It's very easy to "fight" against an unpopular enemy that won't retaliate, like Gandhi did. The death toll of the Indian partition was breathtaking, and Gandhi ... fasted, while refusing to implement basic security measures while easily preventable massacres happened. He was also smart enough to choose his captors wisely, in other words, in the partition he avoided contact with muslims -himself- He had little qualms about sending millions to their death.

That's the theme of Gandhi's non-violence : it's only non-violence if you're looking from very far away focusing on the person. If you were someone affected by the political decisions Gandhi was involved in ... the political change he affected probably felt more like a holocaust. You could say, if you look at it from afar, that he didn't know this was going to happen, and he didn't order it. But he did order people into situations that he knew perfectly well were going to explode.

Here's one account of the immediate result of Gandhi's "non-violence":

There are numerous eyewitness accounts of the maiming and
mutilation of victims. The catalogue of horrors includes
the disembowelling of pregnant women, the slamming of
babies' heads against brick walls, the cutting off of
victims limbs and genitalia and the display of heads and
corpses. While previous communal riots had been deadly,
the scale and level of brutality was unprecedented.
Although some scholars question the use of the term
'genocide' with respect to the Partition massacres, much
of the violence manifested as having genocidal tendencies.
It was designed to cleanse an existing generation as well
as prevent its future reproduction."[1]

Mahatma Gandhi was a skilled orchestrator of public violence, who was very careful about constructing his public image. He has about as much claim to being a non-violent person as Hitler has, who has as far as I know never hurt a fly personally (actually Hitler did military service as a soldier, so I guess that's probably not true). Mahatma Gandi saw himself as being "above" base violence, saw himself as upper class, so he wouldn't touch arms himself. Not because he doesn't believe in violence, but because he doesn't believe in people of his social caste doing anything that could be understood to be work. He started out his political career recruiting for the army, and he's done the same job ever since.

Like most of this kind of "heroes" his non-violence is not the result of a belief that violence is wrong (or he wouldn't have recruited for the army), but the result of the worst aspect of Indian society : the caste system. His non-violence is about him personally refusing to do anything related to violence, except of course, command them from a distance. He would only involve himself in strategy, ordering people around and deciding what is "decent" "good" and "moral", on a grand scale. Personally committing violence is just one of those things he won't do himself, he'll hire/order others to do that for him.

And like any other monster that just happened to do successfully what is popular now, he has a cult following. At least this particular popular monster had the decency and self control to never rape and torture people himself, unlike the ubiquitous Che Guevara.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_India