Difference From The Congress
Apart from firing up college students, educated Indians and people in the cities, the Leagues elicited little response or enthusiasm from India's masses and the British government. It was often divided upon whether to follow up with public demonstrations, or compromise by contesting elections to the legislative councils that were criticized as little more than rubber stamps for the Viceroy.
Its further growth and activity were stalled by the rise of Mohandas Gandhi and his Satyagraha art of revolution: non-violent, but mass-based civil disobedience. Gandhi's Hindu lifestyle, mannerisms and immense respect for Indian culture and the common people of India made him immensely popular with India's common people. His victories in leading the farmers of Champaran, Bihar and Kheda, Gujarat against the British authorities on tax revolts made him a national hero. Gandhi realized that India was 900,000 villages, not the cities of Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta and Madras. Most of its people were poor, illiterate and farmers, not Western-educated lawyers.
Read more about this topic: Indian Home Rule Movement
Famous quotes containing the words difference and/or congress:
“The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“There is not a subject in which I take a deeper interest than I do in the development of Alaska, and I propose, if Congress will follow by recommendations, to do something in that territory that will make it move on.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)