India’s struggle for swaraj continues under the leadership of Gandhi, commonly known as "Mahatma" (or Great Soul). He had been educated in Britain he didn’t have much success as a lawyer while he was in India. He had accepted an invitation in 1893 to represent indentured Indian laborers in South Africa. He stayed on for more than twenty years and been a prominent leader of the anti-Apartheid movement. He had been a vocal opponent of basic discrimination and abusive labor treatment as well as suppressive police control. He returned to India in 1915 and joins the national movement. Gopal Krishna Gokhale, a veteran Congressman and Indian leader became Gandhi's mentor.
Gandhi's ideas and strategies of nonviolent civil disobedience (Satyagraha) appeared impractical to many educated Indians at the beginning. Observers realized Gandhi's political potential when he used the Satyagraha during the anti-Rowlett Acts protests in Punjab. In 1920, under Gandhi's leadership, the Congress was reorganized and given a new constitution, whose goal was swaraj. Membership in the party was opened to anyone prepared to pay a token fee, and a hierarchy of committees was established and made responsible for discipline. During his first nationwide Satyagraha, Gandhi urged the people to boycott British education institutions, law courts, and products (in favor of swadeshi); to resign from government employment; to refuse to pay taxes; and to forsake British titles and honors. The party was transformed from an elite organization to one of mass national appeal.
Gandhi was forced to call off the campaign in 1922 because of atrocities committed against police. However, the abortive campaign marked a milestone in India's political development and Gandhi was imprisoned in 1922 for six years, but was released after serving two. On his release from prison, he set up an ashram, established a newspaper, and inaugurated a series of reforms aimed at the socially disadvantaged within Hindu society, the rural poor, and the. His popularity soared in Indian politics as he reached the hearts and minds of ordinary people, winning support for his causes as no one else had ever done before. By his personal and eclectic piety, his asceticism, his vegetarianism, his espousal of Hindu-Muslim unity, and his firm belief in ahimsa, Gandhi appealed to the many Hindu ideals. For Gandhi, moral regeneration, social progress, and national freedom were inseparable.
As voices inside and outside the Congress became more strident, the British appointed Simon commission in 1927 to recommend further measures in the constitutional devolution of power. The British failure to appoint an Indian member to the commission outraged the Congress and others as a result Congress boycotted the commission. In 1929 the Congress responded by drafting its own constitution under the guidance of Motilal Nehru demanding full independence by 1930 and the Congress observed January 26, 1930, as the first anniversary of the first year of independence.
Gandhi led his most inspired campaign to protest against British taxes on salt on the coast of Gujarat between March 12 and April 6, 1930. Gandhi and his followers marched from his ashram in Ahmadabad to Dandi (400 kilometers) made their own salt from sea water by breaking the law. This symbolic move reflected the rage of Indians on unjust law and India's determination to be free. Approximately over 100,000 people were imprisoned in the course of the Civil disobedience movement (1930-31). While Gandhi was in jail, the first Round Table Conference was held in London in November 1930, without representation from the Indian National Congress. The ban upon the Congress was removed because of economic hardships caused by the Satyagraha. Gandhi, along with other members of the Congress Working Committee, was released from prison in January 1931. In March of 1931, the Gandhi-Irwin Pact was signed, and the government agreed to set all political prisoners free. In return, Gandhi agreed to discontinue the civil disobedience movement and participate as the sole representative of the Congress in the second Round Table Conference, which was held in London in September 1931. However, the conference ended in failure in December 1931. Gandhi returned to India and decided to resume the civil disobedience movement in January 1932.
The Government of India Act 1935, the voluminous and final constitutional effort at governing British India, articulated three major goals: establishing a loose federal structure, achieving provincial autonomy, and safeguarding minority interests through separate electorates. The federal provisions, intended to unite princely states and British India at the centre, were not implemented because of ambiguities in safeguarding the existing privileges of princes. In February 1937, however, provincial autonomy became a reality when elections were held; the Congress emerged as the dominant party with a clear majority in five provinces and held an upper hand in two, while the Muslim League performed poorly. In 1939, the Viceroy Lord Linlithgow declared India's entrance into World War II without consulting provincial governments. In protest, the Congress asked all of its elected representatives to resign from the government.
Jinnah, the president of the Muslim League, persuaded participants at the annual Muslim League session at Lahore in 1940 to adopt what later came to be known as the Lahore Resolution, demanding the division of India into two separate sovereign states, one Muslim, the other Hindu; sometimes referred to as Two Nation Theory. Although the idea of Pakistan had been introduced as early as 1930, very few had responded to it. However, the volatile political climate and hostilities between the Hindus and Muslims transformed the idea of Pakistan into a stronger demand.
In March 1942, faced with an increasingly dissatisfied sub-continent only reluctantly participating in the war, and deteriorations in the war situation in Europe and South East Asia, and with growing dissatisfactions among Indian troops- especially in Europe- and among the civilian population in the sub-continent, the British government sent a delegation to India under Stafford Cripps, in what came to be known as the Cripps' Mission. The purpose of the mission was to negotiate with the Indian National Congress a deal to obtain total co-operation during the war, in return of progressive devolution and distribution of power from the crown and the Viceroy to elected Indian legislature. However, the talks failed, having failed to address the key demand of a timeframe towards self-government, and of definition of the powers to be relinquished, essentially portraying an offer of limited dominion-status that was wholly unacceptable to the Indian movement. To force the Raj to meet its demands and to obtain definitive word on total independence, the Congress took the decision to launch the Quit India Movement.
The aim of the movement was to bring the British Government to the negotiating table by holding the Allied War Effort hostage. The call for determined but passive resistance that signified the certitude that Gandhi foresaw for the movement is best described by his call to Do or Die, issued on 8 August at the Gowalia Tank Maidan in Bombay, since re-named August Kranti Maidan (August Revolution Ground). However, almost the entire Congress leadership, and not merely at the national level, was put into confinement less than twenty-four hours after Gandhi's speech, and the greater number of the Congress leaders were to spend the rest of the war in jail.
On August 8, 1942 the Quit India resolution was passed at the Bombay session of the All India Congress Committee (AICC). The draft proposed that if the British did not accede to the demands, a massive Civil Disobedience would be launched. However, it was an extremely controversial decision. At Gowalia Tank, Mumbai, Gandhi urged Indians to follow a non-violent civil disobedience. Gandhi told the masses to act as an independent nation and not to follow the orders of the British.
The British swiftly responded by mass detentions. A total over 100,000 arrests were made nationwide, mass fines were levied, and demonstrators were subjected to public flogging. The movement soon became a leaderless act of defiance (all the leaders were in jail), with a number of acts that deviated from Gandhi's principle of non-violence.