Among the major theorists who changed the political and ideological settings in the world in the twentieth century, this man appears inflexible austerity and absolute modesty, who complained of the title of Mahatma ('Great Soul') and had given him against his will, The poet Rabindranath Tagore. In a country where politics was synonymous with corruption, Gandhi introduced ethics in this domain through the preaching and example. He lived in unmitigated poverty, never granted privileges to his family, and always rejected political power before and after the liberation of India. This rejection became the leader of non-violence in a unique case among the revolutionaries of all time.
The discovery of the East
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869 in a remote part of India in the coastal town of Porbandar, Gujarat district. This was then a patchwork of tiny principalities, whose rulers had absolute power over the lives of his subjects. His father, Karamchand Gandhi, was Prime Minister of Porbandar and belonged to the caste of Banias, merchants proverbial cunning and skill in the trade. His mother, named Putlibai, came from the sect of the pranamis, who mingled with the teachings of Hinduism, the Qur'an. She was deeply religious and austere divided his time between the temple and the care of their own, apart from frequent practice fasting. In the spiritual formation of Mohandas, who had a boundless love for their parents, and the worship of the god Vishnu who professed the family, attended a series of amalgamated cultures and faiths: Hindu, Muslim, Jain. The latter was particularly influential in his philosophy: the Jains practiced non-violence not only to animals and humans, but even with plants, microbes, water, fire and wind.A typical example of late genius, Mohandas was a teenager silent, withdrawn and nothing brilliant in studies, which passed unnoticed by the schools of Rajkot. At thirteen years, following Hindu custom, he was married to a girl her age called Kasturbai, who was promised for six years without knowing it. The young husband was passionately in love with the girl, and making love to her left the bedside of her dying father the same night that he died. The incident left an indelible blame on Gandhi, later to be declared against child marriage and for sexual continence.
As his grades did not improve in high school, the family decided to send to London for courses in law of the Inner Temple, whose claims were lower than those of Indian universities. With both fear and excitement, the boy embarked on Bombay in September 1888. He was nineteen and had just become a father for the first time. Before leaving solemnly promised his mother not to follow the English custom of eating meat, since it prohibited visnuismo. Several times in his teens he had violated that rule, driven by a friend who advised him to resemble meat in strength to the British.
In London he lived for three years, between 1888 and 1891, during which it produced one of the most decisive of his vocation: the discovery of the East through the West. Indeed, in the English capital began to frequent the Theosophists, who had started the first reading of classical Indian, Bhagavad Gita, which would be considered "the quintessential book for understanding the truth. " There also came into contact with the teachings of Christ, and for a time was so attracted to Christian ethics hesitated between this and Hinduism. In that time their attempts to synthesize the precepts of Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and native religion, through which said as the unifying principle of all: the idea of renunciation.
In these decisive years for their intellectual read Tolstoy, who later find in the guide for the improvement of practice and theory of nonviolence. And when he returned to India with a law degree, he did his oriental identity: he had gone in search of Western wisdom and returned with the secret he had done to the Hindu sages.
The first experiments of resistance gandhista
Returning to Porbandar found his disintegrated family: the mother had recently died and Gandhi had lost all influence in the princely court. As a lawyer did not find many perspectives, as their first professional gig ended in a humiliating failure, it is dumb to go to court and could not continue. Then a Muslim trading post offered him a contract to attend a company event in Durban, Gandhi and jumped at the chance. He sailed to South Africa in 1893In the land of the old Dutch settlers lived a Hindu colony consisting mainly of workers, whom the English called disparagingly Sami. Had no right, they are despised and discriminated racially, as he could see firsthand the young lawyer for some of their trips by rail. But the situation was even worse than it looked. Finished his work, Gandhi was about to return to India when he learned of the existence of a bill to withdraw the right to vote to Indians. He decided to postpone the departure a month to organize the resistance of his countrymen, and the month became twenty.
Gandhi
During that long period of his life, his greatest concern was the release of the Indian community, and it was shaping up arms to fight and who later used his country. In the early years, convinced of the good intentions of British colonialism, he opened a law firm to defend its compatriots in court in Johannesburg and was proposed to articulate a movement dedicated to the agitation by legal means. He founded the newspaper The Indian Opinion "to bring together the Indian community and as an instrument of legal turmoil, established the Natal Indian Congress. Anglophile sympathies led him during the war against the Boers in organizing the Indian Ambulance Corps, an action that earned harsh criticism from Indian nationalists.
Since 1904 the activities of Gandhi suffered a remarkable change: after reading the critique of capitalism contained in "Unto The Last" by John Ruskin, changed his lifestyle and began to live a simple communal existence on the outskirts of Johannesburg where he founded a commune called Tolstoy. At that time outlined the theory of nonviolent activism, which launched for the first time to oppose the registration law. This law required all Indian to enroll in a special register with their fingerprints. Gandhi told his countrymen not to join that trade in the streets without a license and, later, they burned their registration cards in front of the mosque in Johannesburg. Like many of his followers, went to jail several times, but the civil resistance movement won several partial successes.
In 1913 a tax protest against unfair considered resulted in a march through the Transvaal to Natal. The following year the British authorities turned back to the tax and Asian authorized to reside in Natal and labor. The victory was total, and Gandhi, who had left the European clothes in protest, finally left South Africa with his wife and children. In the long run all the achievements of the Indian community were lost and that country's authorities further tightened its racist policies, but South Africa had been the testing ground where Gandhi developed and tested tactics that would later use in his homeland.
The Mahatma
Gandhi arrived in India in 1915 as a true hero, in the glow of their campaigns abroad. The masses of Bombay paid him a warm welcome, the English governor came to greet him and the poet Rabindranath Tagore welcomed the Free University in Santiniketan. Soon after arriving in the city of Ahmedabad was founded almost monastic community in which they were prohibited foreign clothes, foods with spices and private property. Its members were involved only two materials work: agriculture for livelihood, and the tissue by hand, to obtain shelter. Here began a struggle that Gandhi would hold throughout his life: the battle against the evils of Hinduism and for the untouchables. The first step was to admit them as members of the community.In those early years Gandhi gave up all political agitation to support the war efforts of Great Britain in the First World War, even the recruitment of soldiers for the British army. His entry into politics came only India in February 1919, when the passage of the Rowlatt Act, which established the censorship and pointed out severe penalties for anyone suspected of terrorism or sedition, opened his eyes to the true intentions of the imperialists English at home. Gandhi then went on to lead the opposition to the law. Organized a propaganda campaign at national level through non-violence, which began with a general strike . It soon spread throughout the country and protests occurred in major cities, where there were some outbreaks of violence despite the insistence of the leader in the peaceful nature of the demonstrations. When he went to Delhi to appease the people, Gandhi was arrested. Days later, on 13 April, Brigadier-General Dyer ordered his Gurkha fire on the crowd gathered in the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar city. British rule had shown its true face bloody and brutal, nearly four hundred people were killed and thousands injured. But the British authorities were forced to reconsider their tactics and the Rowlatt Act never took effect.
In the years following the slaughter of Amritsar, Gandhi became the undisputed nationalist leader, reaching the presidency of the Indian National Congress, the party founded by Alan Octavius Hume in 1885 - that he knew become an effective instrument for independence . Of a group of urban middle classes, became a mass organization rooted in the villages and the peasantry. Were launched major campaigns of civil disobedience, ranging from mass refusal to pay taxes to the boycott of the authorities. Thousands of Indians filled the jails and Gandhi himself was arrested in March 1922. Ten days later began the "Great Trial"in which Mahatma pleaded guilty and considered the sentence to six years in prison as an honor, so the session ended with a mutual bow between judge and defendant.
When released from prison-made appendicitis colonial authorities released him in 1924 - found that the political landscape had changed in his absence: the Congress Party had split into two factions and unity between Hindus and Muslims, obtained with the civil disobedience movement was gone. Gandhi decided to retire from politics, to live as a hermit in poverty and seeking absolute silence as regenerative force. Retired in his Ashram in those years became the spiritual leader of India, religious leader of international fame that many Westerners in search of spiritual peace treated as a guru.
His retirement ended abruptly in 1927 when the British government appointed a commission to reform the Constitution, which was not involved any native. At the head of the political struggle, Gandhi got that all parties in the country did the boycott of the committee. Soon after, Bardoli strike in support of the refusal to pay taxes, ended in total success. The victory of the movement encouraged Congress to declare independence from India, January 26, 1930, and was entrusted with the leadership of Mahatma nonviolent campaign to implement the resolution. He chose as a target for itself the monopoly of salt particularly affecting the poor, "and left Sabartami March 12 to 79 volunteers due to Dandi, a coastal town 385 kilometers distant. The small movement spread like the waves of a pond to reach across India: farmers planted green branch roads where would that half-naked little man with a stick of bamboo, sea and road in front of a huge army peaceful. On the anniversary of the slaughter of Amritsar, Gandhi came to the sea and picked up a handful of salt. Since then civil disobedience was unstoppable, deputies and local officials resigned, the local notables abandoned their posts, the Indian soldiers refused to fire on demonstrators, women joined the movement, while the followers of Gandhi peacefully invaded salt factories.
Nehru and Gandhi
The campaign ended with a compromise agreement between Gandhi and the viceroy of Her Majesty, under which legalized the production of salt and the approximately 100,000 released prisoners detained during the demonstrations. Furthermore, Gandhi was sent to London to participate in the conference that discussed the steps to establish a constitutional government in India. The presence of the Mahatma in England, apart from the great reception that was dispensed popular neighborhoods of London, did not result in favorable outcomes for the cause, and return home to find that Nehru and other Congress leaders were once again in prison.
Towards Independence
Several times in his life Gandhi resorted to fasts as means of pressure against the power, as a form of spectacular and dramatic fight to stop the violence or the attention of the masses. The inhumanity of the caste system, which condemned the rogue to absolute poverty and ostracism, made Gandhi became the abolition of untouchability in a central objective of their efforts. And Yerva prison, where he was confined again, made a "fast unto death " against the separate elections Hindus and outcasts. This forced all political leaders to come to her bedside prisoner to sign a consent agreement with the English. The work of "popular education" to heal the wounds of Hindu society did not end here. Estranged of Congress to the disappointment caused him maneuvers of politicians, was spent visiting remote villages, with emphasis on popular education, the prohibition of alcohol in man's spiritual liberation.The outbreak of the Second World War was the reason why Gandhi, once again, will return to the political spotlight. His opposition to the war was absolute and did not share the opinion of Nehru and other Congress leaders, likely to support the fight against fascism. But the decision of the viceroy of incorporating the subcontinent to Britain's war preparations without consulting with local politicians, clarified water, causing the mass resignation of ministers belonging to the Congress . After the capture of Rangoon by the Japanese, Gandhi demanded complete independence from India for the country to choose freely their decisions. The next day, on August 9, 1942, was arrested along with other members of Congress, which was a mass uprising of the natives, followed by a series of violent riots throughout India. This was the last prison of Mahatma and perhaps the most painful, because from his prison in Poona he learned of the death of his wife, Kasturbai. He was now a frail elderly and debilitated when he was released in 1944.
After the war, and after the rise of Labour in England, Gandhi played a key role in the negotiations that led to the release. However, its position opposite to the partition of the subcontinent's determination nothing could be leader of the Muslim League, Jinnah, defender of the separation of Pakistan. Hurt by what he considered a betrayal, in 1946 the Mahatma watched in horror as the old Indian ghosts revived during the celebration of the appointment of Nehru as the first prime minister, who was a pretext for violent riots motivated by the struggle between Hindus and Muslims.
Gandhi went to Noakhali, where the fighting had started, and walked from town to town, barefoot, trying to stop the massacres that accompanied the partition of Bengal, Calcutta, Bihar, Kashmir and Delhi. But their efforts only served to increase the hatred he felt for the fans extremists of both peoples: the Indians attacked his life in Calcutta and Muslims did likewise in Noakhali. During his last days in Delhi carried out a fast to reconcile the two communities, which seriously affected his health. Still, appeared again before the public a few days before his death .
On January 30, 1948, when the evening was going to the Eid prayer, was hit by the bullets of a Hindu girl. As he had predicted to her granddaughter, died as a true Mahatma, Rama with the word ('God') on his lips . As Einstein said, "perhaps future generations ever doubt that such a man was a flesh and blood reality in this world".
