Gandhi's Prinplces Applied to Today's Contemporary Issues
Channel: Global History for College Students
Date: 12/10/2023

Gandhi’s choice of nonviolent protest was a new way to engage and defeat an occupying colonial power. The most common pattern had been an armed insurrection by the local people with a quick victory or a long guerrilla war to drive them away. Gandhi chose nonviolence instead. His religious background as a Hindu and professional training as an attorney led him to choose nonviolence. The learning objective for the activity is to apply principles and tactics used by Gandhi during the Indian protest movement with a contemporary protest issue important to students. The first task for your small group is to select a protest issue. The online version of this activity is completed by a Google poll set up for each small group. In the past, the following protest issues have been used. These are only provided to give examples: animal cruelty; high price of college (textbooks, tuition); food choices on campus (vendors of soft drinks, food choices in the cafeterias); working conditions (minimum wage); just to name a few. Often, when the story of Gandhi’s nonviolence movement is told, the focus is with the long march to the sea to protest the British salt monopoly. While this is very important, nearly two dozen other actions were taken to protest the British occupation of India. Each of these individual actions is a “tactic”. The march to the sea would be one tactic. However, simultaneous with this activity were many others, such as providing opportunities for other Indians to join the march, replacing their imported clothing from Britain with hand-made clothing. These nearly two dozen individual tactics can be categorized and placed into small groups that achieve similar objectives. These categories are then called “principles”. One strategy was to select one or more simple yet concrete issues for the protest to focus upon. While the overall goal was for the English to leave India, creating concrete issues to protest included the British monopoly on salt and rejecting the purchase of British-made clothing. During the upcoming learning activity, students will work in small groups to apply what was learned about the Indian protest movement. While some of the individual tactics used by the Indians could be applied to the activity, all of the principles could be used since they apply to any protest.