the new reality of South Asian political discourse?