MAHATMA GANDHI

Mahatma Gandhi quotes  (Briefmahatma gandhi biography)

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, also known as Mahatma Gandhi, was an Indian M nationalist leader, who established India's freedom through a non-violent Revolution. 

M.K.Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869, in the town of Porbandar in the state of Gujarat. He did his schooling in nearby Rajkot, where his father served as a Diwan to the local ruler. Gandhi went to London, to study law, after his university degree. There he met English socialists and Fabians such as George Bernard Shaw, whose ideas contributed greatly to the shaping of his personality and politics. He returned to India in 1891 and then accepted a job at an Indian law firm in South Africa.


There he witnessed, how the non-Whites are ill-treated by the Whites. He was thrown out of a train compartment and was barred from hotels. Many times, he was even beaten up badly. Facing all the injustices, he became more assertive and began educating the fellow Indians in South Africa of their rights. In 1894 he opposed a bill that would deprive Indians of their right to vote and rapidly became a proficient political activist. While unable to stop the bill, he succeeded in attracting widespread attention to his cause.


Gandhi developed the satyagraha ('devotion to truth), a new non-violent way to redress wrongs. The campaign lasted for over seven years, and in 1913, hundreds of people went to jail-and thousands of striking Indian miners faced imprisonment and injury for the cause. Eventually, the South African government, agreed to a compromising solution, under British and Indian pressure, and thus peace was restored. 


In 1914, he returned to India. Then in 1919, the British plans to intern people suspected of sedition prompted him to announce a new satyagraha: The result shook the subcontinent and indirectly led to the Amritsar Massacre, in which nearly 400 Indians were killed by the British forces. Mahatma Gandhi dominated Indian politics, by the year 1920. He transformed the Indian National Congress, Land his programme of peaceful non-cooperation with the British included boycott of British goods and institutions, leading to arrests of thousands of satyagrahis all cheerfully lining up for prison, for defying the British laws.


However, in March 1922, he was sent to jail for six years but was released after two years. By then, the political landscape of India had changed completely The Congress Party had split and Hindu-Muslim unity had disintegrated


For some years, Mahatma Gandhi's political influence was minimal, until the Calcutta Congress in December 1928, where he demanded dominion status for India and threatened a nationwide campaign for complete independence. In 1931, the Round Table Conference took place in London. Gandhiji attended it as the sole representative of the Indian National Congress, but resigned from the party in 1934, in protest at its use of non-violence as a political expedient


The new Labour Government in Britain from 1945 brought negotiations, and these culminated in the Mountbatten Plan of June 1947, and the formation of the two new dominions of India and Pakistan in mid-August.


However, the country was divided and killings and riots between the Hindus and Muslims took place all over the country. Mahatma Gandhi's appeals for peace were ignored, and so he began fasting. This stopped the riots in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in September, and in Delhi in January 1948-but only days later, he was shot dead in Delhi on January 30, 1948, by Nathuram Godse. After Mahatma Gandhi death, we lost a great human from India.