Which leader led a nonviolent campaign against British rule in India?

Mohandas Gandhi, known as Mahatma, led the campaign against British rule using mass nonviolent resistance, a method he developed while working as a lawyer in South Africa before returning to India. His approach, satyagraha, was not simply refusal to fight but deliberate, disciplined disobedience of unjust laws, accepting arrest and punishment in order to make the injustice visible and the country ungovernable without consent. The 1930 salt march is the clearest example. Salt was taxed and its production monopolised, so Gandhi walked to the sea and made salt from seawater, an act trivial in itself and impossible to punish without looking absurd, and it triggered mass imitation and tens of thousands of arrests. He also pressed for the boycott of British cloth in favour of hand-spun khadi, tying the political campaign to economic self-reliance. Independence came in 1947, accompanied by partition, which he opposed.

Gandhi's methods were studied closely by later civil rights campaigners, including Martin Luther King Jr.