MOHANDAS

KARAMCHAND
GANDHI
0 1 In
1948) was
troduction
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (2 October 1869 – 30
January an Indian lawyer, anti-colonial
nationalist and political ethicist who employed nonviolent
resistance to lead the successful campaign for India's
independence from British rule, and to later inspire
movements for civil rights and freedom across the world.
The honorific Mahatma first applied to him in 1914 in
South Africa, is now used throughout the world.

Born and raised in a Hindu family in coastal Gujarat, Gandhi

trained in the law at the Inner Temple, London, and was
called to the bar at age 22 in June 1891. After two uncertain Assuming leadership of the Indian National Congress in 1921, Gandhi led
years in India, where he was unable to start a successful law nationwide campaigns for easing poverty, expanding women's rights, building
practice, he moved to South Africa in 1893 to represent an religious and ethnic amity, ending untouchability, and, above all, achieving
Indian merchant in a lawsuit. He went on to live in South swaraj or self-rule. Gandhi adopted the short dhoti woven with hand-spun yarn
Africa for 21 years. It was here that Gandhi raised a family as a mark of identification with India's rural poor. He began to live in a self-
and first employed nonviolent resistance in a campaign for sufficient residential community, to eat simple food, and undertake long fasts as a
civil rights. In 1915, aged 45, he returned to India and soon means of both introspection and political protest. Bringing anti-colonial
set about organizing peasants, farmers, and urban labors to nationalism to the common Indians, Gandhi led them in challenging the British-
protest against excessive land- tax and discrimination. imposed salt tax with the 400 km (250 mi) Dandi Salt March in 1930 and in
calling for the British to quit India in 1942. He was imprisoned many times and
for many years in both South Africa and India.
2
As many displaced Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs made their way to their new lands, religious violence broke out, especially in the Punjab and Bengal. Abstaining
from the official celebration of independence, Gandhi visited the affected areas, attempting to alleviate distress. In the months following, he undertook several
hunger strikes to stop the religious violence. The last of these, begun in Delhi on 12 January 1948 when he was 78, also had the indirect goal of pressuring
India to pay out some cash assets owed to Pakistan. Although the Government of India relented, as did the religious rioters, the belief that Gandhi had been too
resolute in his defense of both Pakistan and Indian Muslims, especially those besieged in Delhi, spread among some Hindus in India. Among these was
Nathuram Godse, a militant Hindu nationalist from western India, who assassinated Gandhi by firing three bullets into the chest at an inter-faith prayer
meeting in Delhi on 30 January 1948.
3
 Laxmidas (c. 1860–1914); a daughter, Raliatbehn (1862–1960); and another son, Karsandas (c.
1866–1913).

02 E arly Life
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869
into a Gujarati Hindu Modh Bania family in Porbandar (also
known as Sudamapuri), a coastal town on the Kathiawar
Peninsula and then part of the small princely state of
Porbandar in the Kathiawar Agency of the Indian Empire.
His father, Karamchand Uttamchand Gandhi (1822–1885),
served as the dewan (chief minister) of Porbandar state.

Although he only had an elementary education and had

previously been a clerk in the state administration,
Karamchand proved a capable chief minister. During his
tenure, Karamchand married four times. His first two wives
died young, after each had given birth to a daughter, and his
third marriage was childless. In 1857, Karamchand sought
his third wife's permission to remarry; that year, he married
Putlibai (1844–1891), who also came from Junagadh, and
was from a Pranami Vaishnava family. Karamchand and
Putlibai had three children over the ensuing decade: a son,
 dest brother Laxmidas in 1886

On 2 October 1869, Putlibai gave birth to her last child, Mohandas, in a dark,
windowless ground- floor room of the Gandhi family residence in Porbandar city. As
a child, Gandhi was described by his sister Raliat as "restless as mercury, either
playing or roaming about. One of his favorite pastimes was twisting dogs' ears."
The Indian classics, especially the stories of Shravana and king Harishchandra,
had a great impact on Gandhi in his childhood. In his autobiography, he admits that
they left an indelible impression on his mind. He writes: "It haunted me and I must
have acted Harishchandra to myself times without number." Gandhi's early self-
identification with truth and love as supreme values is traceable to these epic
characters.

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In May 1883, the 13-year-old Mohandas was married to 14-year-old Kasturbai Makhanji Kapadia (her first name was usually shortened to "Kasturba", and affectionately
to "Ba") in an arranged marriage, according to the custom of the region at that time. In the process, he lost a year at school but was later allowed to make up by
accelerating his studies.[45] His wedding was a joint event, where his brother and cousin were also married. Recalling the day of their marriage, he once said, "As we
didn't know much about marriage, for us it meant only wearing new clothes, eating sweets and playing with relatives." As was prevailing tradition, the adolescent bride
was to spend much time at her parents' house, and away from her husband.

Writing many years later, Mohandas described with regret the lustful feelings he felt for his young bride, "even at school I used to think of her, and the thought of
nightfall and our subsequent meeting was ever haunting me." He later recalled feeling jealous and possessive of her, such as when she would visit a temple with her
girlfriends, and being sexually lustful in his feelings for her.

In November 1887, the 18-year-old Gandhi graduated from high school in Ahmedabad. In January 1888, he enrolled at Samaldas College in Bhavnagar State, then the
sole degree-granting institution of higher education in the region. But he dropped out and returned to his family in Porbandar.

5
Three Years
blessings, he was excommunicated from his caste.

0
in London
Gandhi had dropped out of the cheapest college he could
afford in Bombay. Mavji Dave Joshiji, a Brahmin priest and
family friend, advised Gandhi and his family that he should
consider law studies in London. In July 1888, his wife
Kasturba gave birth to their first surviving son, Harilal. His
mother was not comfortable about Gandhi leaving his wife
and family, and going so far from home. Gandhi's uncle
Tulsidas also tried to dissuade his nephew. Gandhi wanted
to go. To persuade his wife and mother, Gandhi made a vow
in front of his mother that he would abstain from meat,
alcohol and women. Gandhi's brother Laxmidas, who was
already a lawyer, cheered Gandhi's London studies plan and
offered to support him. Putlibai gave Gandhi her permission
and blessing.

On 10 August 1888, Gandhi aged 18, left Porbandar for

Mumbai, then known as Bombay. Upon arrival, he stayed
with the local Modh Bania community whose elders warned
him that England would tempt him to compromise his
religion, and eat and drink in Western ways. Despite Gandhi
informing them of his promise to his mother and her
 aw Student

Gandhi ignored this, and on 4 September, he sailed from Bombay to London, with his
brother seeing him off. Gandhi attended University College, London, a constituent college
of the University of London. At UCL, he studied law and jurisprudence and was invited to
enroll at Inner Temple with the intention of becoming a barrister. His childhood shyness
and self-withdrawal had continued through his teens. He retained these traits when he
arrived in London, but joined a public speaking practice group and overcame his shyness
sufficiently to practice law. He demonstrated a keen interest in the welfare of London’s
impoverished dockland communities. In 1889, a bitter trade dispute broke out in London,
with dockers striking for better pay and conditions, and seamen, shipbuilders, factory
girls and other joining the strike in solidarity. The strikers were successful, in part due to
the mediation of Cardinal Manning, leading Gandhi and an Indian friend to make a
point of visiting the cardinal and thanking
for his work.
G him 6
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Struggle for
government in the late 1930s.

0
Indian
Independence
At the request of Gopal Krishna Gokhale, conveyed to him by
C. F. Andrews, Gandhi returned to India in 1915. He brought
an international reputation as a leading Indian nationalist,
theorist and community organizer.

Gandhi joined the Indian National Congress and was

introduced to Indian issues, politics and the Indian people

primarily by Gokhale. Gokhale was a key leader of the
Congress Party best known for his restraint and moderation,
and his insistence on working inside the system. Gandhi took
Gokhale's liberal approach based on British Whiggish
traditions and transformed it to make it look Indian.[93]

Gandhi took leadership of the Congress in 1920 and began

escalating demands until on 26 January 1930 the Indian
National Congress declared the independence of India. The
British did not recognize the declaration but negotiations
ensued, with the Congress taking a role in provincial
 with Britain and moved, against Gandhi's strong opposition, to demands for a totally
separate Muslim state of Pakistan. In August 1947 the British partitioned the land with
India and Pakistan each achieving independence on terms that Gandhi disapproved.

Gandhi and the Congress withdrew their support of the

Raj when the Viceroy declared war on Germany in
September 1939 without consultation. Tensions
escalated until Gandhi demanded immediate
independence in 1942 and the British responded by
imprisoning him and tens of thousands of Congress
leaders. Meanwhile, the Muslim League did co-operate
 relaxed the conditions of payment of revenue tax until the famine
ended. In Kheda, Vallabhbhai Patel represented the farmers in

05
negotiations with the British, who suspended revenue collection

K heda and released all the prisoners.

Agitations
In 1918, Kheda was hit by floods and famine and the
peasantry was demanding relief from taxes. Gandhi
moved his headquarters to Nadiad, organizing scores of
supporters and fresh volunteers from the region, the
most notable being Vallabhbhai Patel. Using non-co-
operation as a technique, Gandhi initiated a signature
campaign where peasants pledged non-payment of
revenue even under the threat of confiscation of
land. A social boycott of mamlatdars and talatdars
(revenue officials within the district) accompanied the
agitation. Gandhi worked hard to win public support for
the agitation across the country. For five months, the
administration refused, but by the end of May 1918, the
Government gave way on important provisions and
 Gandhi in 1918, at the time of
The Kheda and Champaran Satyagrahas

8
06 K hilafat Movement
In 1919, following World War I, Gandhi (aged 49) sought political co-operation from Muslims in his fight against British imperialism by supporting the Ottoman
Empire that had been defeated in the World War. Before this initiative of Gandhi, communal disputes and religious riots between Hindus and Muslims were
common in British India, such as the riots of 1917–
18. Gandhi had already supported the British crown with resources and by recruiting Indian soldiers to fight the war in Europe on the British side. This effort of
Gandhi was in part motivated by the British promise to reciprocate the help with swaraj (self-government) to Indians after the end of World War I. The British
government, instead of self government, had offered minor reforms instead, disappointing Gandhi. Gandhi announced his satyagraha (civil disobedience)
intentions. The British colonial officials made their counter move by passing the Rowlatt Act, to block Gandhi's movement. The Act allowed the British
government to treat civil disobedience participants as criminals and gave it the legal basis to arrest anyone for "preventive indefinite detention, incarceration
without judicial review or any need for a trial".

Gandhi felt that Hindu-Muslim co-operation was necessary for political progress against the British. He leveraged the Khilafat movement, wherein Sunni
Muslims in India, their leaders such as the sultans of princely states in India and Ali brothers championed the Turkish Caliph as a solidarity symbol of Sunni
Islamic community (ummah). They saw the Caliph as their means to support Islam and the Islamic law after the defeat of Ottoman Empire in World War I.
Gandhi's support to the Khilafat movement led to mixed results. It initially led to a strong Muslim support for Gandhi. However, the Hindu leaders including
Rabindranath Tagore questioned Gandhi's leadership because they were largely against recognising or supporting the Sunni Islamic Caliph in Turkey.

The increasing Muslim support for Gandhi, after he championed the Caliph's cause, temporarily stopped the Hindu-Muslim communal violence. It offered
evidence of inter-communal harmony in joint Rowlatt satyagraha demonstration rallies, raising Gandhi's stature as the political leader to the British. His
support for the Khilafat movement also helped him sideline Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who had announced his opposition to the satyagraha non-co-operation
movement approach of Gandhi. Jinnah began creating his independent support, and later went on to lead the demand for West and East Pakistan. Though they
agreed in general terms on Indian independence, they disagreed on the means of achieving this. Jinnah was mainly interested in dealing with the British via
constitutional negotiation, rather than attempting to agitate the masses.
Non-cooperation
0
Movement
With his book Hind Swaraj (1909) Gandhi, aged 40, declared that British rule was established in India with the co-operation of Indians and had survived only
because of this co-operation. If Indians refused to co-operate, British rule would collapse and swaraj (Indian independence) would come. In February 1919,
Gandhi cautioned the Viceroy of India with a cable communication that if the British were to pass the Rowlatt Act, he would appeal to Indians to start civil
disobedience. The British government ignored him and passed the law, stating it would not yield to threats. The satyagraha civil disobedience followed, with
people assembling to protest the Rowlatt Act. On 30 March 1919, British law officers opened fire on an assembly of unarmed people, peacefully gathered,
participating in satyagraha in Delhi.

People rioted in retaliation. On 6 April 1919, a Hindu festival day, he asked a crowd to remember not to injure or kill British people, but to express their
frustration with peace, to boycott British goods and burn any British clothing they owned. He emphasized the use of non-violence to the British and towards each
other, even if the other side used violence. Communities across India announced plans to gather in greater numbers to protest. Government warned him to not
enter Delhi. Gandhi defied the order. On 9 April, Gandhi was arrested. People rioted. On 13 April 1919, people including women with children gathered in an
Amritsar park, and a British officer named Reginald Dyer surrounded them and ordered his troops to fire on them. The resulting Jallianwala Bagh massacre (or
Amritsar massacre) of hundreds of Sikh and Hindu civilians enraged the subcontinent, but was cheered by some Britons and parts of the British media as an
appropriate response. Gandhi in Ahmedabad, on the day after the massacre in Amritsar, did not criticize the British and instead criticized his fellow countrymen
for not exclusively using love to deal with the hate of the British government. Gandhi demanded that people stop all violence, stop all property destruction, and
went on fast-to-death to pressure Indians to stop their rioting. The massacre and Gandhi's non-violent response to it moved many, but also made some Sikhs and
Hindus upset that Dyer was getting away with murder. Investigation committees were formed by the British, which Gandhi asked Indians to boycott. The
unfolding events, the massacre and the British response, led Gandhi to the belief that Indians will never get a fair equal treatment under British rulers, and he
shifted his attention to swaraj and political independence for India. In 1921, Gandhi was the leader of the Indian National Congress. He reorganized the
Congress. With Congress now behind him, and Muslim support triggered by his backing the Khilafat movement to restore the Caliph in Turkey, Gandhi
had the political support and the attention of the British Raj.
10
Gandhi expanded his nonviolent non-co-operation platform to include the swadeshi policy – the boycott of foreign-made goods, especially British goods. Linked to this was his
advocacy
that khadi (homespun cloth) be worn by all Indians instead of British-made textiles. Gandhi exhorted Indian men and women, rich or poor, to spend time each day
spinning khadi in support of the independence movement. In addition to boycotting British products, Gandhi urged the people to boycott British institutions and law
courts, to resign from government employment, and to forsake British titles and honors. Gandhi thus began his journey aimed at crippling the British India
government economically, politically and administratively.

The appeal of "Non-cooperation" grew, its social popularity drew participation from all strata of Indian society. Gandhi was arrested on 10 March 1922, tried for
sedition, and sentenced to six years' imprisonment. He began his sentence on 18 March 1922. With Gandhi isolated in prison, the Indian National Congress split
into two factions, one led by Chitta Ranjan Das and Motilal Nehru favoring party participation in the legislatures, and the other led by Chakravarti
Rajagopalachari and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, opposing this move. Furthermore, co-operation among Hindus and Muslims ended as Khilafat movement collapsed
with the rise of Atatürk in Turkey. Muslim leaders left the Congress and began forming Muslim organizations. The political base behind Gandhi had broken into
factions. Gandhi was released in February 1924 for an appendicitis operation, having served only two years.

11
08 S alt Satyagraha
After his early release from prison for political crimes in 1924, over the second half of the 1920s Gandhi continued to pursue swaraj. He pushed through a
resolution at the Calcutta Congress in December 1928 calling on the British government to grant India dominion status or face a new campaign of non-
cooperation with complete independence for the country as its goal. After his support for World War I with Indian combat troops, and the failure of Khilafat
movement in preserving the rule of Caliph in Turkey, followed by a collapse in Muslim support for his leadership, some such as Subhas Chandra Bose and Bhagat
Singh questioned his values and non-violent approach. While many Hindu leaders championed a demand for immediate independence, Gandhi revised his own
call to a one-year wait, instead of two.

The British did not respond favorably to Gandhi's proposal. British political leaders such as Lord Birkenhead and Winston Churchill announced opposition to "the
appeasers of Gandhi" in their discussions with European diplomats who sympathized with Indian demands. On 31 December 1929, an Indian flag was unfurled in
Lahore. Gandhi led Congress in a celebration on 26 January 1930 of India's Independence Day in Lahore. This day was commemorated by almost every other
Indian organization. Gandhi then launched a new Satyagraha against the British salt tax in March 1930. Gandhi sent an ultimatum in the form of a letter
personally addressed to Lord Irwin, the viceroy of India, on 2 March. Gandhi condemned British rule in the letter, describing it as "a curse" that "has
impoverished the dumb millions by a system of progressive exploitation and by a ruinously expensive military and civil administration...It has reduced us
politically to serfdom." Gandhi also mentioned in the letter that the viceroy received a salary "over five thousand times India's average income." In the letter,
Gandhi also stressed his continued adherence to non-violent forms of protest.

This was highlighted by the Salt March to Dandi from 12 March to 6 April, where, together with 78 volunteers, he marched 388 kilometers (241 mi) from
Ahmedabad to Dandi, Gujarat to make salt himself, with the declared intention of breaking the salt laws. The march took 25 days to cover 240 miles with Gandhi
speaking to often huge crowds along the way. Thousands of Indians joined him in Dandi. On 5 May he was interned under a regulation dating from 1827 in
anticipation of a protest that he had planned. The protest at Dharasana salt works on 21 May went ahead without him see.
A horrified American journalist, Webb Miller, described the British response thus:

In complete silence the Gandhi men drew up and halted a hundred yards from the stockade. A picked column advanced from the crowd, waded the ditches and
approached the barbed wire stockade... at a word of command, scores of native policemen rushed upon the advancing marchers and rained blows on their
heads with their steel-shot lathis [long bamboo sticks]. Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off blows. They went down like ninepins. From
where I stood I heard the sickening whack of the clubs on unprotected skulls... Those struck down fell sprawling, unconscious or writhing with fractured skulls
or broken shoulders.

This went on for hours until some 300 or more protesters had been beaten, many seriously injured and two killed. At no time did they offer any resistance. This
campaign was one of his most successful at upsetting British hold on India; Britain responded by imprisoning over 60,000 people. Congress estimates, however,
put the figure at 90,000. Among them was one of Gandhi's lieutenants, Jawaharlal Nehru.
13
Round
or representations based on communal divisions, because he feared that it would not bring

0
people together but divide them, perpetuate their status and divert the attention from India's
struggle to end the colonial rule.

Table
Conferences
During the discussions between Gandhi and the British
government over 1931–32 at the Round Table
Conferences, Gandhi, now aged about 62, sought
constitutional reforms as a preparation to the end of
colonial British rule, and begin the self- rule by Indians.
The British side sought reforms that would keep Indian
subcontinent as a colony. The British negotiators
proposed constitutional reforms on a British Dominion
model that established separate electorates based on
religious and social divisions. The British questioned the
Congress party and Gandhi's authority to speak for all of
India. They invited Indian religious leaders, such as
Muslims and Sikhs, to press their demands along
religious lines, as well as B. R. Ambedkar as the
representative leader of the untouchables. Gandhi
vehemently opposed a constitution that enshrined rights
The Second Round Table conference was the only time he left India between 1914
and his death in 1948. He declined the government's offer of accommodation in an
expensive West End hotel, preferring to stay in the East End, to live among working-
class people, as he did in India. He based himself in a small cell-bedroom at Kingsley
Hall for the three-month duration of his stay and was enthusiastically received by
East Enders. During this time he renewed his links with the British vegetarian
movement. In protest, Gandhi started a fast-unto-death, while he was held in prison.
[154]
The resulting public outcry forced the government, in consultations with
Ambedkar, to replace the Communal Award with a compromise Poona Pact.

14
 Quit India
1 Movement
Gandhi opposed providing any help to the British war effort and he campaigned against any Indian participation in World War II. Gandhi's campaign did not
enjoy the support of Indian masses and many Indian leaders such as Sardar Patel and Rajendra Prasad, and as such failed. Over 2.5 million Indians ignored
Gandhi, volunteered and joined the British military to fight on various fronts of the allied forces.

Gandhi opposition to the Indian participation in World War II was motivated by his belief that India could not be party to a war ostensibly being fought for
democratic freedom while that freedom was denied to India itself. He also condemned Nazism and Fascism, a view which won endorsement of other Indian
leaders. As the war progressed, Gandhi intensified his demand for independence, calling for the British to Quit India in a 1942 speech in Mumbai. This was
Gandhi's and the Congress Party's most definitive revolt aimed at securing the British exit from India. The British government responded quickly to the Quit
India speech, and within hours after Gandhi's speech arrested Gandhi and all the members of the Congress Working Committee. His countrymen retaliated the
arrests by damaging or burning down hundreds of government owned railway stations, police stations, and cutting down telegraph wires.

In 1942, Gandhi now nearing age 73, urged his people to completely stop co-operating with the imperial government. In this effort, he urged that they neither
kill nor injure British people, but be willing to suffer and die if violence is initiated by the British officials. He clarified that the movement would not be stopped
because of any individual acts of violence, saying that the "ordered anarchy" of "the present system of administration" was "worse than real anarchy." He
urged Indians to Karo ya maro ("Do or die") in the cause of their rights and freedoms. Gandhi's arrest lasted two years, as he was held in the Aga Khan
Palace in Pune. During this period, his long time secretary Mahadev Desai died of a heart attack, his wife Kasturba died after 18 months' imprisonment on 22
February 1944; and Gandhi suffered a severe malaria attack. While in jail, he agreed to an interview with Stuart Gelder, a British journalist. Gelder then
composed and released an interview summary, cabled it to the mainstream press, that announced sudden concessions Gandhi was willing to make, comments
that shocked his countrymen, the Congress workers and even Gandhi. The latter two claimed that it distorted what Gandhi actually said on a range of topics and
falsely repudiated the Quit India movement.
15
Gandhi was released before the end of the war on 6 May 1944 because of his failing health and necessary surgery; the Raj did not want him to die in prison and enrage
the nation. He came out of detention to an altered political scene – the Muslim League for example, which a few years earlier had appeared marginal, "now occupied the
center of the political stage" and the topic of Muhammad Ali Jinnah's campaign for Pakistan was a major talking point. Gandhi and Jinnah had extensive correspondence
and the two men met several times over a period of two weeks in September 1944, where Gandhi insisted on a united religiously plural and independent India which
included Muslims and non-Muslims of the Indian subcontinent coexisting.
Jinnah rejected this proposal and insisted instead for partitioning the subcontinent on religious lines to create a separate Muslim India (later Pakistan). These discussions continued
through 1947.

While the leaders of Congress languished in jail, the other parties supported the war and gained organizational strength. Underground publications flailed at the
ruthless suppression of Congress, but it had little control over events. At the end of the war, the British gave clear indications that power would be transferred to
Indian hands. At this point Gandhi called off the struggle, and around 100,000 political prisoners were released, including the Congress's leadership.
16
 Partition and
1 Independence
Gandhi opposed the partition of the Indian subcontinent along religious lines. The Indian National Congress and Gandhi called for the British to Quit India. However, the
Muslim League demanded "Divide and Quit India". Gandhi suggested an agreement which required the Congress and the Muslim League to co-operate and attain
independence under a provisional government, thereafter, the question of partition could be resolved by a plebiscite in the districts with a Muslim majority.

Jinnah rejected Gandhi's proposal and called for Direct Action Day, on 16 August 1946, to press Muslims to publicly gather in cities and support his proposal for the
partition of the Indian subcontinent into a Muslim state and non-Muslim state. Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, the Muslim League Chief Minister of Bengal – now
Bangladesh and West Bengal, gave Calcutta's police special holiday to celebrate the Direct Action Day. The Direct Action Day triggered a mass murder of Calcutta
Hindus and the torching of their property, and holidaying police were missing to contain or stop the conflict. The British government did not order its army to move in to
contain the violence. The violence on Direct Action Day led to retaliatory violence against Muslims across India. Thousands of Hindus and Muslims were murdered, and
tens of thousands were injured in the cycle of violence in the days that followed. Gandhi visited the most riot-prone areas to appeal a stop to the massacres. Archibald
Wavell, the Viceroy and Governor-General of British India for three years through February 1947, had worked with Gandhi and Jinnah to find a common ground, before
and after accepting Indian independence in principle. Wavell condemned Gandhi's character and motives as well as his ideas. Wavell accused Gandhi of harboring the
single minded idea to "overthrow British rule and influence and to establish a Hindu raj", and called Gandhi a "malignant, malevolent, exceedingly shrewd" politician.
Wavell feared a civil war on the Indian subcontinent, and doubted Gandhi would be able to stop it.

The British reluctantly agreed to grant independence to the people of the Indian subcontinent, but accepted Jinnah's proposal of partitioning the land into Pakistan and
India. Gandhi was involved in the final negotiations, but Stanley Wolpert states the "plan to carve up British India was never approved of or accepted by Gandhi". The
partition was controversial and violently disputed. More than half a million were killed in religious riots as 10 million to 12 million non-Muslims (Hindus and Sikhs
mostly) migrated from Pakistan into India, and Muslims migrated from India into Pakistan, across the newly created borders of India, West Pakistan and East Pakistan.

Gandhi spent the day of independence not celebrating the end of the British rule but appealing for peace among his countrymen by fasting and spinning in Calcutta on
15 August 1947. The partition had gripped the Indian subcontinent with religious violence and the streets were filled with corpses. Some writers credit Gandhi's fasting
and protests for stopping the religious riots and communal violence.
17
Years in South Africa
Africa was to present to Gandhi challenges and opportunities that he could hardly have conceived. In
the end he would spend more than two decades there, returning to India only briefly in 1896–97. The
youngest two of his four children were born there.

Emergence as a political and social

activist
Gandhi was quickly exposed to the racial discrimination practiced in South Africa. In
a Durban court he was asked by the European magistrate to take off his turban; he refused and left the
courtroom. A few days later, while traveling to Pretoria, he was unceremoniously thrown out of a first-
class railway compartment and left shivering and brooding at the rail station in Pietermaritzburg. In
the further course of that journey, he was beaten up by the white driver of a stagecoach because he
would not travel on the footboard to make room for a European passenger, and finally he was barred
from hotels reserved “for Europeans only.” Those humiliations were the daily lot of Indian traders and
laborers in Natal, who had learned to pocket them with the same resignation with which they pocketed
their meager earnings. What was new was not Gandhi’s experience but his reaction. He had so far not
been conspicuous for self-assertion or aggressiveness. But something happened to him as he smarted
under the insults heaped upon him. In retrospect the journey from Durban to Pretoria struck him as
one of the most-creative experiences of his life; it was his moment of truth. Henceforth he would not
accept injustice as part of the natural or unnatural order in South Africa; he would defend his dignity
as an Indian and as a man.
While in Pretoria, Gandhi studied the conditions in which his fellow South Asians in South Africa lived
and tried to educate them on their rights and duties, but he had no intention of staying on in South
Africa. Indeed, in June 1894, as his year’s contract drew to a close, he was back in Durban, ready to
sail for India. At a farewell party given in his honor, he happened to glance through the Natal Mercury
and learned that the Natal Legislative Assembly was considering a bill to deprive Indians of the right
to vote. “This is the first nail in our coffin,”
Gandhi told his hosts. They professed their inability to oppose the bill, and indeed
their ignorance of the politics of the colony, and begged him to take up the fight on their behalf.
Until the age of 18, Gandhi had hardly ever read a newspaper. Neither as a student in England nor as
a budding barrister in India had he evinced much interest in politics. Indeed, he was overcome by a
terrifying stage fright whenever he stood up to read a speech at a social gathering or to defend a client
in court. Nevertheless, in July 1894, when he was barely 25, he blossomed almost overnight into a
proficient political campaigner. He drafted petitions to the Natal legislature and the British
government and had them signed by hundreds of his compatriots. He could not prevent the passage of
the bill but succeeded in drawing the attention of the public and the press in Natal, India, and England
to the Natal Indians’ grievances. He was persuaded to settle down in Durban to practice law and to
organize the Indian community. In 1894 he founded the Natal Indian Congress, of which he himself
became the indefatigable secretary. Through that common political organization, he infused a spirit of
solidarity in the heterogeneous Indian community. He flooded the government, the legislature, and the
press with closely reasoned statements of Indian grievances. Finally, he exposed to the view of the
outside world the skeleton in the imperial cupboard, the discrimination practiced against the Indian
subjects of Queen Victoria in one of her own colonies in Africa. It was a measure of his success as a
publicist that such important newspapers as The Times of London and The Statesman and Englishman
of Calcutta
(now Kolkata) editorially commented on the Natal Indians’ grievances.

In 1896 Gandhi went to India to fetch his wife, Kasturba (or Kasturbai), and their two oldest children
and to canvass support for the Indians overseas. He met prominent leaders and persuaded them to
address public meetings in the country’s principal cities. Unfortunately for him, garbled versions of his
activities and utterances reached Natal and inflamed its European population. On landing at Durban in
January 1897, he was assaulted and nearly lynched by a white mob. Joseph Chamberlain, the colonial
secretary in the British Cabinet, cabled the government of Natal to bring the guilty men to book, but
Gandhi refused to prosecute his assailants. It was, he said, a principle with him not to seek redress of a
personal wrong in a court of law.
Resistance and results
Gandhi was not the man to nurse a grudge. On the outbreak of the South African (Boer) War in 1899,
he argued that the Indians, who claimed the full rights of citizenship in the
British crown colony of Natal, were in duty bound to defend it. He raised an ambulance corps of 1,100
volunteers, out of whom 300 were free Indians and the rest indentured laborers. It was a motley
crowd: barristers and accountants, artisans and laborers. It was Gandhi’s task to instill in them a spirit
of service to those whom they regarded as their oppressors. The editor of the Pretoria News offered an
insightful portrait of Gandhi in the battle zone:
After a night’s work which had shattered men with much bigger frames, I came across Gandhi in the
early morning sitting by the roadside eating a regulation army biscuit. Every man in [General] Buller’s
force was dull and depressed, and damnation was
heartily invoked on everything. But Gandhi was stoical in his bearing, cheerful and confident in his
conversation and had a kindly eye.
The British victory in the war brought little relief to the Indians in South Africa. The new regime in
South Africa was to blossom into a partnership, but only between Boers and Britons. Gandhi saw that,
with the exception of a few Christian missionaries and youthful idealists, he had been unable to make a
perceptible impression upon the South African Europeans. In 1906 the Transvaal government
published a particularly humiliating ordinance for the registration of its Indian population. The Indians
held a mass protest meeting at Johannesburg in September 1906 and, under Gandhi’s leadership, took
a pledge to defy the ordinance if it became law in the teeth of their opposition and to suffer all the
penalties resulting from their defiance. Thus was born satyagraha (“devotion to truth”), a new
technique for redressing wrongs through 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. It had its ups and downs, but under
Gandhi’s leadership, the small Indian minority kept up its resistance against heavy odds. Hundreds of
Indians chose to sacrifice their livelihood and liberty rather than submit to laws repugnant to their
conscience and self-respect. In the final phase of the movement in 1913, hundreds of Indians, including
women, went to jail, and thousands of Indian workers who had struck work in the mines bravely faced
imprisonment, flogging, and even shooting. It was a terrible ordeal for the Indians, but it was also the
worst possible advertisement for the South African government, which, under pressure from the
governments of Britain
and India, accepted a compromise negotiated by Gandhi on the one hand and the South African
statesman Gen. Jan Christian Smuts on the other.
“The saint has left our shores,” Smuts wrote to a friend on Gandhi’s departure from South Africa for
India, in July 1914, “I hope for ever.” A quarter century later, he wrote that it had been his “fate to be
the antagonist of a man for whom even then I had the highest respect.” Once, during his not-
infrequent stays in jail, Gandhi had prepared a pair of sandals for Smuts, who recalled that there was
no hatred and personal ill-feeling between them, and when the fight was over “there was the
atmosphere in which a decent peace could be concluded.”

vortex of its racial problem, it had provided him with the ideal setting in which his peculiar talents
could unfold themselves.

The religious quest

Gandhi’s religious quest dated back to his childhood, the influence of his mother and of his home life in
Porbandar and Rajkot, but it received a great impetus after his arrival in South Africa. His Quaker
friends in Pretoria failed to convert him to Christianity, but they quickened his appetite for religious
studies. He was fascinated by the writings of Leo
Tolstoy on Christianity, read the Qurʾān in translation, and delved into Hindu scriptures and
philosophy. The study of comparative religion, talks with scholars, and his own reading of theological
works brought him to the conclusion that all religions were true and yet every one of them was
imperfect because they were “interpreted with poor intellects, sometimes with poor hearts, and more
often misinterpreted.”

Shrimad Rajchandra, a brilliant young Jain philosopher who became Gandhi’s spiritual mentor, convinced
him of “the subtlety and profundity” of Hinduism, the religion of his birth. And it was the Bhagavadgita,
which Gandhi had first read in London, that became his “spiritual dictionary” and exercised probably the
greatest single influence on his life. Two Sanskrit words in the Gita particularly fascinated him.
was aparigraha (“nonpossession”), which implies that people have to jettison the material goods that
cramp the life of the spirit and to shake off the bonds of money and property. The other was
samabhava (“equability”), which enjoins people to remain unruffled by pain or pleasure, victory or
defeat, and to work without hope of success or fear of failure.
Those were not merely counsels of perfection. In the civil case that had taken him to South Africa in
1893, he had persuaded the antagonists to settle their differences out of court. The true function of a
lawyer seemed to him “to unite parties riven asunder.” He soon regarded his clients not as purchasers
of his services but as friends; they consulted him not only on legal issues but on such matters as the
best way of weaning a baby or balancing the family budget. When an associate protested that clients
came even on Sundays, Gandhi replied: “A man in distress cannot have Sunday rest.”
Gandhi’s legal earnings reached a peak figure of £5,000 a year, but he had little interest in
moneymaking, and his savings were often sunk in his public activities. In Durban and later in
Johannesburg, he kept an open table; his house was a virtual hostel for younger colleagues and
political coworkers. This was something of an ordeal for his wife, without whose extraordinary
patience, endurance, and self-effacement Gandhi could hardly have devoted himself to public causes.
As he broke through the conventional bonds of family and property, their life tended to shade into a
community life.
Gandhi felt an irresistible attraction to a life of simplicity, manual labor, and austerity. In 1904—after
reading John Ruskin’s Unto This Last, a critique of capitalism—he set up a farm at Phoenix near
Durban where he and his friends could live by the sweat of their brow. Six years later another colony
grew up under Gandhi’s fostering care near Johannesburg; it was named Tolstoy Farm for the Russian
writer and moralist, whom Gandhi admired and corresponded with. Those two settlements were the
precursors of the more-
famous ashrams (religious retreats) in India, at Sabarmati near Ahmedabad (Ahmadabad) and at
Sevagram near Wardha.
South Africa had not only prompted Gandhi to evolve a novel technique for political action but also
transformed him into a leader of men by freeing him from bonds that make cowards of most men.
“Persons in power,” the British Classical scholar Gilbert Murray prophetically wrote about Gandhi in
the Hibbert Journal in 1918,
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.
Return to India
Gandhi decided to leave South Africa in the summer of 1914, just before the outbreak
of World War I. He and his family first went to London, where they remained for several months.
Finally, they departed England in December, arriving in Bombay in early January 1915.

Emergence as nationalist leader

For the next three years, Gandhi seemed to hover uncertainly on the periphery of Indian politics,
declining to join any political agitation, supporting the British war effort, and even recruiting soldiers
for the British Indian Army. At the same time, he did not flinch from criticizing the British officials for
any acts of high-handedness or from taking up the grievances of the long-suffering peasantry in Bihar
and Gujarat. By February 1919, however, the British had insisted on pushing through—in the teeth of
fierce Indian opposition—
the Rowlatt Acts, which empowered the authorities to imprison without trial those suspected of
sedition. A provoked Gandhi finally revealed a sense of estrangement from the British
raj and announced a satyagraha struggle. The result was a virtual political earthquake that shook the
subcontinent in the spring of 1919. The violent outbreaks that followed—notably the Jallianwala
Bagh Massacre, which was the killing by British-led soldiers of nearly 400 Indians who were
gathered in an open space in Amritsar in the Punjab region (now
in Punjab state), and the enactment of martial law—prompted him to stay his hand. However, within a
year he was again in a militant mood, having in the meantime been
irrevocably alienated by British insensitiveness to Indian feeling on the Punjab tragedy and Muslim
resentment on the peace terms offered to Turkey following World War I.
By the autumn of 1920, Gandhi was the dominant figure on the political stage, commanding an
influence never before attained by any political leader in India or perhaps in any
other country. He refashioned the 35-year-old Indian National Congress (Congress Party) into an
effective political instrument of Indian nationalism: from a three-day Christmas-week picnic of the
upper middle class in one of the principal cities of India, it became a mass organization with its roots
in small towns and villages. Gandhi’s message was simple: 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 not only of British manufactures but of
institutions operated or aided by the British in India: legislatures, courts, offices, schools.
the crest of a rising wave, but, alarmed by a violent outbreak in Chauri Chaura, a remote village in
eastern India, Gandhi decided to call off mass civil disobedience. That was a blow to many of his
followers, who feared that his self-
The campaign electrified the country, broke the spell of fear of foreign rule, and led to the arrests of
thousands
of satyagrahis, who defied laws and cheerfully lined up for prison. In February 1922 the movement
seemed to be imposed
restraints and scruples would reduce the nationalist struggle to pious futility. Gandhi himself was
arrested on March 10, 1922, tried for sedition, and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. He was
released in February 1924, after undergoing surgery for appendicitis. The political landscape had
changed in his absence. The Congress Party had split into two factions, one under Chittaranjan Das
and Motilal Nehru (the father of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister) favoring the entry of
the party into legislatures and the other
under Chakravarti Rajagopalachari and Vallabhbhai Jhaverbhai Patel opposing it. Worst of all, the unity
between Hindus and Muslims of the heyday of the noncooperation movement of 1920–22 had dissolved.
Gandhi tried to draw the warring communities out of their suspicion and fanaticism by reasoning and
persuasion. Finally, after a serious outbreak of communal unrest, he undertook a three-week fast in the
autumn of 1924 to arouse the people into following the path of nonviolence. In December 1924 he was
named president of the Congress Party, and he served
Mahatma Gandhi and Sarojini Naidu on the Salt March, 1930The Salt March, one of the most
important developments of the Indian Independence Movement, ended with the arrest of more than
60,000 Indians.(more)

Gandhi at the Round Table ConferenceMahatma Gandhi (front row, left) and other delegates
attending the Round Table Conference in London, 1931.(more)
During the mid-1920s Gandhi took little interest in active politics and was considered a spent
force. In 1927, however, the British government appointed a constitutional reform commission under
Sir John Simon, a prominent English lawyer and politician, that did not contain a single Indian. When
the Congress and other parties boycotted the commission, the political tempo rose. At the Congress
session (meeting) at Calcutta in December 1928, Gandhi put forth the crucial resolution demanding
dominion status from the British government within a year under threat of a nationwide nonviolent
campaign for complete independence. Henceforth, Gandhi was back as the leading voice of the
Congress Party. In March 1930 he launched the Salt March, a satyagraha against the British-imposed
tax on salt, which affected the poorest section of the community. One of the most spectacular and
successful campaigns in Gandhi’s nonviolent war against the British raj, it resulted in the imprisonment
of more than 60,000 people. A year later, after talks with the viceroy, Lord Irwin (later Lord Halifax),
Gandhi accepted a truce (the Gandhi-Irwin Pact), called off civil disobedience, and agreed to attend the
Round Table Conference in London as the sole representative of the Indian National Congress.
The conference, which concentrated on the problem of the Indian minorities rather than on the
transfer of power from the British, was a great disappointment to the Indian nationalists. Moreover,
when Gandhi returned to India in December 1931, he found his party facing an all- out offensive from
Lord Irwin’s successor as viceroy, Lord Willingdon, who unleashed the sternest repression in the
history of the nationalist movement. Gandhi was once more imprisoned, and the government tried to
insulate him from the outside world and to destroy his influence. That was not an easy task. Gandhi
soon regained the initiative. In September 1932, while still a prisoner, he embarked on a fast to protest
against the British government’s decision to segregate the so-called “untouchables” (the lowest level of
the
Indian caste system; now called Scheduled Castes [official] or Dalits) by allotting them separate
electorates in the new constitution. The fast produced an emotional upheaval in the country, and an
alternative electoral arrangement was jointly and speedily devised by the leaders of the Hindu
community and the Dalits and endorsed by the British government. The fast became the starting point
of a vigorous campaign for the removal of the disenfranchisement of the Dalits, whom Gandhi referred
to as Harijans, or “children of God.”
Mahatma Gandhi, 1931.
With the outbreak of World War II, the nationalist struggle in India entered its last crucial phase.
Gandhi hated fascism and all it stood for, but he also hated war. The Indian National Congress, on the
other hand, was not committed to pacifism and was prepared to support the British war effort if Indian
self-government was assured. Once more Gandhi became politically active. The failure of the mission
of Sir Stafford Cripps, a British cabinet minister who went to India in March 1942 with an offer that
Gandhi found unacceptable, the British equivocation on the transfer of power to Indian hands, and the
encouragement given by high British officials to conservative and communal forces promoting discord
between Muslims and Hindus impelled Gandhi to demand in the summer of 1942 an immediate British
withdrawal from India—what became known as the Quit India Movement.

Aga Khan Palace (Gandhi National Memorial)Aga Khan Palace (Gandhi National Memorial), Pune,
India.
In mid-1942 the war against the Axis powers, particularly Japan, was in a critical phase, and the
British reacted sharply to the campaign. They imprisoned the entire Congress leadership and set out
to crush the party once and for all. There were violent outbreaks that were sternly suppressed, and
the gulf between Britain and India became wider than ev
It was one of the greatest disappointments of Gandhi’s life that Indian freedom was realized without
Indian unity. Muslim separatism had received a great boost while Gandhi and his colleagues were in
jail, and in 1946–47, as the final constitutional arrangements were being negotiated, the outbreak of
communal riots between Hindus and Muslims unhappily created a climate in which Gandhi’s appeals
to reason and justice, tolerance and trust had little chance. When partition of the subcontinent was
accepted—against his advice—he threw himself heart and soul into the task of healing the scars of the
communal conflict, toured the riot-torn areas in Bengal and Bihar, admonished the bigots, consoled
the victims, and tried to rehabilitate the refugees. In the atmosphere of that period, surcharged with
suspicion and hatred, that was a difficult and heartbreaking task. Gandhi was blamed by partisans of
both the communities. When persuasion failed, he went on a fast. He won at least two spectacular
triumphs: in September 1947 his fasting stopped the rioting in Calcutta, and in January 1948 he
shamed the city of Delhi into a communal truce. A few days later, on January 30, while he was on his
way to his evening prayer meeting in Delhi, he was shot down by Nathuram Godse, a young Hindu
fanatic.
Place in history of Mahatma Gandhi
Gandhi Memorial Stone at PuneGandhi Memorial Stone, Gandhi National Memorial, Pune,
Maharasthra, India.
The British attitude toward Gandhi was one of mingled admiration, amusement, bewilderment,
suspicion, and resentment. Except for a tiny minority of Christian missionaries and radical socialists,
the British tended to see him at best as a utopian visionary and at worst as a cunning hypocrite whose
professions of friendship for the British race were a mask for subversion of the British raj. Gandhi was
conscious of the existence of that wall of prejudice, and it was part of the strategy of satyagraha to
penetrate it.
His three major campaigns in 1920–22, 1930–34, and 1940–42 were well designed to engender that
process of self-doubt and questioning that was to undermine
the moral defenses of his adversaries and to contribute, together with the objective realities of the
postwar world, to producing the grant of dominion status in 1947. The British abdication
in India was the first step in the liquidation of the British Empire on the continents of Asia and Africa.
Gandhi’s image as a rebel and enemy died hard, but, as it had done to the memory of George
Washington, Britain, in 1969, the centenary year of Gandhi’s birth, erected a statue to his memory.
Gandhi had critics in his own country and indeed in his own party. The liberal leaders protested that
he was going too fast; the young radicals complained that he was not going fast enough; left-wing
politicians alleged that he was not serious about evicting the British or liquidating such vested Indian
interests as princes and landlords; the leaders of the Dalits doubted his good faith as a social reformer;
and Muslim leaders accused him of partiality to his own community.
Research in the second half of the 20th century established Gandhi’s role as a great mediator and
reconciler. His talents in that direction were applied to conflicts between the older moderate
politicians and the young radicals, the political terrorists and the parliamentarians, the urban
intelligentsia and the rural masses, the traditionalists and the modernists, the caste Hindus and the
Dalits, the Hindus and the Muslims, and the Indians and the British.
It was inevitable that Gandhi’s role as a political leader should loom larger in the public imagination,
but the mainspring of his life lay in religion, not in politics. And religion for him did not mean
formalism, dogma, ritual, or sectarianism. “What I have been striving and pining to achieve these
thirty years,” he wrote in his autobiography, “is to see God face to face.” His deepest strivings were
spiritual, but he did not retire to a cave to meditate on the Absolute. As he explained in Young India in
1924:
I am impatient to realize myself, to attain moksha in this very existence. My national service is part of
my training for freeing my soul from the bondage of flesh. Thus considered, my service may be
regarded as purely selfish. I have no desire for the perishable kingdom of earth. I am striving for the
Kingdom of Heaven which is moksha. To attain my end it is not necessary for me to seek the shelter of
a cave. I carry one about me, if I would but know it.
For Gandhi truth was not something to be discovered in the privacy of one’s personal life; it had to be
upheld in the challenging contexts of social and political life.
Gandhi won the affection and loyalty of gifted men and women, old and young, with vastly dissimilar
talents and temperaments; of Europeans of every religious persuasion; and of Indians of almost every
political line. Few of his political colleagues went all the way with him and accepted nonviolence as a
creed; fewer still shared his food fads, his interest in mudpacks and nature cure, or his prescription of
brahmacarya, complete renunciation of the pleasures of the flesh.
Gandhi’s ideas on sex may now sound quaint and unscientific. His marriage at the age of 13 seems to
have complicated his attitude toward sex and charged it with feelings of guilt, but it is important to
remember that total sublimation, according to one tradition of Hindu thought, is indispensable for
those who seek self-realization, and brahmacarya was for Gandhi part of a larger discipline in food,
sleep, thought, prayer, and daily activity designed to equip himself for service of the causes to which
he was totally committed. What he failed to see was that his own unique experience was no guide for
the common man.

Postage stamp honoring Mahatma GandhiImage of Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi depicted on a

postage stamp from Cyprus.(more)
Scholars have continued to judge Gandhi’s place in history. He was the catalyst if not the
initiator of three of the major revolutions of the 20th century: the movements
against colonialism, racism, and violence. He wrote copiously; the collected edition of his writings had
reached 100 volumes by the early 21st century.
Much of what he wrote was in response to the needs of his coworkers and disciples and the
exigencies of the political situation, but on fundamentals he maintained a remarkable
consistency, as is evident from the Hind Swaraj (“Indian Home Rule”), published in South Africa in
1909. The strictures on Western materialism and colonialism, the reservations about industrialism and
urbanization, the distrust of the modern state, and the total rejection of violence that was expressed in
that book seemed romantic, if not reactionary, to the pre- World War I generation in India and the
West, which had not known the shocks of two global wars or experienced the phenomenon of Adolf
Hitler and the trauma of the atom bomb.
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s objective of promoting a just and egalitarian order at home and
nonalignment with military blocs abroad doubtless owed much to Gandhi, but neither he nor his
colleagues in the Indian nationalist movement wholly accepted the Gandhian models in politics and
economics.
Gandhi’s philosophy lived on in India through the messages of reformers such as social activist Vinoba
Bhave, a land reformer who was also Gandhi’s disciple. Outside of India, other activists, such as Martin
Luther King, Jr., borrowed heavily from Gandhi’s practice of nonviolence and civil disobedience to
achieve their own social equality aims. The freedom that Gandhi’s movement won for India sounded a
death knell for Britain’s other colonial enterprises in Asia and Africa, where his influence bolstered
existing independence movements and became the foundation for new ones.
 JALLIANWALA BAGH MASSACRE
In the Punjab the situation was very critical. It was true that there were disturbances on the part of the
people, but the measures adopted by the Government to check the disturbances were too severe.

The leaders were trying to keep the people peaceful, but the stern measures of repression taken by the
authorities had few parallels in history.

In Amritsar the people were not allowed to move about freely. A proclamation was issued forbidding all
gatherings and meetings. Only a few had the chance to know about the proclamation, however,
because it was not announced widely, and it was made only in English.
It was announced that a meeting was to be held in a garden called Jallianwala Bagh, to make a protest
against the Government’s actions.

General Dyer took no measures to prevent the meeting. He reached the place soon after the meeting
began and he took with him armoured cars and troops. Without giving any warning he ordered, ‘Fire
till the ammunition is exhausted.’
 The Jallianwala Bagh
massacre
(from a painting in the
library of the Golden
Temple, Amritsar)
The garden was surrounded by walls and buildings and had only one exit. At the first shot the exit was
jammed and there was no hope of escape for the crowd. There were between six and ten thousand
people there. The soldiers fired over sixteen hundred rounds into that unarmed mass of people.
Once a garden, it was now a scene of merciless massacre. Hundreds of men, women, and children
were butchered, though the official figures given were only 379 killed and 200 wounded. Leaving the
wounded and dying on the ground, the troops marched away. The words ‘Jallianwala Baugh became a
synonym for massacre.
Bad as this was, there were other even more shameful deeds done all over the Punjab. Indians were
ordered to crawl on their hands and knees. In addition General Dyer ordered that in certain areas all
Indians were to alight from vehicles and salaam whenever they passed a British officer. Furthermore,
at certain places men were stripped naked and flogged. Students and children to walk miles for roll
call, to attend parades, and salute the British flag. Then there was the stripping and flogging of
marriage parties, the censorship of communications, and cutting of water and electricity supplies to
Indian families. The administration of General Dyer’s martial law created a reign of terror in the
Punjab.

C.F. Andrews, who had already reached the Punjab, wrote to Gandhi and begged him to come at once.
Gandhi wanted to go, but his repeated requests for permission to visit the place were turned down by
the Government. Finally, in October that year, the Viceroy permitted him to visit the Punjab, and
Gandhi went.
On his arrival at Lahore railway station, Gandhi found that almost the entire population of the city
was there waiting for him.
The Congress had appointed a committee to enquire into the atrocities committed in the Punjab. On
his arrival in Lahore he was requested to join the committee. He started a slow but methodical
investigation of the incidents in the Punjab.
Jawaharlal Nehru, who was also there in the Punjab, realized that Gandhi was the leader of the
masses. People were drawn to him because of his thoughts and deeds. Nehru saw the scientific
accuracy with which Gandhi was conducting the enquiry.
Gandhi’s report of the atrocities showed that efforts were being made by the government to shield
certain persons. Gandhi was never interested in taking revenge on anybody but he was shocked at the
way the Government sat silent when its own report was published.

Gandhi was very much moved by the sufferings of the people in the Punjab. He knew the extent of the
atrocities which had been committed on the defenseless people.

Gandhi now advised the people to non-co-operate with the Government in every possible way. He
advised them not to accept any of the honours offered by Britain, and requested those who had
already received honours to return them. He wanted people to start a movement to boycott goods. He
wanted every effort to be made to persuade Indians not to serve the Government in any capacity. He
called out students from the educational institutions.

Gandhi’s influence on the Indian people was steadily growing. The old leaders, many of them with
liberal policies, were vanishing from Indian politics. By the close of 1920 Gandhi was the undisputed
leader and head of the Indian National Congress.

The Congress was fighting for immediate Home Rule. Its method of fighting was non-violent non-co-
operation with the Government, and defying carefully selected laws at suitable times.

Gandhi was very interested in Jawaharlal Nehru and his socialistic views. He was most impressed
with the account given by Jawaharlal of his contacts with the peasants. Jawaharlal explained the
difficulties the peasants were experiencing, particularly the high taxes they had to pay.
The political situation in India grew worse. The Government became nervous. There was tension
everywhere and amidst the suppressed people there was the danger of violence.

In spite of the hard attitude of the Government, Gandhi believed that

England would soon right the wrong before it was too late. Jawaharlal
was of the opinion that England would not change her policy unless she
was forced to do so. Jawaharlal was right. Soon the Government
started

With Nehru at Sevagram

arresting the leaders and imprisoning them. The British were afraid to loosen their grip on India.
On August 1, 1920, in a letter to Lord Chelmsford, the Viceroy, Gandhi gave the signal for a non-co-
operation campaign. Along with it he returned the Kaiser-i- Hind gold medal which had been
awarded to him in 1915. In the columns of Young India Gandhi wrote in detail in defence of non-
violent non-co-operation.

With other leaders he traveled extensively, addressing huge meetings and preaching the essentials of
Satyagraha. Everywhere the crowds welcomed him with great love and enthusiasm. Again and again
he warned the people against violence. He abhorred mass fury.

‘If India has to get her freedom by violence,’ he said, ‘let it be by the disciplined violence named war.’

At the end of August the Gujarat Political Conference passed a non-co- operation resolution, and a
special session of the Congress was held in Calcutta on September 4 to 9. The draft of the non-co-
operation resolution had been prepared by Gandhi.
Gandhi was not sure how much support he would get at the Congress session. When he moved the
resolution he said that he knew the resolution envisaged a policy which was different from the policy
hitherto followed. He knew that many leaders were dead against it.
‘But,’ he declared, ‘knowing this I stand before you in fear of God and with a sense
of duty to put this before you for your acceptance.’

The special Congress session adopted the non-co- operation plan as a means of
attaining Swaraj.

During the latter part of 1920 Gandhi advocated a triple boycott. He wanted an
absolute boycott of the Government and all government institutions, including
schools, colleges, and courts. If the people were free of these they could easily
have their own schools, colleges, and courts, and the power of the British would
collapse at once.

Wearing the 'Gandhi' cap

There was much laughter and ridicule from the moderates and the supporters of British rule. But
Gandhi paid no attention to them. Gandhi’s activities made the Government panicky.
They issued a warning that anyone who overstepped the bounds of law would be arrested and
imprisoned.

Gandhi thought that this warning was a victory for the campaign. He issued instructions which the
people were to follow if he were arrested.
On December 26, the Congress session was held in Nagpur. Though there were signs of opposition
to Gandhi’s policies his resolution was passed with an overwhelming majority. The adoption of the
new programme at Nagpur was the signal to start the mass movement. Gandhi felt that the
complete boycott of all government organizations would give a chance to the Congress to set up a
parallel organization, a State within a State which would lead India to Swaraj.
The Duke of Connaught was sent to India in 1921 to try to pacify the Indians. He came to open the
four legislatures in the country which had been introduced as a result of the reforms announced by
the King. His coming and going passed off without any material change in the attitude of Indians
towards Britain.
Gandhi traveled far and wide, propagating the ideals of non-violence and non- co-operation. Day by
day the Indians were getting more and more excited over carrying out Gandhi’s programme. Many
students left their institutions, many officers resigned their posts. The boycott movement gained
momentum.
As the people’s morale grew, the morale of the Government went down. Repression started. Gandhi
advised the people to have patience, and he insisted on non-violence. He saw the weakness of Indians
and he urged them to improve. He wanted social reforms and constructive work to be intensively
followed.

It was announced were arranged the Prince of Wales was to visit India.
Functions were arranged at many places to enable him to meet his
loyal subjects.

Gandhi was indignant when he read the announcement in the

newspapers.

With Annie Besant, Shrinivas Shastri, and Satyamurthi

‘Do the British think we are children?’ he

said. ‘Do they believe that parades for the Prince will make us forget atrocities in the Punjab or the
perpetual delay in granting us Home Rule?’

On Gandhi’s advice the Congress declared that all parades, receptions, and celebrations in honour of
the Prince were to be strictly boycotted.
‘We have no grudge against His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales,’ said Gandhi, ‘but our ideas are
against him as a symbol of oppression. We can show the world that such non-co- operation is just the
reverse of the European doctrine of the sword. Let us act in accordance with the holy prophets of old.
Non-co-operation without violence is the battle of the brave.’ Fearing that there would be disorder
when His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales visited various places, the government began severe
acts of suppression. Thousands of people were arrested.

The Indians people were so agitated than in city after city bonfires burned and the bonfires were
made with foreign cloth, especially British cloth.
On November 17, 1921, the Prince of Wales landed in Bombay. Loyal stooges of Britain went to greet
the royal visitor. Those who were observing non-violent non-cooperation did not molest them.
However, passion suddenly blazed out. Religious and political hatreds fanned the flames. Riots
started, many were killed, much property was destroyed. There was panic in the city.

Gandhi was in Bombay, and he rushed to the scene of disorder to stop the rioting. Order was finally
restored.

‘Every man has the right to his religion and his own political opinion. Satyagraha will never succeed
until man understands that,’ Gandhi announced bitterly.

In other cities the boycott of the Prince’s visit was peaceful. As the unfortunate Prince of Wales
visited city after city, he was greeted with empty streets. Not a shop was open. The people
remained behind closed doors and drawn curtains. This infuriated the British and they called upon
the Government of India to act.

Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal, and other leaders were arrested and sentenced to various terms of
imprisonment. Yet the determined courage of the people did not abate. They were ready to suffer any
penalty for the cause of Home Rule.

Demands had been made to Gandhi that he should start a mass movement for the attainment of
Swaraj.
Gandhi decided to act. Preparations were made to start Satyagraha in Bardoli. But Gandhi had to
stop the campaign suddenly because of what had happened in Bombay and other places.
In Chauri Chaura, near Gorakhpur in U.P., some policemen fired on a crowd which was holding a
demonstration against the Government. This annoyed the demonstrators to such an extent that they
 became very violent. They chased the police. The police took refuge in the city hall. The angry mob
surrounded the hall and set it on fire. Some policemen were burned to death. Others, trying to
escape, were killed by the furious mob outside.

Gandhi was very upset. He thought that it was clear that the people were still not prepared for
satyagraha. He stopped the intended satyagraha at Bardoli.

CABINET MISSION PLAN

In 1939 the Second World War broke out. England and France declared war on Nazi Germany. Without consulting
Indian leaders, Britain declared India to be at war on the allies' side.

Gandhi's sympathies were with the British, but the believed that all violence was evil and he would
therefore have nothing to do with the war effort, although he gave England his moral support.

The Indian National Congress wanted to help Britain and fight on the allies' side, but only as a free nation. But to grant India
independence seemed ridiculous to Churchill and his Government. They had no intention the co- operation
offered by the Congress.
As a protest, all the Congress ministries in the provinces resigned. The Government took over the administration and
they acted in such a way as to help their war effort. Acting on the goodwill and restraint taught by Gandhi, the
Indian leaders showed no reaction.
Events in Europe were having repercussions in India however. The Congress working Committee found itself
unable to accept in its entirety Gandhi's attitude to the war. In particular
they would not accept his view that the
defence of India should not depend on armed force.
The leaders met again and again in Gandhi's room at Sevagram and
talked of their desire to start some
With Tagore at Santiniketan, 1946

action. Finally a proposal was put forward that all provincial Governments should join with the British
authorities in the defence of India. The Government, however, rejected the offer.
In September 1940, a meeting of All-India Congress Committee was held in Bombay. There as a
protest against England's utter indifference to India's hopes, it was decided to launch individual civil
disobedience against the authorities. It was also decided to hold meetings to protest against British
imperialism. At that time such meetings were forbidden
 Vinoba Bhave was the first to inaugurate individual satyagraha. He was
arrested and so were hundreds of other who followed him.
Nehru also was arrested. Within a few months over thirty thousand
Congressmen were put in jail.
Gandhi alone was not imprisoned. He devoted his time to spreading the

With Sir Stafford Cripps, 1942

1941 the Government released all the satyagrahis. Then, in 1942, as the Japanese swept across the Pacific and went
through Malaya and Burma, the British began to think of a settlement with India. Japan might even invade India.

With the threat of invasion by Japan even Gandhi began to feel that his pacifism might stand in the way of
India's future. So he made the proposal of a provisional Government's side in the struggle against the
aggressors. But this proposal was ignored.
In March 1942 Churchill announced that the war cabinet had agreed on a plan for India and that Sir Stafford Cripps
had agreed to go to India to find out whether the Indian leaders would accept the plan, and whether they would
devote all their thought and energy to the defence of India against Japan.

Sir Stafford Cripps arrived in Delhi on March-22. He met Gandhi, Nehru, Azad, Jinnah and other important
leaders. Cripps promised greater freedom than that which had been offered before. He also offered complete
freedom after the war, if India wanted it. The leaders would perhaps have accepted this offer if it had come a year
earlier, but now it was rejected.

The Congress leaders did not trust the people of India sufficiently to give them any real power, and so the Indian
leaders felt that they could not trust the British to hand over power after the war.
The assassination
The 78-year-old Gandhi, reverently called Mahatma as a sign of respect, spent much of his adult life advocating
civil disobedience (satyagraha) and peaceful protests as the way for India to gain its independence from Britain,
which had ruled India directly since 1858. Independence was finally declared on August 15, 1947, about a month
after the British Parliament passed the Indian Independence Act, which partitioned British India into the
countries of India and Pakistan. Amid growing communal violence, Gandhi traveled to New Delhi, India’s capital,
to take part in a fast for peace and to participate in prayer meetings. His presence on the day of his death
attracted a crowd of followers estimated at between several hundred and 1,000 people.

About 5:15 pm, Gandhi and his two granddaughters left Birla House, where he had been living, with the intent of
leading his followers to a nearby summer pagoda where he often made his evening devotions. Nathuram Godse
approached the frail politician, greeted him, then fired three shots at close range from a small-calibre revolver
that he had hidden in his clasped hands, striking Gandhi in the upper thigh, abdomen, and chest. As Gandhi fell to
the ground, he put his hand to his forehead in the Hindu gesture of forgiveness. He was quickly carried back into
Birla House and placed on a couch, his head resting in the lap of his granddaughter Mani, who minutes later told
the crowd: “Bapu is finished.” His final words were, allegedly, “He Ram, He Ram” (“Oh God, Oh God”).
The immediate aftermath

The funeral procession for Mahatma Gandhi, February 2, 1948

Funeral procession for Mahatma Gandhi, February 2, 1948, with a quote from the eulogy by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
News of Gandhi’s death spread quickly throughout India, generating a sometimes violent response. In Bombay (now Mumbai),
riots set fundamentalist Hindus against terrified Muslims. In New Delhi, throngs of people left their homes and businesses to
mourn at Birla House. Troops were sent to maintain order. A few hours after Gandhi’s death, a balcony window at Birla House
was opened and Gandhi’s body was carried outside and placed in a chair facing the crowd.
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru gave a radio address later in the evening in which he proclaimed a day of national mourning
and appealed for calm:
The light has gone out of our lives, and there is darkness everywhere. I do not know what to tell you and how to say it. Our
beloved leader, Bapu as we called him, the Father of the Nation, is no more.…We will not run to him for advice and seek solace
from him, and that is a terrible blow….The light has gone out, I said, and yet I was wrong….The light that has illumined this
country for these many years will illumine this country for many more years, and a thousand years later, that light will be seen in
this country and the world will see it and it will give solace to innumerable hearts.
Delhi, India: Raj Ghat Raj Ghat, a memorial to Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi, Delhi, India. At the end of his speech, Nehru
informed listeners that Gandhi’s body would be brought out at
11:30 am the following day and taken to the banks of the Yamuna River, a tributary of the Ganges.