Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa

Introduction

MAHATMA GANDHI will be remembered as the architect of India's independence and the pioneer of nonviolence as a pattern of political action. Gandhi, a Hindu, was born in 1869 in the state of Gujarat, western India. His family sent him to London, England, to study law and, although he returned to Bombay, he left to live and work in South Africa in 1907. There, he worked ceaselessly to improve the rights of the immigrant Indians by taking part in passive protests against the government's discriminatory policies. It was there that he developed his creed of passive resistance against injustice or satyagrahas, meaning “truth force,” and began to be jailed as a result of his protests. Before he returned to India, he had radically changed the lives of Indians living in South Africa.

Discussion

The Indian movement of independence intensified in the 1920s due to a combination of factors such as the lack of satisfaction with existing measures—the Morley-Minot reforms of 1909 had not redressed total political domination of a white elite—and the increasing currency of ideas of national self-determination that undermined the basic premise of the British Empire. As a result, Gandhi began to encourage Indians to boycott British goods and buy Indian goods instead. This helped to revitalize local economies in India while having deleterious consequences for the British economy. The other two names to emerge in the 1920s as key actors of the independence movement were Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Jinnah.

Gandhi started his second civil disobedience campaign in 1930, during the time the Simon Commission reported on India's suitability for self-rule. This encompassed Gandhi deliberately shattering the law. After a 250-mile march to the sea, Gandhi started to produce his own salt, acting against a law stating that only the government could manufacture salt. This made a brutal conflict with the British authorities and Gandhi was arrested.

By the early 1930s, a sympathetic British viceroy organized two roundtable conferences in London to discuss the future of India. Although nothing directly emerged from these talks (as many INC members were in prison), the British government eventually passed the Government of India Act, introducing limited self-rule and an elected Indian assembly. From then on, and until the final independence of India, the biggest challenge to be faced by Gandhi and the independence movement was the degree of religious division between Hindus and Muslims. Although Gandhi and the Congress Party under Nehru were determined to preserve Indian unity, the results of the 1937 regional elections gave the Muslim League under Jinnah enough popular support to demand a separate state of their own to be called Pakistan.

The situation of Indian independence came to a head soon after the end of World War II. Gandhi, realizing that the religious issues of India were too deep, collaborated with the British in the build-up to independence in 1947. This association with the break-up of India was to cost him his life. The last two months of his life were spent trying to end the appalling ...