Gandhiji. (Part..4..)
Africa was to present to MKGandhi challenges and
opportunities that he could hardly have conceived. In a Durban court, he was
asked by the European magistrate to take off his turban, he refused and left
the courtroom. A few days later, while travelling to Pretoria, he was
unceremoniously thrown out of a first-class railway compartment and left
shivering and brooding at Pietermaritzburg Station, in the further course of
the journey he was beaten up by the white driver of a stagecoach because he
would not travel on the footboard to make room for a European passenger, and
finally he was barred from hotels reserved "for Europeans only."
These humiliations were the daily lot of Indian traders
and labourers in Natal who had learned to pocket them with the same resignation
with which they pocketed their meagre earnings. What was new was not MKGandhi's
experience but his reaction. He had so far not been conspicuous for
self-assertion or aggressiveness. But something happened to him as he smarted
under the insults heaped upon him. In retrospect the journey from Durban to
Pretoria struck him as one of the most creative experiences of his life. It was
his moment of truth. Henceforth he would not accept injustice as part of the
natural or unnatural order in South Africa. He would defend his dignity as an
Indian and as a man.
While in Pretoria, MKGandhi studied the conditions
in which his countrymen lived and tried to educate them on their rights and
duties, but he had no intention of staying on in South Africa. Indeed, in June
1894, as his year's contract drew to a close, he was back in Durban, ready to
sail for India. At a farewell party given in his honour he happened to glance
through the Natal Mercury and learned that the Natal Legislative Assembly was
considering a bill to deprive Indians of the right to vote. "This is the
first nail in our coffin," MKGandhi told his hosts. They professed their
inability to oppose the bill, and indeed their ignorance of the politics of the
colony, and begged him to take up the fight on their behalf.
In July 1894, when he
was barely 25, he blossomed almost overnight into a proficient political
campaigner. He drafted petitions to the Natal legislature and the British
government and had them signed by hundreds of his compatriots. He could not
prevent the passage of the bill but succeeded in drawing the attention of the
public and the press in Natal, India, and England to the Natal Indians'
grievances. He was persuaded to settle down in Durban to practice law and to
organize the Indian community.
In 1894, he founded the Natal Indian Congress of
which he himself became the indefatigable secretary. Through this common
political organization, he infused a spirit of solidarity in the heterogeneous
Indian community. He flooded the government, the legislature, and the press
with closely reasoned statements of Indian grievances. Finally, he exposed to
the view of the outside world the skeleton in the imperial cupboard, the discrimination
practiced against the Indian subjects of Queen Victoria in one of her own
colonies in Africa. It was a measure of his success as a publicist that such
important newspapers as The Times of London and the Statesman and Englishman of
Calcutta editorially commented on the Natal Indians' grievances.
In 1896 MKGandhi went to India to fetch his wife
Kasturba and their children and to canvass support for the Indians overseas. He
met prominent leaders and persuaded them to address public meetings in the country's
principal cities. Unfortunately for him, garbled versions of his activities and
utterances reached Natal and inflamed its European population. On landing at
Durban in January 1897, he was assaulted and nearly lynched by a white mob.
Joseph Chamberlain, the colonial secretary in the British Cabinet, cabled the
government of Natal to bring the guilty men to book, but Gandhi refused to
prosecute his assailants. It was, he said, a principle with him not to seek
redress of a personal wrong in a Court of Law.
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