Highlight Mahatma Gandhi’s role in the Indian National Movement. (2004)
When Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi returned from South Africa in January 1915, the Congress was an assembly of the educated few, split since Surat (1907). By 1947 it had led three all-India mass movements. His role can be seen in five parts: method, organisation, strategy, social reach and moral leadership.
1. A New Method: Satyagraha
- Petitioning reached too few; revolutionary violence invited repression and excluded the unarmed. Satyagraha, tested in South Africa from 1906, was a third way: mass, non-violent and law-breaking.
- He first tried it on local grievances: indigo at Champaran (1917), revenue at Kheda (1918), wages at Ahmedabad (1918). The Rowlatt Satyagraha (1919) made it all-India.
2. Rebuilding the Congress
The Nagpur session (December 1920) turned the Congress into a permanent mass party:
- Provincial committees were organised by language, not by the colonial provinces.
- A standing Working Committee ran the party between sessions.
- A four-anna membership fee opened it to villages and mohallas.
3. Strategy of the Three Movements
| Movement | Innovation | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Non-Cooperation (1920–22) | Withdrawal of cooperation; alliance with the Khilafat movement | Made the Congress a mass party; withdrawn after Chauri Chaura |
| Civil Disobedience (1930–34) | Deliberate breach of the salt law (Dandi, 12 March–6 April 1930) | Gandhi–Irwin Pact placed the Congress and the Raj on equal terms |
| Quit India (1942) | Do or Die | Showed the administration could no longer rely on Indian obedience |
Bipan Chandra calls this rhythm Struggle–Truce–Struggle. Periods of agitation alternated with rebuilding, and each retreat prepared the next advance. It resembles Antonio Gramsci‘s war of position against a hegemonic state.
4. Widening the Social Base
The movement came to include peasants, women (in the salt marches and the picketing of liquor and cloth shops), Muslims during the Khilafat years, and the Frontier’s Khudai Khidmatgars under Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan. Symbols such as salt, the charkha and khadi carried the message without explanation.
5. Moral and Ideological Leadership
- Hind Swaraj (1909) gave the movement an ideology beyond self-government: swaraj as self-rule, swadeshi and the rejection of imperial civilisation.
- He made the removal of untouchability a condition of swaraj.
- In 1946–47 he walked through Noakhali and fasted in Calcutta against communal killing.
Historiographical Assessment
- The nationalist school sees him as the architect of a multi-class movement against colonialism.
- Judith Brown treats him as a political broker who linked provincial networks to an all-India platform.
- R. Palme Dutt (India To-day, 1940) argued that he repeatedly halted mass movements when they threatened propertied interests.
- Shahid Amin showed that peasants in Gorakhpur built their own Mahatma through rumour, sometimes acting beyond Congress control.
- B. R. Ambedkar held that the Poona Pact (1932) and the postponing of caste left Dalits without real power; Hindu–Muslim unity also did not outlast 1924.
Contemporary Relevance
Satyagraha remains India’s everyday language of protest. The largely non-violent farmers’ agitation of 2020–21 ended with the repeal of the three farm laws in 2021, and the UN marks his birthday as the International Day of Non-Violence.
Conclusion
Gandhi’s decisive role was to solve the problem of scale. He found a way for unarmed millions to challenge an empire that could not easily crush them. He could not settle the communal and caste divisions that unity postponed, but the independent India of 1947 was a mass democracy largely because he built a mass movement.