September 11 is an important date in the international calendar for two very different, indeed opposed, reasons. The one we all know is the anniversary of the bombing of the Twin Towers in New York in 2001: a deliberate slaughter of thousands of office workers in the epicentre of western superpower.
The other September 11 marks the launch in 1906 of Mahatma Gandhi's modern non-violent resistance movement, called Satyagraha, in South Africa. Satyagraha was consciously used by Martin Luther King to oppose segregation in the US, by Gandhi to win independence from the British in India, and in South Africa, by Nelson Mandela to bring an end to apartheid.
If nothing else, September 11 will always be remembered as a shocking display of two very different kinds of power. One violent, merciless and completely disengaged: to date we have no proof of the perpetrator. The other non-violent on principle, respectful and fully engaged: its strength lying in its connectedness, its universality of appeal.
I'm in New Delhi at the invitation of India's ruling Congress party to celebrate the centenary of Satyagraha. It is a moment of some irony. Only last week, on the day that the Doomsday clock moved two minutes forward by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the Indian sub-continent was identified as the region most likely to use nuclear power in an act of aggression against a neighbour.
Is this invocation of the Gandhian legacy pure cynicism? Or is India playing some new game of international diplomacy that deserves some attention?
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