By Ridhima Kapoor | Human Interests & Social Pursuits | The WFY Magazine, October 2025 Edition
When neutrality becomes complicity, peace loses its soul. True non-violence is not silence in the face of injustice, but resistance shaped by conscience and courage.
The Silence That Kills: Rethinking Non-Violence in an Age of Intolerance
In a world where silence enables injustice, true non-violence must mean active resistance. This article redefines ahimsa as moral courage, confronting hate, defending justice, and restoring India’s constitutional soul of equality, fraternity, and peace.
When Peace Becomes Complicity
There is a moment in every civilisation when silence turns into surrender.
When choosing to “stay peaceful” becomes an excuse for indifference.
When neutrality, disguised as non-violence, allows violence to thrive unchallenged.
India, long hailed as the land of ahimsa and tolerance, stands at such a crossroads today. From political persecution and communal polarisation to the suppression of dissent, the nation is witnessing a slow corrosion of its democratic and moral foundations. In this climate, the old Gandhian virtue of non-violence is often invoked, but rarely understood. Non-violence, stripped of its moral and political depth, has been reduced to a fragile word that now often means doing nothing.
The argument that underpins our time is simple: when injustice becomes structural, silence becomes violence.
True ahimsa is not the absence of conflict; it is the presence of conscience.
The Myth of Passive Non-Violence
History tells us that violence is not merely physical, it is social, psychological, and systemic. It lives in inequality, in hunger, in humiliation. Against this, to remain passive is not to be peaceful; it is to consent.
The notion that one can be “non-violent” by staying disengaged from the world’s cruelty is a dangerous myth. When caste discrimination continues, when religious hatred festers, when the powerless are crushed under bureaucracy and the privileged profit from their pain, non-resistance is not virtue, it is betrayal.
Even Gandhi, the global symbol of ahimsa, understood this nuance. His non-violence was not passivity; it was organised defiance. His satyagraha movements were acts of moral rebellion, not polite silence. To refuse to cooperate with evil was his weapon of choice. Yet in today’s distorted moral imagination, ahimsa has been reduced to a personal posture, not a public responsibility.
In truth, non-violence without justice is hypocrisy. It denies the moral right to resist, which is as natural to humanity as the instinct for survival. When the law protects the powerful and persecutes the poor, resistance becomes a duty. Ahimsa was never meant to protect the oppressor, it was meant to empower the oppressed.
Institutionalised Intolerance in India
Across India, intolerance is no longer spontaneous; it is being manufactured.
According to Reuters, incidents of hate speech in 2024 increased by 74 per cent compared to the previous year. Muslims and Christians remain the primary targets, often vilified in political rallies, processions, and protests. The state machinery, once designed to protect, increasingly functions as a tool of intimidation.
The legal system, too, appears selective. Activists like Umar Khalid, jailed for years without trial under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, represent a generation punished not for violence, but for dissent. Meanwhile, individuals convicted of heinous crimes, such as Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, walk out of prison on parole with alarming ease.
Recent anti-conversion laws, including Rajasthan’s 2024 legislation prescribing life imprisonment and fines up to ₹1 crore, weaponise religion under the guise of protection. Nuns, priests, and even children are arrested on fabricated charges of conversion, while their attackers enjoy impunity.
At the same time, tribal communities, historically peace-loving and self-governing, are being manipulated to fight one another. The violence in Manipur, as detailed by the PUCL report, was not accidental, it was planned, ethnically targeted, and facilitated by state failure. The very communities that once stood for solidarity and coexistence have been turned into instruments of division.
When leaders weep selectively, mourning insults to themselves while remaining silent during the brutalisation of women in Manipur or the rape victims of Hathras, Unnao, and Kathua, the moral compass of the nation falters. Whose pain deserves outrage? Whose suffering is allowed to go unspoken?
Global Complicity and the Death of Conscience
The disease is not national alone,it is global.
Across continents, silence has become the most convenient form of participation in violence.
The ongoing genocide in Gaza exposes this moral collapse vividly. As bombs fall on children, the world watches from a distance of conscience. Western democracies that preach human rights continue to supply weapons to the aggressors. The arms industry, worth trillions, thrives on the death of empathy.
In August 2025, Italian Cardinal Matteo Zuppi stood for seven hours in Monte Sole reading the names of Gazan children killed by Israeli strikes. The world, meanwhile, scrolled past. His vigil symbolised something the modern world has forgotten: the voice of moral witness. When states fail, conscience must speak, but today, even conscience is censored.
This global silence is complicity, not neutrality. When powerful nations invoke “peace” to mask their economic interests, peace itself becomes propaganda. We are witnessing the death of humanity, law, and governance, a world where morality is traded for markets.
Gandhi and Ambedkar: Two Faces of Justice
India’s moral imagination often orbits around Gandhi, but any conversation on justice is incomplete without Ambedkar. The two men represent parallel moral universes: Gandhi’s rooted in moral persuasion, Ambedkar’s in structural reform.
Gandhi’s ahimsa was the soul of his politics. He resisted colonial rule without violence, mobilising millions with spiritual conviction. Yet his notion of non-violence did not dismantle caste hierarchies, it merely sought to soften them. His opposition to separate electorates for Dalits, his defence of varna dharma, and his fasts that pressured Ambedkar into compromise revealed the limits of his moral imagination. His non-violence ended colonial rule but did not end social slavery.
Ambedkar, on the other hand, understood that justice must be institutional, not sentimental. He saw that freedom without equality is empty, and peace without representation is fraud. Reservation, in his view, was not charity, it was restoration. It was his way of transforming reconciliation into justice.
Where Gandhi sought unity through moral appeal, Ambedkar sought equality through law. The difference was not merely in method but in vision: one saw peace as submission, the other as empowerment.
Today, as India’s social fabric frays, Ambedkar’s warning feels prophetic. Without justice, fraternity becomes a slogan. Without equality, peace becomes oppression by other means.
The Death of Conscience and Media
Democracies die not when tanks roll in, but when truth stops speaking.
India’s democracy today is being eroded not by coups but by complicity, of institutions, of media, of citizens.
Independent institutions, once the backbone of the Republic, are now increasingly subordinate to political power. The Election Commission rebukes whistle-blowers but shields offenders. The judiciary, often slow or selective, appears hesitant to confront executive overreach. The media, once the conscience of the public, now too often functions as the amplifier of propaganda. Hate sells, fear trends, truth is algorithmically silenced.
The death of Father Stan Swamy in custody symbolised this decline. An octogenarian Jesuit who fought for tribal rights, he was arrested under the UAPA on fabricated charges, denied medical aid, and died shackled to injustice. The later cancellation of a memorial lecture in his name at St Xavier’s College under political pressure was not just censorship, it was erasure. India did not merely imprison him; it sought to erase his memory.
Even academics and artists, once free to provoke thought, now whisper. Seminars on citizenship, discussions on faith, and posts on social media carry risk. Fear has replaced debate; loyalty has replaced law.
This is the violence of silence, the quiet suffocation of democracy.
The Meaning of Real Ahimsa
The word ‘ahimsa’ has been flattened into moral wallpaper. We cite it in speeches, print it on banners, and claim it as heritage, but few live by its essence.
In truth, ahimsa is not simply the refusal to strike; it is the refusal to dehumanise. It is the equilibrium between self and other, between human and nature. It recognises that life is interrelated, that I exist because you do. True ahimsa is thus not passivity but participation in the moral balance of the world.
When Gandhi spoke of non-violence, he meant resistance infused with love. His marches, his imprisonments, and his fasts unto death were not acts of withdrawal but confrontation. He transformed moral energy into political power, making conscience a weapon sharper than any sword. Yet his failure to challenge caste hierarchies shows that even the noblest non-violence falters without justice.
Therefore, the challenge today is to reclaim ahimsa not as nostalgia, but as a living ethic of justice. In a society fractured by hate, it must mean defending the dignity of minorities. In an economy driven by greed, it must mean protecting nature and ensuring fair access to resources. In a polity of fear, it must mean speaking truth to power, even at cost.
A Roadmap for Reclaiming Justice and Fraternity
If silence has become violence, then speech must become salvation. The task before India, and the world, is to transform conscience into collective action.
- Conscientise Citizens – Democracy is not self-sustaining; it requires informed and courageous citizens ready to defend justice, equality, and fraternity as daily duties.
- Depoliticise Faith – The fusion of religion and politics is the nation’s greatest contemporary danger. The state must protect freedom of belief, not weaponise it.
- Ethics in Education – Education has become transactional, producing workers but not citizens. Moral reasoning and empathy must return to classrooms.
- Protect the Vulnerable – Justice must prioritise the weakest, the Dalit, the tribal, the poor, the religious minority, the woman denied voice.
- Environmental Justice – To destroy the earth is to enact violence against future generations. Sustainable coexistence is the purest form of ahimsa.
- Reclaim Media and Civil Society – Journalism must rediscover its moral duty of truth-telling. Civil society must resist through documentation, legal aid, and solidarity networks.
- Build Grassroots Peace Networks – Violence thrives where communities are divided. Local collaborations across faiths and cultures can rebuild the social trust politics seeks to fracture.
Ultimately, justice is the soul of non-violence. To speak of peace without confronting injustice is to mistake silence for virtue.
Equality Against Inequality, Justice Against Injustice
India’s Constitution does not ask its citizens to be tolerant; it demands that they be just. Tolerance can coexist with inequality; justice cannot.
The framers of the Constitution understood that fraternity is not a feeling, it is a political choice, a shared moral contract.
In the end, the true test of a society lies not in how loudly it proclaims peace, but in how bravely it resists oppression. A government that demands silence in the face of injustice is asking for obedience, not harmony.
Ahimsa, therefore, must return to its truest meaning: the courage to confront evil without becoming it. The time for polite silence is over.
The call of conscience is clear:
Equality against inequality. Justice against injustice. Fraternity against hatred.
That, and only that, is the real non-violence.