Gandhi's Early Satyagrahas (1917-1918)

Before he led all-India movements, Gandhi tested satyagraha in three local struggles in 1917 and 1918: for the indigo peasants of Champaran, the mill workers of Ahmedabad, and the drought-hit peasants of Kheda. Each was a "first" of its kind. Together they showed that non-violent mass action could win real results. They also won Gandhi the trust of the masses and brought forward lieutenants like Rajendra Prasad and Sardar Patel, who would shape the freedom struggle. This is a high-yield topic.

Towards the end of the First World War, the Indian struggle against imperialism took a decisive turn. It became a broad-based, popular movement, and Gandhi led that turn. Conditions in India and influences from abroad together created a situation ripe for a national upsurge.

• Post-war economic hardship hit every section. Industry faced a recession after a price boom. Workers and artisans met unemployment and high prices. The peasantry, crushed by taxation and poverty, waited for a lead. Soldiers returned to an impoverished country. The educated urban classes faced unemployment and racial insult.
• Expectations of political reward. India had given enormous men and money to the war effort. Nationalists expected self-government in return. The disappointment of those hopes charged the atmosphere.
• Worldwide disillusion with imperialism. The Paris Peace Conference, the post-war settlement among the victorious powers, showed they had no intention of loosening their grip. They divided the colonies of the defeated among themselves. This eroded the myth of white superiority. It sparked nationalist activity across Asia and Africa, in Turkey, Egypt, Ireland, Indonesia, China and beyond.
• The Russian Revolution (November 1917). The Bolshevik overthrow of the Czarist regime founded the first socialist state. It renounced Czarist imperial rights and granted self-determination to former colonies. It brought home the message that immense power lay with the masses. Ordinary people, if organised, united and determined, could challenge the mightiest of tyrants.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869 at Porbandar in Kathiawar, Gujarat. After studying law in England, he went to South Africa in 1893 on a legal case. He stayed until 1914, fighting the racism that humiliated Indians there. His struggle moved through two phases:

• The moderate phase (1894-1906): he relied on petitions and memorials, set up the Natal Indian Congress and started the paper Indian Opinion.
• The satyagraha phase (1906-1914): when a law made Indians carry registration certificates, Gandhi launched the first satyagraha. He founded the Passive Resistance Association to defy the law and accept the penalties. Later campaigns opposed restrictions on Indian migration, a £3 poll tax, and a court order invalidating non-Christian marriages (which drew many women in). Gandhi set up the Phoenix Farm (1904) and the Tolstoy Farm (1910) as self-reliant communities of satyagrahis. Eventually, through negotiations with General Smuts (aided by C.F. Andrews), the major Indian demands were conceded.

From South Africa, Gandhi learnt several things. The masses had an immense capacity for sacrifice. Indians of different religions and classes, men and women alike, could be united under one leadership. A leader must sometimes take decisions unpopular with his own followers. And he could evolve a new style of leadership free of India's existing political currents.

Satyagraha, literally "insistence on" or "devotion to truth", was the method Gandhi evolved in South Africa. It was based on truth and non-violence. He drew on Indian tradition, the Christian idea of turning the other cheek, and Tolstoy's belief that evil is best met by non-violent resistance. Its basic tenets:

• a satyagrahi never submits to what is wrong, but stays truthful, non-violent and fearless;
• the method works through withdrawal of cooperation and boycott, and includes non-payment of taxes and refusal of honours;
• a satyagrahi accepts suffering in the struggle against the wrongdoer, as part of the love for truth, and bears the wrongdoer no hatred;
• a true satyagrahi never bows before evil, whatever the consequence; and
• only the brave and strong can practise satyagraha, it is not for the weak or cowardly; even violence was preferred to cowardice. Above all, ends could not justify the means.

When Gandhi returned to India in January 1915, he followed the advice of Gopal Krishna Gokhale, the senior Moderate leader. He spent his first year touring the country to see the condition of the masses and took no political position. He was convinced of the limits of Moderate politics. He also felt that the wartime moment was wrong for Home Rule agitation. He believed the only technique fit for India's aims was a non-violent satyagraha. The three local struggles of 1917 and 1918 were its first Indian tests.

This was Gandhi's first civil disobedience in India. Invited by a local peasant, Rajkumar Shukla, Gandhi went to Champaran in Bihar to look into the plight of indigo farmers. European planters there forced peasants to grow indigo on three-twentieths of their land (the tinkathia system). When German synthetic dyes destroyed the indigo market, the planters squeezed the peasants with high rents and illegal dues before letting them switch crops.

When Gandhi, joined by Rajendra Prasad, Mazhar-ul-Haq, Mahadev Desai, Narhari Parekh and J.B. Kripalani, reached Champaran, the authorities ordered him to leave. The professions of these associates are a favourite exam point. Most of Gandhi's Champaran colleagues were lawyers: Rajendra Prasad, Braj Kishore Prasad, Anugrah Narayan Sinha and Mazhar-ul-Haq all practised law. J.B. Kripalani stood apart as a teacher by profession; he was then teaching at a college in Muzaffarpur in Bihar. He defied the order and chose to face punishment. This was a novel method at the time. The government retreated and appointed an enquiry committee with Gandhi as a member. It accepted that the tinkathia system should be abolished and that the peasants should be compensated for the illegal dues (he settled for 25 per cent of the money taken). Within a decade the planters left the area. It was Gandhi's first victory for civil disobedience in India.

In March 1918 Gandhi intervened in a dispute between the cotton-mill owners of Ahmedabad and their workers over the withdrawal of the "plague bonus." Wartime inflation had doubled prices, so the workers demanded a 50 per cent wage rise. The owners offered only 20 per cent. Anusuya Sarabhai, a social worker and sister of the mill-owner Ambalal Sarabhai, brought the dispute to Gandhi. He was respected by both sides.

Gandhi asked the workers to demand a 35 per cent rise and to stay strictly non-violent. When negotiations stalled, he undertook his first hunger strike (fast unto death) to strengthen the workers' resolve. This also pressured the owners. The strike was settled by a tribunal, which awarded the workers the 35 per cent rise Gandhi had sought.

The strike had a lasting institutional outcome. In 1920 Gandhi founded the Ahmedabad Textile Labour Association, known in Gujarati as the Majoor Mahajan Sangh, as an outgrowth of the 1918 mill-workers' satyagraha. It became a model trade union run on Gandhian lines, settling disputes between workers and owners through arbitration rather than confrontation. Anusuya Sarabhai served as its guiding figure. Remember the link for the exam: the 1918 strike led to the 1920 union, and Gandhi was its founder.

Drought in 1918 ruined the crops in Kheda district of Gujarat. Under the Revenue Code, if the yield fell below one-fourth of normal, the farmers were entitled to a remission of land revenue. The government refused and threatened to seize property. This became Gandhi's first non-cooperation.

Gandhi was the spiritual head, but the campaign on the ground was organised by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel with devoted Gandhians like Narahari Parikh, Mohanlal Pandya and Ravi Shankar Vyas. They told the villagers to refuse to pay the tax. The revolt was remarkable for its discipline and unity. Even when the government seized their land and property, the great majority of Kheda's farmers stood firm. Gujaratis who bought the confiscated lands were socially boycotted. Eventually the government agreed to suspend the tax for the year, reduce the rate increase, and return the confiscated property.

The three famous satyagrahas were not Gandhi's only work in these years. He also fought the system of indentured labour, a contract arrangement under which poor Indians were shipped to British colonies such as Fiji, Mauritius and Natal to work on plantations for fixed terms in near-slavery. Gandhi had seen its cruelty first-hand in South Africa. He campaigned hard for its end, and under this pressure the government abolished the recruitment of indentured labour in 1917. The abolition of this system is counted among his instrumental early achievements in India.

His stance on the First World War surprised many followers. At Lord Chelmsford's War Conference in Delhi in April 1918, a meeting the Viceroy called to rally Indian support for the war, Gandhi supported the resolution to recruit Indians for the war effort. He hoped that loyal cooperation would earn India self-government after the war. He even toured Kheda villages asking peasants to enlist, which earned him the mocking label of "recruiting sergeant". Remember the contrast for the exam: the apostle of non-violence backed war recruitment in 1918.

One related marker belongs to a later phase. Only after Gandhi broke the Salt Law in the Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930 did the colonial government declare the Indian National Congress illegal. No such ban followed the early satyagrahas of 1917-1918.

• Indentured labour: contract migration of Indian workers to colonial plantations, ended in 1917 after Gandhi's campaign.
• War Conference (1918): Viceroy Chelmsford's meeting where Gandhi supported recruiting Indians for the war.
• Congress declared illegal: happened in 1930 after the Salt Satyagraha, not in this early phase.

The peasant awakening of these years also produced organised bodies called kisan sabhas, peasant associations that voiced grievances over rent, eviction and illegal dues. The most important early one was the U.P. Kisan Sabha, founded at Lucknow in February 1918 by Gauri Shankar Misra and Indra Narain Dwivedi, with the support of Madan Mohan Malviya, the nationalist leader and founder of Banaras Hindu University. Within a year it had spread to roughly 450 branches across the United Provinces.

A common trap is to link Jawaharlal Nehru to this founding. Nehru was not associated with the formation of the U.P. Kisan Sabha in 1918. His contact with the peasants of Awadh came later, around 1920, when a more radical body, the Awadh Kisan Sabha (October 1920), grew out of the movement led by Baba Ramchandra, a former indentured labourer who organised tenants against oppressive taluqdars.

• U.P. Kisan Sabha (February 1918): founded by Gauri Shankar Misra and Indra Narain Dwivedi, backed by Madan Mohan Malviya.
• Not a founder: Jawaharlal Nehru, who reached the Awadh peasants only around 1920.
• Awadh Kisan Sabha (1920): the later, more radical body linked to Baba Ramchandra.

These three struggles, modest in scale, were a turning point for Gandhi and the movement:

• they demonstrated the efficacy of satyagraha to the people;
• Gandhi found his feet among the masses and came to understand their strengths and weaknesses;
• he won the respect and commitment of many, especially the youth; and
• the struggles awakened the peasantry, who began to see that they would not be free of injustice until the country won complete independence.