An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1927–29)
Hate the Sin
In Johannesburg in 1903, two officers in the Asiatic Department were extorting hundred-pound bribes from immigrants for residency permits. They hired spies to watch the office of Mahatma Gandhi, who represented the applicants. He gathered evidence and gave it to the police commissioner, who arrested both men. At the trial, a white jury acquitted them. The colonial government dismissed them anyway. Soon the two men were broke and applied for clerical jobs with the town council. An intermediary came to ask Gandhiji if he would oppose their hiring. He said he would not, and both men got work.
In An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1927–29), he put the principle into seven words: "Hate the sin and not the sinner." He noted that this rule is easy to understand and rarely practised. When someone cheats an office or breaks a promise, anger spreads quickly to the person. But an action is not the human being who did it. You can oppose a crooked habit with everything you have. The person who did it still deserves the chance to do better.
Therefore
Fight the bad rule or the unfair deed, but do not turn the dispute into a grudge. Leave the other person room to change.
Navajivan, Ahmedabad, 1927
Gandhiji reflected on the Johannesburg case twenty years later at Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad. He was writing his life story a chapter a week in Gujarati for his weekly paper, Navajivan. His secretary Mahadev Desai translated each installment into English. Gandhiji used the story of the two dismissed officers to explain how to resist a system without hating its servants. He had spent months in a South African jail on the orders of General Jan Smuts. While locked up, he made Smuts a pair of leather sandals. Smuts wore them for decades, and returned them on Gandhiji's seventieth birthday.
A small reminder, on the desk or the notebook, that you can fight an unfair practice without turning the person behind it into an enemy.
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