I'd recommend you watch this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8N1HT0Fjtw) video by Norman Finkelstein about Gandhi. A lot of people get him wrong apparently; he wasn't a pacifist in the way you are suggesting.

TL;DW Gandhi knew that to resist the British, they would need a critical mass of people resisting (armed or not). Armed resistance against a superior force is futile. His whole idea of Satyagraha was intentionally self-sacrificial for the nonviolent protestors who would die, because he knew it would stir the masses to action.

I also agree that violence is tragic and we should always take care not to glorify or idealize it, but we should also contextualize it when used by people resisting systems of oppression. As Nelson Mandela said:

> A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle,and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor.At a point, one can only fight fire with fire

> A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a point, one can only fight fire with fire.

Which often leads to this point, as in Lord of War:

> Every faction in Africa calls themselves by these noble names - Liberation this, Patriotic that, the Democratic Republic of something-or-other... I guess they can't own up to what they usually are: the Federation of Worse Oppressors than the Last Bunch of Oppressors. Often, the most barbaric atrocities occur when both combatants proclaim themselves Freedom Fighters.

another book (that i have admittedly been dragging my feet on finishing) that covers this idea is 'The Wretched of the Earth' by Frantz Fanon. i have never personally been directly exposed to the ill effects of state-imposed violence to the degree that others have. it's eye-opening to more-seriously consider the positions of those who have.

> pacifist

That pacifism was very much required though. The whole projection of India as this "mystic peaceful place full of peace-loving meditating sadhus that the Beatles and Steve jobs were so enamored by" was instrumental for the way we got independent with minimal balkanization[1], our ability to stay non-aligned in the cold war (which btw, is the original definition of a third world country!) and maintain strategic autonomy throughout the following decades - which we exercise quite well today. Of course, it was nothing but a political image, and we built nukes behind the scenes (by order of the very same politician nehru), but gandhis pacifist outlook and the heavy marketing of this in western countries (see Nehru's rallies in USA at the time), as well as in soviet Russia, was very necessary. People like to say we shouldn't have been socialist back then, but the Soviet help that arose out of that was really useful. In geopolitics there are no morals, so it is also completely OK that we took a U-turn from all that a while later. The only interest is self-interest.

My point is, a lot of these political positions are simply projections cast in order to achieve a certain goal, meaning to look at it from a moral standpoint is useless.

This is true for any political position held in any country anywhere in the world at any point in history.

[1] If you think the partitions were bad... the rest of india would have had a much worse fate had foreign interests gotten involved. Think: other cold war battlefields of the late 20th century. The number of secessionist states at the time in india...the cia and the kgb would have had a field day.