When Gandhi first visited South Africa, he found that the Indian labourers and others had no sense of dignity, were perfectly contented with their lot, and did not even resent the shameful treatment accorded to them. It was mainly through Gandhi's efforts that the proposed disfranchisement of Indians failed to receive the Royal assent. But he did not propose to stay on in South Africa and wanted to return as soon as possible to India.
When the Indians in South Africa requested him, with one voice, to assume their leadership, he yielded to their entreaties, deciding to earn his livelihood by the practice of law.
Gandhi has evidently inherited the spirit of passive resistance from his father, who ever stubbornly refused to obey unreasonable orders. Once he fell out with the British Political Agent in Kathiawar for having passed some strictures on the Thakur Sahib. The Resident soon found out that tying Karam Chand to a tree would produce no apology from him. He had once his house bombarded by the State troops, because of his refractory behaviour towards the Raja, who wanted Karam Chand to carry out some instructions contrary to the latter's judgment Gandhi approves of passive resistance as being superior in quality to resistance with physical force, and as connoting a higher stage of development. But the success of the movement depends, according to him, on the reasonableness of the cause for whose vindication it is organised, and the reality of the grievances whose redress it seeks.
It is sometimes pointed out that political move ments in India have, as their objective, the ameliora tion of the status of educated Indians and men of the upper classes, and are positively indifferent to the interests of the proletariat. The very mention of Mr. Gandhi's name is enough to dispel the erroneous impression. Gandhi may quite properly be called the greatest Labour Leader of India, even though the sphere of his activities has been South Africa, for the most part, and he has not yet organised a Labour movement, constructive in its aims and aggressive in its demands—of the type that obtains in Western countries. In fact, Gandhi would be the last person to inspire the same ideals into an Indian organisation as are operative in Western labour movements in their persistent struggles with powerful capitalistic interests. Being an uncompromising Tolstoyan, and completely other-worldly in all affairs, he would abstain, on principle and in virtue of his passivist and quiescent temperament, from driving the demands of labour to their logical con clusion. Besides, the masses of Indian labourers
being illiterate, it would be difficult, under existing circumstances, even to expound to them the first principles involved in the fiercer struggles, in more progressive countries for the capture of power and political control, for the abolition of capitalism itself, for the conscription of wealth or for the national isation and state-control of industries.
The problems that Gandhi has had actually to face have been of a different nature, quite remote from the region of Socialism or even that of an industrial revolution. In passing judgments on Gandhi's work, therefore, we must appreciate the nature of the problems that he has had to face and also the solutions towards which he has helped. And we must, likewise, bear in mind that the utility of Gandhi's services, apart from their intrinsic worth, consists in his complete identfi cation as an intellectual and as a member of the upper middle class, with the struggles, risks and hardships of skilled and unskilled labour. He has been for the proletariat, though not ol them. Nor has his work consisted of mere plat form oratory. He has had to suffer with the poor and the oppressed. On more than one occasion he has had to face the ugly passions of excitable and hostile crowds in South Africa. Once the timely inter vention of an English lady saved him from being kicked to death by some hooligans in a mob. On numerous occasions has he been sent to prison, where he had to submit to the indignities and roughness of Kafir warders, who would offer him food that was most repugnant to him.
When we remember that Gandhi is physically very delicate, though capable of great powers of endurance, we get some notion of how his severe handling by the authorities in South Africa must have affected him. Often he would politely decline preferential treatment by the South African courts, and being tried as an ordinary indentured labourer would accept the hard lot that was bound up with his ill-starred position. Once, on his return from India, the passengers of his ship were not allowed to land, the populace issuing the threat that should they disembark, they would certainly be put to death. But Gandhi was not to be bluffed. He insisted on his rights, and on those of his fellow passengers, and made the authorities yield to his pressure, and on landing was given the protection of law, which however did not keep him immune from the fierce onslaughts of the populace.