Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand

The leader of the Indian independence movement preached a creed of non-violence from the time he organized his first satyagraha in South Africa in 1906. He launched in 1919 the Rowlatt satyagraha, which led indirectly to the Amritsar massacre (q.v.), and admitted to a “Himalayan blunder” in calling for a movement without having devised the means for keeping it under control. He was more successful with the two subsequent mass campaigns that he led, the non-cooperation movement of 1920-22 and the Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930-34, which were both on the whole non-violent. His arrest on the eve of the “Quit India Movement” in August 1942 prevented him from playing a leading role in it, and he was particularly chagrined by British accusations that he had abetted violence. In the last two years of his life, he was mostly occupied with preventing further massacres between Hindus and Muslims, and his intervention in Calcutta in August 1947 and in Delhi in September 1947 actually played a major role in stopping the killings. His tragic death in January 1948 under the bullets of an assassin testifies to the difficulty of his struggle for non-violence.