"The Christian and Buddhistic doctrine of turning the other cheek to the smiter...is as dangerous as it is impracticable. [It is] a radically false moral distinction and the lip profession of an ideal which mankind has never been able or willing to carry into practice. The disinterested and desireless pursuit of duty is a gospel worthy of the strongest manhood ; that of the cheek turned to the smiter is a gospel for cowards and weaklings. Babes and sucklings may practise it, because they must, but with others it is a hypocrisy."
Sri Aurobindo - Notes on the Mahabharata
''a frequent misconception is that if we reject non-violence, we must fall into violence—there is no alternative beyond those two opposite poles. That is a terrible and costly confusion, which the Gita goes to great pains to dispel : between blind, asuric violence and noble but impotent non-violence, there is conscious, detached shakti, which can remain powerfully still or also wage war, as circumstances demand. True, in the world's history, most aggressive expansions, especially the Christian and Islamic, followed the asuric path and washed the earth with blood—there is at least one notable exception, though, and that is India, whose sole weapon of conquest was always her culture. Yet she was by no means non-violent. Alexander was confronted by Paurava's armies ; the Pratihara empire, the last Hindu empire of Northwest India, checked the progress of Islam into India for three centuries ; we know well enough the great deeds of a Shivaji or a Lakshmibai and countless other heroes of this land, including those who fought and often died for India's freedom. Sri Krishna's injunctions as to the Kshatriya's dharma were therefore no dead letter in India's past.
As to the present, it is a frequently heard complaint that Mahatma Gandhi's teaching of non-violence is no longer followed in India ; but it rather seems to me that it has penetrated the collective Indian consciousness deep enough to make it wince at the very thought of force and put a brake on its use even when and where it is patently needed. Certainly no other country would have tolerated with so little reaction the amount of aggression India has suffered since Independence, and at what terrible cost.''
Michel Danino
