1947: the end of the Raj: thirty years of nonviolent protests led by Gandhi forced the British out of the Indian subcontinent, and gave birth to both India and Pakistan

New York Times Upfront, Jan 30, 2006 by Peter Edidin

Mohandas K. Gandhi bent down, grabbed a handful Jof salty mud, and held it up in the air. "With this," he declared, "I am shaking the foundations of the British empire."

It was April 6, 1930, and Gandhi, the 61-year-old Indian nationalist leader, had just completed a 240-mile walk from his home in Ahmedabad to the town of Dandi, on the Arabian Sea. What became known as the Great Salt March had begun 24 days earlier, as Gandhi and 78 followers set out on foot to protest British rule of India.

When they reached their destination, Gandhi, now surrounded by throngs of onlookers, took his muddy mixture and boiled it to make salt--an illegal act, since the British government required taxes to be paid on all salt made or sold in India.

BRITISH INDIA

Gandhi's act of civil disobedience (and the many others he staged, all nonviolent) would eventually help convince the British to give up their prized colony, which was given its independence and partitioned into India and Pakistan in August 1947.

The beginning of British rule in India is usually dated to 1757, when an army assembled by the British East India Company--British investors who wanted to trade with India--defeated the governor of Bengal in a battle near Calcutta.

This private company, with its own troops and powers of taxation, soon became the dominant force on a subcontinent with 400 million people. (The company's highest officers became so rich that their money, some historians have argued, financed the Industrial Revolution in England.)

The East India Company was a brutal and often racist overseer whose indifference helped create and exacerbate famines in the 1770s and '80s.

But colonial rule also brought some benefits, especially after the East India Company was abolished and India became an official British colony in 1858. The British introduced the rail-road and the telegraph, and the English language, which gave educated Indians, who spoke many languages, a common means of communication. And the British legal tradition introduced Western notions of individual and social rights. In fact, the greatest leaders of Indian independence--Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru (India's first Prime Minister) and Mohammad Ali Jinnah (Pakistan's first Governor General)--were all trained as lawyers in London.

GANDHI EMERGES

While there had been periodic rebellions against British rule, it was after World War I (1914-18) that the drive for self-rule gained traction. During the war, 1.3 million Indians served the British as soldiers or laborers, and the Raj (as the British administration in India was known) promised self-government after the war.

But in 1919, Britain adopted the Rowlatt Acts, giving the government emergency powers, including the right to imprison anyone deemed suspicious. It seemed to be a betrayal of promises of self-rule, and protests broke out.

This was the moment Gandhi emerged as a national figure. After 21 years in South Africa fighting prejudice against Indian workers there, he had returned to India in 1914 and founded a religious commune near Ahmedabad.

Gandhi was unlike any political leader India had ever seen. He looked like a simple Hindu holy man in his white loincloth and shawl of homespun cotton; he was a vegetarian and espoused nonviolence. But he was a powerful speaker whose quiet delivery before even the biggest crowds made people feel he was addressing them individually. It was Gandhi who transformed the drive for Indian independence into a mass movement.

'NON-COOPERATION'

In response to the Rowlatt Acts, he called for a day of protest in which businesses shut down throughout the country. The British arrested Gandhi and other protest leaders, causing more demonstrations. At one of them, on April 13, 1919, in Amritsar, British forces fired on the unarmed crowd, killing more than 400 people.

The massacre galvanized Indians, and the leader they rallied around was Gandhi. They began to call him Mahatma ("great soul" in Sanskrit).

Gandhi called for a campaign of "non-cooperation" with the British. Indian children were withdrawn from schools, Indians in public office resigned, and Indians boycotted the legal system. Sitting crowds made streets impassable, refusing to budge when beaten by police. (Blacks in the American South would later copy Gandhi's methods of nonviolent protest during the civil rights movement.)

In 1930, the National Congress (Gandhi's political party) declared its goal of independence from Britain. Gandhi called upon people to refuse to pay the taxes that funded the colonial administration--including the tax on the production and sale of salt, which led to the Great Salt March.

Again, Gandhi was arrested, but tens of thousands of Indians followed his example, making salt at the seaside and submitting to beatings and arrests. The mass demonstrations that followed were a public-relations nightmare for the British, who were forced to release Gandhi in 1931.

TOWARD INDEPENDENCE

When World War II began, Gandhi and Nehru, his longtime political ally, decided not to support the war unless India was granted immediate independence. Britain refused, and Gandhi began a "Quit India" campaign. He was quickly arrested along with as many as 100,000 others, short-circuiting the protests.