If Restless as Mercury: My Life as a Young Man contained the story of Gandhi, in his words, from his childhood to 1914, the sequel, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi: I am an Ordinary Man, takes it forward right up to the last day of his life. Edited by Gopalkrishna Gandhi, it considers an intense phase of Gandhi’s life with several movements in the run-up to Independence and Partition. In 1930, Gandhi threw one of the biggest challenges to the British Raj with his launch of the salt satyagraha. His unique protest against the Salt Laws by walking with fellow workers to Dandi changed the course of the freedom struggle. Edited excerpts:
Next to air and water, salt was perhaps the greatest necessity of life. It was the only condiment of the poor. There was no article like salt outside water taxing which can hurt the starving millions, the sick, the maimed, and the utterly helpless. The tax constituted, therefore, the most inhuman poll tax that the ingenuity of man could devise.
Mahatma Gandhi set out with volunteers on a 241-mile-march to the seashore at Dandi, on March 12, 1930. | Photo Credit: Gandhi Smriti
The salt law-breaking satyagrahi would walk to a coast where the salt lay, bend down and scoop it up. Those unable to go to a shore could break the law by selling or buying untaxed salt. My intention was to start the movement only through the inmates of the Ashram, unknown to fame.
A retired salt officer wrote to me without disclosing his name, saying: ‘Trying to get salt from government salt works without paying duty would be stealing or robbery, an act of first class hinsa.’ I did not share the salt officer’s characterisation. If the impost is wrong, it is wrong whether in connection with manufactured salt or the crude article. If a robber steals my grain and cooks some of it, I am entitled to both the raw and the cooked grain.
Active non-violence
Mahatma Gandhi talks to a crowd in India in 1931. | Photo Credit: AP
In the 27 February issue of Young India, I wrote saying it must be taken for granted that when civil disobedience is started, my arrest is a certainty. On my arrest, I said, there is to be no mute, passive non-violence, but non-violence of the activest type should be set in motion so that not a single believer in non-violence as an article of faith for the purpose of achieving India’s goal should find himself free or alive at the end of the effort to submit any longer to the existing slavery.
Reginald Reynolds, a young English friend, had come to the Ashram in 1929 in a spirit of the purest service. He had no axe of his own to grind. And he held views that could startle the most advanced nationalist. He attended the Lahore Congress. Through him, I had a letter dated 2 March 1930 to the viceroy Lord Irwin, taken to the Viceregal Lodge and specially delivered to the private secretary to the viceroy.
In my letter to the viceroy, I asked for a radical cutting down of the revenue and, therefore, of the expenses of the administration, which I described as demonstrably the most expensive in the world. ‘Take your own salary,’ I wrote. ‘You are getting over 700 rupees a day against India’s average income of nearly 2 rupees a day. Thus you are getting much over five thousand times India’s average income....’
‘On bended knees, I ask you to ponder over this phenomenon. I have taken a personal illustration to drive home a painful truth. 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 that 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.’
During the civil disobedience movement in India. | Photo Credit: special arrangement
‘Religious act’
For me, the sending of the letter was a religious act, as the whole struggle was. I selected the English friend as my messenger because I wanted to forge a further check upon myself against any intentional act that would hurt a single Englishman. It pleased me also to have the unselfish and unsolicited association of a cultured, well-read, devout Englishman in an act which may, in spite of all my effort to the contrary, involve loss of English life. Before sending him with it, I insisted on his reading the letter carefully as I did not wish him to associate himself with it unless he was in complete agreement with its contents. The letter itself was not an ultimatum but a friendly, if also a frank, communication from one who considered himself a friend of Englishmen.
Mahatma Gandhi arrives at Seth Jamnalal Palace, Wardha, to attend the Congress Working Committee Meeting. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel is beside him. | Photo Credit: The Hindu photo archives
At the prayer meeting in the Ashram on March 5, I said: ‘The campaign will start on the morning of the 12th and that all joining me had five days to get ready. Only men, I said, would accompany me because the British do not attack women, and it would be cowardice to have women accompany us. Taking children too would be sheer folly as, in the coming struggle, they could get killed.’
Gandhi’s house at Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
On March 7, I got news of Vallabhbhai [Patel] having been arrested at the Ras village of Kheda district. It is a good omen for us, I said in a statement, that Sardar Vallabhbhai has been arrested and sentenced. I described his arrest as a happy beginning. I asked for a general hartal, to ‘celebrate’ his arrest and said there should be no need to tell Gujarat to preserve peace.
Asked will the movement lead to violence, I said: “It may, though I am trying my best to prevent any outbreak of violence. If non-violence has to prove its worth, it must prove its worth today. I must fight unto death the system based on violence.”
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi: I am an Ordinary Man (1914-1948); Edited by Gopalkrishna Gandhi, Aleph, ₹999.
Excerpted with permission from Aleph.
