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Peacemaker of the Month
Mohandas K. Gandhi
Mohandas K. Gandhi was born to his Hindu parents in 1869 in the state of Gujarat in Western India. He entered an arranged marriage at the age of thirteen with Kasturbai Makanji. His family later sent him to London to study law, and he was admitted to the Inner Temple in 1891, and called to the bar. In Southern Africa he worked to improve the rights of the immigrant Indians. It was there that Gandhi developed his Creed of Passive Resistance against injustice, satyagraha, meaning truth force, and he was jailed quite often because of the protests that he led. Before he returned back to India with his wife and children in 1915, he had greatly changed the lives of Indians living in Southern Africa.
Before long, Gandhi was taking the lead in the long struggle for independence from Britain. He never wavered in his sturdy belief in nonviolent protest and religious tolerance. When Muslim and Hindu compatriots committed acts of violence, whether against the British who ruled India, or against each other, he fasted until it stopped. When independence came in 1947, it was not a military victory, but rather a celebration of human will. However, to his despair, India was divided into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. He spent the last two months of his life trying to end the appalling violence which developed, leading him to fast to the brink of death, an act which finally stopped the riots. He died in January 1948, at the age of 79, when he was killed by an assassin as he walked through a crowded garden in New Delhi to take evening prayers.