Mahatma Gandhi Research Paper

Mohandas Gandhi was a religious man, however, his religious beliefs did not come from his childhood but from his studies that he began as a political activist in South Africa. Upon his return to India from England, he had had a rough start as a lawyer and accepted an offer to work on a case in South Africa. He ended up staying in South Africa for more than twenty years. In South Africa Gandhi became a leader of the Indian immigration population. Gandhi had to learn skills to overcome caste, class, and religious divisions to build a base for dramatic mass actions. In the process, Gandhi’s religious development influenced his politics. He believed that the search for truth was the goal of human life, and since “no one could ever be sure of having

Gandhi expressed this concern by condemning the violence that had broken out on both sides, though it was far from equal. Gandhi felt he had made a mistake in calling for mass civil disobedience without enough organizational and ideological control over the movement.

But the next mass movement, the Non-Cooperation Movement, also unleashed forces beyond Gandhi's control, and he called the campaign off when a crowd in Chauri-Chaura responded to police beatings and gunfire by killing cops. The fact that Gandhi could call an all-India movement--and then call it off when it got too militant for his taste shows how important he had become to the national movement.

Gandhi also started the Civil Disobedience Movement which began with the campaign to violate the British salt monopoly. The salt satyagraha escalated quickly. Mass marches to the coast to break the British salt monopoly led to mass arrests. Throughout the country, peasants who had refused to pay their land taxes physically resisted police attempts to seize their

It was clear that the British empire was crumbling. Inside India, Gandhi launched the Quit India Movement, which became the biggest revolt against the British since 1857. But after the war, when Britain was negotiating terms of departure with Congress and the Muslim League, the revolt continued without Congress support.

In the end, Congress agreed to partition off Pakistan because the party was not prepared to support class struggle. The British, for their part, were eager for Congress to take over, since they realized that an Indian government could more easily put down the wave of strikes than they themselves could.

After India had achieved its independence, Gandhi personally journeyed to areas where communal violence had broken out and did his best to persuade people to stop, walking barefoot through the riot-torn slums and threatening "to fast unto death.” His moral authority was able to stop the violence sometimes, but when he left, all the social and economic problems that led people to see another religious group as their main enemy were still in