ivil disobedience is the non-violent refusal to submit to laws and governmental authority as a form of protest or expression of dissent in which policies perceived unjust are challenged. It is important to understand that civil disobedience is an extreme form of protest in which the very legitimacy of the state’s basic functions, such as collection of taxes, enforcement of laws and authority to maintain organised violence are called into question. Nevertheless, it is a political protest, not a militant reaction. Therefore, civil disobedience movements, throughout history, have been a source of expression of dissent as a response to a state’s perceived repressive and authoritarian forays.

Examples of civil disobedience in recent history include Mohandas K Gandhi’s civil disobedience during India’s freedom movement against the British Raj; Martin Luther King Jr’s famous Montgomery Bus Boycott, in which African Americans refused to use segregated buses; suffragette movements in the UK and elsewhere, in which women refused to pay taxes to seek the right to vote; the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, where Nelson Mandela challenged racial segregation and oppression under apartheid; and quite recently, environmental protests by groups such as Extinction Rebellion, who have employed tactics of civil disobedience to draw attention to climate change and its colossal impact.

The civil disobedience called by Gandhi, in the colonial context, was a non-cooperation strategy in its initial phase. He contended that the imperialist structure was sustained on the basis of cooperation of the Indians, especially the Indian elite and middle classes who offered their services as collaborators of the Raj. This cooperation was in the form of the acceptance of the Raj’s legitimacy for the collection of taxes; studying in modern educational institutions, where they submitted to the colonial state’s capacity to social transformation; acceptance of law, courts and adjudication process, in which violators were sentenced in line with submission to the colonial state’s legal rational authority. Gandhi believed, moreover, that the acceptance of the colonial state’s authority to maintain organised violence through the police and military muscle was also cooperation.

Therefore, he sought to boycott these four components as a non-cooperation strategy, a form of civil disobedience, to challenge the very basis of British authority in the colonial state apparatus. However, the Gandhian call to civil disobedience was not received well; even the Madras Hindu College refused to shut its doors in line with the non-cooperation movement. One of the major victims in educational institutions was Aligarh MAO College, where the Ali Brothers sought to expel British faculty and a hostile division emerged. However, some of the leading educationists refused to submit to the wishes of non-cooperationists. A few barristers stopped appearing in the courts. But this exercise, too, remained limited in scope and implementation.

The newly introduced laws were received in an environment of commotion and concern and the reaction sometimes reached the violent threshold. The Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar (April 13, 1919) was one such bloody event. The new laws were popularly described in Urdu as na wakeel, na daleel, na appeal (no lawyer, no argument, no appeal). Jinnah wanted constitutional advancement and through it, progress to Indian freedom. He argued in the famous Memorandum of the Nineteen that the British had overreacted and curtailed essential freedoms. This document foreshadowed his 14 points charter of demands.

As far as the Hijrat movement was concerned, the adventure by a segment of Muslim leadership was met with disastrous consequences for those involved. Overall, the non-cooperation movement (April, 1919-February, 1922) mostly remained an exercise in rhetoric. It did not prove a watershed movement resulting in relief to the people or causing the empire to recede. The Indian National Congress experienced a severe difference of opinion, splitting into two. The Sawaraj faction participated in electoral politics and contested the 1920 elections. Even in the Punjab (in the background of the Jallianwala Bagh incident), most of the political parties participated in elections, particularly in rural areas and only a slight decline in voter turnout was observed in urban centres of Amritsar and Lahore.

Another civil disobedience movement started to develop in the backdrop of the boycott of the Simon Commission. It gained momentum in the 1930s, ultimately ending in the signing of the Gandhi-Irwin pact. The Congress, in its famous Lahore session of 1929, adopted the creed of purna swaraj (complete freedom) shifting from self-rule. The most famous milestone of civil disobedience movement was the Dandi Salt March (March 12 to April 6, 1930). Gandhi chose the action because he believed the salt preparing process to be of least governmental intervention. It was a limited and local procedure to prepare salt from sea water. The boycott was conceived to be only against the salt tax, a meagre fraction of the overall taxation. It was designed to serve as a symbolic rather than a substantive move.

The Quit India Movement was launched during the WWII period. There was no refusal to pay taxes or boycott the police or the military. The leadership realised that it would be counterproductive to launch a civil disobedience during the war effort and the government would deal sternly with it.

Pakistan’s history is marked with a number of agitations and protest movements such as the Anti-Ayub movement of the late 1960s; the Pakistan National Alliance movement against ZA Bhutto government; the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy against the Zia regime; and the Lawyers’ Movement against the Musharraf regime. However, none of the protest movements assumed the momentum of civil disobedience, nor did a leader of any dissenting movement claim to pursue a civil disobedience movement. That was until the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf’s 2014 and the very recent calls to civil disobedience. Nonetheless, both attempts appear to be an expression of frustration due to perceived failure in earlier political protest moves. Both instances lack well chalked-out plans and are marked by a failure to evaluate the implications of such a call to civil disobedience.

The writer heads the History Department at the University of Sargodha. He has worked as a research fellow at the Royal Holloway College, University of London. He can be reached at abrar.zahoor@hotmail.com His X handle: @AbrarZahoor1