Mohandas Gandhi
When Mohandas Gandhi returned to India from South Africa, he saw the British ruling India. The British brought some benefits to India but many costs to the Indian people, such as economic. When the British persuaded farmers to switch from growing crops to growing cotton, there was not enough food for the country and millions of people died from lack of food. The increasing taxes and lack of food made many Indians suffer on account of the British.
Because of the poor living conditions and prejudice, Mohandas Gandhi started a nonviolent resistance movement in India. This was opposing the British in a nonviolent way. The Indians would not cooperate, not do their work, and defy the British. The purpose of this movement was to give India its independence. At first, it didn’t work out. The first nonviolent movements were a setback and ended in killing and violence. This was not what Gandhi wanted. He figured that the only way for people to stop fighting and rioting would be if he went on a hunger strike. Eventually, the hunger strike worked. When all the Indians were not cooperating with the British, Gandhi stopped fasting. But then the British jailed Gandhi for a couple of years. After he was released, Gandhi walked more than 250 miles to the Indian Sea. He arrived on the day of the massacre of Champara, a great massacre that killed 1,516 Indians with 1,650 bullets. He then made salt, which was a symbolic message for the Indians. He then was arrested for making salt.
When Gandhi was in jail, Gandhi’s friend, Jawaharlal Nehru organized a nonviolence movement. Hundreds of Indians went to the Salt Works Factory and tried to get in. The Indians walked united, one line at a time, to the gates of the factory, where they were beaten down by sepoys. One journalist that saw the whole thing and reported, “It went on and on into night…India is free.” The Indians had broken the spirit of the British.
Because of nonviolent resistance, Gandhi and his followers eventually gained India’s independence. The British finally backed off and let India become its own country without their help. Gandhi’s symbolic resistances to the British finally made the British look at the...