Gandhi & Churchill (59 page)

Churchill even told Irwin, “I believe you have a great opportunity on your hands” to show British resolve and to crush any renewal of civil disobedience. Churchill fully expected compromise to fail, with even the so-called Moderates routed and silenced. “It is my conviction,” he wrote, “that upon the supreme issue of India the British Empire will arise in its old strength and that those who, like you, are risking their lives to keep the flag flying, may act with growing confidence.”
⁶⁶

Even as Churchill wrote these lines, however, another flag was being unfurled on the banks of the Ravi River. Midnight had come to Lahore, and the New Year had begun. As the crowd danced and sang, Jawaharlal Nehru, the Congress president, hoisted the new national flag of India. The flag owed its basic tricolor design to Gandhi, with a stripe of saffron for Hindus, green for Muslims, and white for everyone else, and with a charkha represented at its center.

Gandhi had also composed a rousing Declaration of Independence:

We believe it is the inalienable right of the Indian people, as of any other people, to have freedom and enjoy the fruits of their toil and have the necessities of life…The British Government of India has not only deprived the Indian people of their freedom but has based itself on the exploitation of the masses, and has ruined India economically, politically, culturally, and spiritually. We believe, therefore, that India must sever the British connection and attain
Purana Swaraj,
or Complete Independence.

The battle had begun.

Chapter Seventeen

SALT

1930

This is God’s grace, let us remain unmoved and watch His miracles.

MOHANDAS K. GANDHI, APRIL
5, 1930

B
ATTLE HAD BEEN JOINED, BUT FOR
six weeks almost nothing happened.

Many Indian cities celebrated Congress’s India Independence Day, which Gandhi had set for January 26, 1930. Some Union Jacks were burned; some new Indian flags were flown. On the thirtieth Subhas Chandra Bose and some companions went to jail for one year. But their crime was not to have committed acts of civil disobedience or noncooperation. The crime was to have organized an unauthorized parade as part of All-Bengal Political Sufferers’ Day the previous August.
¹

In fact few visible acts of civil disobedience took place anywhere in India—certainly few that were meaningful. This should have come as no surprise to Gandhi. Very reluctantly he had agreed at Lahore to drop the boycott of schools and universities and courts from his satyagraha program, thus letting India’s urban middle class off the civil disobedience hook. Schools, shops, and factories stayed open. Congress members were still supposed to resign from the provincial legislatures, but few did.
²

Gandhi, meanwhile, was back at Sabarmati, spinning cotton thread by the hour and thinking. At Lahore his Congress supporters had looked more like a disorganized rabble than a strong disciplined elite.
³
He decided he could not expect them to take any initiative or follow complicated orders. Gandhi wanted a satyagraha campaign that would give Indians a sense of unity and moral uplift: Swaraj in the truest sense. But as he freely admitted, he had no idea how to do it. “It may be impossible to offer civil disobedience at this stage,” he wrote on January 9. “Just now everything is in the embryonic state.”
⁴

Gandhi also realized that he must not repeat the mistakes of the past. His hopes in 1920 had perished in the flames of Chauri Chaura. He had to find a different path this time, something that would be both more effective and less likely to spin out of the bounds of ahimsa. On the ninth he told readers of
Young India,
“I am concentrating all my powers on discovering a working formula.” Not until mid-February did he find the answer.

There were several reasons why Gandhi finally decided to make abolition of the salt tax into the issue to launch his next (and ultimately most famous) satyagraha campaign. First, the sale of salt had been a government monopoly going back to Mughal times. Robert Clive used the accompanying tax to reward his cronies in Bengal, and in 1878 it became uniform across India and the princely states.
⁵
The salt tax had been a symbol of sovereignty since the days of Akbar, and since 1878 a symbol of India’s subjection to the British.

That meant that everyone in India, rich or poor, paid the tax. It made a clear and unambiguous uncontroversial target for popular action. Even Muslims, who had largely opted out of the January 26 independence celebrations, paid it. Gandhi hoped the protest against the salt tax could unite Hindus and Muslims against the Raj. It might also draw in the peasantry, whom the tax hurt most.
⁶
India’s poorest had rallied to him in his most successful satyagraha campaigns, in Champaran and in Kaira and most recently in Bardoli. Before that they had saved him from humiliation in South Africa. More and more Gandhi saw them as his true constituency. Here was a chance to free them from a tax that pinched their meager incomes, especially as the worldwide depression loomed on the doorstep of India.

Gandhi had also found a new approach to civil disobedience, which he tested at Bardoli. Only trained and committed satyagrahis were to commit overt acts of resistance. As his picked elite, they would lead, while ordinary people would watch and bear witness. Gandhi was determined that if violence broke out, it would not be the satyagrahis’ fault, or Gandhi’s.

His plan was debated and approved at an AICC meeting at Sabarmati in mid-February. “It is only a wonder,” Motilal Nehru confessed to M. A. Ansari on the seventeenth, “that no one else ever thought of it.”
⁷
But Gandhi’s real stroke of genius came later. He decided he would walk,
Bhagavad Gita
in hand, from Sabarmati ashram to the town of Dandi, on Gujarat’s west coast, and formally break the law himself by making salt from the sea.

No written document tells us how or when he arrived at this extraordinary plan. He certainly knew that Bombay, as well as Madras and the central and southern princely states, all got their salt from government sea salt plants along that coast. It was the same coast where residents had made their own salt for centuries. Gandhi had used the march formula in previous satyagraha campaigns, and Dandi was in the district (Jalalpur) where he had first launched his Bardoli satyagraha. “I still have many sweet memories of my experience of the place,” he wrote. The organizational structure for civil disobedience in Jalalpur was still up and working.
^*85
8

As late as February 27, in an article in
Young India
entitled, “When I Am Arrested,” Gandhi brought up the satyagraha without mentioning any march. On March 2 he sent a letter to Lord Irwin. Beginning “Dear Friend,” it contained his Eleven Points, or eleven grievances against British rule that, if not corrected, would force him to break the salt law. Even at this point the march to the sea may still only have been a fleeting idea—Gandhi’s letter did not mention it—but it did warn Irwin that once he broke the law, it would be the signal for followers across India to do the same.

Setting off a fresh round of civil disobedience meant running a “risk I have dreaded,” he admitted, even a “mad risk.” However, “the victories of truth have never been won without risks, often of the gravest character.” The campaign, he said, would begin on March 12. The letter was a chivalrous heads-up but also a gauntlet tossed at the viceroy’s feet. Gandhi was virtually daring him and the entire machinery of the Raj to stop him.
⁹

The letter was delivered by a Quaker friend to Viceroy House, where Irwin had just returned from watching polo matches at Meerut.
¹⁰
Irwin, sensitive but unresponsive as always, sent a four-line reply. It only expressed regret that Gandhi intended to break the law. Gandhi was crestfallen. “On bended knee, I asked for bread,” he told followers, “and I received stone instead.” On the eleventh he began final preparations for his march. He told the members of the ashram that night, “Our cause is just, our means are strong, and God is with us.”
¹¹

He chose from their ranks seventy-nine companions to make the 240-mile journey, in the middle of the dry season. Those he chose were delighted; the others, including six-year-old Narayan Desai and the other children, were crushed at being left behind. But they all rose before dawn to see him off.

A crowd from town had gathered throughout the night. Before the morning’s first light they numbered in the hundreds of thousands. “Beneath the ashram’s ancient tamarind tree,” Desai remembered fifty years later, “were parked what seemed like all the cars in Ahmedabad.”
¹²
There were correspondents from Indian, European, and American newspapers and news photographers. Because of the crowd, morning prayers could not be held on the usual ground. They moved instead to the dried-up riverbed of the Sabarmati. Pandit Khare, who led the prayers at the ashram every morning, could barely make his voice heard over the throng.

The voices soon joined together in chanting,
“Raghupati Raghave Rajaram.”
Just before leaving, Gandhi visited some of the ashram’s sick children. Three had just died of smallpox, including Pandit Khare’s infant son—a revealing index of the general state of health at the ashram. But Khare, like Sarojini Naidu and Gandhi’s secretaries Desai and Pyarelal, was still marching.

They gathered in the courtyard. The marchers had been carefully selected as a rainbow coalition of followers, including Muslims, Sikhs, untouchables, and Christians. They were all men and covered a span of ages. The youngest was sixteen; Gandhi was the oldest, at sixty-one.
¹³
Vallabhbhai Patel was not among them; he had been arrested four days earlier. Neither were the Nehrus. But each marcher had his copy of the
Gita,
and homespun cotton garlands hung around their necks, like beasts to the sacrifice. Many, including Gandhi, thought the police might gun them down as they left the ashram. Most assumed Gandhi would be arrested before he set out.

Gandhi brought along a long bamboo stick to lean on, with an iron tip. The children’s teacher pinned a badge to his shawl and kissed him goodbye. Another woman applied a red paste dot or
bindi
to his forehead, to ward off bad luck. Then as the crowd cried and chanted
“Vaishnav Jan”
^*86
and the
Ramanama,
Gandhi set off.
¹⁴

The march to the sea may have been heroic, even saintly. But it was also carefully planned and executed. Besides his seventy-eight fellow pilgrims, an enormous crowd of newspaper reporters, photographers, and other onlookers followed Gandhi everywhere.
Navajivan
and
Young India
had published his proposed route, which wound through Kaira province to Dandi, and the fact that he would travel in the early morning hours and late afternoon. This made it easier for casual spectators and supporters to make the rendezvous and join the throng.
¹⁵

Gandhi’s goal was to stop in at least one village during the morning and another at night. He expected no accommodations for himself or his friends. They would sleep in the open. The horde of news media and other hangers-on had to make their own arrangements. Gandhi himself required only a place to wash and water and some uncooked food to eat. He also wanted information: on the village’s population and sanitation, on how much alcohol was consumed (Gandhi the New Ager was still determined to make India a teetotal nation), and how much the peasants had to pay in land and salt tax.
¹⁶
Like the march across Champaran in 1917, this one was to be a walking lesson on conditions in India, a peripatetic education for himself and his followers as well as the London
Times,
the
Bombay Chronicle,
and other media following in his wake.

The march to the coast was India’s introduction to the art of public relations on a massive scale. It proceeded at a leisurely pace and took a month. At each village Gandhi spoke of his vision for satyagraha, gave press interviews, and dictated articles for his
Navajivan
and
Young India,
even as the crowds grew and grew. At Nadiad, Kaira’s largest town, he attracted 20,000 people; in Anand, 10,000; in Broach, almost 15,000. Then in Surat, only forty kilometers from Dandi, he drew more than 30,000.
¹⁷

On April 3 he was close to his goal, at Navsari. That evening he spoke to the crowd of 9,000 (organizers claimed 50,000), seated on a raised dais, as electric lights paid for by a local Parsi businessman illuminated the darkness. Gandhi thanked the local Parsis for their support and emphasized the importance of women for this satyagraha campaign, since they were the living “embodiment of renunciation and compassion, i.e. nonviolence.” At Vanji he had told his followers to be prepared for a violent crackdown: “We have prepared ourselves for death from cannons and guns.”
¹⁸
Indeed, as his march neared its end, Gandhi secretly wondered what the government
was
doing and why Irwin and his police officials hadn’t moved in.

The truth was the march caught Irwin by surprise. Privately, he was amazed that a man of sixty-one known to have a tricky heart and a history of high blood pressure was capable of it: “The will power of the man must be enormous.” The viceroy’s first impulse was not to rise to what he considered Gandhi’s bait. He even nursed a hope that Gandhi’s health would give out: an incapacitated Gandhi, or even a dead one, would solve everyone’s problems.
¹⁹
But otherwise Irwin took what one biographer calls “a low key approach” and resisted officials who wanted to disperse the crowd with tear gas and toss Gandhi in jail at once. He had no desire to give Gandhi his “martyr’s halo,” as he put it, or trigger worse trouble once Indians learned of Gandhi’s arrest.