Mahatma Gandhi
Hero of Indian Independence
by Jayasri Jayakody
When celebrating Sri Lanka's
independence from the British rule, one cannot disregard the Indian
freedom fighters who wrested power from the colonialists in a series of
bloody skirmishes.
Their success led to the British relinquishing Sri Lanka, then
Ceylon, almost without a struggle. The greatest
Indian freedom activist, Gandhi, became the figurehead of the struggle
for home rule. The leaders of our freedom struggle learnt a lot from the
Mahatma.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in Porbandar in the present state
of Gujar?t on October 2, 1869, and educated in law in London. In 1891,
he was admitted to the British bar.
Gandhi returned to India and attempted unsuccessfully to establish a
law practice in Bombay (now Mumbai). Two years later an Indian firm with
interests in South Africa retained him as legal adviser in its office in
Durban.
Arriving in Durban, Gandhi found himself treated as an inferior and
was appalled at the widespread denial of civil liberties and political
rights to Indian immigrants to South Africa. He threw himself into the
struggle for elementary rights for Indians.
For 20 years Gandhi remained in South Africa, suffering imprisonment
many times. In 1896, after being attacked and beaten by white South
Africans, Gandhi began to teach a policy of passive resistance to, and
noncooperation 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 (Sanskrit for "truth and firmness").
After the war he returned to his campaign for Indian rights. In 1910,
he founded Tolstoy Farm, near Johannesburg, 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.
Gandhi became a leader in a complex struggle, the Indian campaign for
home rule. Following World War I, in which he played an active part in
recruiting campaigns, Gandhi, advocating Satyagraha, launched his
movement of passive resistance to 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 through 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 organised campaign of noncooperation. Indians in public office
resigned, government agencies such as courts of law were boycotted, and
Indian children were withdrawn from government schools.
Through 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 (Sanskrit,
"self-ruling") 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 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
(Sanskrit, "great soul"), a title reserved for the greatest sages.
Gandhi's advocacy of nonviolence, known as ahimsa (Sanskrit, "noninjury"),
was the expression of a way of life implicit in the Hindu religion. By
the Indian practice of nonviolence, Gandhi held, 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. The Indian
population, however, could not fully comprehend the unworldly ahimsa. A
series of armed revolts against Britain 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.
Released 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 Ahmadabad 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.
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 the
Vaisya (merchant) 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.
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.
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. During the riots that followed the
partition of India, Gandhi pleaded with Hindus and Muslims to live
together peacefully. Riots engulfed Calcutta (now Kolkata), 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 Nathuram Godse, a Hindu fanatic.
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. under the civil rights leader Martin Luther King,
Jr. |