Gandhi arrives: Champaran, Rowlatt, and Jallianwala Bagh

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi returned to India from South Africa in January 1915, where he had developed satyagraha, the method of non-violent resistance, in campaigns for Indian rights. In India he first tested his method in local struggles: at Champaran in Bihar in 1917, where indigo peasants were forced to grow indigo on part of their land; at Kheda in Gujarat in 1918, where peasants sought relief from revenue after a failed harvest; and at Ahmedabad in 1918, where he supported mill workers in a dispute over wages. In each case he investigated the facts, mobilised the affected people, and negotiated a settlement, building a reputation as a leader who worked from the ground up.

The Rowlatt Act of 1919 changed the scale of the struggle. Passed in March 1919, it allowed the government to detain suspects without trial, continuing wartime emergency powers into peacetime. Gandhi called a nationwide hartal, a day of strike and prayer, against the Act, and protests spread across the country. The government's response was severe, and in the Punjab, where martial law was declared, the tension exploded at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar.

On 13 April 1919, a crowd gathered at Jallianwala Bagh, a walled garden, for a public meeting and the Baisakhi festival. Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to fire on the crowd without warning, killing several hundred people. The official Hunter Committee later put the number of dead at 379, while Congress investigators estimated a higher figure, and the exact toll remains disputed. Dyer was removed from command but was praised by some in Britain, a reaction that shocked Indian opinion and turned many Moderates towards the national movement.

Jallianwala Bagh was a turning point. Gandhi, who had earlier supported the British war effort and hoped for reform, now concluded that the government could not be trusted to reform itself, and he returned the medals he had received for earlier service. The massacre also gave the movement its first martyr site, a place where the cost of colonial rule could be seen and remembered, and it prepared the ground for the first nationwide non-cooperation campaign.