Gandhi's leadership: Non-Cooperation Movement and the Dandi March

Gandhi's road to leadership

1. 1893
   Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, a lawyer trained in Britain, goes to South Africa and stays for about 21 years.
2. South Africa
   He fights racial discrimination against Indians and develops satyagraha, non-violent insistence on truth and justice. His struggle succeeds.
3. 1915
   He returns to India in January. In May 1915 he sets up his first ashram at Kochrab in Ahmedabad, to live by truth and non-violence. In 1917 it moves to the banks of the Sabarmati and becomes the Sabarmati Ashram (your NIOS lesson says he founded it in 1916). On Gokhale's advice he tours the villages to understand people's problems.
4. 1917★
   Champaran, Bihar: his first satyagraha in India, for peasants oppressed by the indigo plantation system.
5. 1918
   Kheda, Gujarat: satyagraha for peasants who could not pay revenue after crop failure and epidemics. Ahmedabad: he leads the cotton mill workers.
6. 1919
   He calls a nationwide satyagraha against the Rowlatt Act and warns that non-cooperation will follow if the government does not listen.

★ key step

Non-Cooperation Movement (1920 to 1922): the programme

• Give up titles and honorary posts, and resign nominated seats in local bodies.
• Stay away from official and semi-official functions.
• Withdraw children, step by step, from government schools and colleges, and set up national schools.
• Lawyers and litigants to boycott British courts, step by step.
• Soldiers, clerks and labourers to refuse to enlist for service in Mesopotamia (today's Iraq).
• Candidates and voters to boycott the council elections.
• Boycott foreign goods.
• Constructive programme: swadeshi, especially hand-spinning and weaving; removal of untouchability; Hindu-Muslim unity.

How Non-Cooperation grew and ended

1. August 1920
   Gandhi launches the movement. The Khilafat movement joins it in one common struggle against the British.
2. November 1920
   More than two-thirds of voters stay away from the council elections.
3. 1920 to 1921
   Thousands of students and teachers leave government schools and start Indian ones. Lawyers such as Motilal Nehru, C. R. Das, C. Rajagopalachari and Asif Ali boycott the courts. Foreign cloth burns in bonfires.
4. 1921
   Violence breaks out in places. Leaders are arrested, and nearly 30,000 people are jailed in two months.
5. 4 to 12 February 1922★
   On 4 February a mob at Chauri Chaura in Gorakhpur district, Uttar Pradesh, sets fire to the police station, and the policemen inside are killed. On 12 February Gandhi calls off the movement. Your NIOS lesson prints 9 and 14 February; the exam usually asks only the year, 1922.
6. March 1922
   Gandhi is arrested at Ahmedabad on 10 March and on 18 March is sentenced to six years' simple imprisonment (your lesson gives 18 March as the day of arrest).
7. Result
   Swaraj was not won, but the struggle became a mass movement and a platform for later ones.

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Between the movements, and the Dandi March (1923 to 1931)

1. 1923
   C. R. Das (president) and Motilal Nehru (secretary) form the Swaraj Party on 1 January 1923, a party within the Congress, to oppose the government from inside the councils.
2. 1927 to 1928
   The Simon Commission, sent to review the 1919 reforms, has no Indian member. It meets black flags, hartals (strikes with shops shut) and the cry 'Simon go back'. Lala Lajpat Rai dies of injuries from a police lathi charge.
3. 1928
   Indian leaders draft the Nehru Report, an outline constitution with a declaration of rights, adult franchise, a parliamentary system and an independent judiciary under a supreme court.
4. 1929
   At its Lahore session the Congress demands Purna Swaraj, complete independence. On 26 January 1930 it celebrates Independence Day; the Constitution, adopted on 26 November 1949, came into force on the same date in 1950, now Republic Day.
5. March 1930
   Protesting the tax on salt, a basic need of every home, Gandhi marches on foot from Sabarmati Ashram to Dandi on the Gujarat coast.
6. 6 April 1930★
   At Dandi he picks up salt from the shore and so breaks the salt law. Farmers, traders and women join the Civil Disobedience Movement in large numbers.
7. May 1930
   Gandhi is arrested and held in Yeravda jail, Poona. Civil disobedience goes on, with boycott of foreign cloth.
8. 1931
   The Gandhi-Irwin Pact is signed. Gandhi attends the Second Round Table Conference in London as the only Congress representative, but no settlement is reached.

★ key step

On the map

• Champaran: north-western Bihar, on the Nepal border, north of the Ganga; Gandhi's first satyagraha in India (1917).
• Kheda: central Gujarat, south east of Ahmedabad; peasant satyagraha over land revenue.
• Ahmedabad: on the river Sabarmati in Gujarat; the Sabarmati Ashram and the mill workers' struggle; the Dandi March started here.
• Dandi: a village on the Arabian Sea coast of southern Gujarat, south of Surat; the salt law was broken here on 6 April 1930.
• Chauri Chaura: a village in Gorakhpur district, eastern Uttar Pradesh; violence here in February 1922 ended Non-Cooperation.
• Amritsar: in Punjab, near the border with Pakistan; Jallianwala Bagh massacre, 13 April 1919.
• Bombay (Mumbai): on the west coast of Maharashtra; the first Congress session (1885) and the Quit India call (1942).
• Wardha: in eastern Maharashtra, near Nagpur; the Quit India resolution was first passed here in July 1942.