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For Gandhiji non-violence was a matter of principle. But for most of his contemporaries in the Congress-C.R. Das, Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru, Maulana Azad, Sardar Patel, Acharya Narendra Dev and so on it was a matter of policy. As policy and as form of political action and behaviour, it was an essential component of the overall strategy of the National Congress. In fact, non-violence was in some essential ways integral to the nature of the Indian National Movement as a hegemonic movement based on wide mass mobilization. It was because of this hegemonic and mass character of the National Movement that non-violence became one of its basic elements.
The adoption of non-violent forms of struggle enabled the participation of the mass of the people who could not have participated in a similar manner in a movement that adopted violent forms. This was particularly true of women's participation. Women would have found it difficult to join an armed struggle in large numbers. But when it came to undergoing suffering, facing lathi charges, picketing for hours on end in the summer or the winter, women were probably stronger than men. Non-violence as a form of struggle and political behaviour was also linked to the semi-hegemonic, semi-authoritarian character of colonial state and the democratic character of the polity in Britain. Non-violence meant above all fighting on the terrain of moral force. Non-violent mass movements placed the colonial authorities in the wrong and exposed the underpinning of colonial state power in brute force, when the authorities used armed force against peaceful Satyagrahis. In fact a non-violent mass movement put the rulers on the horns of a dialemma. If they hesitated to suppress it because it was peaceful, they lost an important part of their hegemony, because the civil resisters did break existing colonial laws; not to take action against them amounted to the abdication of administrative authority and a confession of the lack of strength to rule. If they suppressed the movement by use of force, they still lost, for it was morally difficult to justify the suppression of a peaceful movement and non-violent law-breakers through the use of force. They were in a no-win situation. The National Movement had, on the other hand, a winning strategy; a semi-democratic rule had no answer to a mass movement that was non-violent and had massive popular support. In practice the colonial authorities constantly vacillated between the two choices, usually plumbing in the end for suppression. By taking resource to suppression of a non-violent movement, they had to suffer constant erosion of hegemony by exposing the basic underpinning of colonial rule in force and coercion. Consequently, the hegemony of colonial rule or its moral basis was destroyed bit by bit.
