Using nonviolent resistance based on public self-suffering to deprive oppressive leaders and regimes of all power and thereby effect profound social change
MOHANDAS GANDHI
(1869–1948)
“Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth,” Albert Einstein wrote of Mohandas Gandhi. The reality-redefining physicist could barely comprehend and only wonder at how a human being would so willingly embrace self-suffering rather than inflict suffering on another, no matter how oppressive that other was. Even more wonderful, in Einstein’s eyes, was Gandhi’s avowed expectation—the fulfilled expectation—that self-suffering was the ultimate weapon against tyranny.
As Einstein’s classic equation E=mc2 was the most elegantly simple expression of nature ever devised, so Gandhi’s method of creating social change was as simple in concept as it was difficult in execution. Through self-suffering, one human being can end some degree of injustice and oppression. It was an act of faith, but not merely of faith, for it was based on a logical understanding of motivation and political, social, and economic action. You cannot prevent another from causing you pain. If, however, you possess the courage to endure the pain that comes with refusing to yield to tyranny, you defeat the tyrant by rendering impotent the only weapon the tyrant possesses: coercion. It is a concept both simple and awesome to contemplate.
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Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869, in the coastal town of Porbandar, now a part of Gujarat, which borders Pakistan to the northwest and the Indian state of Rajasthan to the north and northeast. He was the youngest child of Hindu parents. His father, like his father before him, served as a diwan of Porbandar state, a liaison between the prince of Porbandar and the British government’s political agent (chief colonial administrative officer). Young Mohandas grew up greatly admiring his father’s practical political wisdom, his talent for resolving conflict, and his personal courage as a social leader. In Karamchand Gandhi, he saw a selfless public servant. In his mother, Putlibai, Mohandas saw an example of religious devotion and spiritual willpower. She was a follower of Jainism, a Hindu sect committed to nonviolence and vegetarianism—since killing animals was an unacceptable act of violence against the sacredness of life.
Mohandas Gandhi attended primary school and high school, and in 1883 he was married to Kasturba (whom Gandhi affectionately called “Ba”) in a traditional Hindu arranged marriage. The couple’s early life together was often tumultuous, and Gandhi came to regret his vain efforts to compel Kasturba to conform to his will. He became persuaded that voluntary obedience was the only valid and viable form of compliance. The Gandhis would have five sons, of whom all but one lived to adulthood.
In 1887, Gandhi enrolled in Samaldas College in Bhavnagar, Gujarat, but left after a single term for England to study law. The decision resulted in Gandhi’s excommunication from his caste, which forbade overseas travel. Craving acceptance by English society, young Gandhi began to dress and behave in emulation of an “English gentleman,” even though his circle of English friends consisted of people who held unconventional, even radical ideas. Before long, he rejected his worship of all things English and reasserted his Indian identity. In 1891, he qualified as a barrister and returned to India—only to discover that his London training had not adequately prepared him for a career in Indian law. He accepted a job offer from an Indian firm in South Africa and, in April 1893, once again left his native land, this time with his young family.
Gandhi discovered that the small South African Indian community was intensively oppressed by the white majority, which regarded Indians as nothing more than a source of cheap manual labor. Heavily taxed, Indians were nevertheless denied the rights of citizens, including the right to vote. Racial discrimination was pervasive, and in May 1893, while traveling by train from Durban to Pretoria to prosecute a lawsuit for a Muslim client, Gandhi was forced out of the first-class compartment for which he held a ticket. When the guard (conductor) told him he had to go to a third-class van, Gandhi protested: “But I have a first-class ticket.” The guard repeated his demand and threatened to “call a police constable to push you out.”
It was at this point that Gandhi uttered words that changed his life.
“Yes,” he replied, “you may. I refuse to get out voluntarily.”
He had discovered nonviolent “passive resistance.”
As a result of this incident—the police ejected him from the train, but he was not forced to “get out voluntarily”—Gandhi resolved to lead the Indian community in a campaign to transform the South African government and society. He met with local Indian community leaders and proposed forming an association to win rights. He organized laborers and sympathizers in passive resistance campaigns and founded the Natal Indian Congress to coordinate the movement. When, in the course of this work, a white mob nearly beat him to death, Gandhi responded by publicly forgiving his attackers. In 1903, he started a journal, Indian Opinion, and in 1904 he founded the Phoenix commune on three principles: that the good of the individual is contained in the good of all; that all work is equally valuable; and that only a life of labor is worth living. In 1907, he mounted a nonviolent campaign to overturn the newly passed Transvaal Asiatic Registration Act (TARA), a South African law requiring Indians living in the Transvaal to be fingerprinted and issued government registration certificates. He called the protest a “satyagraha campaign,” using a Hindu word meaning “quest for truth.” The campaign employed nonviolent civil disobedience to compel change: the entire South African Indian community refused to obey the registration law. The resisters were jailed, soon creating so great a burden on South African prisons that General Jan Smuts, the nation’s premier, repealed the registration law in exchange for voluntary submission to registration. When Smuts subsequently reneged, Gandhi led public burnings of the voluntary registration certificates and encouraged illegal crossings of the Transvaal border.
Securing 1,100 acres outside of Johannesburg, Gandhi founded Tolstoy Farm, a communal center of resistance and self-sufficiency. On the morning of November 6, 1913, in protest of a tax imposed on Indians, he led a “Great March” of 2,200 men and women in a mass illegal border crossing. There were arrests and incarcerations, but the world was watching the movement Gandhi had begun and, under international pressure, Smuts repealed the tax and relaxed the immigration laws.
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Having emerged as a remarkable leader of change in South Africa, Gandhi returned to India after twenty-one years. In May 1915 he founded the Satyagraha Ashram. Two years later, he embarked on his first Indian satyagraha campaign to liberate the indigo tenant farmers of Champaran (a district in northern Bihar) from oppression by their planter landlords. He was arrested and summoned to court to answer charges. He offered no defense but admitted his guilt, explaining that his obedience was to a higher law of conscience. The case was dropped, and Gandhi traveled throughout the district taking down stories of hardship from farmers. This moved the government to appoint a committee of inquiry in June 1917, and, in the end, the landlord planters were ordered to make restitution to their tenant farmers.
Gandhi conducted more satyagraha campaigns. While leading a textile-mill strike in 1918, he introduced the fast as a means of applying moral pressure on the mill owners to accept arbitration. The owners did not want to be responsible for the self-starvation of Gandhi, so they agreed to binding arbitration, which resulted in a substantial wage increase. Gandhi applied satyagraha to other campaigns, and soon the Indian peasants were awakened to the power of mass civil disobedience. This prompted the British government, early in 1919, to pass the Rowlatt Acts, which criminalized the possession of any antigovernment document with the “intention” to circulate it. The satyagraha Gandhi led against the law swept up all of India, and the country effectively ground to a halt in a general strike, protest, and boycott. Colonial officials arrested Gandhi. Against his will, violence erupted in response; however, the protests also managed to unite Muslims and Hindus for a common purpose.
Gandhi’s satisfaction in this result was short-lived. On April 13, 1919, British general Reginald Dyer attacked a mass meeting of some ten thousand in Amritsar at the Jallianwala Bagh, a public space of seven acres enclosed by a wall through which there were just five exits. Two British armored cars, each with machine guns, opened fire on the protesters, killing more than a thousand Indians in ten minutes. At the next meeting of the Indian National Congress, Gandhi called for a new round of nonviolent resistance, including the revival of traditional Indian hand spinning and weaving as alternatives to importing British cloth. The boycott was economically devastating to the British textile industry.
Soon also, the British government broke its pledge to support the Ottoman sultan of Turkey against the republican revolution seeking to overthrow him. Indian Muslims saw any contribution to the sultan’s overthrow as an attack on Islam. Gandhi rallied Indian Hindus to join in supporting the nation’s Muslims and proposed what he called “non-cooperation” with the British government—a massive program of nonviolent civil disobedience that amounted to a large-scale boycott of British laws, institutions, mercantile concerns, and import merchandise. With this, Gandhi led India to turn its back on Britain—the first step toward swaraj, or home rule for India. The swaraj movement called for renunciation of all titles and honors conferred by the British government and a total boycott of law courts, educational institutions, councils, elections, imported merchandise (especially foreign cloth), and all functions of government. If Britain had no one to rule in India, it could not rule India. Gandhi promoted a program of Indian national education and Indian home industries, especially the spinning and weaving of homespun cloth.
As noncooperation swept the nation, Indians in 1921 bestowed on Gandhi the title of Mahatma—roughly, “Great Soul”—and he was widely worshipped as a quasi-messiah. The government responded with mass arrests, which only inflamed India. As violence broke out, Gandhi appealed to the Congress to suspend the campaign. He himself was arrested, tried, and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment for sedition, but released in 1924 for an appendectomy. With the country still roiled by violence, he fasted for three weeks in a bid to restore nonviolence. He launched a new satyagraha in 1928, protesting a sharp increase in land taxes with an expanded anti-British boycott. Indian officials resigned en masse, so severely crippling the colonial government that officials released political prisoners, returned seized lands, and compensated individuals for other property loss. Gandhi believed the time was now ripe for the “Salt satyagraha.”
After the British viceroy rejected his demands for self-government, Gandhi decided to attack the salt law, which taxed salt—a staple of rich and poor alike—and outlawed the manufacture of one’s own salt as well as the purchase of untaxed domestic salt. On March 12, 1930, in a demonstration extensively covered by the international press, Gandhi led a 240-mile march to the sea, where he intended to break the law by “making salt”—gathering the natural sea salt that had crystallized under the sun on the beach. When Gandhi reached the ocean and picked up a fistful of salty mud on April 6, Indians began making and selling illegal salt everywhere. Although Gandhi and others were arrested, international pressure moved the viceroy to repeal the salt tax and other repressive measures.
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Mahatma Gandhi was now one of the most famous men in the world. He went to London to attend the Round Table Conference of 1931 as the representative of the Indian National Congress. He visited the English textile workers, who were hard-pressed by the Indian boycott, yet who expressed enthusiastic solidarity with Gandhi’s movement. No sooner did the world-famous Gandhi return to India, however, than he discovered that the government had arrested his movement’s key leaders. When Gandhi protested to the viceroy, he himself was arrested and the Indian National Congress declared illegal. As the British endeavored to create division among the Hindus by making the segregation of the lower from the upper castes a matter of colonial law, Gandhi announced from prison a “fast unto death” beginning on September 20, 1932. The fast succeeded in uniting the Hindus against the segregation. This persuaded Gandhi, weak and near death, to break his fast.
The outbreak of World War II in September 1939 brought a new crisis. Britain took India into the war without even consulting Indian leaders. Gandhi launched a civil disobedience campaign against the curtailment of freedom in wartime; but when Japan joined World War II in December 1941, posing an immediate threat to India, the British proposed granting India dominion status, which would give the individual Indian states and provinces the authority to secede from the empire after the war. Gandhi saw this as an attempt to dismember India, and the Congress rejected it, passing instead a “Quit India” resolution on August 8, 1942, setting total and complete independence as its objective. Gandhi and other Congress leaders were jailed, and, absent his direct leadership, the independence movement became violent.
While both Gandhi and his wife, Kasturba, were in prison, Kasturba died from pneumonia on February 22, 1942. In deep despair, Gandhi suffered a decline in his own health, which alarmed his jailers, who released him in May. The end of World War II in September 1945 brought the Labour Party to power in Britain, and the liberalized government began to cooperate with Gandhi and the Congress to work out terms of independence. The British wanted to partition India into three provincial groups, one dominated by a Hindu majority, the other two by Muslim majorities. Gandhi was adamant against dismembering the nation. The dispute between the Hindus and the Muslims grew violent, even as Gandhi walked from house to house in Calcutta barefoot, to talk and to listen to both sides, desperate to reconcile them. At the very verge of independence, India was also on the brink of civil war. The Congress defied Gandhi by creating an independent Pakistan. While some celebrated independence on August 15, 1947, Gandhi embarked on a new “fast unto death” in a successful effort to restore peace between Calcutta’s Hindus and Muslims.
Hindu extremists were horrified that, in the end, Gandhi served India and not the Hindus of India. He was denounced by the extremist fringe as a traitor. Various attempts were made on his life, including the detonation of a bomb at one of his regular prayer meetings. Gandhi, however, refused to allow the fear of death to deter him from working to unite Muslims and Hindus. At 5:10 in the afternoon on January 30, 1948, as he walked onto the lawn of Birla House, where he was living in New Delhi, to join about five hundred others in prayers, he was shot at point-blank range by Nathuram Vinayak Godse, a Hindu extremist. Although Mahatma Gandhi’s Hindu supporters insisted that he died with “Hey Ram” (Oh God) on his lips, others present recalled only a sigh or perhaps the single syllable “Ah,” which they interpreted as an expression of empathy for the state of humanity.
His end was tragic, but what Gandhi had achieved was real and momentous. Not only did his life of nonviolent resistance bring about the dismantling of the British Empire and signal a reversal of European imperialism generally, it inspired the many nonviolent leaders who followed him—most notably, in the United States, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.