On April 6, 1930, after having marched 241 miles on foot from his village to the sea, Mohandas Gandhi arrived at the coastal village of Dandi, India, and gathered salt. It was a simple act, but one which was illegal under British colonial rule of India. Gandhi was openly defying the British Salt Law. Within a month, people all over India were making salt illegally, and more than 100,000 were sent to jail; many fell victim to police violence, but none retaliated or even defended themselves (Herman 99-101).

The Salt March of 1930 was a vital step toward India’s independence from Britain. Gandhi, who was known to many as “Mahatma” (Great Soul), had led the masses of India into a programme of massive disobedience to British law; what was most important to Gandhi, however, was that Indians use neither violence nor hatred in their fight for freedom. What was Gandhi’s philosophy? Was he successful?

Elements of Gandhi’s philosophy were rooted in the Indian religions of Jainism and Buddhism. Both of these advocate ahimsa (non-violence), which is “absence of the desire to kill or harm.. The Acaranga Sutra, a Jainist text, describes the fundamental need for non-violence: “All beings love life; they like pleasure and hate pain, shun destruction and like to live, they long to live. To all, life is dear”. Ahimsa is a way of living and thinking which respects this deeply.

Gandhi was both religious (he was Hindu) and open-minded, and saw the different religions as paths to the same goal. He was inspired by the teachings of Jesus, in particular the emphasis on love for everyone, even one’s enemies, and the need to strive for justice. He also took from Hinduism the importance of action in one’s life, without concern for success; the Hindu text Bhagavad-Gita says, “On action alone be thy interest, never on its fruits. Abiding in discipline perform actions, abandoning attachment, being indifferent to success or failure”..

For Gandhi, ahimsa was the expression of the deepest love for all humans, including his opponents; this non-violence therefore included not only a lack of physical harm to them, but also a lack of hatred or ill-will towards them. Gandhi rejected the traditional dichotomy between one’s own side and the “enemy;” he believed in the need to convince opponents of their injustice, not to punish them, and in this way one could win their friendship and his own freedom. If need be, he might need to suffer or die in order that they may be converted to love..

Gandhi also firmly believed that if violence was used to achieve any end – even if it was employed in the name of justice – the result would be more violence. But such pragmatism in matters of non-violence was unimportant to Gandhi. Thomas Merton writes:

“In Gandhi’s mind, non-violence was not simply a political tactic which was supremely useful and efficacious in liberating his people from foreign rule. [. . .] On the contrary, the spirit of non-violence sprang from an inner realization of spiritual unity in himself”).

This way of thinking reflects the Hindu idea of “being indifferent to success or failure,” which I described above.

Gandhi’s main tactic in his fight against the British was what he called Satyagraha, which means “Soul-Force” or “The power of truth”). Gandhi developed Satyagraha as the practical extension of ahimsa and love; it meant standing firmly behind one’s ideals, but without hatred. Satyagraha took the form of civil disobedience and non-cooperation with evil. Civil disobedience involved breaking a specific law if it was believed to be unjust, and then facing the consequences. The Salt March of 1930, which I described above, was one of Gandhi’s greatest successes in civil disobedience. Salt was necessary to the life of Indian farmers’ cattle, and the British monopoly on salt production had led to massive taxes on the vital substance.

The other element of Satyagraha, non-cooperation with evil, consisted of pulling out all support for an unjust system, such as the British rule of India. This tactic need not break any law, but might include boycotting British products, refusing to work for British employers, pulling one’s children out of British schools, refusing to supply the British with services, and not paying taxes). In 1920, after the British army massacred 400 unarmed demonstrators, Gandhi organized a nation-wide Satyagraha which used non-cooperation techniques such as the ones above, as well as public demonstrations, in order to “withdraw Indian support from the vast, monstrous Machine of Empire until it ground to a halt”).

http://www.socialchangenow.ca/mypages/gandhi.htm