Non violent Protest "Satyagrah"
Soul Force
Satyagraha loosely translated as "Soul Force," or "truth force," is a particular philosophy and practice within the broader overall category generally known as nonviolent resistance or civil resistance. The term "satyagraha" was conceived and developed by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi(also known as "Mahatma" Gandhi). He deployed satyagraha in the Indian independence movement and also during his earlier struggles in South Africa. Satyagraha theory influenced Nelson Mandela's struggle in South Africa under apartheid, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s campaigns during the civil rights movement in the United States, and many other social justice and similar movements.
For Gandhi, satyagraha went far beyond mere "passive resistance" and became strength in practising non-violent methods. he said:
"Truth (satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement Satyagraha, that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence, and gave up the use of the phrase “passive resistance”, in connection with it, so much so that even in English writing we often avoided it and used instead the word “satyagraha” itself or some other equivalent English phrase."
He also wrote: "..... the idea usually held is that the goal in any conflict is necessarily to defeat the opponent or frustrate the opponent’s objectives, or to meet one’s own objectives despite the efforts of the opponent to obstruct these. In satyagraha, by contrast, these are not the goals. “The Satyagrahi’s object is to convert, not to coerce, the wrong-doer.” Success of a satyagrah can be defined as cooperating with the opponent to meet a just end that the opponent is unwittingly obstructing. The opponent must be converted, at least as far as to stop obstructing the just end, for this cooperation to take place." and rejected the idea that injustice should, or even could, be fought against “by any means necessary” — if you use violent, coercive, unjust means, whatever ends you produce will necessarily embed that injustice. To those who preached violence and called nonviolent actionists cowards, he replied: “I do believe that, where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence.He believed that nonviolence is infinitely superior to violence, forgiveness is more manly than punishment.”
Lately it is becoming relevant not only in India where some non political leaders like Anna Hazare and Baba Ramdev adopted it to fight the scourge of corruption prevalent in India, but also in Spain as recently witnessed in the Youth protests against the political system.