Why didn't the British in India execute Gandhi?

He was far less dangerous alive than dead for starters, murder him and he comes a marter. You also need to take into account that where as Gandhi represented trouble for the British he represented non violence, the Indians with the guns were in background waiting their chance. I have no idea what they could chanre and then pin on him to have them do this.

As a BTW having Hitler suggest that shooting Gahdhi is sure proof that the idea in wrong:D

Definitely. The British were even afraid that he should starve himself to death. They were not so incredibly stupid as to kill Gandhi. On the contrary. They were afraid that he should kill himself by starving himself to death.
 
George Orwell wrote that "It was also apparent that the British were making use of him, or thought they were making use of him. Strictly speaking, as a Nationalist, he was an enemy, but since in every crisis he would exert himself to prevent violence — which, from the British point of view, meant preventing any effective action whatever — he could be regarded as “our man”. In private this was sometimes cynically admitted. The attitude of the Indian millionaires was similar. Gandhi called upon them to repent, and naturally they preferred him to the Socialists and Communists who, given the chance, would actually have taken their money away. How reliable such calculations are in the long run is doubtful; as Gandhi himself says, “in the end deceivers deceive only themselves”; but at any rate the gentleness with which he was nearly always handled was due partly to the feeling that he was useful. The British Conservatives only became really angry with him when, as in 1942, he was in effect turning his non-violence against a different conqueror." http://www.orwell.ru/library/reviews/gandhi/english/e_gandhi
 
North Ireland: area 14130 km^2, population in 1971 about 1.5 million
British Raj: area 2.7 million km^2, population in 1901 about 220 million

We know that amount of trouble (pun intended) the british and the protestant northern irelanders went thru to keep the catholics down; now project the scenario to an area 193 times larger, with a population 147 times larger without any possible face saving exit strategy. My take is that keeping under control a diffusely insurrectional India would have sucked by itself all the resources of the British Empire.
 
Besides that it would be ridiculous to kill him, if they would have wanted him dead they would not even have to execute him. They could simply wait for an episode where he would starve himself to dead. But of course, the British wanted to avoid even that, as they would be blamed for his death.
 
Besides that it would be ridiculous to kill him, if they would have wanted him dead they would not even have to execute him. They could simply wait for an episode where he would starve himself to dead. But of course, the British wanted to avoid even that, as they would be blamed for his death.

Or, you know.. accident happens.

States are certainly no stranger at this kind of play.
 
Or, you know.. accident happens.

States are certainly no stranger at this kind of play.
No one is going to believe for a second that it was an accident. If Gandhi dies, particularly if he dies while in British captivity, it doesn't matter if he decided to light himself on fire and run up and down Bombay screaming "I am the Human Torch"; the British are still getting blamed for his death.
 
No doubt more than a few Britons would be horrified by such a move.

This is a big reason too: we believed we were the good guys, bringing law and peace and civilisation to the bally heathens. Shooting a feeble old man who wasn't being violent and was being very careful about the laws he broke and could throw our rhetoric back at us? Some people would be happy to do it, the rest would feel awkward and icky and struggle to justify it (and we'd justified a lot to ourselves). This is what made him such an effective force against us.

(And as David quotes, probably a bunch of people thought "at least we can talk to Gandhi")
 
No one is going to believe for a second that it was an accident. If Gandhi dies, particularly if he dies while in British captivity, it doesn't matter if he decided to light himself on fire and run up and down Bombay screaming "I am the Human Torch"; the British are still getting blamed for his death.

Oh I fully agree with you, it was more an answer to the whole "well, he didn't break any major law" discussion from above :) If you piss off a state enough, you don't really need to actually break laws to, hum, commit suicide by shooting yourself in the back several times before hanging yourself.

Generally, there's first some kind of scandal, rape or embezzlement, the person goes in reclusion for a time and then hangs oneself. Of course, with Gandhi persona, it doesn't work as well as the guy was the embodiment of virtue.

That said, it's horrible but Gandhi running Bombay screaming that would be quite a sight...
 

Cook

Banned
Why didn't the British in India execute Gandhi?

Execute him for what? Nothing he did constituted anything more than civil disobedience; hardly something likely to lead to the gallows in the British Empire. And it is important to remember that Gandhi wasn't ignorant of British Law; he was a Barrister who had been a member of London's prestigious Inner Temple; he knew exactly how far he could push the British, and constructed his strategy by continuously pushing them by small steps, each step of which could not be considered unacceptable to 'a reasonable man': Gandhi relied very heavily upon the English self-perception of themselves as reasonable men.
Doubtless Gandhi had read his Sun Tzu.
 
No one is going to believe for a second that it was an accident. If Gandhi dies, particularly if he dies while in British captivity, it doesn't matter if he decided to light himself on fire and run up and down Bombay screaming "I am the Human Torch"; the British are still getting blamed for his death.

The British even wanted to avoid that he starved himself to death while he was free, of course they would consider it far worse if he did so why in captivity. Needless to say the idea of executing him is absurd... On the contrary, when in prison, if he showed any sign of getting seriously ill, they would release him immidiately.
 
We know that amount of trouble (pun intended) the british and the protestant northern irelanders went thru to keep the catholics down

You seriously need to research the modern history of Northern Ireland. As a starter the British Army was first deployed in support of the civil powers in defending catholic republicans against attacks by protestant loyalists. Not to start an argument but to suggest further research.

There is a mild connection to Ghandi in that it was the civil disobedience campaign that led to the actions to remove the protestant bias of provincial government and policing that arose because both Dublin and Westminster preferred to ignore Northern Ireland in the vague hope the problem would either go away or be deferred to some later government. The terrorism achieved little but death and poverty.

I heartily applaud his choice of non violence (IIRC he said that he would not have dared use it against anyone but the British) but the little old man in the dhoti with a spinning wheel was pure spin. His attire of choice previously was the formal attire of a middle class barrister, wing collar and all, and the uniform of his volunteer army service. Good spin though. Amongst the senior British officials he was, socially, 'one of us' and we don't hang 'one of us'.
 
The British establishment had known that India would be granted independence or Dominionhood from at least the early 30s (Under Baldwins inititative an act was passed granting greater Home Rule in India) if not probably before and while there was a great deal of resistance this tended to be from the older members (Winston Churchill among them).

So executing the man that would probably become the leader of an independent India is not a good idea.
 
Or, you know.. accident happens.

I am sure the british considered accidents but then what?

Possible accidents:
  • a muslim kills Gandhi, start of a hindu-muslim civil war (not a beautiful sight), hard liners at the helm of indian protest;
  • a "lonely madman" :D kills Gandhi, everybody in India thinks that this is a british conspiracy, heavy protests, again hard liners at the helm;
  • Gandhi "commits suicide", as above;
  • Gandhi "vanishes", as above;
  • Gandhi has a transportation "accident", as above.
There is no "accident" scenario that ends positevely for the british. In any case, Gandhi successor would not be wheel-spinning ascetics but always a hard line militant, with all the entailing consequences. Gandhi was allowed to live because the was the less bad option the brits had.
 
Possible accidents:
a muslim kills Gandhi, start of a hindu-muslim civil war (not a beautiful sight), hard liners at the helm of indian protest;
a "lonely madman" kills Gandhi, everybody in India thinks that this is a british conspiracy, heavy protests, again hard liners at the helm;
Gandhi "commits suicide", as above;
Gandhi "vanishes", as above;
Gandhi has a transportation "accident", as above.
There is no "accident" scenario that ends positevely for the british. In any case, Gandhi successor would not be wheel-spinning ascetics but always a hard line militant, with all the entailing consequences. Gandhi was allowed to live because the was the less bad option the brits had.

Well, not entirely period appropriate but if your goal is to keep India at all cost, the Muslim assassination scenario is perfect for a divide and conquer scenario. Especially if Ghandi is not the only one killed but several other leaders get offed at the same time to prevent risks of accusation of British involvement.

The situation boils, thr British come in to "calm" the situation and use it as a pretext to show India is not ready for independance on its own.
 
And yet...

Hitler was not exactly the only one to have such an idea.

Winston Churchill infamously suggested in 1920 that Gandhi "ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back."
And yet, despite Winston Churchill being Prime minister of the UK for five years during WW2, and having ample opportunity to dispose of him in any way that he wished, Gandhi remained miraculously untrampled by an elephant... :D
 
And yet, despite Winston Churchill being Prime minister of the UK for five years during WW2, and having ample opportunity to dispose of him in any way that he wished, Gandhi remained miraculously untrampled by an elephant... :D

I guess he was dumb enough to say things like that, but not quite dumb enough to go through with them. ;)
 
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