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9/11 Programme - 100 years of Satyagraha
Mumbai will see a different 9/11 this
year. It was on 11 September 1906, hundred years ago, Mohandas
Karamchand Gandhi, addressed a meeting at Johanesburg demanding equal
rights for Indians. The meeting, ultimately, changed the human history.
It was the birth of Satyagraha, Non-violence resistant. Satyagraha
mobilised millions of people all over the world. In the violent world,
people realised the importance of Satyagraha to fight against violence
through non-violent way.
About the Film
A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict explores how
popular movements have battled entrenched regimes or military forces
with weapons very different from guns and bullets. Strikes, boycotts,
and other actions were used as aggressive measures to battle opponents
and win concessions. Petitions, parades, walkouts and demonstrations
roused public support for the resisters. Forms of non-co-operation
including boycotts and civil disobedience helped subvert the operations
of government. And direct intervention in the form of sit-ins,
nonviolent sabotage, and blockades frustrated many rulers’ efforts to
suppress people.
The historical results were massive: tyrants were toppled, governments
were overthrown, and occupying armies were impeded and political systems
that withheld human rights were shattered. Entire societies were
transformed, suddenly or gradually, by nonviolent resistance that
destroyed opponents’ ability to control events. These events and the
ideas underlying nonviolent action are the focus of this three-hour
documentary television production.
The television series begins in 1907 with a young Mohandas Gandhi, the
most influential leader in the history of nonviolent resistance, as he
rouses his fellow Indians living in South Africa to a nonviolent
struggle against racial oppression. The series recounts Mohandas
Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaign against the British in India; the
sit-ins and boycotts that desegregated downtown Nashville, Tennessee;
the nonviolent campaign against apartheid in South Africa; Danish
resistance to the Nazis in World War II; the rise of Solidarity in
Poland; and the momentous victory for democracy in Chile. A Force More
Powerful also introduces several extraordinary, but largely unknown
individuals who drove these great events forward, and let them tell
their stories.
Few who relied on nonviolent sanctions in the twentieth century did so
because of a principled attachment to nonviolence. For some, arms were
unavailable as a way to fight. Others had seen a violent insurrection
fail, at devastating cost to life and property. But they had no desire
to be passive: they wanted passionately to overturn the rulers or the
laws that subjected them.
The greatest misconception about conflict is that violence is the
ultimate form of power, surpassing other methods of advancing a just
cause or defeating injustice. But in conflict after conflict throughout
the twentieth century, people have proven otherwise. At a time when
violence is still too often used by those who seek power, A Force More
Powerful dramatizes how ordinary people throughout the world, working
against all kinds of opponents, have taken up nonviolent weapons and
prevailed.
A Force More Powerful was also released as a 110-minute 35 mm film which
told three stories of nonviolent conflict - Gandhi’s independence
movement in India, the Nashville sit-ins, and the consumer boycotts in
South Africa. It played in film festivals nationwide. |
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