India's Founding Fathers

               August 15, 1947, a day which India will remember forever. On this day, about 20 years of long, drawn-out, tensions between India and Great Britain came to a close. From this time on colonial India ceased to exist and a new India, an independent India, came into fruition. This can be attributed to men such as Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. These men greatly influenced the events leading to total independence such as the Civil Disobedience Movement, the Muslim-Hindu tensions, and the “Quit India Movement.”

                Mohandas Gandhi was able to help drive the British from India by using one banner, salt. Among the many unfair things that the British imposed upon the Indian was the salt tax. (10) Salt was a staple in India and by taxing it, they were putting an unfair price on every person’s life. Even Gandhi said, “The tax constitutes therefore the most inhuman poll tax the ingenuity of man can devise.”(11) Under the banner of salt, Gandhi began the Civil Disobedience Movement and started nationwide protests against the British. (12) By weakening the domestic support of the British, Gandhi had started the road to Indian Independence.

                Nehru, the first prime minister of India, was a man who was the diplomat to the British and one of the leaders of the independence movement. His influential support of the Quit India Movement helped him gain much political power in India. By making congress boycott the British, he was able to weaken much of the British stranglehold on India. With the resulting arrests of nearly every congressman, Nehru was one of the few remaining free Indian national leaders, thus putting himself in major power for the rest of India.

                Jinnah may have been the most influential, yet least known of the three, simply because of his radical movement to separate India from their Muslim inhabitants. (13) As the leader of the All-India Muslim league, he fought hard with the British and Indians for a separate Muslim country. (14) He called for Muslim to rebel against the British and Indians. (15) With massacres in Bihar and Calcutta of both Hindus and Muslims, the British called for a ceasefire in which they finally gave up India. (16) However with Jinnah as the leader, he replied, “they (the Muslim League) will not yield an inch for Pakistan.” (17) With that demand, India was liberated from Great Britain and Pakistan, Jinnah’s dream country, separated from India.

                These three men led the biggest revolution in India’s history. Without any of these men, India would be a very different country and still part of Great Britain. Twenty years of their hard work and dedication led to August 15, 1947, the official Indian Independence Day.