Arab Spring, Gene Sharp, Mahatma Gandhi

Prof.Gene Sharp's a little old book, Gandhi as a Political Strategist, Porter Sargent, Boston, 1979, is an important contribution to the Gandhian literature even today, especially in view of the movement for "Arab Spring". The second chapter is particularly significant. This is where the author refers to 'Gandhi's acquaintance with various cases of nonviolent action, and his first contact with the theory of power upon which it is based.'(p.27).
On the one hand the author says that Gandhi was not the initiator of non-violent action, and he knew it himself. Gandhi, for instance, seeing the overwhelmingly non-violent nature of the 1905 Russian Revolution, wrote that 'The present unrest in Russia has a great lesson for us...We, too, can resort to the Russian remedy against tyranny'. On the other hand, 'The view of the power of rulers as being dependent on the ruled continued throughout his life to be the fundamental political insight upon which Gandhi's struggle rested'(p.39). We will have to grasp this aspect of Gandhi's political thought by re-reading his Hind Swaraj, which is well-known at least partly by its submission that the British rule over India has been made possible by the subservience on the part of the Indians, particularly the educated class.
Gene Sharp's grasp of Gandhi here is wholly from the point of peace and democratization. As such, it, together with several instances of more recent non-violent movement against Nazi or communist regimes discussed in the first chapter, must have encouraged the Arab Spring, or any other movement similar in nature.
The anti-dictatorship alone, however, is not entirely Gandhian. The latter should include some schemes for the just distribution in the society, whether Gandhi himself succeeded in doing so or not. The ongoing 'Anna Hazare Phenomenon' in India is such an example. It is a movement against universally permeated bribery, and as such demanding a more just distribution. But we will look at today's Gene Sharp effect more closely, putting off Anna Hazare to our next column.
From Dictatorship to Democracy:A Conceptual Framework for Liberation, The Albert Einstein Institution, Boston, 4th US Edition, 2010, is one of Sharp's more recent works. It is a booklet of only 93 pages, but of great significance. He initially wrote it in Thailand in 1993 at the request of a Burmese in exile. It is 'a generic analysis', a 'brief examination of how a dictatorship can be disintegrated'. Even without referring Gandhi or Martin Luther King it is from the beginning to the end on nonviolent defiance vs.dictatorship. When the author says 'Contrary to popular opinion, even totalitarian dictatorships are dependent on the population and the societies they rule'(p.20), the link with the earlier one is immediately apparent.
When the BBC reporters reached the Tahrir Square, Cairo, earlier this year, they saw that the booklet had been widely distributed in its Arabic translation. Some of the readers had been detained, but some others were reading it with a torch by the side of the tank. Gandhi's contemporary significance has extended this much.
Have the courageous fighters in Libya, Syria and others also read this booklet?