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Bringing Down an Empire: Gandhi and Civil Disobedience
From The Constitutional Rights Foundation

Naturally shy and retiring, Mohandas K. Gandhi was a small, frail man with a high-pitched voice. He
didn't seem like a person destined to lead millions of Indians in their battle for independence from the British
Empire . And the tactics that he insisted his followers use in this strugglenon-violent civil disobedience
seemed unlikely to drive a powerful empire from India
Traveling to South Africa in 1893, Gandhi soon discovered that the ruling white Boers, descendants of
Dutch settlers, discriminated against the dark-skinned Indians who had been imported as laborers. Gandhi
himself experienced this discrimination when railroad officials ordered him to sit in a third-class coach at the
back of a train even though he had purchased a first-class ticket. Gandhi refused the order and police forced him
off the train.
This event changed his life. Gandhi soon became an outspoken critic of South Africa's discrimination
policies. This so angered the Boer population that at one point a white mob almost lynched him
In 1907, the Boer legislature passed a law requiring that all Indians register with the police and be
fingerprinted. Gandhi, along with many other Indians, refused to obey this law. He was arrested and put in jail,
the first of many times he would be imprisoned for disobeying what he believed to be unjust laws.
While in jail, Gandhi read the essay "Civil Disobedience" by Henry David Thoreau, a 19th-century
American writer. Gandhi adopted the term "civil disobedience" to describe his strategy of non-violently refusing
to cooperate with injustice, but he preferred the Sanskrit word satyagraha (devotion to truth). Following his
release from jail, he continued to protest the registration law by supporting labor strikes and organizing a
massive non-violent march. Finally, the Boer government agreed to a compromise that ended the most
objectionable parts of the registration law.
Having spent more than 20 years in South Africa, Gandhi decided that his remaining life's work awaited
him in India. As he left South Africa in 1914, the leader of the Boer government remarked, The saint has left
our shores, I sincerely hope forever."
Civil Disobedience in India

In 1917, while Britain was fighting in World War I, Gandhi supported peasants protesting unfair taxes
imposed by wealthy landowners in the Bihar province in northeastern India. Huge crowds followed him
wherever he went. Gandhi declared that the peasants were living "under a reign of terror." British officials
ordered Gandhi to leave the province, which he refused to do. "I have disregarded the order," he explained, "in
obedience to the higher law of our being, the voice of conscience."
The British arrested Gandhi and put him on trial. But under pressure from Gandhi's crowds of
supporters, British authorities released him and eventually abolished the unjust tax system. Gandhi later said, "I
declared that the British could not order me around in my own country"...
Gandhi Against the Empire

Instead of granting India independence after World War I, Britain continued its colonial regime and
tightened restrictions on civil liberties. Gandhi responded by calling for strikes and other acts of peaceful civil
disobedience. During one protest assembly held in defiance of British orders, colonial troops fired into the
crowd, killing more than 350 people. A British general then carried out public floggings and a humiliating
"crawling order." This required Indians to crawl on the ground when approached by a British soldier.
The massacre and crawling order turned Gandhi against any further cooperation with the British
government. In August 1920, he urged Indians to withdraw their children from British-run schools, boycott the
law courts, quit their colonial government jobs, and continue to refuse to buy imported cloth. Now called
"Mahatma," meaning "Great Soul," Gandhi spoke to large crowds throughout the country. "We in India in a
moment," he proclaimed, "realize that 100,000 Englishmen need not frighten 300 million human beings."
In 1922, the British arrested Gandhi for writing articles advocating resistance to colonial rule. He
used his day in court to indict the British Empire for its exploitation and impoverishment of the Indian people.
"In my humble opinion," he declared at his trial, non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation
with good." The British judge sentenced him to six years in prison
In 1930, Gandhi carried out his most spectacular act of civil disobedience. At that time, British colonial
law made it a crime for anyone in India to possess salt not purchased from the government monopoly. In
defiance of British authority, Gandhi led thousands of people on a 240-mile march to the sea where he picked
up a pinch of salt. This sparked a mass movement among the people all over the country to gather and make
their own salt.
Gandhi was arrested and jailed, but his followers marched to take over the government salt works.
Colonial troops attacked the marchers with clubs. But true to Gandhi's principle of non-violence, the protesters
took the blows without striking back. Gandhi explained, I want world sympathy in this battle of Right against
Might.
You assist an unjust administration most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil administration never deserves such
allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. A good person will resist an evil system with his whole soul. Disobedience of
the laws of an evil state is therefore a duty. --Mohandas Gandhi

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Bringing Down an Empire: Gandhi and Civil Disobedience

From The Constitutional Rights Foundation

Civil Disobedience in India

Gandhi Against the Empire

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