A nonviolent revolution canceled
February 12, 2024
February 1922 was the crescendo of India’s post-WW1 independence campaign, and Gandhi prepared to open a new line of attack. His prominence gave him immunity from the wave of arrests that had claimed many of the campaign’s leaders, and he had given the British Viceroy an ultimatum on February 1. Free political prisoners and lift the publication bans on various newspapers, Gandhi warned, or on February 12, massive civil disobedience would begin in Bardoli. Some 4,000 residents had pledged to refuse to pay taxes, even at the price of imprisonment or death.
However, a week before “the nonviolent rebellion” was to start, a horrific incident took place in the village of Chauri Chaura. Police fired on a procession of Gandhi’s supporters, and the crowd had turned into a mob. They surrounded the police station and set it on fire; as constables tried to escape, they were butchered. Twenty-two policemen were hacked to death or burned alive over shouts of “Victory to Mahatma Gandhi!”
Gandhi was stunned by the first reports of this senseless violence. His youngest son rushed to the scene to gather more information. But the story was true; his message of nonviolence had not trickled down to the masses as he previously believed. The only thing to do, he decided, was to stop and reevaluate.
On February 12, a two-part resolution was issued by Gandhi and the All-India Congress Committee. First, after condemning the murders of the policemen, it called for a complete halt to the nationwide movement. There were to be no public processions, no courting of arrest, no civil disobedience of any kind. Instead, the second part laid out a constructive program which would help the nation realize nonviolence “as an integral, active, and chief part of mass civil disobedience.” The goals included publicizing homespun cloth, organizing schools, helping the poor, promoting sobriety, and donating regularly to the Congress.
Gandhi took the setback personally, and that evening he began a 5-day fast as penance for those “who with my name on their lips have brutally hacked constables to death.” (I’ve started mine as well.) The British, however, saw the suspension of the campaign as weakness. Within a month, Gandhi was arrested... but that’s another story.
The next 30-day Gandhi challenge begins this week, and the fasts that bookend it honor the power of unions to achieve nonviolent change. One of Gandhi’s students in America, Cesar Chavez, began a 25-day fast on February 15, 1968, to dedicate the United Farm Workers to nonviolence. Fifty years earlier, Gandhi began a fast to the death on March 15 to strengthen a union of textile workers, an act which biographer Erik Erikson has called ‘the birth of militant nonviolence.’ Challenge yourself to emulate these men in abstaining from intoxicants; register at this link.
Do you think Gandhi would have still called off civil disobedience if he’d known that it would delay independence by 25 years?