The year, 2017 marks the centenary of the Champaran Satyagraha, the first nonviolent movement by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on the Indian soil, which gave a new direction to India’s freedom movement and channelized people’s power in the fight against colonial power .
On his return to India in 1915, after 21 years experiments in South Africa with the weapon of Satyagraha safe in his armoury, Gandhi launched his first Satyagraha on Indian soil in 1917 at Champaran, taking up the cause of the poor disinherited peasants, and humbled the might of the British and proved to the world that Satyagraha in South Africa was not a coincidence, a onetime wonder, but a powerful way of conflict resolution.
In Champaran, a district in the state of Bihar, thousands of landless serfs, indentured labourers and poor farmers were forced by Europeans to grow indigo, a blue dye, and this imposed on them untold sufferings. Champaran....
