An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1927–29)
Hate the Sin
In Johannesburg around 1903, two colonial officers in the Asiatic Department were extorting £100 bribes from Indian and Chinese residents for entry permits. The local community asked Mahatma Gandhi to help them. He collected sworn statements and brought the evidence directly to the Johannesburg Police Commissioner. Warrants went out, and the police arrested both men. An all-white jury acquitted them at trial anyway. The colonial government saw the evidence was plain, and it dismissed both officers from public service.
Years later, Gandhiji reflected on that tussle and wrote: "Hate the sin and not the sinner." He noted that the precept is easy to understand and rarely practised, which is why the poison of hatred spreads in the world. People regularly confuse a wrong action with the person who did it. When someone cuts you off in traffic or cheats you at work, the first impulse is to hate them. Gandhiji insisted that an evil deed deserves rejection, but the person who did it always deserves respect or pity. You can resist an unfair policy with all your power without treating the official as an enemy.
Therefore
Oppose an unjust action with everything you have, but leave the door open for the person who carried it out. When you attack the human being instead of the act, you lose the chance to ever change their mind.
An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1927–29)
After their dismissal, the two ex-officers were destitute and applied for clerk jobs with the Johannesburg Municipality. Many people assumed Gandhiji would block them to get revenge. The men were terrified and sent an intermediary to plead with him. If he spoke out, they would starve. Gandhiji refused to oppose their hiring, and the town council gave them the jobs. He recorded the incident at Sabarmati Ashram for his weekly paper, Navajivan, translated into English by his secretary Mahadev Desai. What worked was letting them earn a living. The idea underneath it was that attacking the person who carries out a bad law ends up destroying your own cause.
A small reminder, on the laptop or the desk, that you can fight an unfair system without making an enemy of the human being in front of you.
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