The Essential Gandhi (39 page)

[Traveling incessantly through the country making propaganda for khadi, Hindu-Moslem amity and desegregation of untouchables, meeting crowds numbering hundreds of thousands, the Mahatma broke down and became ill.]

Well, my cart has stuck in the mire. Tomorrow it might break down beyond hope of repair. What then? [The Gita] proclaims that everyone that is born must die, and everyone that dies must be born again. Everyone comes, repays part of his obligation and goes his way.
¹

[As soon as he recuperated, however, he returned to his favorite pursuit: traveling in tightly packed third-class railway cars from region to region and village to village bringing his philosophy to the poor. In December, 1928, en route to the annual Congress Party convention in Calcutta, he was asked about his attitude toward a political war of independence.]

I would decline to take part in it. [He was then asked for his view of a national militia.] I would support the formation of a national militia under [self-rule] if only because I realize that people cannot be made nonviolent by compulsion. Today I am teaching the people how to meet a national crisis by non-violent means.
²

[Violence filled the air of India. The intellectuals in the Congress Party and their followers were growing impatient. They wanted action to oust the British.]

If India attains what will be to me so-called freedom by violent means she will cease to be the country of my pride.
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[Prophetically he pictured the ideal: freedom should come non-violently] through a gentlemanly understanding with Great Britain.

But then, it will not be an imperialistic haughty Britain maneuvering for world supremacy but a Britain humbly trying to serve the common end of humanity.
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[The younger leaders of the Congress Party, among them Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose, were asking for complete independence within a year and for action to attain it. The Congress Party convention instructed its members and friends to withdraw from all legislatures set up by the British Government in India. It sanctioned the non-payment of taxes and a massive Civil Disobedience movement. It accepted Gandhi’s condition that he was to determine the nature, scope and timing of the movement. The poet Rabindranath Tagore came to see Gandhi at Sabarmati Ashram on January 18, 1930, and inquired what Gandhi proposed to do.]

I am furiously thinking night and day, and I do not see any light coming out of the surrounding darkness.
⁵

[Gandhi was waiting to hear his “Inner Voice.”]

The “Inner Voice” may mean a message from God or from the Devil, for both are wrestling in the human breast. Acts determine the nature of the Voice.
⁶

[Finally he knew. He had heard the Inner Voice, and on March 2, 1930, he wrote an unprecedented letter to the British Viceroy, Lord Irwin, later Lord Halifax.]

Dear Friend, Before embarking on Civil Disobedience and taking the risk I have dreaded to take all these years, I would fain approach you and find a way out.

My personal faith is absolutely clear. I cannot intentionally hurt anything that lives, much less human beings, even though they may do the greatest wrong to me and mine. Whilst, therefore, I hold the British rule to be a curse, I do not intend harm to a single Englishman or to any legitimate interest he may have in India.… And why do I regard the British rule as a curse?

It has impoverished the dumb millions by a system of progressive exploitation and by a ruinous expensive military and Civil administration which the country can never afford.

It has reduced us politically to serfdom. It has sapped the foundations of our culture. And by the policy of cruel disarmament, it has degraded us spiritually.…

I fear … there never has been any intention of granting … Dominion Status to India in the immediate future.…

[The] whole revenue system has to be so revised as to make the peasant’s good its primary concern. But the British system seems to be designed to crush the very life out of him. Even the salt he must use to live is so taxed as to make the burden fall heaviest on him, if only because of the heartless impartiality of its incidence. The tax shows itself still more burdensome on the poor man when it is remembered that salt is the one thing he must eat more than the rich man.… The drink and drug revenue, too, is derived from the poor. It saps the foundations both of their health and morals.

The iniquities sampled above are maintained in order to carry on a foreign administration, demonstrably the most expensive in the world.… I have too great a regard for you as a man to wish to hurt your feelings. I know that you do not need the salary you get. Probably the whole of your salary goes for charity. But a system that provides for such an arrangement deserves to be summarily scrapped. What is true of the Viceregal salary is true generally of the whole administration.… Nothing but organized non-violence can check the organized violence of the British government.…

This non-violence will be expressed through civil disobedience, for the moment confined to the inmates of the Satyagraha [Sabarmati] Ashram, but ultimately designed to cover all those who choose to join the movement.…

My ambition is no less than to convert the British people through non-violence, and thus make them see the wrong they have done to India. I do not seek to harm your people. I want to serve them even as I want to serve my own.…

If the [Indian] people join me as I expect they will, the sufferings they will undergo, unless the British nation sooner retraces its steps, will be enough to melt the stoniest hearts.

[If] my letter makes no appeal to your heart, on the eleventh day of this month, I shall proceed with such co-workers of the Ashram
as I can take, to disregard the provisions of the Salt Laws.… It is, I know, open to you to frustrate my design by arresting me. I hope that there will be tens of thousands ready, in a disciplined manner, to take up the work after me.…

This letter is not in any way intended as a threat but is a simple and sacred duty peremptory on a civil resister.… Your sincere friend, M. K. Gandhi.
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[Lord Irwin did not reply. His secretary sent a four-line acknowledgment saying, “His Excellency … regrets to learn that you contemplate a course of action which is clearly bound to involve violation of the law and danger to the public peace.”
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On March 12th, prayers having been sung, Gandhi and seventy-eight male and female members of the ashram, whose identities were published in
Young India
for the benefit of the police, left Sabarmati for Dandi, due south of Ahmedabad. Following winding dirt roads from village to village, Gandhi and his seventy-eight disciples walked two hundred miles in twenty-four days.] We are marching in the name of God, [Gandhi said].

[He had no trouble in walking.] Less than twelve miles a day in two stages with not much luggage, [he said]. Child’s play. [Several became fatigued and footsore, and had to ride in a bullock cart. A horse was available for Gandhi throughout the march but he never used it.] The modern generation is delicate, weak, and much pampered, [Gandhi commented. He was sixty-one. He spun every day for an hour and kept a diary and required each ashramite to do likewise.

The entire night of April 5th, the ashramites prayed, and early in the morning they accompanied Gandhi to the sea. He dipped into the water, returned to the beach, and there picked up some salt left by the waves. Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, standing by his side cried, “Hail, Deliverer.” Gandhi had broken the British law which made it a punishable crime to possess salt not obtained from the British government salt monopoly. Gandhi, who had not used salt for six years, called it a] nefarious monopoly. [Salt, he said, is as essential as air and water, and in India all the more essential to the hard-working, perspiring poor man and his beasts because of the tropical heat.

The act performed, Gandhi withdrew from the scene. India had its cue. Gandhi had communicated with it by lifting up some grains of salt.

All India began making salt illegally. The biography of
Viscount Halifax
, by Alan Campbell Johnson, records that sixty thousand political offenders were arrested. Finally Gandhi was arrested. From jail he wrote to Miss Slade, the Englishwoman who had become a disciple and co-worker.]

I have been quite happy and making up for arrears in sleep.
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[To the children of the ashram he wrote a special note.]

Little birds, ordinary birds cannot fly without wings. With wings, of course, all can fly. But if you, without wings, will learn how to fly, then all your troubles will indeed be at an end. And I will teach you.

See, I have no wings, yet I come flying to you every day in thought. Look, here is little Vimala, here is Hari and here is Dharmakumar. And you can also come flying to me in thought.…

Send me a letter signed by all, and those who do not know how to sign may make a cross.

Bapu’s blessings.
¹⁰

[Just before his arrest, Gandhi had drafted a letter to the Viceroy announcing his intention to raid the Dharasana Salt Works with some companions. Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, the poet, led twenty-five hundred volunteers to the site one hundred and fifty miles north of Bombay. Webb Miller, the well-known correspondent of the United Press, was on the scene and described the proceedings. When a picked group of the marchers approached, police officers ordered them to retreat. They continued to advance. “Suddenly,” Webb Miller reported, “at a word of command, scores of native policemen rushed upon the advancing marchers and rained blows on their heads with their steel-shod lathis. Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows. They went down like nine-pins.… The waiting crowd of marchers groaned and sucked in their breath in sympathetic pain at every blow. Those struck
down fell sprawling, unconscious or writhing with fractured skulls or broken shoulders.… The survivors, without breaking ranks, silently and doggedly march on until struck down.” When the first column was laid low, another advanced. Then another.

“By eleven (in the morning),” Miller continued, “the heat had reached 116 and the activities of the Gandhi volunteers subsided.” Miller went to a temporary hospital and counted three hundred and twenty injured, many of them unconscious, others in agony from body and head blows. Two men had died. The same scenes were repeated for several days.

Rabindranath Tagore wrote in the
Manchester Guardian
of May 17, 1930, “Those who live in England, far away from the East, have now got to realize that Europe has completely lost her former moral prestige in Asia. She is no longer regarded as the champion throughout the world of fair dealing, and the exponent of high principle, but as the upholder of Western race supremacy and the exploiter of those outside her own borders.

“For Europe, this is, in actual fact, a great moral defeat that has happened. Even though Asia is still physically weak and unable to protect herself from aggression where her vital interests are menaced, nevertheless she can now afford to look down on Europe where before she looked up.”
¹¹
He attributed the achievement in India to Mahatma Gandhi.

The Salt March made it clear to many Englishmen that they could not rule India against the wishes of the Indians, and it made it clear to Indians that they had it in their power to make orderly British rule in their country impossible.

January 26, 1931, had been fixed by the Congress Party as the day of Independence, for on that day a Declaration of Independence had been issued by the Congress Party. On January 26, Lord Irwin released Gandhi from jail. This was taken by Gandhi and others as a gesture of friendship and conciliation. On February 16 Gandhi, the ex-prisoner, kept an appointment with the Viceroy in his palace. Winston Churchill remarked that he was revolted by “the nauseating and humiliating spectacle of this one-time Inner Temple lawyer now seditious fakir, striding half-naked up the
steps of the Viceroy’s palace, there to negotiate and to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.”
¹²

Gandhi returned for many more interviews with the Viceroy. At the end of the conferences, the Irwin-Gandhi Pact was signed on March 5, 1931. On that day Gandhi addressed Indian and American journalists.]

I am aware that I must have, though quite unconsciously, given him cause for irritation. I must also have tried his patience, but I cannot recall an occasion when he allowed himself to be betrayed into irritation or impatience. [The settlement was] provisional … conditional … a truce. India cannot be satisfied with anything less [than complete independence]. The Congress [Party] does not consider India to be a sickly child requiring nursing, outside help and other props.
¹³

[In effect Gandhi had been recognized by the British Government as a power with which it had to negotiate.

Gandhi sailed for England from Bombay on August 29 to negotiate with the British Government at the Second Round Table Conference. The day after his arrival in England, the Columbia Broadcasting System arranged for a radio address to the United States. Gandhi refused to prepare a script and spoke extemporaneously. In the studio, he eyed the microphone and said] Do I have to speak into that? [He was already on the air.]

 … We [in India] feel that the law that governs brute creation is not the law that should guide the human race. That law is inconsistent with human dignity.

I, personally, would wait, if need be, for ages rather than seek to attain the freedom of my country through bloody means. I feel in the innermost recesses of my heart, after a political experience extending over an unbroken period of close upon thirty-five years, that the world is sick unto death of blood-spilling. The world is seeking a way out, and I flatter myself with the belief that perhaps it will be the privilege of the ancient land of India to show the way out to the hungering world.

I have, therefore, no hesitation whatsoever in inviting all the great nations of the earth to give their hearty coöperation to India in her mighty struggle.…