Gandhi began his journey from South Africa. He fought for the rights of Indians staying in South Africa. He showed his organizing capacity for larger interest of the people. He created impression as a miraculous worker and savior. It aroused the hopes of the people. It helped him gain acceptance.

In South Africa he did experiments of his ideas and methods. It was phase of evolution and implemetation of his ideas and political methods. The success of all his experiments filled public faith in him.

When he entered into India, there was disillusionment among the people. People were facing various ups and down in ongoing National movement. There were different groups and parties working but failing to come to public expectation. There was leadership vacuum in the country. Both moderates and extremist have lost public faith. Home rule movement did not sustain, and revolutionaries too lost somewhere. Gandhi had character to capitalize such situations.

Gandhi could capitalize Pan India forum named Indian National congress. The congress party already had many achievements in his credit. It had already long anti imperialist struggle in her credit.

Gandhi started his political career with smaller Satyagraha E.g. Champaran, Ahmedabad and Kheda Satyagraha. The success of these Satyagraha popularized Gandhian ideology and people developed faith in him.

Gandhi identified himself with masses. His ideas were not new to masses. Non-violence, Celebacy, etc were already part of Indian thinking. He associated himself with public through his simple dress, language, foods and thought.

The Novelty of his methods also raised his stature. His methods like Satyagraha, marches, civil disobedience etc. were intelligible to common man. The efficacy of his methods were age old proved.

He adopted comprehensive political outlook. His programme included Hindu Muslim unity, communal harmony, upliftment of Harijans and emancipation of women etc.

The Rowlatt satyagrapha

During the years 1917 and 1918 Gandhi took little interest in all-India issues. He protested against internment of Annie Besant, and also demanded the release of Ali brothers (Mohamed Ali and Shaukat Ali) who were actively associated with the Khilafat issue. Unlike other political leaders of the time he did not take active interest in the Reform proposals. But it was the British decision to pass ‘Rowlatt Act’ which forced him to plunge into national politics in a forceful manner.

Rowlatt act

In 1917 the Government of India had appointed a committee under the chairmanship of Justice Sydney Rowlatt to investigate “revolutionary crime” in the country and to recommended legislation for its suppression. After a review of the situation, the Rowlatt committee proposed a series of changes in the machinery of law to enable the British government to deal effectively with the revolutionary activities. In the light of these recommendations the Government of India drafted two bills and presented them to the Imperial Legislative Council on 6 February 1919. The government maintained that the bills were ‘temporary measures’ which aimed at preventing ‘seditious crimes’.

The new bills attempted to make war-time restrictions permanent. They provided trial of offences by a special court consisting of three high court judges. There was no provision of appeal against the decision of this court which could meet in camera and take into consideration evidence not admissible under the Indian Evidence Act. The bill also proposed to give authority to the government to search a place and arrest a person without a warrant. Detention without a trial for maximum period of two years was also provided in the bills. The bills were regarded by nationalist leaders as an effort to conciliate a section of official and non-official white opinion which had resented Montague’s Reform proposals.

There was widespread condemnation of the bills in the whole country. Gandhi also launched his campaign against the bills. He said that the proposed powers were out of all proportion to the danger, particularly when the Viceroy possessed emergency powers of legislation by ordinance. He also stated that they were instruments of distrust and repression. Moreover, he opposed not just the content of the bills, but also the manner in which they were enacted in the country without regard to public opinion. He formed a Satyagraha Sabha on 24th February 1919 in Bombay to protest against the Rowlatt Bills. Its members signed a pledge proclaiming their determination “to refuse civilly to obey these laws (i.e., the Rowlatt Bills) and such other laws as a committee hitherto appointed may think fit and we (members) further affirm that in this struggle we will faithfully follow truth and refrain from violence to life, person or property.” While launching the Satyagraha agitation against the Rowlatt bills Gandhi said: “It is my firm belief that we shall obtain salvation only through suffering and not by reforms dropping on us from the English-they use brute force, we soul force.”

Despite strong opposition in the whole country the government remained firm. The Council passed one of the bills, though all the non-official members voted against it. The Viceroy gave assent to the bill on March 21, 1919. A group of liberals like Sir D.E. Wacha, Surendranath Banerjee, T.B. Sapru and Srinivas Shastri opposed Gandhi’s move of starting Satyagraha. Their reason for opposing the Satyagraha was that it would hamper the Reforms. Some of them also felt that the ordinary citizen would find it difficult to civilly disobey the Act. Annie Besant also condemned the Satyagraha on the grounds that there was nothing in the Act to resist civilly, and that to break laws at the dictate of others was exceedingly dangerous. But the younger and radical elements of Annie Besant’s Home Rule League supported Gandhi. They formed the main cadre of Satyagraha movement in different parts of the country. In organising this Satyagraha, Gandhi was also assisted by certain Pan-Islamic Leaders, particularly Abdul Bari of Firangi Mahal Ulema group at Lucknow, and some radical members of the Muslim League like M.A. Jinnah also opposed the Rowlatt Bill vehemently and warned the Government of the dangerous consequences if the government persisted in clamping on the people of India the “lawless law”.

Gandhi inaugurated his Satyagraha by calling upon the countrymen to observe a day of ‘hartal’ when business should be suspended and people should fast and pray as a protest against the Rowlatt Act. The date for the ‘hartal’ was fixed for 30th March but it was changed to April 6th. The success of hartal varied considerably between regions and between towns and the countryside. In Delhi a hartal was observed on 30th March and ten people were killed in police firing. Almost in all major towns of the country the hartal was observed on the 6th April and the people responded enthusiastically. Gandhi described the hartal a ‘magnificent success. Gandhi intensified the agitation on 7th April by advising the satyagrahis to disobey the laws dealing with prohibited literature and the registration of newspapers. These particular laws were selected because disobedience was possible for an individual without leading to violence. Four books including Hind Swaraj of Gandhi, which were prohibited by Bombay Government in 1910 were chosen for sale as an action of defiance against the government.

Gandhi left Bombay on the 8th to promote the Satyagraha agitation in Delhi and Punjab But, as his entry in Punjab was considered dangerous by the government, so Gandhi was removed from the train in which he was travelling at Palwal near Delhi and was taken back to Bombay. The news of Gandhi’s arrest precipitated the crisis. The situation became tense in Bombay and violence broke out in Ahmedabad and Virangam. In Ahmedabad the government enforced martial law.

The Punjab region as a whole and Amritsar, in particular, witnessed the worst scenes of violence. In Amritsar, the news of Gandhi’s arrest coincided with the arrest of two local leaders Dr. Kitchlew and Dr. Satyapal on 10th April. This led to mob violence and government buildings were set on fire, five Englishmen were murdered, and a woman assaulted. The civil authority lost its control of the city. On 13th April, General Dyer ordered his troops to fire on a peaceful unarmed crowd assembled at Jallianwala Bagh. Most of the people were not aware of the ban on meetings, and they were shot without the slightest warning by General Dyer who later on said that it was no longer a question of merely dispersing the crowd, but one of ‘producing a moral effect.’ According to official figures, 379 persons were killed but the unofficial accounts gave much higher figures.

Importance

The whole agitation against the Rowlatt Act shows that it was not properly organised. The Satyagraha Sabha concentrated mainly on publishing propaganda literature and collecting signatures on the Satyagraha pledge. The Congress as an organisation was hardly in the picture at all. In most of the areas people participated because of their own social and economic grievances against the British rule.

Gandhi’s Rowlatt Act Satyagraha provided a rallying point to the people belonging to different sections and communities. This aspect of the movement is quite evident from the massive participation of the people in Punjab which Gandhi had not even visited before the movement. Broadly speaking, the movement was intense in cities than in rural areas.

On 18th April Gandhi decided to call off the Satyagraha because of the widespread violence particularly in his home state in Ahmedabad city. He confessed publically that he committed a ‘Himalayan blunder’ by offering civil disobedience to people who were insufficiently prepared for the discipline of Satyagraha. The most significant result of this agitation was the emergence of Gandhi as an all India leader. His position became almost supreme in the Indian national movement and he began to exercise decisive influence on the deliberation of the Congress. At Amritsar session of the Congress in 1919 Gandhi proposed that the Indians should cooperate in the working of Reforms despite some inadequacies. But in September 1920 Gandhi reversed his policy of cooperation and decided to launch the Non-Cooperation Movement.

The gandhian ideology

Before we discuss Gandhi’s ideology it is necessary to mention that there were a number of influences which worked on Gandhi and helped him in evolving his philosophy. His autobiography makes it clear that the outlook of his parents and the socio-religious millieu of his native place left a profound influence on him. In particular, the values of Vaishnavism and the tradition of Jainism shaped his early thoughts. Moreover, some Hindu texts like the Bhagavata Gita also influenced him. The Gospels (especially the Sermon on the Mount) and the writings of Tolstoy, Thoreau and Ruskin also greatly influenced his thinking. Gandhi was primarily a man of action and his own experiences in life helped him more than his readings in evolving and shaping his ideology.

Satyagraha

The chief aspect of Gandhi’s ideology was Satyagraha i.e. ‘force of truth’. As mentioned earlier, it was evolved by Gandhi in South Africa but after it had been fully developed it became a dominant element in India’s struggle for freedom from 1919 onwards. For Gandhi, the Satyagraha was to be used so that by self suffering and not by violence the enemy could be converted to one’s own view. P. Sitaramayya aptly explains Satyagraha as follows:

It involves self-chosen suffering and humiliation for the resisters. If it is effective, it is so by working on the conscience of those against whom it is being used, sapping their confidence in the exclusive rightness of their cause making their physical strength important, and weakening their resolution by insinuating a sense of guilt for the suffering they have part in causing.

Gandhi made a distinction between the Satyagraha and passive resistance, when he wrote:

The latter (passive resistance) has been conceived as a weapon of the weak and does not exclude the use of physical force or violence for the purpose of gaining one’s end; whereas the former (Satyagraha) has been conceived as a weapon of the strongest, and excludes the use of violence in any shape.

In fact, for Gandhi, Satyagraha was not merely a political tactic but part of a total philosophy of life and ideology of action. Gandhi believed that the search for truth was the goal of human life. Since no one could know the ultimate Truth one should never attack another’s integrity or prevent another’s search for truth.

Non-violence

Non-Violence formed the basis of Satyagraha. Gandhi wrote:

When a person claims to be non-violent he is expected not to be angry with one who has injured him. He will not wish him harm; he will wish him well; he will not swear at him; he will not cause him any physical hurt. He will put up with all the injury to which is subjected by the wrong doer. Thus non violence is complete innocence. Complete Non-Violence is complete absence of ill will against all that lives.

Gandhi emphasised that non-violent Satyagraha could be practised by common people for achieving political ends. But some time Gandhi took a position which fell short of complete non-violence. His repeated insistence that even violence as preferable to a cowardly surrender to injustice sometimes created a delicate problem of interpretation.

In 1918 Gandhi campaigned for military recruitment in the hope of winning concessions from the British government after the war which can not be easily reconciled with the doctrine of non-violence.

In practice, Satyagraha could assume various forms-fasting, non-violent picketing, different types of non-cooperation and ultimately in politics, civil disobedience in willing anticipation of the legal penalty. Gandhi firmly believed that all these forms of Satyagraha were pure means to achieve pure ends. Gandhi’s critics sometime take the view that through the technique of Satyagraha, Gandhi succeeded in controlling the mass movements from above. The dominant section in the peasantry and the business groups also found the Gandhian non-violent model convenient because they feared to lose if political struggle turned into uninhibited and violent social revolution. On the whole, the use of Satyagraha by Gandhi and the Congress in national movement brought different sections and classes of society together against the British rule.

Trusteeship

Trusteeship is a socio-economic philosophy that was propounded by Mahatma Gandhi.He believed that the rich people could be persuaded to part with their wealth to help the poor. Putting it in Gandhiji's words "Supposing I have come by a fair amount of wealth – either by way of legacy, or by means of trade and industry – I must know that all that wealth does not belong to me; what belongs to me is the right to an honourable livelihood, no better than that enjoyed by millions of others."  This concept was condemned by socialists as being in favour of the landlords, feudal princes and the capitalists.

Religion

Another important aspect of Gandhi’s ideology was his attitude towards religion. Religion for Gandhi was not a doctrinal formulation of any religious system but a basic truth underlying all formal religions. Gandhi described religion as the struggle for Truth. His conviction was that religion could not be relegated to the realm of private opinion but must influence and permeate all activities of men. He was convinced that religion provided the fundamental basis for political action in India. This makes easy for us to explain that Gandhi took the Khilafat issue of the Muslims with a view to bringing them in the movement against the British government. Gandhi also used the religious idiom through concepts like ‘Ram Raj’ to mobilize people in the national movement. However, it cannot be denied that this use of religious idiom prevented Gandhi and the national movement under his leadership from giving effective challenge to a major category of division among the Indian people which can cause a fissure in our national unity in periods of crisis and strain, and tended to push into the background their internal differences and conflicts.

Hind swaraj

The other important feature of Gandhian thought was the body of ideas which he illustrated in his book ‘Hind Swaraj’ (1909). In this work, Gandhi pointed out that the real enemy was not the British political domination but the modern western civilization which was luring India into it’s stranglehold. He believed that the Indians educated in western style, particularly lawyers, doctors, teachers and industrialists, were undermining India’s ancient heritage by insidiously spreading modern ways. He criticised railways as they had spread plague and produced famines by encouraging the export of food grains. Here he saw Swaraj or self rule as a state of life which could only exist where Indians followed their traditional civilization uncorrupted by modern civilization. Gandhi wrote:

Indian’s salvation consists in unlearning what she has learnt during the past 50 years or so. The Railways, telegraphs, hospitals, lawyers, doctors and such like have to go and the so-called upper classes have to learn to live consciously and religiously and deliberately the simple life of peasant.

These ideas certainly look utopian and obscurantist in the context of the early twentieth century. But it seems that his ideas reflected adverse effects of ‘modernization’ under the colonial rule on the artisans and poor peasantry in the countryside.

Later on, Gandhi tried to give concrete shape to his social and economic ideas by taking up the programme of Khadi, village reconstruction and Harijan welfare (which included the removal of untouchability). It is true that these efforts of Gandhi could not completely solve the problem of the rural people, but it cannot be denied that this programme of Gandhi succeeded in improving their conditions to a certain extent and making the whole country conscious of the new need for its social and economic reconstruction.

Swadeshi

Gandhi advocated swadeshi which meant the use of things belonging to one’s own country, particularly stressing the replacement of foreign machine made goods with Indian hand made cloth. This was his solution to the poverty of peasants who could spin at home to supplement their income and his cure for the drain of money of England in payment for imported cloth. It is interesting to find that despite his pronounced opposition to the influences of Western Industrial civilization Gandhi did not take a hostile view towards emerging modern industries in India. As noticed earlier, Gandhi had close relations with industrialists like Ambalal Sarabhai. Another noted industrialist G.D. Birla was his close associate after 1922. Gandhi believed in the interdependence of capital and labour and advocated the concept of capitalists being ‘trustees’ for the workers. In fact, Gandhi never encouraged politicization of the workers on class lines and openly abhorred militant economic struggles. As a matter of fact, all the major elements of Gandhi’s ideology are based on a distrust of conflict in the notion of class interests. Gandhi always emphasised the broad unity that can and must be achieved on the basis of a larger objective among people divided on account of class of any other category.

Constructive Works Programmes of Gandhi

Constructive works programme of Gandhi was essentially a comprehensive socio Economic programme. These programmes were part of Gandhian Nationalistic political struggle as well. His programme represents issue like social service, social reforms and Economic reconstructions.

Component of constructive work programme

I.          Hindu Muslim unity.

II.         Harijan upliftment

III.        Emancipation of women

IV.        National Education              

V.         Promotion of Khadi

VI.        Promotion of Village Industry

Relevancy in context of Gandhian leadership

The constructive work programme made Gandhian leadership more comprehensive. His political struggle was no longer associated with political issues only and was closely associated with the socio-economic issues facing country. These played vital role in popularizing Gandhian ideas and philosophy and earned him the support of the masses in the National Movement.

Relevancy in context of national movement

Constructive works Programme played crucial role

I.          During passive phase of National movement.

II.         In filing the political void and sustained the sense of political activism.

III.        In overcoming desperation and disillusionment of people.

IV.        In providing alternative for participation in nationalistic struggle.

V.         Expanded social base of National movement. It attracted many new groups into National Movement.

VI.        Strengthened secular ideas among general public.

VII.       Established links between urban and rural areas. It established organizational links between peoples of different areas.

VIII.      Filled the sense of confidence among people. It especially filled sense of confidence among Harijans and women. They began to come into national mainstream.

Gandhi and dalit emancipation

He founded “All India untouchable league” which later got renamed as “Harijan Sevak Sangh” in 1932. He also started one journal named “Harijan” for propagation of his ideas. Gandhian Harijan works or programme for dalit emancipation was part of his constructive works programmes. He played vital role as a social reformer, motivated entire national movement for upliftment of down trodden section of society. He successfully linked political struggle with social struggle. He advocated that without social democracy, political democracy was meaningless. He associated his works mainly with issues like.

End of oppression and exploitation.

Spread of education among down trodden section of society.

He secured religious rights of the people through his temple entry movement.

He secured right of Harijans to use public well, road & tank etc.

Gandhi had very cautious approach in dalit affairs. He avoided politicization of issue of Harijans. He did not project them as collective political entity. Gandhi was not votary of social revolution. He was not to change fundamental structure of society. He advocated reforming the evils of society that too gradually. He played instrumental role in opening schools and vocational training institute. He founded many housing societies, cooperative credit society, for Harijans. He also influenced working of congress ministries favouring Harijans.