Mohandas Gandhi, named Mahatma or “Great Soul” by his countrymen, became the prototype of peaceful resistance for leaders like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.
When faced with injustice, he sought to right it, despite the hardships and suffering that came with resistance without violence.
He became a leader of men, free from the bonds that make cowards of most men. The British Classical scholar, Gilbert Murray, wrote about Gandhi in the Hibbert Journal in 1918, “Persons in power should be very careful how they deal with a man who cares nothing for sensual pleasure, nothing for riches, nothing for comfort or praise, or promotion, but is simply determined to do what he believes to be right. He is a dangerous and uncomfortable enemy, because his body which you can always conquer gives you so little purchase upon his soul.”
Gandhi came from a prominent family in Porbandar, Gujart, India. He was able to study law at the Inner Temple, a law college in London. He was more concerned with moral issues than with academic ambitions. He found the legal profession to be overcrowded when he returned to India, so he accepted the offer of a year’s contract from an Indian firm in Natal, South Africa.
He was quickly exposed to racial discrimination practiced in South Africa. While traveling to Pretoria, he was thrown out of a first-class railway compartment and left, shivering, at a railway station. Then he was beaten up by the white driver of a stagecoach because he wouldn’t travel on the footboard to make room for a European traveler and was barred from hotels reserved for Europeans only.
He decided he wouldn’t accept injustice as the social order in South Africa. He would defend his dignity as an Indian and as a man. In 1894, he founded the Natal Indian Congress. He flooded the government, the legislature and the press with reasoned statements of Indian grievances. He was able to have important newspapers like The Times of London and The Statesman and Englishman of Calcutta (now Kolkata) editorially comment on the Natal Indians’ grievances.
He persuaded Indians to defend South Africa in the Boer War in 1899.
The new government became a partnership between Boers (South African plantation owners) and Britons. In 1906, the government published an ordinance requiring the registration of Indians in South Africa. Gandhi led the Indian population to adopt satyagraha, “devotion to truth”, seeking redressing wrongs by inviting, rather than inflicting, suffering, for resisting adversaries without rancor and fighting them without violence.
The struggle in South Africa lasted for more than seven years. In the final phase of the movement in 1913, hundreds of Indians, men and women, went to jail. Thousand of Indian workers went on strike in the mines and were imprisoned, beaten and shot. Finally the South African government, under pressure from the governments of Britain and India, accepted a compromise negotiated by Gandhi and South African statesman General Jan Christian Smuts.
Gandhi left India in the summer of 1914 for a brief stay in London, and then to Bombay in January, 2015.
As a result of dissolving the East India Company after the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, Britain gained control of most of India.
In February, 1919, the British enacted, in the face of fierce Indian opposition, the Rowlatt Acts, which empowered the authorities to imprison without trial anyone suspected of sedition.
Gandhi announced a satyagraha struggle. As a result there were violent outbreaks, including the Massacre of Amritsar, where nearly 400 Indians were killed by British-led soldiers.
In the autumn of 1920, Gandhi refashioned the Indian National Congress (Congress Party) into an effective political instrument of Indian nationalism. Gandhi’s message was, it was not British guns but imperfections of Indians themselves that kept their country in bondage. His program, the nonviolent noncooperation movement against the British government, included boycotts of British manufacturers and institutions operated or aided by the British in India. Thousand of satyagrahis, were arrested and cheefully lined up for prison.
Gandhi was arrested on March 10, 1922 and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. He was released during February, 1924, after undergoing surgery for appendicitis. During his absence, the Congress Party split into separate branches for Hindus and Muslims.
During the autumn of 1924, Gandhi undertook a three-week fast to encourage the people to follow the path of nonviolence.
At an Indian Congress session at Calcutta in December, 1928, Gandhi submitted a resolution demanding dominion status for India from the British government within a year under threat of a nationwide nonviolent campaign for complete independence.
In March, 1930, he launched the Salt March, a satyagraha against the British-imposed tax on salt. It resulted in the imprisonment of more than 60,000 people.
A year later, Gandhi accepted a truce, called off civil disobedience, and agreed to attend a Round Table Conference in London as the sole representative of the Indian National Congress. The Round Table was a disappointment for Indian nationalists.
When Gandhi returned to India in December, 1931, he was imprisoned again. The government tried to isolate him from the outside world to destroy his influence. During September, 1932, he embarked on a fast to protest the British government’s decision to segregate “untouchables” (the lowest Indian caste.)
With the outbreak of World War II, the nationalist struggle in India entered its last phase. In the summer of 1942, Gandhi demanded an immediate British withdrawal from India.
The British imprisoned the entire Congress leadership, and tried to crush the party, once and for all.
The victory of the Labour Party in Britain in 1945 led to prolonged negotiations among the leaders of the Congress, the Muslim League and the British government, culminating in the Mountbatten Plan of June 3, 1947, and the formation of the two new dominions of India and Pakistan in mid-August, 1947
On January 30, 1948, while on his way to his evening prayer meeting in Delhi, Gandhi was shot and killed by Nathuram Godse, a young Hindu fanatic.
Mohandas Gandhi remains a great example of courage seeking to peacefully speak his truth and redress wrongs in the face of tremendous suffering and powerful opposition.