Mahatma Gandhi

Monhandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in the small town of Porbandar, on

the west coast of India, on October 2 1869. He belonged by birth to the
Vaishya, or trading caste. His father died when he was 15 years old, and apart
from that time, his mother became the greatest influence in his life. Her
spiritual teacher was a Jain devotee. Among the Jains in India the central
doctrine is the "sanctity of all life," or Ahimsa, which is often translated as
"non-violence." This teaching remained paramount with Gandhi.

In South Africa

When 19, he came to London, qualified as a barrister (being "called" at the

Inner Temple), and, returning to Bombay in 1892, set up a practice.

In 1896 he went to the Transvaal to help a client in a legal suit. That visit
changed the whole course of his life. Seeing the social and political disabilities
of his fellow-countrymen in South Africa, he decided to stay and help them
and soon he had become their political leader and adviser. Meanwhile a
religious conflict was taking place in within him. He read Tolstoy and
corresponded with him: the result was an experiment in the simple communal
life conducted by a small band of enthusiasts whom he had gathered together.
He became an ascetic of the most rigorous type, setting great store by fasting
and every form of self-denial. To the end of his life he remained a devout
Hindu, but declared if ever "untouchability" were made part of Hinduism he
would cease to be a Hindu. Perhaps the greatest religious effort of his life was
to break down "untouchability."

He went on steadily preparing his followers in South Africa for the struggle
which was to end the indignities under which they suffered. Three times he
went to prison. Little by little, the Indians gained the respect of the Europeans
in South Africa by the faith with which they obeyed their leader in his
campaigns of passive resistance. The summer of 1914 brought victory for the
cause, and in July of that year the Gandhi-Smuts Settlement was signed.

When the war of 1914-18 broke out he came to Britain to organise an Indian
ambulance corps (he had done ambulance work in both the Zulu campaign
and the Boer War), but was taken so seriously ill the doctors sent him back to
India. He founded a religious retreat on Tolstoyan lines near Ahmedabad, the
Viceroy conferred on him the Kalsar-Hind Gold Medal for distinguished
humanitarian work in South Africa, and, by general consent, he began to be
called by the name Mahatma, which means literally "Great Soul."

Non-Co-operation

A series of events quickly following each other at the end of the war brought
him back into political leadership. The first was the passing of the Rowlatt Act,
the second the tragedy of the Punjab and Amritsar, the third was what was
regarded in India as the betrayal of the Indian Moslems by the Treaty of
Sevres. He launched a non-co-operation movement in September,1920, but
the non-violence which he demanded from his followers was broken. Congress
revolted against his authority and the government selected the moment for
eliminating him from the political scene. He was arrested, brought to trial for
promoting disaffection, and sentenced to six years imprisonment.

On his return to politics he found himself a stranger in the existing

atmosphere of disillusioned realism. He yielded the leadership to C.R. Das and
Motilal Nehru, and retired to hand-spinning and the editing of his weekly
paper. He showed no desire to resume his old position as dictator, and for that
reason his moral supremacy was recognised even by his political rivals. So
when at the time of the Simon Commission the old Congress leaders found
that the young men were heading for revolution they decided that the only
remedy was to call him back.

Round table conference

Gandhi, on his return, demanded from the government more than Lord
Irwin's promise of future Dominion status or Ramsay MacDonald's offer of a
round-table Conference. Hence his illicit salt campaign and plans for mass
non-violence, which resulted in his second imprisonment in May, 1930.
Britain had well recognised that she could not afford to allow the Round-table
Conference, then sitting, to be a fiasco, and the new idea of an All-India
Federation and the principle of responsibility at the centre was adopted.

There followed the historic negotiation between Lord Irwin and Gandhi in
which - on March 4,1931- Gandhi agreed to urge Congress to take part in the
second Round-table Conference. But it soon became apparent at the
conference that Gandhi's idea of a settlement was radically different from
those of the Moslems, the Princes, or the British Government, and the only
hope was that he might consent to stand aside. His attitude was still
ambiguous when he returned to India from London at the end of the
conference, but the refusal of Lord Willingdon (who had succeeded Lord Irwin
as Viceroy) to discuss measures for restoring order decided for him his line of
action. Terms of imprisonment in which he embarked upon "fasts" followed.
Political India had meanwhile begun to look to Jawaharial Nehru for a lead -
and Gandhi left the centres of political activity to go on a long tour on behalf of
the untouchables' cause.

Thenceforward it seemed that his political influence was on the wane. But
congress had to meet the situation created by the Government's determination
to give India a new Constitution. The realists maintained that civil
disobedience had failed, and that Congress must try the policy of capturing the
Legislatures. Gandhi declared in favour of this; endeavouring at the same time
to avoid driving revolutionaries and idealists out of the Congress camp. All his
old prestige and popularity returned, and he achieved astonishing successes.

On his own authority in April, 1934, he called off the civil disobedience
campaign, and thus made it possible for the Indian Government again to
recognise the Congress as a legal and constitutional organisation. At the same
time he gave public approval the drift towards Parliamentarianism and,
finally, in October, he succeeded in remodelling the constitution of Congress
and directing its activities on more promising lines, creating on one side an
organisation for the development of village life and industries, and on the
other a Parliamentary board designed to organise electioneering and to
control the action of Congress members in the Legislatures.

Attitude to war

When war broke out in 1939 he was still the most influential man in India, and
the mass of Hindus looked to him for leadership. His attitude during the war
years was difficult to define. He could not be described as having opposed the
basic cause for which Great Britain stood - popular government, the rights of
the individual man, national independence. Yet he could not bring himself to
support the British in war. For one thing, he would never compromise over
pacifism. War, for whatever cause, was in his view a bad thing. Though evil
must be resisted, it could never be fought effectively by violence, for violence
was the root of all evil. Resistance to Germany and Japan must therefore be by
the same means of non-violence which he had himself used in India against
the British.

But Gandhi was not content with withholding support for the British war
effort. The war cut across his own struggle with the British for Indian
independence. He could not help using the war in order to aid what he
conceived to be India's cause. If in doing so he increased the chances of a
German or Japanese victory, which would in the long run have been fatal for
Indian independence itself, that was an incidental effect of his actions and was
never his intention. Moreover, when he was reproached that by his actions he
was weakening Great Britain, the main champion of the causes for which he
stood, he replied that Great Britain, by its imperialist rule in India, was
weakening itself morally. If this rule was liquidated, Great Britain's moral
stature would grow. In opposing Great Britain he was really working for its
welfare. At times he seemed maddeningly incapable of realising that, as the
world then stood, a morally purified Great Britain would have been of little use
to the cause of righteousness if it was also militarily weakened.

The Cripps Mission

The crisis in the war-time relations between Mr Gandhi and the British
Government came during the Cripps mission in the spring of 1942. Sir
Stafford Cripps took with him proposals for establishing in India immediately
after the war Dominion status of full self-government, with the right to declare
independence, the minimum provision being made to render the scheme
acceptable to Moslems. During the war the ultimate control of India's war
effort, and all that implied, was to rest with the British Government, Indian
politicians being invited to form the Government of India, subject only to that
ultimate control. These proposals were rejected by the Congress Working
Committee with Gandhi's approval and, it seems, chiefly at his instigation. The
crucial issue was "immediate independence," on which Congress insisted. The
manner in which British control was to be withdrawn and a provisional
Government substituted was set out - along with a threat of mass civil
disobedience, under Gandhi's direction - in a remarkable resolution of the
Congress Working Committee which formally summoned the British
Government to act on Gandhi's formula. "Leave India to God or anarchy."

The Indian Government retaliated by publishing the original draft of a

resolution drawn up by Gandhi for the Congress Working Committee on April
27, which showed that he expected India to use her independence to negotiate
for peace with Japan. The effect on opinion was such that Gandhi felt impelled
to explain away much that appeared on the face of the draft before the
resolution of July 14 came before the All-India Congress Committee at
Bombay in August. A few hours after the resolution had been carried he was
interned, as he must have expected to be.
The last phase

His internment ended in April, 1945. He was then 76 and though his hold over
the country was unshaken, he allowed the leadership in policies to pass
increasingly into the hands of Mr. Patel and Mr. Nehru. After the election of
the Labour Government, Great Britain made absolutely clear that it would lay
down its power in India, and the principal question was whether it should
transfer power to a unitary India or to two separate Governments of Hindu
and Moslem India. Mr. Gandhi was known to believe that the division of India
would be a calamity. At one time in the negotiations between Congress and the
British he seemed to acquiesce in division, as the price of freedom, but later he
reverted to unqualified opposition. Opinion in the Congress Working
Committee was, however, for division as the only solution, and Mr. Gandhi
therefore stood aside and left the decision to the younger men, believing that
they were taking a disastrous course, but believing too that the leadership
must now be in their hands.

His last few months he spent in continuous and not unsuccessful attempts to
restore peace in one area after another as communal hostility flared up into
massacre and calamity after the withdrawal of the British power. With a
number of disciples he made a progress through the disturbed parts of Bengal,
awing the excited masses into peace by the prestige of his name and his
asceticism. His reply to a renewal of violence in Calcutta in September was a
complete fast from everything but water. After three days peace was restored
and his fast was broken. Again early this month he met communal
disturbances in Delhi with another fast - of five days - which had great moral
effect and led to solemn assurances of consideration for the Moslem minority.
Less than a fortnight later he was to meet his death while engaged in religious
observances.

Thus at the end of his career he appeared more than ever before in his life a
being strayed out of the Middle Ages. And these last few months of his life, a
kind of coda, may have touched the Indian imagination more creatively than
any previous actions and have larger consequences.

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