The general relief in India following the June 2024 Loksabha elections outcome, now six months down the line, feels somewhat premature and naive. Stung by the outcome, the BJP-RSS combine, with some alacrity, is now using every saam, daam, dund, bhed (persuasion, money power, punishment, divisiveness) with absolute vitriol, to ram its objectives through. The Opposition and the people, equally suddenly, find that nothing being tried seems to be apparently working. Unable to figure out what to do, what they are left with are doubts, fears, resignation and probing in the dark.
At such a pass, it could prove to be a learning to return to the country’s freedom struggle and pick up from the various plans and methods adopted therein. Consider, for instance, the Salt Satyagrah – one of the three major all-India satyagrah – and see if its strategy can, in any way, light our path today.
It was already some years since 1922 when, shaken by the arson committed by the people in Chauri Chaura (Gorakhpur, UP – on 5 February 1922) wherein all its about two dozen police inmates were reduced to ashes, Gandhiji suddenly terminated the Non-cooperation Movement. Most fellow political stalwarts and others were unhappy with Bapu’s decision and felt that it derailed the momentum for freedom built in the Movement. But to Gandhiji, the violence in Chauri Chaura, meant the people were not yet ready for freedom and were, in fact, yet to truly grasp the meaning of what freedom meant or ought to mean.
In December 1928, the murder of British officer John Saunders – howsoever by mistake – by Bhagat Singh and Rajguru (and Chandrashekhar Azad), to avenge the death of Lala Lajpat Rai, had already caught the people’s imagination. And the Congress felt hard-pressed to undertake a major action programme.
Various suggestions came up. Vallabhbhai Patel wanted a people’s march on Delhi; Jawaharlal Nehru suggested setting up of an alternative government; someone else suggested “boycotting” the Courts, et al. Unable to decide, the Congress approached Bapu for solution, and he suggested ‘Breaking the Salt Law’ !
Again, most Congressmen were disappointed with Gandhiji’s suggestion. Motilal Nehru wrote him a long letter, questioning the very idea and its practical wisdom as basis of a large-scale political movement! Indulal Yagnik, an All-India Kisan Sabha leader and close associate of Bapu, said it would only prove to be a stunt and, at best, briefly divert the attention and energies of the British. Someone else commented the suggestion was like seeking to kill a fly with a hammer. Newspapers on either side of the political spectrum, made fun of the idea.
But Gandhiji had long thought over the Salt Law and talked of its abolition earlier as well. He believed that after air and water, salt was the next most present in nature, and so must be freely available to the people.
What actually was the Salt Law?
The long Indian sea-coastline offered availability of good quality salt, which the local communities had been widely producing for centuries. Britain too had huge reserves of salt but perhaps not of comparable quality. So, in 1835, the government imposed special taxes on the local salt to facilitate the sale of that imported from England. By 1851, 2.5 metric tons of salt was being imported in India. In 1858, as much as 10% of the government’s revenues was accrued from the sale of imported salt.
Lucrative as this was, subsequently the India Salt Act 1882 was enacted, making the production and sale of salt other than by government depots, a punishable offence. Enacting on the law, and to prevent salt smuggling and increase tax collection, severe measures were taken, of which the most identifiable was “customs line”, the erection of an “utterly impassable by man or beast” thorn fence! This fence, started in the 1840s from Bengal had by 1869 stretched from the Indus in the north to Mahanadi in the east, almost 2300 miles long and was heavily guarded by nearly 12,000 men! This provoked even a British civil servant, Sir John Stracheyi to state “To secure the levy of a duty on salt… there grew up gradually a monstrous system, to which it would be almost impossible to find a parallel in any tolerably civilized country.”
However, generally perceived as inconsequential in comparison to the Government’s more stringent policies and practices of deprivation and inequality, the Salt Tax never really exercised the freedom fighters. But underlining the Salt Law to be the most inhuman poll tax, Gandhiji saw it as symbolic of immoral and unjust British governance.
Shortly before embarking on the Salt March on 12 March 1930, Gandhiji wrote a letter to the Viceroy Lord Irwin on 2 March, stating, “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 ruinously 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…..
“It seems as clear as daylight that responsible British statesmen do not contemplate any alteration in British policy that might adversely affect Britain’s commerce with India or require an impartial and close scrutiny of Britain’s transactions with India. If nothing is done to end the process of exploitation, India must be bled with an ever increasing speed…..
“Unless those who work in the name of the nation understand and keep before all concerned the motive that lies behind the craving for independence, there is every danger of independence coming to us so changed as to be of no value to those toiling voiceless millions for whom it is sought and for whom it is worth taking. It is for that reason that I have been recently telling the public what independence should really mean…..
“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 show itself still more burdensome on the poor man when it is remembered that salt is the one things he must eat more than the rich man both individually and collectively…..
“The inequities sampled above are maintained in order to carry on a foreign administration, demonstrably the most expensive in the world. Take your own salary. It is over Rs 21,000 per month, besides many other indirect additions. The British Prime Minster gets 5000 per year, i.e., over Rs 5400 per month at the present rate of exchange. You are getting over Rs 700 per day against India’s average income of less that 2 anna per day. Thus you are getting over five thousand times India’s average income…..
“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…..
“A radical cutting down of the revenue, therefore, depends upon an equally radical reduction in the expenses of the administration….. Not one of the great British political parties, it seems to me, is prepared to give up the Indian spoils to which Great Britain helps herself day to day…..”
The government did not take Gandhi’s Salt March plan seriously. Indeed, when the government in England asked the Viceroy here about it, the latter, in a rather cavalier tone, replied, “We are not losing our sleep over it!” Indeed, since in his letter to the Viceroy, Gandhiji too had essentially underlined the economy and morality of the British governance, the government in its over-confidence, surmised that Salt satyagrah would end up becoming just a symbolic march from Sabarmati Ashram to Dandi with a mere 80 ‘unknown’ volunteers!
But clear in its objectives and actions, the Dandi march which indeed started with a mere 80 volunteers, grew up 24 days and 240 miles later into a massive crowd that was 2-3 miles long! And by the time, the Government grasped the true impact of the Movement, it was much too late. On the morning of 6 April 1930, when Bapu picked up a handful of earth at the Dandi sea-coast and declared: ‘With this, I am shaking the foundations of the British Empire’, his statement spread throughout the world. And the people across the country were most vigorously breaking Salt Law by ‘producing/manufacturing’ it, even far inland from a seacoast, by adding salt to water and heating and evaporating the water to collect the residue – and then ‘selling’ what came to be called at the time – ‘Gandhi salt’!
But at the end of the Satyagrah, neither was the Salt ax withdrawn nor did government’s monopoly over its ‘production and sale’ end. So, what did the Salt Satyagrah achieve?
While the Viceroy had written merely a two-liner in response to Gandhiji’s letter to him, the Salt March forced the government to come to the discussion table, curtail many of the other harsh measures as part of the Salt Law and give the coastal communities the right to produce salt from the sea.
Nehru who was among the early skeptics of Bapu’s Satyagrah suggestion, confessed “We were bewildered and could not fit in a national struggle with the common salt.” Martin Luther King Jr would later cite the Salt March as a crucial influence on his own philosophy of civil disobedience. And Winston Churchil, who derided Gandhi as ‘the naked fakir’, later admitted that the Satyagrah and its aftermath “inflicted such humiliation and defiance as has not been known since the British first trod the soil of India.”
So how do we look at the Salt Satyagrah as a protest strategy?
It was not a mere protest strategy against the Salt Law. Maybe Gandhiji didn’t even think of it as a protest strategy because if it was just the issue of breaking the Salt Law, it could have been done in a single day – in Sabarmati, in Delhi, on the Dandi sea-coast. The Salt Satyagrah had a greater objective and intent.
As Nehru said, it reawakened people’s urge, spirit and self-belief for freedom. It made people sans-fear and boldly defiant of the Britist adminstration. And, most importantly, the Satyagrah saw the women cross the boundaries of their homes and for the first time en masse participate in the freedom movement. Gandhiji had deliberately chosen not to include any woman volunteer in the list of the original marchers, but he had a definite plan for their participation, for which he rallied right through the March by including and prominently discussing the rampant problem of alcoholism in the society. In fact, at the end of the March, he even had the women conduct a three-day gathering/workshop on the issue. So, when across the country, the Salt Law was being broken, the women alongside and particularly, were also picketing liquor shops in large numbers.
At a strategic level, by choosing an apparently nondescript issue, hitherto outside any public debate and concern, Gandhiji took the government by surprise! Also, by choosing an issue which affected every Indian, and stretching it over 24 days, he brought the concern to centre-stage and ensured its wide publicity and people’s participation. More importantly, by aiming at the nerve centre of the government – its economy – he identified for the people, the harsh and immoral undercurrent of British colonization, its most severe consequence, and a better understanding of what freedom meant.
Biju Negi, Hind Swaraj Manch, Dehra Dun
