Mahatma Gandhi
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi developed mass non-violent resistance into a practical political method and used it to make British rule in India unworkable. Born in Porbandar in 1869 to a family of the merchant caste, he trained as a barrister in London and failed to establish a practice in India, taking a one-year contract in South Africa in 1893 instead. He stayed twenty-one years. Thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburg for sitting in a first-class carriage, he began organising Indian labourers and merchants against discriminatory legislation, and there worked out satyagraha — a discipline of accepting suffering without retaliating, designed to make repression politically costly for the repressor. He returned to India in 1915 and applied it at Champaran in 1917 and Kheda in 1918 before taking over the Congress. He led the non-cooperation movement from 1920, calling it off after protesters burned twenty-two policemen alive at Chauri Chaura in 1922. In 1930 he walked 240 miles to the sea at Dandi to make salt in defiance of the government monopoly, choosing a tax that touched the poorest; some 60,000 were imprisoned. He remade Congress from an elite debating body into a mass organisation, and made hand-spun khadi cloth a symbol of economic self-reliance. He campaigned against untouchability, calling the excluded Harijans, though B. R. Ambedkar argued that his approach preserved caste itself and the two clashed bitterly over separate electorates in 1932. He opposed the partition of India and fasted to stop the communal killing that accompanied it in 1947. A Hindu nationalist who considered him too conciliatory towards Muslims shot him in Delhi in January 1948.
- Lived: 1869 CE – 1948 CE
- Nationality: Indian
- Roles: activist, lawyer, independence_leader, philosopher
