ECHOES OF CONSCIENCE PART I

GANDHI AND MARTIN LUTHER KING JR

- By Shaleeka Jayalath

In the story of human progress, some figures emerge whose ideas transcend borders, languages and centuries.

Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. were two such figures. The former faced colonialism in India, while the latter confronted racial segregation in the United States. Rather like characters from Jeffrey Archer’s Kane & Abel, Gandhi and King lived in different worlds and faced different forms of oppression. They never had the opportunity to meet each other either. Yet, their struggles were bound together by a single moral thread: the conviction that lasting change can be achieved through nonviolent resistance. This shared belief shaped not only their respective nations, but also the very language of modern social movements.

Gandhi's transformation began not in India but in colonial South Africa. Arriving in 1893 as a young lawyer, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi encountered the indignities of racial discrimination firsthand. The Pietermaritzburg incident was his “moment of truth”, where Gandhi was thrown off a train on his way to Pretoria, despite holding a valid first-class ticket.

Rather than retreat, he chose to act. He organised South Africa’s Indian community into the Natal Indian Congress, launched campaigns for basic civil rights, and eventually developed satyagraha, a philosophy of nonviolent resistance that involved confronting injustice with nonviolence and self-suffering to appeal to the oppressor‘s conscience and bring about social and political change.