of battle plans commonly associated with political rebellion.
To be sure, Gandhi's India was not immune to political violence, either before or after Indian independence. Further, Heehs asserts that the violence of some Indian independence factions not affiliated with Gandhi served Gandhi's political agenda because of the British perception that Gandhi was the lesser evil. But whether he benefited from the violence of rival political factions, the record is that Gandhi himself uniformly opposed its strategic or tactical use in quest of Indian independence. Indeed, Gandhi appears to have connected rejection of revolutionary violence to successful political transition following independence: "For freedom won through non-violence [sic] will mean the inauguration of a new order in the world." As early as 1909, Gandhi distanced himself from extremist and moderate Indian home-rule activists alike because, as he stated in Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, "either party relies on violence ultimately." In an introduction to the 1938 edition of the volume Gandhi stuck to the theme:
I felt that violence was no remedy for India's ills, and that her civilization required the use of a different and higher weapon for self-protection. . . . In my opinion, it is a book which . . . replaces violence with self-sacrifice. It pits soul-force against brute-force. . . . If India adopted the doctrine of love as an active part of her religion and introduced it in her politics. Swaraj [Home Rule or Self-Rule] would descend upon India from heaven.
An active employment of nonviolence can be a militant strategy of political transformation. Where nonviolence is conceived as a weapon, the radical rethinking of political relationships that such a conception implies results in uncompromising rejection of what is politically unacceptable but an acceptance of political risk. In this regard, Parekh asserts that Gandhi's ideas of nonviolent revolution reject sta...