Mohandas Gandhi was one of India’s most popular leaders. A lawyer by trade, he left the law to fight personally for his people’s rights against their British rulers. Deeply committed to nonviolence, Gandhi was determined to win India’s freedom by avoiding confrontation.

 

Over the years he developed a code of action known today as civil disobedience. Gandhi’s code called for nonviolent noncooperation to achieve independence. Whenever armed British soldiers came to enforce the occupation government’s laws, Gandhi urged his people not to fight. Instead, they stood still, refusing to move backward or forward and refusing to give in to the soldiers. Unwilling to shoot the unarmed crowd, the British usually retreated. However, in the massacre of Amritsar, British soldiers killed almost four hundred of Gandhi’s followers.

 

Gandhi and his followers knew that nonviolent protests could lead to imprisonment and even death, but they remained loyal to the independence movement until Great Britain granted the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947.

 

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