Kheda Satyagraha

Background

Kheda district suffered widespread crop failure in 1917–18 following heavy rains, plague, and a general agricultural crisis. Under the prevailing land-revenue system, cultivators owed a fixed assessment to the Bombay Presidency government regardless of yield, with only limited provision for remission in years of below-average harvest. Local farmers, organized through the Gujarat Sabha, petitioned the government for full remission, arguing the shortfall met the threshold set by revenue rules. Officials disputed the extent of the failure and refused blanket relief.

The campaign

Gandhi, fresh from his intervention in the Champaran indigo dispute in Bihar the previous year, was invited to lead the Kheda cause and agreed to organize a satyagraha — his second in India. Vallabhbhai Patel, then a Ahmedabad lawyer, took an organizing role that established his standing among Gujarati cultivators; other participants included Indulal Yajnik, Mahadev Desai, and Narhari Parikh. Villagers pledged collectively to withhold revenue payments, accepting that the government could seize land or property as a consequence. The campaign drew on Gandhi's method of disciplined, public, nonviolent resistance rather than covert evasion: participants openly declared their refusal to pay.

Settlement

After several months of standoff, and as some wealthier landholders who had already paid began pressing for a resolution, the two sides reached an informal settlement in mid-1918. The government agreed to suspend revenue collection for cultivators unable to pay and to restore any confiscated property, without a formal written concession on the remission principle itself, allowing both sides to present the outcome as satisfactory. The campaign gave Patel his first sustained political base in Gujarat and marked an early instance of Congress-aligned satyagraha applied to an agrarian grievance rather than a purely political demand.