THE FREEDOM MOVEMENT AND THE PARTITION OF INDIAscene who knew what to do: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. He designed
a campaign which came to be known as the ‘Rowlatt satyagraha’ the first
experiment with non-violent resistance on a national scale.
Gandhi and non-cooperationGandhi was born in 1869 in a small princely state of Gujarat. The son of
the chief minister, he completed his studies in London and subsequently
tried rather unsuccessfully to practise law in Bombay. He had then gladly
accepted the offer of a Muslim businessman who sent him on some legal
business to South Africa. As that country’s only Indian lawyer he had
emerged as the leader of the Indian minority. In fighting against
discriminatory legislation he and his followers had adopted the methods of
passive resistance, i.e. deliberate and open breach of those laws. As Gandhi
did not like to call this resistance passive, he finally coined the term
‘satyagraha’ (holding on to the truth). With his carefully designed non-
violent campaigns, Gandhi even made an impression on his great
adversary, General Smuts, the powerful home and defence minister of the
Union of South Africa. When Gandhi returned to India in 1915 he was
known to all Indian nationalists as leader of the Indian minority in South
Africa, but nobody had any idea of what Gandhi was going to do in India
and whether he could be classified as a ‘Moderate’ or as an ‘Extremist’.
Aged 46 at the time of his return to India, Gandhi was no longer a
novice, yet he was ready to listen to his mentor Gokhale, whose Servants
of India Society he intended to join. Gokhale sent him on a one-year tour
of India during which he was not supposed to make any speeches or take a
stand in politics: he was merely to see things for himself. Unfortunately,
Gokhale died soon after sending Gandhi on this tour and the other
members of the Servants of India Society later refused to admit him,
suspecting that his views were much more radical than theirs. In this they
were quite right and Gandhi accepted their verdict ungrudgingly.
In subsequent years Gandhi devoted his attention to some local
campaigns for the peasants of Champaran district, Bihar, and those of
Kheda district, Gujarat, and the millhands of Ahmadabad. In these
campaigns he gained a great deal of experience and won loyal followers,
such as Rajendra Prasad in Bihar and Vallabhbhai Patel in Gujarat. In the
last year of the war he even conducted a campaign for the recruitment of
soldiers for the British Indian army in Gujarat. He was still a loyalist at
that time and thought that the British would honour India’s loyalty after
the war. The recruiting campaign failed and taught Gandhi the lesson that
people will not respond to a leader if he asks them for something which
they really are not prepared to give. Knocking at the doors of the peasants
of Kheda district—the very ones who had followed him earlier and had
appreciated his help—he found no response when he pleaded for support