At the request of
Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Gandhi returned to India in 1915. Gandhi joined the
Indian National Congress and was introduced to Indian issues, politics and the Indian people primarily by Gokhale. Gokhale was a key leader of the Congress Party best known for his restraint and moderation, and his insistence on working inside the system. Gandhi took Gokhale's liberal approach based on British
Whiggish traditions and transformed it to make it look Indian. Gandhi agreed to support the war effort. However, Gandhi stipulated in a letter to the
Viceroy's private secretary that he "personally will not kill or injure anybody, friend or foe." Gandhi's support for the war campaign brought into question his consistency on nonviolence.
Gandhi's private secretary noted that "The question of the consistency between his creed of '
Ahimsa' (nonviolence) and his recruiting campaign was raised not only then but has been discussed ever since." In July 1918, Gandhi said that he could not persuade even one individual to enlist for the world war. "So far I have not a single recruit to my credit apart," Gandhi wrote. He added: "They object because they fear to die."
Champaran agitations Gandhi's first major achievement came in 1917 with the
Champaran agitation in
Bihar. The Champaran agitation pitted the local peasantry against largely Anglo-Indian plantation owners who were backed by the local administration. The peasants were forced to grow indigo (
Indigofera sp.), a cash crop for
Indigo dye whose demand had been declining over two decades and were forced to sell their crops to the planters at a fixed price. Unhappy with this, the peasantry appealed to Gandhi at his
ashram in Ahmedabad. Pursuing a strategy of nonviolent protest, Gandhi took the administration by surprise and won concessions from the authorities. organising scores of supporters and fresh volunteers from the region, the most notable being
Vallabhbhai Patel. Using non-co-operation as a technique, Gandhi initiated a signature campaign where peasants pledged non-payment of revenue even under the threat of confiscation of land. A social boycott of
mamlatdars and
talatdars (revenue officials within the district) accompanied the agitation. Gandhi worked hard to win public support for the agitation across the country. For five months, the administration refused, but by the end of May 1918, the government gave way on important provisions and relaxed the conditions of payment of revenue tax until the famine ended. In Kheda, Vallabhbhai Patel represented the farmers in negotiations with the British, who suspended revenue collection and released all the prisoners. This was in part motivated by the British promise to reciprocate the help with
swaraj (self-government) to Indians after the war. Instead, the British government offered only minor reforms, disappointing Gandhi. He announced his
satyagraha (civil disobedience) intentions. The British countered with the
Rowlatt Act to block Gandhi's movement, making civil disobedience a criminal offence and enabling internment without trial. Gandhi leveraged the
Khilafat Movement, wherein
Sunni Muslims in India championed the Turkish
Caliph as a symbol of Sunni Islam (
ummah). Gandhi's support gave mixed results. It initially brought strong Muslim support. However, Hindu leaders including Rabindranath Tagore questioned Gandhi's leadership because they opposed recognising the Caliph. Gandhi's increased Muslim support temporarily stopped Hindu-Muslim communal violence, and helped sideline
Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Jinna went on to lead the demand for a Muslim homeland. Though they agreed on Indian independence, they disagreed on the means of achieving it. Jinnah favoured constitutional negotiation, rather than agitating the masses. In 1922, the Khilafat Movement collapsed following the end of the
non-cooperation movement and Gandhi's arrest. A number of Muslim leaders abandoned Gandhi and Congress. Hindu-Muslim communal conflicts reignited, and deadly religious riots re-appeared in numerous cities.
Non-co-operation en route to a meeting in
Madras in September 1921. Earlier, in
Madurai, on 21 September 1921, Gandhi had adopted the
loin-cloth for the first time as a symbol of his identification with India's poor. With his book
Hind Swaraj (1909) Gandhi, aged 40, declared that British rule was established in India with the co-operation of Indians and had survived only because of this. If Indians refused to co-operate, British rule would collapse and
swaraj (Indian independence) would come. In February 1919, Gandhi cautioned the Viceroy of India that the
Rowlatt Act would result in civil disobedience. The British government ignored him, and the
satyagraha civil disobedience followed, with British law officers firing on unarmed people. Riots followed; Gandhi urged peaceful protest. The
Jallianwala Bagh massacre enraged the subcontinent. Gandhi criticised his fellow countrymen for not exclusively using "love" to deal with the "hate" of the British government. Gandhi shifted his attention to
swaraj and political independence for India. In 1921, Gandhi became the leader of the Indian National Congress. Gandhi expanded his nonviolence to include the
swadeshi policy – the boycott of foreign-made goods, especially British goods, and to boycott British institutions and law courts. Gandhi was arrested on 10 March 1922, tried for sedition, and sentenced to six years' imprisonment.
Salt Satyagraha (Salt March/Civil Disobedience Movement) After his release from prison in 1924, Gandhi continued to pursue
swaraj. He pushed through a resolution at the Calcutta Congress in December 1928 calling on the British government to grant India
dominion status or face further non-cooperation. The British did not respond favourably. Gandhi led Congress in a celebration on 26 January 1930 of
India's Independence Day in Lahore. Gandhi launched a new Satyagraha against the British salt tax in March 1930, condemning British rule in a letter to the viceroy. This was highlighted by the Salt March from 12 March to 6 April, where Gandhi and volunteers marched from Ahmedabad to Dandi, Gujarat to make salt himself, with the declared intention of breaking the salt laws, watched by huge crowds. On 5 May, Gandhi was interned under a regulation dating from 1827 in anticipation of a planned protest. The protest at Dharasana salt works on 21 May went ahead without Gandhi and was brutally suppressed. The campaign succeeded in upsetting the British; Britain responded by imprisoning at least 60,000 people.
Gandhi as folk hero Indian Congress in the 1920s appealed to
Andhra Pradesh peasants by creating Telugu language plays that combined Indian mythology and legends, linked them to Gandhi's ideas, and portrayed Gandhi as a
messiah, a reincarnation of ancient and medieval Indian nationalist leaders and saints. The plays built support among peasants steeped in traditional Hindu culture, according to Murali, and this effort made Gandhi a folk hero in Telugu speaking villages, a sacred messiah-like figure.
Negotiations The government, represented by
Lord Irwin, the
Viceroy of India, decided to negotiate with Gandhi. The
Gandhi–Irwin Pact was signed in March 1931. The British Government agreed to free all
political prisoners, in return for the suspension of the civil disobedience movement. According to the pact, Gandhi was invited to attend the Round Table Conference in London for discussions and as the sole representative of the Indian National Congress. The conference was a disappointment to Gandhi and the nationalists. Gandhi expected to discuss India's independence, while the British side focused on the Indian princes and Indian minorities rather than on a transfer of power. Lord Irwin's successor,
Lord Willingdon, took a hard line against India as an independent nation, began a new campaign of controlling and subduing the nationalist movement. Gandhi was again arrested, and the government tried and failed to negate his influence by completely isolating him from his followers. In Britain,
Winston Churchill, a prominent Conservative politician who was then out of office but later became its prime minister, became a vigorous and articulate critic of Gandhi and opponent of his long-term plans. Churchill said in a widely reported 1931 speech: Churchill's bitterness against Gandhi grew in the 1930s. He called Gandhi as the one who was "seditious in aim" whose evil genius and multiform menace was attacking the British empire. Churchill called him a dictator, a "Hindu
Mussolini", fomenting a race war, trying to replace the Raj with
Brahmin cronies, playing on the ignorance of Indian masses, all for selfish gain. Churchill attempted to isolate Gandhi, and his criticism of Gandhi was widely covered by European and American press. It gained Churchill sympathetic support, but it also increased support for Gandhi among Europeans. The developments heightened Churchill's anxiety that the "British themselves would give up out of pacifism and misplaced conscience."
Round Table Conferences at Birla House, 1939 During the discussions between Gandhi and the British government over 1931–32 at the
Round Table Conferences, Gandhi, now aged about 62, sought constitutional reforms as a preparation to the end of colonial British rule, and begin the self-rule by Indians. The British side sought reforms that would keep the Indian subcontinent as a colony. The British negotiators proposed constitutional reforms on a British Dominion model that established separate electorates based on religious and social divisions. The British questioned the Congress party and Gandhi's authority to speak for all of India. They invited Indian religious leaders, such as Muslims and Sikhs, to press their demands along religious lines, as well as
B. R. Ambedkar as the representative leader of the untouchables. Gandhi vehemently opposed a constitution that enshrined rights or representations based on communal divisions, because he feared that it would not bring people together but divide them, perpetuate their status, and divert the attention from India's struggle to end the colonial rule. The Second Round Table conference was the only time Gandhi left India between 1914 and his death in 1948. He was accompanied by his secretary
Mahadev Desai, son
Devdas Gandhi and British supporter
Mirabehn. Gandhi declined the government's offer of accommodation in an expensive
West End hotel, preferring to stay in the
East End, to live among working-class people, as he did in India. Gandhi based himself in a small
cell-bedroom at his friend
Muriel Lester's "People's House" at
Kingsley Hall for the three-month duration of his stay. He was enthusiastically received by East Enders. Local children gave him toys for his birthday and Lester noted that he would gently place them on window sills and in carriages during his stay and took them back to India. The resulting public outcry forced the government, in consultations with Ambedkar, to replace the Communal Award with a compromise
Poona Pact.
Congress politics In 1934, Gandhi resigned from Congress party membership. He did not disagree with the party's position, but felt that if he resigned, Gandhi's popularity with Indians would cease to stifle the party's membership, which actually varied, including communists, socialists, trade unionists, students, religious conservatives, and those with pro-business convictions, and that these various voices would get a chance to make themselves heard. Gandhi also wanted to avoid being a target for Raj propaganda by leading a party that had temporarily accepted political accommodation with the Raj. In 1936, Gandhi returned to active politics again with the Nehru presidency and the Lucknow session of the Congress. Although Gandhi wanted a total focus on the task of winning independence and not speculation about India's future, he did not restrain the Congress from adopting socialism as its goal. Gandhi had a clash with Subhas Chandra Bose, who had been elected president in 1938, and who had previously expressed a lack of faith in nonviolence as a means of protest. Despite Gandhi's opposition, Bose won a second term as Congress President, against Gandhi's nominee,
Bhogaraju Pattabhi Sitaramayya. Gandhi declared that Sitaramayya's defeat was his defeat. Bose later left the Congress when the All-India leaders resigned en masse in protest of his abandonment of the principles introduced by Gandhi. Violent attacks were carried out by nationalists against the British. Gandhi was motivated by his belief that India could not be party to a war for democratic freedom while that freedom was denied to India. He explicitly called for the British to
Quit India in a 1942 speech in Mumbai. The British government responded quickly, arresting Gandhi. Indians retaliated by damaging hundreds of government owned railway stations and police stations, and cutting telegraph wires. In 1942, Gandhi urged his people to completely stop co-operating with the imperial government, again calling for non-violence. He urged Indians to
karo ya maro ("do or die") in the cause of their rights and freedoms. His arrest lasted two years. He was released before the end of the war on 6 May 1944 because of his failing health and necessary surgery; the Raj did not want him to die in prison and enrage the nation. Gandhi and Jinnah had extensive correspondence and the two men met several times in September 1944. Jinnah rejected Gandhi's proposal for Hindu-Muslim coexistence, insisting on partitioning the subcontinent on religious lines to create a Muslim homeland (later Pakistan). At the end of the war, the British gave clear indications that power would be transferred to Indian hands. Gandhi called off the struggle, and around 100,000 political prisoners were released, including the Congress's leadership.
Partition and independence in September 1944 (far right) during
Noakhali riots in October 1946 Gandhi
opposed the partition of the Indian subcontinent along religious lines. The Indian National Congress and Gandhi called for the
British to
Quit India. However, the
All-India Muslim League demanded "Divide and Quit India." Gandhi suggested an agreement which required the Congress and the Muslim League to co-operate and attain independence under a provisional government, thereafter, the question of partition could be resolved by a plebiscite in the districts with a Muslim majority. Jinnah rejected Gandhi's proposal and called for
Direct Action Day, on 16 August 1946, to press Muslims to publicly gather in cities and support his proposal for the partition of the Indian subcontinent into a Muslim state and non-Muslim state.
Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, the Muslim League Chief Minister of Bengal – now
Bangladesh and
West Bengal (excluding
Cooch Behar), gave Calcutta's police special holiday to celebrate the Direct Action Day. The Direct Action Day triggered a mass murder of Calcutta Hindus and the torching of their property, and holidaying police were missing to contain or stop the conflict. The British government did not order its army to move in to contain the violence. The violence on Direct Action Day led to retaliatory violence against Muslims across India. Thousands of Hindus and Muslims were murdered, and tens of thousands were injured in the cycle of violence in the days that followed. Gandhi visited the most riot-prone areas to appeal a stop to the massacres. , Britain's last Viceroy of India, and his wife
Edwina Mountbatten Archibald Wavell, the Viceroy and Governor-General of British India for three years through February 1947, had worked with Gandhi and Jinnah to find a common ground, before and after accepting Indian independence in principle. Wavell condemned Gandhi's character and motives as well as his ideas. Wavell accused Gandhi of harbouring the single-minded idea to "overthrow British rule and influence and to establish a Hindu raj", and called Gandhi a "malignant, malevolent, exceedingly shrewd" politician. Wavell feared a civil war on the Indian subcontinent, and doubted Gandhi would be able to stop it. The British reluctantly agreed to grant independence to the people of the Indian subcontinent, but accepted Jinnah's proposal of partitioning the land into Pakistan and India. Gandhi was involved in the final negotiations, but
Stanley Wolpert states the "plan to carve up British India was never approved of or accepted by Gandhi". The partition was controversial and violently disputed. More than half a million were killed in religious riots as 10 million to 12 million non-Muslims (Hindus and Sikhs mostly) migrated from Pakistan into India, and Muslims migrated from India into Pakistan, across the newly created borders of India, West Pakistan and East Pakistan. Gandhi spent the day of independence not celebrating the end of the British rule, but appealing for peace among his countrymen by fasting and spinning in Calcutta on 15 August 1947. The partition had gripped the Indian subcontinent with religious violence and the streets were filled with corpses. == Death ==