Essay on mahatma gandhi and non violence
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Ahimsa has been part of the Indian religious tradition for centuries: Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist. It was Gandhi's genius that transformed, what had been an individual ethic, into a tool of social and political action. This he did in the course of his twenty-year long struggle against racialism in South Africa. Since 1894 he had been pleading with the colonial regime for the removal of iniquitous curbs and disabilities from which Indian immigrants in Natal and Transvaal suffered. He made little headway. In 1906 an exceptionally humiliating law was enacted for registration of Indians in the Transvaal; Gandhi found he had reached a dead end. The colonial government in Pretoria, supported by the dominant European community, was adamant; the Government of India was indifferent, and the imperial government in London reluctant to intervene. A stage was reached in Gandhi's agitation when something more than reasoning and persuasion were demanded. It was at this critical juncture that he stumbled upon a new technique of fighting social and political injustice. He called it satyagraha (holding on to truth). Its principles were to gradually evolve in the ensuing years; its author was a man for whom theory was the handmaiden of action. Of one thing Gandhi had no doubt; it was to be a method without hatred and without violence. During the next eight years he used this method with a measure of success until 1914 when he reached an agreement with the South African government and left for India. It was as the author and sole practitioner of satyagraha that he entered the Indian political scene in 1919-20, which he was to dominate for the next three decades.