Man of Firm Step
Independence for India
When World War II broke out, the Congress party and
Gandhi demanded a declaration of war aims and their
application to India. As a reaction to the unsatisfactory response
from the British, the party decided not to support Britain in the
war unless the country were granted complete and immediate
independence. The British refused, offering compromises that
were rejected. When Japan entered the war, Gandhi still refused
to agree to Indian participation. He was interned in 1942 but was
released two years later because of failing health.
Kamat's Potpourri
By 1944 the Indian struggle for independence was in its final
stages, the British government having agreed to independence
on condition that the two contending nationalist groups, the
Muslim League and the Congress party, should resolve their
differences. Gandhi stood steadfastly against the partition of
India but ultimately had to agree, in the hope that internal peace
would be achieved after the Muslim demand for separation had
been satisfied. India and Pakistan became separate states when
the British granted India its independence in 1947 (see:
Tryst with Destiny -- the story of India's independence). During
the riots that followed the partition of India, Gandhi pleaded with
Hindus and Muslims to live together peacefully. Riots engulfed
Calcutta, one of the largest cities in India, and the Mahatma fasted
until disturbances ceased. On January 13, 1948, he undertook
another successful fast in New Delhi to bring about peace, but on
January 30, 12 days after the termination of that fast, as he was on
his way to his evening prayer meeting, he was assassinated by a
fanatic Hindu.
Gandhi's death was regarded as an international catastrophe. His
place in humanity was measured not in terms of the 20th century,
but in terms of history. A period of mourning was set aside in the
United Nations General Assembly, and condolences to India were
expressed by all countries. Religious violence soon waned in India
and Pakistan, and the teachings of Gandhi came to inspire nonviolent
movements elsewhere, notably in the U.S.A. under the civil rights
leader Martin Luther King, Jr. and in South Africa under Nelson Mandela
Resistance to Injustice
Gandhi remained in South Africa for twenty years, suffering
imprisonment many times. In 1896, after being attacked and
humilated by white South Africans, Gandhi began to teach a
policy of passive resistance to, and non-cooperation with, the
South African authorities. Part of the inspiration for this policy
came from the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, whose influence on
Gandhi was profound. Gandhi also acknowledged his debt to
the teachings of Christ and to the 19th-century American writer
Henry David Thoreau, especially to Thoreau's famous essay
"Civil Disobedience." Gandhi considered the terms passive
resistance and civil disobedience inadequate for his purposes,
however, and coined another term, Satyagraha (from Sanskrit,
"truth and firmness"). During the Boer War, Gandhi organized an
ambulance corps for the British army and commanded a Red
Cross unit. After the war he returned to his campaign for Indian rights
. In 1910, he founded Tolstoy Farm, near Durban, a cooperative
colony for Indians. In 1914 the government of the Union of South
Africa made important concessions to Gandhi's demands, including
recognition of Indian marriages and abolition of the poll tax for them.
His work in South Africa complete, he returned to India.
Campaign for Home Rule
the Indian campaign for home rule. Following
World War I, in which he played an active part
in recruiting campaigns, Gandhi, again advocating
Satyagraha, launched his movement of non-violent resistance to
Great Britain. When, in 1919, Parliament passed the Rowlatt Acts,
giving the Indian colonial authorities emergency powers to deal
with so-called revolutionary activities, Satyagraha spread throughout
India, gaining millions of followers. A demonstration against the
Rowlatt Acts resulted in a massacre of Indians at Amritsar by British
soldiers; in 1920, when the British government failed to make amends,
Gandhi proclaimed an organized campaign of non-cooperation.
Indians in public office resigned, government agencies such as courts
of law were boycotted, and Indian children were withdrawn from
government schools. Throughout India, streets were blocked by
squatting Indians who refused to rise even when beaten by police.
Gandhi was arrested, but the British were soon forced to release him.
Economic independence for India, involving the complete boycott
of British goods, was made a corollary of Gandhi's Swaraj (from Sanskrit,
"self-governing") movement. The economic aspects of the movement were
significant, for the exploitation of Indian villagers by British
industrialists had resulted in extreme poverty in the country
and the virtual destruction of Indian home industries. As a
remedy for such poverty, Gandhi advocated revival of cottage
industries; he began to use a spinning wheel as a token of the
return to the simple village life he preached, and of the renewal
of native Indian industries.
Gandhi became the international symbol of a free India. He lived
a spiritual and ascetic life of prayer, fasting, and meditation. His
union with his wife became, as he himself stated, that of a brother
and sister. Refusing earthly possessions, he wore the loincloth and
shawl of the lowliest Indian and subsisted on vegetables, fruit juices,
and goat's milk. Indians revered him as a saint and began to call him
Mahatma (great-souled), a title reserved for the greatest sages. Gandhi's
advocacy of nonviolence, known as ahimsa (non-violence), was the
expression of a way of life implicit in the Hindu religion. By the Indian
practice of nonviolence, Gandhi held, Great Britain too would eventually
consider violence useless and would leave India.
The Mahatma's political and spiritual hold on India was so great that the
British authorities dared not interfere with him. In 1921 the Indian
National Congress, the group that spearheaded the movement for
nationhood, gave Gandhi complete executive authority, with the
right of naming his own successor. The Indian population, however,
could not fully comprehend the unworldly ahimsa. A series of
armed revolts against the British broke out, culminating in such
violence that Gandhi confessed the failure of the civil-disobedience
campaign he had called, and ended it. The British government again
seized and imprisoned him in 1922.
After his release from prison in 1924, Gandhi withdrew from active
politics and devoted himself to propagating communal unity.
Unavoidably, however, he was again drawn into the vortex of the
struggle for independence. In 1930 the Mahatma proclaimed a
new campaign of civil disobedience, calling upon the Indian population
to refuse to pay taxes, particularly the tax on salt. The campaign was
a march to the sea, in which thousands of Indians followed Gandhi from
Ahmedabad to the Arabian Sea, where they made salt by evaporating
sea water. Once more the Indian leader was arrested, but he was
released in 1931, halting the campaign after the British made
concessions to his demands. In the same year Gandhi represented
the Indian National Congress at a conference in London.
Gandhi takes on Domestic Problems
In 1932, Gandhi began new civil-disobedience campaigns
against the British. Arrested twice, the Mahatma fasted for
long periods several times; these fasts were effective
measures against the British, because revolution might
well have broken out in India if he had died. In September
1932, while in jail, Gandhi undertook a "fast unto death"
to improve the status of the Hindu Untouchables. The British,
by permitting the Untouchables to be considered as a
separate part of the Indian electorate, were, according to
Gandhi, countenancing an injustice. Although he was himself
a member of an upper caste, Gandhi was the great leader
of the movement in India dedicated to eradicating the unjust
social and economic aspects of the caste system.
In 1934 Gandhi formally resigned from politics, being
replaced as leader of the Congress party by Jawaharlal Nehru.
Gandhi traveled through India, teaching ahimsa and demanding
eradication of "untouchability." The esteem in which he was held
was the measure of his political power. So great was this
power that the limited home rule granted by the British in
1935 could not be implemented until Gandhi approved it.
A few years later, in 1939, he again returned to active
political life because of the pending federation of Indian
principalities with the rest of India. His first act was a
fast, designed to force the ruler of the state of Rajkot to
modify his autocratic rule. Public unrest caused by the fast
was so great that the colonial government intervened; the
demands were granted. The Mahatma again became the
most important political figure in India.
