Indian Activist Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was tragically assassinated by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist, on 30 January 1948. Gandhi was born 2 October 1869. He was raised in a Hindu merchant caste family in coastal Gujarat, India, and trained in law at the Inner Temple, London, Gandhi first employed nonviolent civil disobedience as an expatriate lawyer in South Africa, in the resident Indian community’s struggle for civil rights. After his return to India in 1915, he set about organising peasants, farmers, and urban labourers to protest against excessive land-tax and discrimination. He Assumed leadersip of the Indian National Congress in 1921, And led nationwide campaigns for various social causes And unified the masses in a common protest against British Rule By using nonviolent civil disobedience, in order to achieve Swaraj or self-rule forIndia.
Gandhi famously led Indians in challenging the British-imposed salt tax with the 400 km (250 mi) Dandi Salt March in 1930, and later in calling for the British to Quit India in 1942. He was imprisoned for many years, upon many occasions, in both South Africa and India. He lived modestly in a self-sufficient residential community and wore the traditional Indian dhoti and shawl, woven with yarn hand-spun on a charkha. He ate simple vegetarian food, and also undertook long fasts as a means of both self-purification and political protest.
Gandhi’s vision of an independent India based on religious pluralism, however, was challenged in the early 1940s by a new Muslim nationalism which was demanding a separate Muslim homeland carved out of India. Eventually, in August 1947, Britain granted independence, but the British Indian Empire was partitioned into two dominions, a Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. As many displaced Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs made their way to their new lands, religious violence broke out, especially in the Punjab and Bengal. Eschewing the official celebration of independence in Delhi, Gandhi visited the affected areas, attempting to provide solace. In the months following, he undertook several fasts unto death to stop religious violence. The last of these, undertaken on 12 January 1948 when he was 78,also had the indirect goal of pressuring India to pay out some cash assets owed to Pakistan.
However Some Indians thought Gandhi was too accommodating. Godse was later Captured along with many of his co-conspirators and collaborators, and Godse and his co-conspirator Narayan Apte were tried, convicted and executed while many of their other accomplices were given prison sentences. He has since inspired many movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. The honorific Mahātmā (Sanskrit: “high-souled”, “venerable”) applied to him first in 1914 in South Africa is now used worldwide. In India, he is also called Bapu (Gujarati: endearment for father, papa and Gandhi ji, and known as the Father of the Nation.