Calling the British Empire's (or any other) colonialism "benevolent" has to be a joke. Or is it?

Satyagraha worked in India not because the British were too benevolent or too media conscious - it worked because of the intricate British policy of keeping as little as possible original British forces in the region (manpower has always been a problem in that respect for GB) and installing satraps (or raj) which were supposed to take care of local affairs with a certain amount of autonomy.
The British knew how to respond to violent uprisings - dispatch few elite troops alongside with a larger, domestic force (mostly Gurkha and Sikh units in India), move in fast and hard, and get the hell out again. That doesn't work against peaceful protesters who have gained a reasonable amount of support from the local populace, because that would be extremely provocative. Also it's harder to play peaceful portesters against each other and hope the problem will just solve itself.
The second reason for it to work, was that Britain had enormous problems on its hands elsewhere and couldn't muster the energy to concern themselves as throroughly with India as would have been necessary to break the Satyagraha movement (see Churchill's comments on Gandhi).

Civilian disobedience worked for MLK in the U.S., because it was a clever media effort and the U.S. weren't as good at policing then. I'm not so sure whether it would work equally well nowadays.

The velvet revolution worked because the Warszaw Bloc as a whole was already toppling and the SSSR was too weak / concerned with other problems to intervene by force, plus it would have been a pretty stupid idea, geopolitically speaking.

I'm sorry, but I can't bring myself to agree with your thesis of a "benevolent" tormenter.

on a side note, I think gandhi was just utterly clueless on what happened in germany when he said that.