Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who died from an assassin's bullet on Jan. 30, 1948, used non-violent civil disobedience to end British colonial rule in India. His ideas inspired millions, including leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Aung San Suu Kyi. (Getty Images)

It was the cruellest of ironies, a blow to a philosophy that had changed the world for the better.

Sixty years ago this week, on Jan. 30, 1948, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was murdered. A man who had driven the British out of India with non-violent civil disobedience fell victim to an assassin's bullet.

Gandhi's frail frame and bespectacled face were already familiar around the world, thanks to his tireless campaign against imperial Britain. Known as "Mahatma" — which means "Great Soul" in Sanskrit — he was revered as a saint, a demi-god, in his native land. His death plunged the country into spasms of grief and self-doubt.

"The light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere," India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, told the Indian people. "Our beloved leader … the Father of the Nation, as we call him … is no more."

The murder was a profoundly political act. The gunman, a Hindu fanatic named Nathuram Godse, revelled in his guilt and went to the gallows unrepentant. His brother and co-conspirator Gopal Godse, told Time magazine in 2000 that Gandhi had betrayed the Hindus of India in favour of the Muslims of Pakistan.

History takes the opposite view. Gandhi is widely recognized as one of the greatest figures of the 20th century — a man whose moral leadership liberated hundreds of millions of people.

Inspired in South Africa

Gandhi became a believer in non-violent civil disobedience while he was a young lawyer in white-ruled South Africa in the early 20th century. He returned to India during the First World War to continue his struggle, but this time against the formidable might of the British Empire.

As a prisoner of conscience and president of post-apartheid South Africa, Nelson Mandela says he respected and followed the ideals of Gandhi. (Alexander Joe/Getty Images)

Thanks in large part to his efforts and example, India achieved full independence on Aug. 15, 1947.

The idea that a people could free themselves from oppression without the use of violent force was breathtaking. It was called ahimsa, a word from Sanskrit that means simply "avoidance of violence."

Gandhi's ideas, and his success in India, inspired people around the world, among them Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr. and Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma (also known as Myanmar). Each took the core notion of non-violence and made it fit their own societies, their own challenges.

It was with great reluctance, Mandela has said, that his African National Congress decided to set up a militant wing, Unkhonto we Sizwe, in 1961. It was a response to vicious Sharpeville massacre of 1960, when South African police opened fire on a crowd of protesters, killing around 90 of them.

"I followed the Gandhian strategy for as long as I could," Mandela said, "but then there came a point in our struggle when the brute force of the oppressor could no longer be countered through passive resistance alone."

Sabotage and violence against property were preferred to attacks on people, Mandela said.

'A false ideal'

King discovered non-violence as a university student and applied the idea by urging his followers to boycott segregated public services and protest peacefully against racist laws in the American south.

U.S. civil rights advances of the 1960s sprung in no small way from the images of King and other protesters facing down the clubs, bullwhips and fire hoses wielded by white policeman in southern cities like Birmingham, Ala.

Hundreds of thousands died and millions were displaced in the Rwandan genocide of the mid-1990s. (Jerome Delay/Associated Press)

King was not without his critics. Some black community leaders thought non-violence a self-defeating strategy that enabled racist brutality against people who wouldn't respond. Stokely Carmichael's Black Panther party considered King's approach "a false ideal," and Black Muslim leader Malcolm X said oppressed people should reserve the right to use force.

"Concerning non-violence, it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself," he wrote in his autobiography in 1964.

Other critics of non-violence go further and ask whether such an approach is suited to confronting evil on any scale. Thomas Hurka, a professor in the University of Toronto's philosophy department, cites some of the worst moments of the 20th century in questioning the relevance of Gandhi's legacy.

"Non-violence is a great idea, but does it work against real evil?" Hurka said. "Would non-violence have stopped Hitler or the Rwandan genocide? I don't think so."

Changing the world

With wars raging in Iraq and Afghanistan, and countless civil conflicts around the world, even the most fervent advocates of Gandhi's ideals might find their faith tested by the realities of today.

But one Toronto-based academic went through such a test recently, and emerged, he says, even more committed to non-violence.

Iranian-Canadian Ramin Jahanbegloo is a visiting professor at the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto. He was arrested in his native Iran in 2006 and held for four months at Teheran's notorious Evin prison, accused of vague links to spying.

Now back in Toronto, Jahanbegloo told CBCNews.ca that his jail time only served to underline the contemporary relevance of non-violence and of Gandhi's legacy.

"You have time [in prison] to reflect on your choices, and on how Gandhi and Mandela used their jail terms. They grew as humans, rejected revenge and resentment and emerged to change the world," he said.

"That's the choice we have."

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