Gandhi and Indian Independence
In 1915, at age forty-five, Gandhi arrived in Bombay. Considered a national hero, he was given the title Mahatma (Great Soul). In the in dustrial city of Ahmedabad in his native Gujarat, Gandhi established an ashram (community), where he continued training his core of disciplined followers. In 1917, he led a strike of mill workers in Ahmedabad and a peasant strike in the district of Kheda. After World War I (Gandhi supported military service during the conflict as a claim for full partnership), the continuation of wartime antiterrorist legislation under the Rowlett Act thrust Gandhi into the national limelight when he called for a nationwide one-day work stoppage in April 1919. According to Hunt, the unforeseen disturbances accompanying the protest “led to a brutal repression in Amristsar, where 379 unarmed civilians were killed.” Gandhi received an appointment to the investigation committee of the Indian National Congress (INC) and constructed a report that contradicted the official account presented by the ruling British government.
Mahatma Gandhi understood the importance of trade for empire and used the boycott of British goods as a method for driving India’s imperial rulers out of the subcontinent. (Library of Congress)
By 1920, Gandhi had accumulated significant political power within the INC. He organized an effective campaign that reached into the villages to begin his first mass noncooperation campaign, calling for the boycott of the schools, law courts, polls, legislative councils, and perhaps eventually taxes, as well as the renunciation of foreign goods. His movement for Indian independence from British rule advocated Indian self-reliance. In 1922, British judges sentenced him to six years in prison, but he was released in 1924 because of ill health. In 1929, he called for complete independence. Throughout the 1920s, according to Judith Brown, Gandhi had experimented “with a whole range of symbolic and small-scale modes of Satyagraha, such as refusing to wear foreign cloth, selling banned books and papers, [and] making salt illegally.” On March 12, 1930, in one of his most daring acts of civil disobedience, later called the Gandhi Salt March, he walked 240 miles to the sea at Dandi, where, as Hunt describes, he intentionally made salt “and launched a national wave of protest resulting in the jailing of over 60,000 men and women.” Again, British officials sentenced him to jail. In 1931, he won his release after negotiating the “Gandhi-Irwin Pact” with the viceroy, thus ending the protests with a compromise on the salt issue.
The coming of war in 1939 led to further calls for independence. In these struggles, Gandhi’s “constructive program” focused on three functions of civil disobedience: to redress a local wrong; to rouse consciousness of a particular wrong; and in the struggle for political freedom, to concentrate on a particular issue like freedom of speech. He expressly warned that “civil disobedience can never be directed for a general cause such as independence. The issue must be definite and capable of being clearly understood within the power of the opponent to yield.” In October 1940, he conducted a number of “individual satyagrahas” aimed at opposing Britain’s refusal to let Indians decide their own participation in the Indian army. In 1942, Gandhi declared a “Quit India” campaign; he and other INC leaders remained jailed until 1944. His nonviolent campaigns netted him a total of 2,338 days in the prisons of South Africa and India.
India finally achieved independence in 1947. Independence occurred at the same time as the partitioning of the subcontinent as Muslim Pakistan separated from predominantly Hindu India. For years, Gandhi sought to ease tensions be tween the Hindus and Muslims, arguing that they belonged to one nation. On January 30, 1848, in New Delhi, a Hindu assassinated him, blaming Gandhi for the partition because of his sensitivity to India’s Muslim minority.
Gandhi became the first person to demonstrate effectively the strength of nonviolent civil disobedience. Many of his protests focused on economic and trade issues. His “constructive program” concentrated on social and economic uplift for India’s millions. More than any other person in the twentieth century, with the possible exception of Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi dedicated his life to peace and economic justice. For him, no distinction existed between one’s public and private life. He insisted that “the public and political domain, as much as the life of the individual, must be seen as a moral enterprise, as the arena in which men and women must seek after ultimate truth and love according to it.”
Charles F. Howlett
See also: British Empire; Salt.