Phase 4 — Gandhi's Opening Moves (1915–1922)

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi returned to India from South Africa in January 1915, already internationally known for two decades of civil-rights campaigning among the Indian diaspora in Natal and the Transvaal, where he had developed and first practised Satyagraha ("truth-force" / soul-force) — non-violent civil resistance grounded in a refusal to cooperate with unjust laws while accepting the legal consequences of that refusal. On Gokhale's advice, Gandhi spent his first year travelling India quietly, watching and learning, before undertaking any political action of his own.

His first three interventions on Indian soil were deliberately local and were, in effect, controlled experiments in Satyagraha before any attempt at a nationwide campaign:

• 1917 — Champaran Satyagraha (Bihar). Under the tinkathia system, European planters compelled tenant farmers in Champaran district to grow indigo on a fixed proportion (three-twentieths) of their land, regardless of profitability, and to sell it at prices the planters dictated — a system that had ruined many peasants as synthetic dyes displaced natural indigo on world markets, leaving planters desperate to extract fixed payments in lieu. Invited by a local peasant leader, Rajkumar Shukla, Gandhi arrived to investigate; when ordered by magistrates to leave the district he refused, courting arrest — his first act of civil disobedience on Indian soil. The resulting outcry forced the government to appoint a committee (on which Gandhi himself sat) that recommended abolition of the tinkathia system. Champaran mattered enormously as proof of concept: peasant grievance, patient fact-finding, calibrated defiance of an unjust order, and negotiated victory — the Satyagraha template that would recur, at ever larger scale, for the next three decades. Rajendra Prasad, J.B. Kripalani, and Mahadev Desai were among those who assisted or were drawn into public life through this campaign.
• 1918 — Kheda Satyagraha (Gujarat). Following crop failure, Kheda district's peasants — many of them Patidars — sought remission of land revenue under the terms of existing famine-relief codes; the government refused, insisting on full payment. Gandhi organised a campaign of revenue withholding, again risking confiscation of land and property, until the government quietly agreed to remit revenue for the poorest cultivators without a formal climb-down on either side — a face-saving compromise typical of Gandhi's early method. Vallabhbhai Patel, a Kheda-district lawyer, played a crucial organising role here and emerged as a national figure through it — the beginning of the Gandhi-Patel political partnership.
• 1918 — Ahmedabad Mill Strike. Here Gandhi intervened not against the government but as a mediator between Ahmedabad's textile mill owners and workers demanding a wage increase (partly to offset wartime inflation, and after the withdrawal of a "plague bonus"). When the workers' resolve wavered, Gandhi undertook his first hunger strike — ostensibly to strengthen the workers' resolve, though he was uneasily aware it also pressured the mill owners, several of whom were his own financial patrons, creating an ethical dilemma he later reflected on at length. A tribunal-mediated settlement granted a 35% wage rise.

Memory hook — Gandhi's three 1917–18 test runs, "CKA": Crop, Kisan, Karkhana — Champaran (a crop grievance, indigo), Kheda (a kisan/peasant revenue grievance), Ahmedabad (a karkhana/factory wage grievance). Picture Gandhi walking from a field, to a farm, to a mill floor — same method, three settings, escalating scale.

Practice Recall: Name Gandhi's three pre-1919 campaigns in India in order, the grievance behind each, and one person who rose to prominence through each — before reading on.

These three campaigns, all completed before Gandhi held any formal Congress office, established both his method and his moral authority. The movement then scaled up to a national stage:

• 1919 — the Rowlatt Act (formally the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act) extended emergency wartime powers of detention without trial into peacetime, provoking Gandhi's call for a nationwide hartal (general strike) — his first all-India political initiative.
• 13 April 1919 — the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, Amritsar. On Baisakhi day, thousands had gathered at the walled Jallianwala Bagh in defiance of a ban on public assembly imposed under martial law in Punjab. Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer marched troops to the only exit, blocked it, and ordered continuous rifle fire into the unarmed crowd for roughly ten minutes without warning, killing several hundred (official British figures said 379; Indian estimates ran far higher) and wounding well over a thousand. The massacre, and Dyer's later unrepentant testimony to the Hunter Commission, radicalised moderate Indian opinion decisively; Rabindranath Tagore renounced his knighthood in protest, writing to the Viceroy that he wished "to stand, shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of my countrymen." The episode remains, in nationalist memory, the single most searing symbol of colonial violence.
• 1919 — the Government of India Act, 1919 (Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms) introduced dyarchy in the provinces — a division of subjects into "reserved" (retained by the British-appointed Governor) and "transferred" (given to Indian ministers responsible to the legislature) — an unsatisfying half-measure that satisfied almost nobody.
• 1920 — the Non-Cooperation Movement, launched by Gandhi at the Congress's Calcutta special session and formally endorsed at Nagpur that December, was deliberately merged with the Khilafat Movement — Indian Muslim agitation, led by the Ali Brothers, Mohammad Ali and Shaukat Ali (with support from Maulana Abul Kalam Azad), against the harsh post-WWI treatment of the Ottoman Caliph, seen as the spiritual head of Sunni Islam. The merger produced, for the first and arguably only sustained time, genuine mass Hindu-Muslim political unity: surrender of government titles and honours, boycott of legislative councils, courts, schools and foreign cloth, and resignation from government service, all pursued non-violently.
• February 1922 — the Chauri Chaura incident, United Provinces. A Non-Cooperation procession clashed with police at Chauri Chaura; the enraged crowd set fire to the local police station, killing more than twenty policemen trapped inside. Gandhi, appalled that the movement had turned violent, unilaterally suspended Non-Cooperation days later — a decision that dismayed many colleagues (including Nehru and C.R. Das, then in jail) who felt a nationwide momentum had been sacrificed for a single local lapse, but one Gandhi defended as essential: a movement built on non-violence could not survive compromising on the principle, whatever the immediate cost. Gandhi himself was arrested in March 1922 and tried for sedition, memorably telling the court he pleaded guilty and invited "the highest penalty."