On This Day: Gandhi Imprisoned for Civil Disobedience

Mohandas K. Gandhi emerged as the leader of India’s resistance to British colonial rule shortly after World War I. He wore the white loincloth of a Hindu holy man, led an ascetic existence, and espoused a doctrine of peaceful “non-cooperation” against the British Raj, according to The New York Times.

Gandhi was convicted in 1922 of conspiring to overthrow the government after leading a civil disobedience campaign aimed at ending British rule through such voluntary “non-cooperation” with British institutions.

His conviction came after an unruly crowd at a demonstration killed about 20 Indian policemen in the small market town of Chauri Chaura, India.

The Atlantic Monthly’s feature on Gandhi, written by Edmund Candler in July 1922 during Gandhi’s imprisonment, gives a detailed contemporary view of his political activities. “Gandhi has awakened the national consciousness in a way that no other man could awaken it; at the same time, he has unloosed forces that he is unable to control," Candler wrote. “But he has lighted a candle … In Mahatma Gandhi the youth of the country have their own national hero now—a man to whom they can point, without moral or physical fear; like Garibaldi or Mazzini, only saintlier.”

The activist leader served only two years of his six-year prison term after a court released him owing to ill health, commuting his sentence in 1924.

In 1930, he led the “March to the Sea,” protesting a discriminatory British salt tax in which thousands of people symbolically made their own salt from seawater. The march launched a widespread grassroots effort to end colonial rule that lasted for almost two decades.

Britain would finally cede power and declare India an independent nation on Aug. 15, 1947. Gandhi's pacifistic strategies have since influenced many political dissidents such as Martin Luther King, Jr.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948) was India’s preeminent nationalist leader. Born in Gujarat in 1869, he studied law in London and fought for the civil and human rights of Indian peoples both in South Africa. He developed non-violent political strategies influenced “primarily by Hinduism, but also by elements of Jainism and Christianity, as well as writers including Tolstoy and Thoreau,” according to the BBC.

Upon his return to India, Gandhi applied these tactics, called “satyagraha” or “devotion to truth,” to the colonial independence movement.

British colonial authorities in India arrested him in March 1922 for sedition, after he led a number of non-violent campaigns involving civil disobedience, according to the BBC.

When he was released two years later, he worked to “improve Hindu-Muslim relations,” the BBC writes. He was assassinated in 1948 by an man upset about Gandhi’s opposition to the British plan to divide the former colony into the two separate countries of India and Pakistan. The British would partition colonial India along religious lines, separating the country into the independent states of India and Pakistan in 1947.

In a roundup of eminent Asians from the latter half of the 20th century, Time magazine calls Gandhi “a cross between a saint and a ward politician…he managed to distill the qualities of both and yet transcend their contradictions.” Combined with his skill in assembling people to rally for his cause, his brand of passive resistance positioned him both as a “saint and strategist” for the Indian nationalist movement. His protégé Jawaharlal Nehru drew from Gandhi’s legacy, using his stalwart political passion to push forward the drive for independence.