Politics & Power Quote by Mahatma Gandhi

Gandhi’s line quietly detonates a comforting fiction: that violence only counts when it bleeds. By naming intolerance as “a form of violence,” he shifts the argument from manners to harm. Intolerance isn’t just an unpleasant attitude; it’s coercion in civilian clothes, a social pressure that narrows what people can safely say, believe, or become. The phrasing also indicts the respectable center, the people who condemn riots but shrug at exclusion. Gandhi drags them into the moral ledger.

The second clause is the real blade. “An obstacle to the growth of a true democratic spirit” treats democracy not as a switch you flip (constitutions, elections, flags) but as a habit you cultivate. “Spirit” implies an interior discipline: the capacity to live with disagreement without reaching for domination. Gandhi’s nonviolence was never passive. It demanded a civic psychology strong enough to resist the easy dopamine of scapegoating.

Context matters: Gandhi fought an empire and, later, watched communal tensions between Hindus and Muslims metastasize into partition and mass bloodshed. In that world, intolerance wasn’t abstract; it was the precondition for pogroms, for the bureaucratic sorting of neighbors into enemies. His intent is preventative. He’s warning that democratic forms can coexist with a violent social imagination - and that the real test of self-rule is whether citizens can grant one another dignity before law is forced to.

The subtext is stern: if you want democracy, you don’t get to outsource it to institutions. You have to practice it in your prejudices.