The purpose of this research is to examine the views of Mohandas K. Gandhi and Mao Tse-tung on the subject of whether violence should be used to defeat imperialism, achieve independence, and gain social justice. The plan of the research will be to set forth the historical and political context in which the views of Mao and Gandhi emerged, and then to discuss how their arguments differ, as well as the arguments for and against the use of violence, with a view toward suggesting the position that appears to lend itself most strongly to political and historical cogency.
The public lives of Mao Tse-tung and Mohandas K. Gandhi were roughly contemporary as far as achievement of their respective goals of political revolution are concerned. The elder contemporary, Gandhi, was assassinated at the age of 80 in 1948, following the achievement of India's absolute independence from British rule and about one year before Mao's communist revolution succeeded on the Chinese mainland. The public lives of Gandhi and Mao were circumscribed by an apparently absolute commitment to radical social transformation in the modern period. In China and India, respectively, Mao and Gandhi were positioned in the vanguard of political, social, and economic change. Indeed, Merriam says that both leaders' charisma took on the character of near deification among their most loyal followers.
The popular historical record readily confirms their success in achieving measurable transformation of their societies and indeed cultures. Vaitheswaran finds similarity between Gandhi and Mao in the fact that both matured under imperialist rule and developed a specifically native nationalistic outlook. But their practical methods and theoretical foundations differed dramatically. Mao's revolutionary leadership was surrounded by what one could call all the violence of civil war, but Gandhi's was organized and implemented without a commitment to armed insurrection and the kinds ...