Gandhiji..Part.5.
MKGandhi was not the man to nurse a grudge. On the
outbreak of the South African Boer War in 1899, he argued that the Indians,
were in duty bound to defend it. He raised an ambulance corps of 1,100
volunteers, out of whom 300 were free Indians and the rest indentured
labourers. It was a motley crowd of
barristers and accountants, artisans and labourers.
It was MKGandhi's task to instill in them a spirit
of service to those whom they regarded as their oppressors. The editor of the
Pretoria News has left a fascinating pen portrait of MKGandhi in the battle
zone.
“After a night's work which had shattered men with
much bigger frames, I came across MKGandhi in the early morning sitting by the
roadside eating a regulation army biscuit. Every man in General Buller's force
was dull and depressed, and damnation was heartily invoked on everything. But
MKGandhi was stoical in his bearing, cheerful and confident in his conversation
and had a kindly eye.”
The British victory in the war brought little relief
to the Indians in South Africa. The new regime in South Africa was to blossom
into a partnership, but only between Boers and Britons. MKGandhi saw that, with
the exception of a few Christian missionaries and youthful idealists, he had been unable to make a perceptible impression upon the
South African Europeans.
In 1906 the Transvaal government published a
particularly humiliating ordinance for the registration of its Indian
population. The Indians held a mass protest meeting at Johannesburg in
September 1906 and, under Gandhi's leadership, took a pledge to defy the
ordinance if it became law in the teeth of their opposition, and to suffer all
the penalties resulting from their defiance.
Thus was born satyagraha "devotion to
truth", a new technique for redressing wrongs through inviting, rather
than inflicting, suffering, for resisting the adversary without rancour and
fighting him without violence.
The struggle in South Africa lasted for more than
seven years. It had its ups and downs, but under MkGandhi's leadership, the
small Indian minority kept up its resistance against heavy odds. Hundreds of
Indians chose to sacrifice their livelihood and liberty rather than submit to
laws repugnant to their conscience and self-respect. In the final phase of the
movement in 1913, hundreds of Indians, including women, went to jail, and
thousands of Indian workers who had struck work in the mines bravely faced
imprisonment, flogging, and even shooting. It was a terrible ordeal for the
Indians, but it was also the worst possible advertisement for the South African
government, which, under pressure from the governments of Britain and India,
accepted a compromise negotiated by MkGandhi on the one hand and the South
African statesman General Jan Christian Smuts on the other.
"The saint has left our shores," Smuts
wrote to a friend on MKGandhi's departure from South Africa for India, in July
1914, "I hope for ever." Twenty-five years later, he wrote that it
had been his "fate to be the antagonist of a man for whom even then I had
the highest respect." Once, during his not infrequent stays in jail,
MkGandhi had prepared a pair of sandals for Smuts, who recalled that there was
no hatred and personal ill-feeling between them, and when the fight was over
"there was the atmosphere in which a decent peace could be
concluded."
As later events were to show, MkGandhi's work did
not provide an enduring solution for the Indian problem in South Africa. What
he did to South Africa was indeed less important than what South Africa did to
him. It had not treated him kindly, but, by drawing him into the vortex of its
racial problem, it had provided him with the ideal setting in which his
peculiar talents could unfold themselves.
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