Mohandas Gandhi
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Mohandas Gandhi was a religious man, however, his religious beliefs did not come from his childhood but from his studies that he began as a political activist in South Africa. Upon his return to India from England, he had had a rough start as a lawyer and accepted an offer to work on a case in South Africa. He ended up staying in South Africa for more than twenty years. In South Africa Gandhi became a leader of the Indian immigration population. Gandhi had to learn skills to overcome caste, class, and religious divisions to build a base for dramatic mass actions. In the process, Gandhi’s religious development influenced his politics. He believed that the search for truth was the goal of human life, and since “no one could ever be sure of having attained the ultimate truth, use of violence to enforce one’s own necessarily partial understanding of it was sinful.”
Gandhi had worked out the basic strategy of nonviolent resistance, which he called satyagraha. It consisted of training a core of volunteers who helped to lead mass marches and mass violations of specific laws that resulted in intentional mass arrests. Three satyagraha campaigns made him famous in India even before he returned. While he was still in South Africa, Gandhi wrote about India in his pamphlet, “Hind Swaraj,” and targeted industrial civilization because he thought that was the real enemy.
The appeal of Gandhis non-violence strategy appealed to two groups of people. It appealed to masses of villagers because it was a collective way to resist, trying to rise above all the violence and show the dignity of their cause. It also appealed to the wealthy merchants, landlords, and small-holding peasants who supported Gandhi because it offered the hope of getting rid of the British while not threatening to destroy their property or endanger their economic and social position.
Gandhi returned to India and joined the Indian National Congress during the First World War. The war was bringing an economic and political crisis for the British, and space opened up for Indian textile bosses to get a greater share of the home market. A growing section of them was impatient with British control of the market, and many became supporters of the nationalist movement.
The Rowlatt Act, which sought to extend war-time restrictions on civil rights, coincided with a strike wave by mill workers. Gandhis approach to the Rowlatt Act was to launch a satyagraha to channel peoples anger in a nonviolent direction. He called for mass demonstrations nationwide, but called them for a Sunday so as not to encourage work stoppages.
Mass marches and strikes broke out in many other cities, and the middle class started to fear the militancy of workers and peasants. Gandhi expressed this concern by condemning the violence that had broken out on both sides, though it was far from equal. Gandhi felt he had made a mistake in calling for mass civil disobedience without enough organizational and ideological control over the movement.
But the next mass movement, the Non-Cooperation Movement, also unleashed forces beyond Gandhis control, and he called the campaign off when a crowd in Chauri-Chaura responded to police beatings and gunfire by killing cops. The fact that Gandhi could call an all-India movement–and then call it off when it got too militant for his taste shows how important he had become to the national movement.
Gandhi also