Gandhi Gandhi And Essence Of His Movement - 1613 Words

Secular Gandhi and Essence of his movement in Revolutionizing Congress Mahatma Gandhi was a political and spiritual leader, though not in a religious sense. He was a religious person but believed that all religions were equal and did not advocate on religion over another. Gandhi was born in 1869 in Porbandar on the Western coast of India and raised by Hindu parents, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi found many opportunities in his youth to meet people of all faiths. He had many Christian and Muslim friends, as well as being heavily influenced by Jainism in his youth. Gandhi probably took the religious principle of Ahimsa from his Jain neighbours, and from it developed his own famous principle of Satyagraha later on in his life. Gandhi hoped†¦show more content†¦When he returned to India, his immediate problem was to settle his small band of relatives and associates in an ashram, which was a group life lived in a religious spirit. His ashram was a small model of the whole moral and religious ideal. It did not enforce on its inmates any theology or ri tual, but only a few simple rules of personal conduct. More like a large family than a monastery, it was filled with children and senior citizens, the uneducated and American and European scholars, devout followers and thinly disguised sceptics - a melting pots of different and sometimes opposing ideas, living peacefully and usefully with each other. He was the moral father of the ashram, and would fast as penance when any wrong was committed within its walls. Everyone was bound to him by love and a fear of hurting him. His increasing influence over the Indian masses with satyagraha , which he first coined in his South Africa campaigns, was no less different. Gandhi s involvement with politics in the region meant that he had to tread carefully around the sometimes conflicting ideals of the Hindus and Muslims in the Indian National Congress. Although he initially believed that the British colonial influence was a good one, he was increasingly aware that to be truly equal, the Indians would need independence from British rule. When he and other members of the Congress were arrested on 9 August 1942 for promoting this idea, a wave of violent disobedience swept