The Times Great Lives. Anna Temkin

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      A convinced Hindu, but widely read in other faiths and a great admirer of the Christian ideal, he was a powerful advocate of social reform. The poverty of the masses and his desire for India to return to the simplicities of the past led him to proclaim the need for the people, rich and poor alike, to spin by hand their own cotton thread and to weave and wear their own hand-made cotton cloth. Wherever he went his charka (spinning wheel) went with him, and as he talked to those who sought him daily he spun his cloth.

      Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869, at Porbandar, the capital of a small State in Kathiawar, Western India, where his father, though belonging only to the socially obscure Bania (moneylending) section of Hindus, was the Dewan. He was married when only 13 to a child of the same age, but from 1906 was a Brahmacharya – that is, a celibate within the marriage state for the purpose of realizing God. In early life he admired Western ways, and in this period he read law at the Inner Temple and was called to the Bar. He was meticulous in wearing the top hat and frock coat of the ‘town kit’ of the period. Some years later on, after conviction in India, he was disbarred. All his life he remained a strict vegetarian and total abstainer. In 1893 he went from Bombay to South Africa in connection with an Indian legal case of some complexity, and remained to oppose discriminatory legislation against Indians, and his stay lasted for 21 years. Gandhi was admitted an advocate of the Supreme Court. When the South African war broke out he organized an Indian Ambulance Corps, 1,000 strong, which often worked under heavy fire. Again, in 1906, on the outbreak of the Zulu rebellion, he formed a stretcher-bearer corps.

      After the passage of an Act in 1913 restricting Indian migration between the different Provinces of the Union, some 3,000 Indians with Gandhi at their head, crossed the border from Natal into the Transvaal in order to court arrest. Many, including the leader, his wife, and one of his sons, were imprisoned. In 1914 Gandhi returned to India by way of London, and he landed here a few days before the outbreak of the 1914–18 War. He was instrumental in organizing from among the Indian students a volunteer ambulance corps, which rendered good service. In Western India he rapidly became the champion of all whom he regarded as weak and oppressed, and was associated with the whirlwind movement for Home Rule resulting from the activities of Annie Besant, but at the War Conference convened by the Viceroy at Delhi in the spring of 1918 he supported ‘with all his heart’ a resolution of support of the war effort.

      In 1919, in pursuance of what he called satyagraha, or ‘truth-seeking’, he issued a pledge of refusal to obey the Rowlatt Acts, ‘and such other laws as the committee to be hereafter appointed may think fit’. There followed the serious disturbances of April, 1919, both at Ahmedabad, Gandhi’s home, and in the Punjab, notably at Amritsar. The loss of life thus caused led Gandhi to admit that he had made a blunder of ‘Himalayan’ dimensions. But from this time began his unquestioned mastery over the Congress Party organization. To him that party was India; and as its spokesman he was India’s chosen mouthpiece.

      In the spring of 1920 Gandhi considered that India was spiritually prepared to undertake a further campaign of passive resistance without risk of lapse into violence. He started a movement of ‘non-violent non-cooperation’, declaring it would be maintained until the claims of the Khilafat movement – started by Indian Muslims to obtain alleviation of the harsh peace terms imposed on Turkey after the 1914–18 war – were conceded, and until public servants alleged to be guilty of ‘martial law excesses’ in the Punjab were adequately punished. He promised swaraj, meaning complete self-government without the aid of the British, within a year. On paper at least he collected within a few months a crore of rupees (£750,000) for swaraj. Gandhi’s open letter to the Viceroy (the first Lord Reading) dated February 9, 1922, giving him seven days in which to announce a change of policy, had scarcely been dispatched when at Chauri-Chaura, in the Gorakhpur district, United Provinces, a number of constables were attacked in their thana and burnt to death. He called a halt to the civil disobedience movement and imposed upon himself a five days’ fast. On March 10, 1922, he was arrested, and was later tried for conspiracy. Gandhi pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six years’ simple imprisonment, but was released in January, 1924, after an operation in gaol for appendicitis.

      Early in 1929 Gandhi shared responsibility for a resolution of conditional acceptance of the proposed Round Table Conference passed at a meeting of political leaders. But on March 12, 1930, Gandhi, with 80 volunteers, began a march of 200 miles on foot from his ashram, near Ahmedabad, to Dandi, a village on the sea coast in the Surat district, for the purpose of collecting salt, and thereby defying the law. On May 5 he was arrested and interned at Yeravda Gaol, near Poona, under a Bombay Regulation of 1827. The economic effects of the second era of civil disobedience were much more serious than those of the first, owing in large measure to the intensity of the boycott.

      The Round Table Conference met in London in the autumn of 1930. Lord Irwin (now Lord Halifax) released the Congress leaders to facilitate discussions and had a number of interviews with Gandhi. These led in March, 1931, to the signature of the famous Irwin-Gandhi Pact.

      Gandhi came to London in the late summer as the sole delegate of the Congress at the Round Table Conference. The expectation formed in many quarters here of seeing a man of commanding gifts was not fulfilled. He had no mastery of detail: constitutional problems did not interest him. He was no orator; his speeches were made seated and delivered slowly in low, level tones, which did not vary whatever his theme might be. His interventions in discussion were mainly propagandist, and often had little real connection with the matter in hand. He made no real constructive contribution to the work of the Conference. Meantime the pact was breaking down, and on Gandhi’s return to Bombay a renewed campaign of civil disobedience was initiated by the Congress under his chairmanship. Once more he was arrested, on January 4, 1932, and detained in Yeravda Gaol.

      When the British Government’s communal award was published he intimated to the Prime Minister (Mr Ramsay MacDonald) that he would starve himself to death unless the part of the award giving separate seats to the depressed classes (which in his view cut them off from the Hindu community) were withdrawn or suspended. The fast began on September 20, 1932, but some political leaders of the two communities negotiated a compromise, approved by the Mahatma and accepted by Government. Gandhi accordingly broke his fast on the seventh day. There was great diversity of opinion, in Hindu ranks particularly, on Gandhi’s advocacy of legislation to secure admission of the depressed classes to the temples of higher caste folk. At the end of April, 1933, he announced his intention in this connection to fast for 21 days, and when the ordeal began on May 8 he was unconditionally released. Soon after Gandhi arranged to lead another civil disobedience ‘march’. On the eve of the march, July 31, he was arrested, and a few days later was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment.

      Dissatisfied with the facilities given to him in prison to work for the Harijans (his name for the depressed classes), he decided once more to fast, and after a week of abstinence from food he was released purely for medical reasons on August 23. The civil disobedience movement was waning, and in April, 1934, Congress adopted his advice to suspend it. But his personal contact, and that of Congress leaders generally, with the Viceroy and the Governors was not resumed until, in the summer of 1937, the Viceroy (Lord Linlithgow) took the initiative in bringing the long estrangement to an end by inviting Gandhi to meet him at Delhi.

      In the first general election for the Provincial Parliaments under the Act of 1935 the widespread Congress organization scored striking successes, and its candidates obtained majorities in six of the 11 Provinces of British India. When provincial autonomy was introduced in April, 1937, and the question of acceptance or non-acceptance of office by the Congress Party was under constant discussion, Gandhi casually admitted to a distinguished and sympathetic British public man that he had not read the India Act of 1935, for his entourage and advisers had assured him that it gave nothing of real worth to India. Persuaded by his visitor to repair the omission, he admitted when they next met that he had been mistaken and that the Act marked a very substantial advance. Thereupon he threw his immense weight against Pandit Nehru’s policy of abstention and of course carried the day. Congress СКАЧАТЬ