Gandhi : to what extent did he help Indians with his actions and ideology ?

Gandhi (LCE)

“The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members.”

• The wise man who once said these words is known as the Mahatma, which means great soul in Hindi.

• Mohandas Gandhi, to name him, was a civil rights activist who believed in justice, as suggested in this quote.
•  He was born in 1869 in India, and died in 1948, assassinated by a Hindu extremist
• Went to work in South Africa, where he discovered the inequalities and racism against Black people and Indians
• Gandhi spent 20 years fighting for Indians' rights in South Africa. In 1894, he established the Natal Indian Congress (NIC).
• Was also the one who founded the Indian independence movement.
• Spent the rest of his life working to end British rule over his country.

Satyagraha:

• While fighting discrimination in South Africa, Gandhi developed satyagraha, a nonviolent way of protesting against injustice.
• The term Satyagraha translates roughly from Hindi as "Truth-force."
• This concept designates Gandhi’s method of action against oppression : a determined but nonviolent resistance to evil. 
• Based on two principles : civil disobedience and non-cooperation

So now we are going to see to what extent did Gandhi help Indians with his actions and his ideology of Satyagraha.

• Firstly, I will talk about an article on the Salt March, to show that he helped a lot even though his methods involved suffering
• And secondly I will comment on a documentary presenting the Partition of India, one of the only negative points that resulted from Gandhi’s influence – or lack of influence

• In 1930, Gandhi decided to defy the Salt Act as a way of protesting against the British domination over India. Indeed, breaking this law didn’t involve violence : only civil disobedience.
• He marched from Sabermanti to Dandi with his followers to collect salt from the sea. And so began the well-known Salt March. As you can see on the map, he did not take the shortest path to the sea : he stopped in many important cities to gather more followers.
• When he and his followers finally arrived in Dandi and started collecting salt, they were arrested by the local police. Gandhi himself was arrested on May 5, but the Satyagraha continued.
• On May 21, 2,500 peaceful marchers came to Dharasana to collect salt *show map*. They were met by hundreds of policemen and viciously beaten.
• The incident, recorded by American journalist Webb Miller, shook the entire Western world, because, I quote, “ The Western mind can grasp violence returned by violence, can understand a fight, but is, I found, perplexed and baffled by the sight of men advancing coldly and deliberately and submitting to beating without attempting defense.”
• In the article he wrote, which was published on May 1930, in The New York World-Telegram, he seems rather shocked : he uses many strong adjectives and adverbs to shows the absurdity of the situation, such as “perplexed and baffled” “surprising”, “astonishing”. He also uses a really dark vocabulary to denounce the awfulness and the violence of the events, for example “revulsion” “harrowing” “suffering” “injuries”…This idea of brutality is highlighted in the following parallelism: “During the morning I saw and heard hundreds of blows inflicted by the police, but saw not a single blow returned by the volunteers”. We can clearly see the opposition between, on one hand, “hundreds of blows” and, on the other hand “not a single blow”.
• Miller also explains that, I quote, “It was apparent that most of the injured gloried in their injuries.” Again, this shows that the purpose of the protesters was, in fact, to get beaten, in order to attract attention and to make the British aware of the senseless violence of their actions. Doing so, Miller wants to make a more global point: the nonsense of the British occupation, which is the point Gandhi is trying to make.

Miller didn’t know this yet, since he wrote this article the day after the protest, but its objective was finally reached in January 1931: the British government agreed to release Gandhi and invited him to a meeting in London where they would negotiate a more honest deal; if he stopped the Satyagraha. The Mahatma had gained the influence he needed in order to achieve his goal : India finally won its independence in August 1947 mainly because of his actions.

• (The ideals of Satyagraha are not shared by everyone. Indeed, Gandhi had to face many difficulties because there were people disagreeing with him on both sides : on one hand, his principal enemy was the government, either the South African government or the Indian, pro-Endland government. But some of the worst enemies of his ideology were, surprisingly, those he always tried to save.)

Let us now focus on a 2007 documentary from the BBC, called “The day India burned”, about one of the most tragic incidents in Indian history, The Partition of India. It took place in 1947 despite Gandhi’s efforts to maintain a united India, and it can be seen as one of his biggest failures.

While everyone remembers Gandhi as the one who permitted India’s independence, we tend to forget that this independence came at a great cost : the documentary shows that during the negotiations between the English government, the Hindu Congress and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, we can see that Gandhi tried his best to prevent a partition of India.

He had to face Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League which wanted a separated country for Muslims, in fear of discriminations because there was a majority of Hindus in India. They also feared losing political power if India became independent. Thus, they wanted six provinces in northwest India, where Muslims predominated, to become an independent country. 

In the end, following his Satyagraha ideology, Gandhi agreed to a compromise : two countries would be created, India and Pakistan, and the boundary would be set according to which religious community was predominant in each region. I don’t really have an opinion concerning whether India should have stayed united or not, but the problem here is how it was done.

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