Gandhi’s Assassination, Political Violence, and the Discipline of Noncooperation

Tomorrow, January 30, the anniversary of Gandhi’s assassination will arrive the way it always does: a flood of familiar images, familiar quotations, familiar grief. Gandhi was killed in New Delhi after an evening prayer gathering on January 30, 1948, shot by Nathuram Godse. But the point of remembering cannot be to make the past feel tidy. If the day becomes a ritual of comfort, then the assassination succeeds twice: once in the act itself, and again in the way it trains us to sentimentalize what it tried to destroy.

Assassination is never only the removal of a person. It is a political message delivered through terror: this is what happens to those who insist on an inconvenient moral horizon. It tries to turn fear into “common sense.” It tries to narrow the range of available futures. It tries to teach the living to confuse safety with silence.

Today that “lesson” is being fought over in real time across Gaza, Iran, India, Sudan and the United States— to name but some — across contested ground where the state (and state-aligned forces) dress coercion up as “order,” criminalize dissent, and where people are being killed while ordinary civilians asking for basic rights and dignity are treated as disposable.

It is tempting, in such a world, to treat violence as the only grown-up language—an ugly necessity that “works,” while ethics are framed as decoration. This is one of violence’s great propaganda victories: it sells itself as realism. It flatters despair by calling it wisdom.

Gandhi’s nonviolence, at its most serious, was not an aesthetic preference and not a spiritual brand. It was a theory of power that refused violence’s claim to be the final interpreter of reality. The shallow version of nonviolence asks people to be harmless. Gandhi’s version asked people to be disruptive without becoming dehumanizing—to confront domination while refusing to worship domination’s methods. That’s why the engine of Gandhi’s politics was never simply “peace.” It was noncooperation: the decision to withdraw the everyday forms of consent that allow an unjust order to reproduce itself—labor, legitimacy, social prestige, participation, the quiet obedience of routine.

Noncooperation matters because most oppressive systems do not run on brute force alone; they run on normalized collaboration, much of it coerced, some of it habitual, some of it purchased by fear. Violence tries to keep that collaboration intact by making the cost of refusal feel unbearable. In this sense, political violence is not only physical harm; it is a campaign against the imagination of collective agency.

This is also why Gandhi is still contested. Many people want the photograph without the method: the saintly icon who can be invoked to discipline protest, rather than the strategist who made governance and empire expensive by organizing refusal. A domesticated Gandhi is useful to any status quo. A Gandhi who insists that moral courage must become material disruption—that legitimacy can be denied, not merely requested—is much less convenient.

None of this requires romanticizing nonviolence or pretending it guarantees victory. It doesn’t. Nothing does. But noncooperation offers something violence rarely can: the possibility of mass participation without moral corrosion. Violence can win battles and still leave behind a society trained to accept cruelty as competence. Noncooperation, at its best, tries to build a different kind of capacity: solidarity that outlasts adrenaline, courage that isn’t dependent on hatred, discipline that doesn’t collapse when the spectacle fades.

If we want to write about Gandhi’s assassination in a way worthy of its seriousness, we have to resist the easy move: condemning violence in the abstract while quietly accepting the world violence produces. The harder move is to ask what our institutions, our media ecosystems, and our communities are being trained to tolerate—and then to build practices that interrupt that training. Noncooperation, now, might look like refusing dehumanizing hierarchies of grief; making truth harder to suppress through documentation and community storytelling; building legal and care infrastructures that keep people from being isolated into silence; organizing boycotts, divestment, labor action, and principled noncompliance with strategies that are collective rather than performative. It is not a single gesture. It is a long practice of withdrawing legitimacy from cruelty—until cruelty becomes politically expensive again.

Gandhi’s assassination was meant to teach a lesson: that a different politics could be ended with bullets. The only adequate response is to make sure the opposite lesson survives—that movements can refuse domination without inheriting domination’s soul, and that “realism” does not have to mean surrendering our moral imagination to the logic of fear.

Q&A

What is political violence—beyond “terrorism” or “riots”?
Political violence is any organized infliction (or strategic tolerance) of harm intended to shape power: who belongs, who speaks, who governs, what futures are permitted. It includes assassinations and mob attacks, but also state repression, collective punishment, and policies that predictably produce mass suffering while being justified as “security” or “order.”

Why is assassination uniquely corrosive to public life?
Because it is violence that aims at the social atmosphere. It doesn’t only eliminate a person; it teaches everyone else what is “unsafe” to think or do. Its aftereffects—self-censorship, withdrawal from organizing, normalization of threat—often deliver more durable political value than the single act.

What did Gandhi mean by nonviolence in political terms?
Not passivity. Not politeness. Gandhi’s nonviolence was a refusal to let domination set the terms of reality. It sought to confront power while refusing the worldview that makes domination possible: the reduction of human beings into objects to be managed through fear.

How is noncooperation different from protest?
Protest is often expressive: it communicates dissent. Noncooperation is infrastructural: it withdraws the inputs an unjust system needs to function—labor, compliance, legitimacy, normalcy. It treats power not as a monument but as a supply chain.

Does nonviolence require treating all uses of force as morally identical?
No serious analysis can be that tidy. People under extreme repression or siege make choices under constraint. The nonviolent tradition’s central claim isn’t “everyone who uses force is the same,” but that violence often carries predictable costs—especially to civilians, legitimacy, and long-term political possibility—and that those costs are frequently underestimated in moments of justified rage.

How can communities respond to political violence without sliding into vigilantism?
By separating protection from punishment. Community safety can mean de-escalation teams, legal support, rapid-response accompaniment, secure communications, trauma care, and disciplined documentation. The goal is to reduce harm and prevent isolation—not to become a parallel force that reproduces the same logics of domination.

What does noncooperation look like in the U.S. context right now?
It looks like building durable civic muscle in an environment where intimidation and polarization thrive: protecting the right to organize; refusing dehumanizing rhetoric that primes people for harm; investing in coalitions that can withstand disinformation; and creating care and legal infrastructures so targeted communities aren’t forced into silence by fear. (And it means taking official warnings about targeted violence seriously without letting “security” become a blank check for surveillance of dissent.)

How do internet shutdowns relate to political violence?
They are often “non-kinetic” coercion: they sever witness from witness, disrupt livelihoods, block access to services, and increase the cost of organizing—especially for marginalized groups. That kind of enforced isolation can become a force multiplier for physical violence because it reduces accountability and delays response.