For more than ten years he had been fighting for the elementary civic rights of Indian immigrants in Natal and Transvaal, sending well-worded petitions and leading deputations to high officials in South Africa and England, but without tangible results. Matters came to a head in Transvaal on the question of registration of Indians. He was stunned when he read the clauses of a bill in the Transvaal Gazette (August 22, 1906), which had been prepared for the Transvaal legislature. It required every Indian, including children above eight, to register. In courts, in revenue offices, indeed almost at any time or place an Indian could be challenged to produce his registration certificate; police officers could enter any house to examine permits. ‘Dog’s collar’ was an apt description of this measure.

Gandhi’s hopes of securing amelioration of the condition of Indians by educating public opinion in South Africa, India and Britain were frustrated. In India there was plenty of sympathy for Indians in South Africa, reflected in the resolutions passed by the Indian National Congress (INC). However, Indian politicians were conscious of their limitations. As Sir Pherozeshah Mehta bluntly remarked to Gandhi when they travelled to Calcutta for the 1901 session of the INC: “But what rights have we in our own country? I believe that so long as we have no power in our own land, you cannot fare better in the colonies.”

The object of the new registration measure in Transvaal was apparently to demoralise the better educated and prosperous Indian. The Indians had no representation in the legislature. Gandhi was convinced that if this measure became law and the Indians accepted it, it would ‘spell absolute ruin to them’. It was better, he felt, for Indians to die rather than submit to such a law. But how were they to die? What should they dare and do, so that there would be nothing before them except the choice between victory and death? An impenetrable wall was before him; he could not see his way through it.

On September 11, the Indians met at the Empire Theatre hall at Johannesburg — 3,000 of the 13,000 Indians in Transvaal were present. The main resolution, drafted by Gandhi, proclaimed that the determination of the community not to submit to the proposed measure. When one of the speakers declared in the name of God that he would never submit to that law, Gandhi was, as he wrote later, “startled and put on his guard”. The suggestion of a solemn oath helped him to think out “the possible consequences in a single moment,” and his “perplexity gave way to enthusiasm”. A solemn oath meant much to him. His life had been moulded by the vows he had taken. The idea of a pledge of resistance to an unjust law, with God as witness, and with no fear of consequences, demolished the wall which had been obscuring his vision.

The meeting ended with a solemn oath by “all present standing with raised hands, with God as witness not to submit to the (Asiatic Registration) Ordinance if it became law”. Gandhi did not explain the mode of resistance; perhaps he was himself not clear about it. Of one thing, however, there was no doubt; it was to be free from violence. He was vaguely aware that a new principle of fighting political and social evils had come into being. Indian Opinion, the voice of Gandhi’s movement in South Africa, invited suggestions for an appropriate name for this principle. The word ‘sadagraha’ (which means firmness in good conduct) appealed to Gandhi; he amended it to ‘satyagraha’ (firmness in truth). The methodology of the new movement, however, was to evolve gradually in the ensuing months and years; its author was a man for whom theory was the handmaid of action.

How significant September 11 was for humankind comes through in a conversation between Albert Einstein and Jawaharlal Nehru in the United States in 1949. Soon after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing in 1945, the Mahatma had questioned Nehru on the atom bomb. In Nehru’s words, “with deep human compassion loading his gentle eyes,” he remarked that this wanton destruction had confirmed his faith in God and non-violence, and that “now he realised the full significance of the holy mission for which God had created him and armed him with the mantra of non-violence”. Nehru recalled later that, as Gandhi uttered these words, he had resolved then and there to make it his mission to fight and outlaw the bomb.

Gandhi was not destined to launch that crusade. He was assassinated in January 1948. The following year, when Nehru visited the US he related his conversation with Gandhi to Albert Einstein. With a twinkle in his eyes, Einstein wrote down a number of dates on one side, and events on the other, to show the parallel evolution of the nuclear bomb and Gandhi’s satyagraha respectively — almost from decade to decade since the beginning of the 20th century. It turned out that by a strange coincidence that while Einstein and his fellow scientists were engaged in work which made the fission of the atom possible, Gandhi was embarking on his experiments in peaceful, non-violent satyagraha in South Africa; indeed the Quit India struggle almost coincided with the American project for the manufacture of the atom bomb.

The choice between these two opposite and parallel strategies, which Einstein noted in 1949, has become once again a critical and difficult one today. Will the instinctive death-wish of our species (which Freud perceived) triumph over the soul force which Gandhi sought to evoke in the human breast? Gandhi himself had no doubt that peace “will not come out of a clash of arms, but out of justice lived and done by unarmed nations in the face of odds”.

The writer, founder-director of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, is one of the foremost historians of the Indian national movement, and has written extensively on Gandhi