Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869 to 1948) turned nonviolence from a personal ethic into a method of mass political struggle. Indians call him the Mahatma, “great soul,” a title he was uneasy with.

South Africa

Born in Porbandar in western India, Gandhi trained as a lawyer in London and in 1893 went to South Africa for a legal case. Soon after arriving he was thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg for refusing to leave a first-class compartment reserved for white passengers. He stayed for over twenty years, organizing the Indian community against discriminatory laws. In 1906, when the Transvaal government moved to require Indians to register and carry passes, Indians pledged to refuse, and over the following years thousands defied the law and accepted jail. Out of these campaigns Gandhi developed his method and its name.

Satyagraha

Satyagraha joins satya, truth, and agraha, firmness or holding. It is often translated “truth force” or “holding firmly to truth.” Key ideas:

• No one possesses the whole truth. Because you might be wrong, you must not harm your opponent; you should be willing to suffer yourself instead.
• Self-suffering: by accepting beatings, jail or hunger without retaliating, the resister aims to reach the conscience of the opponent and of onlookers.
• Means and ends are inseparable. Gandhi compared means to a seed and ends to a tree: violent means would grow a violent society.
• Constructive programme: resistance must be joined to building a better society now, through village industry, hand spinning, sanitation, education and work against untouchability.

The Salt March

Back in India from 1915, Gandhi led several national campaigns. The most famous began on 12 March 1930. British law gave the government a monopoly on salt and taxed it. Gandhi chose this target because salt touched every household, rich or poor, and the grievance was easy to understand. He walked with about 80 followers from his ashram near Ahmedabad to the coastal village of Dandi, roughly 240 miles (about 390 km). On 6 April, after more than three weeks on the road, he picked up a lump of natural salt, breaking the law. Across India, people made salt, boycotted British cloth and resigned government posts. About 60,000 people were jailed. Weeks later, at the Dharasana salt works, lines of volunteers walked toward police who beat them with steel-tipped clubs; none raised a hand, and reports spread around the world.

The march did not win independence directly, but it showed the power of a well-chosen symbol and badly damaged the moral standing of British rule.

Other methods

Gandhi used hartals (general shutdowns of business), boycotts of foreign goods, mass refusal to obey laws, and fasting. He called off the 1920 to 1922 non-cooperation movement after a crowd killed policemen at Chauri Chaura, insisting that discipline mattered more than momentum.

Limits and criticisms

• Caste. B.R. Ambedkar, leader of India's “untouchable” (Dalit) communities, argued that Gandhi opposed untouchability but defended the caste system itself for too long, and that Gandhi's 1932 fast pressured him to give up separate electorates for Dalits.
• Race. Gandhi's early South African writings contain contemptuous remarks about Black Africans, which his defenders say he later outgrew.
• Extreme regimes. In 1938 Gandhi advised Jews in Germany to resist Nazi persecution only nonviolently, advice many found unrealistic and painful.
• Causes of independence. Historians note that Britain's exhaustion after the Second World War, unrest in the armed forces and other movements also drove independence in 1947.

Independence came with partition and terrible communal violence. Gandhi fasted to stop the killing and was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist on 30 January 1948.

Worked example: why salt?

When Gandhi announced that the 1930 campaign would target the salt laws, many leaders of the Indian National Congress were puzzled. Why not aim at something bigger? Looking back, the choice shows strategic thinking that organizers still study.

• Universal. Everyone needs salt, so the tax touched rich and poor, Hindu and Muslim, city and village. Almost anyone could see the grievance.
• Simple to join. Breaking the law required only boiling seawater or picking up natural salt. No training, money or weapons were needed.
• A dilemma for the authorities. If officials ignored the lawbreaking, the salt law (and British authority) looked toothless. If they arrested tens of thousands of peaceful people for making salt, British rule looked petty and cruel. Either way the movement gained. Organizers today call this a dilemma action.
• Dramatic and slow. A walk of more than three weeks gave newspapers a daily story and let excitement build village by village.
• Linked to a bigger goal. The salt tax was small, but it stood for the larger claim that India's resources belonged to Indians.

The campaign also had limits. It did not win repeal of the salt laws, and the 1931 agreement that ended it, the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, disappointed many activists. Still, it turned independence from an elite demand into a mass movement and showed the world a new kind of struggle.