Advancing the debate. When public discussion of a vital issue is stagnant or nonexistent, civil disobedience can cause discussion to occur in a higher key or to arise for the first time. A disobedient’s act, if sufficiently out of the ordinary and sufficiently open, attracts the attention of the media and the public. Debate on the substantive issue often follows.
Susan B. Anthony, the great American advocate of woman’s suffrage, knew this purpose well. In 1872, she attempted to vote when she knew she was prohibited from doing so on the grounds of gender. Her prosecution and trial made for front-page news all across the United States, stirring up a discussion of women’s rights as no other single act had done.3
Creating change. Civil disobedience can be used to create a variety of forms of change—political, social, cultural, legal, and more. It often does so through what is now a fairly well established dynamic. The disobedient breaks a law; the disobedient suffers; the public takes note of the suffering and inquires as to the reason for the disobedient’s action; the public sympathizes with the disobedient; the public puts pressure for change on those in power; and those in power react by enacting curative, institutional reform. While this dynamic does not fully explain every case of successful civil disobedience undertaken to create change, it does explain many such cases and it does highlight the critical role self-suffering plays in a civil disobedience campaign to create change.4
A leading example of civil disobedience undertaken to create change occurred in 1961 when equality activists boarded passenger buses in Washington, D.C., with the intent to travel to New Orleans and to challenge racial segregation in bus stations along the way. As the Freedom Riders moved from terminal to terminal, they drew the attention of the media, the public, and state and federal governments to the segregated terminals, particularly when they were severely beaten, their bus firebombed, and their lives threatened by racist opponents. The suffering they endured raised questions around the country about segregation, caused the public to sympathize with them, and created pressure on the federal government to intervene not only to protect the riders but also to create new law. At the insistence of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued new regulations banning racial discrimination in terminals.5
An important variant of this dynamic occurs when the disobedience is committed not by a small band of resisters seeking sympathy from the wider public, but by a significant swath of the population. Because government depends for its operation on the consent of the governed, when an appreciable portion of the public withdraws that cooperation through disobedience, government cannot function properly.6 The Danish population demonstrated this principle with its widespread resistance to German occupation during World War II. In 2011, disobedient citizens in Tunisia and Egypt, as part of the Arab Spring, removed their rulers from power by withdrawing consent to their rule. Wael Ghonim, the young Google marketing director who was a key player in communicating the substance of the uprising to the Egyptian public, encapsulated the revolution’s message to the Egyptian people in words Gandhi himself could not have improved upon: “This is your country; a government official is your employee who gets his salary from your tax money, and you have your rights.”7
Gandhi’s South African experiments follow this progression of purposes, though I am quite confident he did not anticipate their doing so. They begin with test-case disobedience, end with change-creating disobedience, and rest on the same foundation throughout—the need to act in concert with conscience.
GANDHI IN CONTEXT
This book focuses on the story of Gandhi’s life as a lawyer, almost all of which takes place in South Africa in the years 1893 to 1911. After Gandhi leaves South Africa, he spends virtually the rest of his life (1915–1948) in India, where he devotes himself to the movement to free India from rule by the British. (British control of India began with the coming of the East India Company in the seventeenth century, accelerated with the assumption of the company’s governing role by the British government in 1858, and ended with Britain’s granting independence to India and Pakistan in 1947.) While it is beyond the scope of this book to address Gandhi’s time in India in any great detail, a brief discussion of his work there will put this exploration of his life as a lawyer in South Africa in context.
Every schoolchild who has seen a map of Asia knows that India’s landmass is vast, extending from the Indian Ocean in the south to the disputed border with Pakistan far to the north. Its history is equally vast, stretching from its millennia-old origins along the Indus River through the late-fifteenth-century arrival of the first Europeans to India’s present-day parliamentary democracy.
Thrusting himself into the midst of this historical current near the start of the twentieth century was the forty-five-year-old Mohandas K. Gandhi, who, despite having spent most of his adult life in South Africa, would profoundly influence India and its history. The India that Gandhi found on his arrival home in 1915 was neither a clearly defined country nor an independent one. Its British rulers, however, had unintentionally done their best in the sixty years before his arrival to present Gandhi with a set of conditions that encouraged both Indian nationhood and Indian freedom.
Fielding a small but powerful force of not many more than a thousand men, the British Empire used its Indian Civil Service (ICS) to exercise authority throughout India, with ICS agents controlling virtually all aspects of government within their jurisdictions. David Lloyd George, Britain’s prime minister from 1916 to 1922, famously credited the ICS with being “the steel frame on which the whole structure of government and of administration in India rests.” That steel frame demonstrated for Indians that a competently operated administrative body could bring the subcontinent under the control of a national government.
The ICS was not the only enterprise that the empire created that paved the way for its own departure and made Gandhi’s job of unifying and leading India easier. By the dawn of the twentieth century the British had put a railway system in place that was among the world’s five largest. By connecting Indians to each other and to the world, Britain’s investment in the railway system helped integrate India’s economy. Much the same can be said of the methods of communication that the British developed in India in the second half of the nineteenth century. The postal service installed by the British served virtually the entire subcontinent, while the telegraph system reached areas where even the rail system had not penetrated. These modern systems of transportation and communication helped create a feeling of nationality as Indians from disparate parts of the subcontinent came to feel a connection to one another.
In addition to building India’s infrastructure, the British educated the Indians who would come to oppose their rule. In the mid-nineteenth century, London ordained that there should be universities all across India.8 At the same time this university system was developing, the British welcomed Indian students to Britain, where they might train for the professions—chiefly medicine and law. Gandhi, like many a nationalist leader in the making, would study law in Britain.
The supply of educated Indians soon outstripped the number of positions available. In 1884 Lord Ripon, the Crown’s viceroy in India, reported the danger that education was creating: “Unless we are prepared to afford these men legitimate openings for their aspirations and ambitions, we had better at once abolish our Universities and close our Colleges, for they will only serve to turn out year by year in ever-increasing numbers men who must inevitably become the most dangerous and influential members of our rule.”9
Ripon’s fears would soon begin to be realized when in 1885 the Indian National Congress (INC)—a body of nationalists that would grow in importance and later include Gandhi—held its first meeting in Bombay (today, Mumbai). While the Congress founders who assembled then were not quite the radicals Ripon had described, they did raise their voices against the status quo, they were as influential as Ripon had predicted, and they had, courtesy of Ripon’s empire, Western educations.
A small number of Western-educated elites dominated Indian intellectual life at the time of the 1885 meeting. Having been educated in British or British-influenced institutions, they gravitated toward employment in the service of the Raj or in the professions. The leadership of the INC, dominated as it was by lawyers trained in Britain, was a microcosm of this development. As a result of their education, they identified with the empire.
The demands that emerged from the first Congress meeting were predictably modest. When early Congress members sought greater Indian involvement in government, the government they had in mind was the colonial government, not that of an independent India. They considered themselves loyal sons of the empire who were simply asking for their rights as family members—a theme we will see Gandhi repeatedly articulate in South Africa as he argued for the rights of the clients and countrymen he was careful to call not Indians, but British Indians.
A favorite activity of the early nationalists was petitioning, an approach that rested on a belief in British fair play and equal justice. In his early South African days, we will see Gandhi often file petitions with South Africa’s colonial governments—petitions that demonstrated a faith no less naïve than that of his nationalist counterparts in India. The similarity was not superficial. Gandhi and India’s moderate nationalists shared a common understanding of the nature and role of the petition as polite, respectful, relatively restrained. Petitions fit neatly into the reigning paradigm: more Indian control of Indian affairs, yes, but within the imperial system.
This paradigm did not go unchallenged. Eventually a fissure opened in the nationalist movement, with moderates on one side and those known as “extremists” on the other. Dissatisfied with the slow approach of the moderates, the extremists engaged with the moderates in a struggle for supremacy during the early twentieth century. The strength of the movement for independence was so weakened by this internecine struggle that it opened a path for Gandhi to make his move into the leadership of the nationalist movement.
But first there was a year of relative silence while Gandhi, newly arrived in India, educated himself by traveling about the subcontinent. As he did so, he had time to reflect on his experience with nonviolence in South Africa, where his form of opposition to the government was originally called passive resistance—principally a refusal to obey the law based on conscience. Because Gandhi did not believe this term adequately captured the spirit of his movement, he held a contest to rename it. His cousin suggested sadagraha—“firmness in a good cause.” Gandhi reacted in this wise: “I liked the word, but it did not fully represent the whole idea I wished it to connote. I therefore corrected it to ‘Satyagraha.’ Truth (Satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement ‘Satyagraha,’ that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence, and gave up the use of the phrase ‘passive resistance.’”10
When Gandhi did enter into Indian politics and began to acquire a more robust national profile, it was, paradoxically, at the local level, where he conducted three attention-getting satyagraha campaigns. These early experiences—some of them involving civil disobedience—were the start of a process that caused Gandhi to become a national figure.
The journey to national prominence, however, would not be easy. Having lived abroad almost continuously since he was eighteen, Gandhi had no easy familiarity with India, its people, or its problems. In South Africa, for example, very little was made of a long-standing Indian problem: Hindu-Muslim discord. The South African Indian community, strangers together in a foreign land, was unified. In fact, Gandhi, a Hindu, conducted a very successful commercial law practice representing almost exclusively Muslim traders in South Africa. Indians, displaced from their native land, overlooked their differences and clung to each other.
On their home soil in India there was no similar motivation for unity. Conflict was the norm. Attempting to vault into the leadership of a movement deeply fractured by these differences was immensely difficult—and Gandhi clearly saw it that way. His response to this reality was to seek out issues, such as the Caliphate movement in the 1920s—that he could use to unite the two religious communities. While some judge it to have been unsuccessful in uniting the communities, in none of his campaigns—from the campaign against restrictions on Indian civil liberties in the early twenties to the pro-independence “Quit India” movement during World War II—did he succeed on as many levels as he did in the Salt Campaign of the early 1930s, a campaign in which Gandhi capitalized on the lessons he had learned in South Africa about sacrifice, suffering, and civil disobedience.
By the time of the annual Congress meeting in 1928, a split in the Congress had developed between those who favored Dominion status within the empire and those who favored complete and immediate independence. Gandhi brokered a compromise. The Congress would issue an ultimatum to Britain: either India would receive Dominion status by the end of 1929, or Congress would organize “non-violent non-co-operation” in support of complete independence.
Britain responded. In October 1929, the British viceroy in India, Lord Irwin, announced that the government had allowed him “to state clearly that . . . the natural issue of India’s constitutional progress . . . is the attainment of Dominion status.” Moreover, Indian representatives would be invited to a Round Table Conference to discuss “the British-Indian and All-Indian problems.” The Congress saw this statement as a commitment to write the constitution for a new India at the conference; its initial reaction, accordingly, was largely positive. However, in the House of Commons British politicians rose in opposition to the idea, renewed resistance to Dominion status caused a split within the Congress, and Irwin himself was unable to guarantee the Congress that Dominion status would emerge from the conference as the Indians originally anticipated. When the Congress met at the end of 1929, it committed itself to complete independence, authorizing consideration of civil disobedience.
It was up to Gandhi to conceive of and lead the disobedience. He devised a brilliant plan calling for a tightly controlled group of ashram-based supporters to break the laws that imposed taxes on salt and restricted the free manufacture of salt by Indians.11 Gandhi would greatly reduce the chance of violence by keeping the initial disobedience in-house. Disobedience against the salt laws slyly promoted Muslim-Hindu unity by bringing the two communities together around a nonreligious, economic issue. And, as historian Judith Brown has observed, the campaign’s “condemnation of a tax on a necessity of life for all by an exploitative foreign government could serve as a mass rallying cry and would probably rouse sympathy in England and America, elevating the whole campaign to a moral plane which would embarrass the raj.”12
Gandhi dramatized his disobedience by staging a huge buildup to it. He would undertake a long march to the sea with a band of dedicated supporters and, only after he arrived there, break the law by making salt. Before the march, Gandhi wrote to Lord Irwin sharing the details of his planned disobedience and offering a negotiated settlement.
When the British declined to settle, Gandhi and seventy-eight compatriots set off on the morning of March 12, 1930, from Gandhi’s Ahmedabad ashram for the seashore at Dandi—some 220 miles away.13 A huge crowd—one British newspaper’s estimate was 100,000—lined the immediate road ahead. The plan was to stop at a different village each night and each morning. At each stop, Gandhi would speak not only against the salt tax, but for the adoption of the ideal of village life as a path toward freedom and a good in its own right. The crowds for these talks were superb, ranging from the hundreds in small villages to the tens of thousands in larger towns.
The delegation reached Dandi on April 5. The next day, Gandhi defied the empire by very deliberately stooping over and gathering up a concoction of mud and salt. His followers then boiled seawater from which they extracted salt in defiance of the law. Gandhi used the first days after this initial salt-making to speak about the injustice of the salt
laws. In the meantime, illegal salt-making erupted all across the country. Many thousands were arrested.
For weeks after the Dandi conclusion to the march, Gandhi mounted a vigorous, highly public campaign against the salt law. As he did so, government officials simply did not know what to do with him. If they arrested him, they would help transform him into an even greater hero than he already was. If they let him continue his defiance, the power of the government would be progressively diminished. Gandhi had plans to make matters more difficult for the government by raising the stakes; he intended to lead a nonviolent raid on the Dharasana Salt Works. The government, with its continued credibility at stake, felt forced to act. It arrested Gandhi just past midnight on May 5. Nonetheless, the raid went on. The disobedients endured exceptionally violent treatment by the lathi-armed police. There were multiple results flowing from this violence: injuries to hundreds of peaceful disobedients—with at least two of the injured dying; journalist Webb Miller’s moving reporting of Indian bravery in the face of police brutality; the inspiration for many other Indians to participate in subsequent raids; and the generation of enormous sympathy from the West for Gandhi’s cause.
Even with Gandhi and his co-workers in jail—or perhaps because they were in jail—civil disobedience against the salt laws continued. Thousands of localized civil disobedience movements around the country broke out over the course of the next year, accompanied by a widespread boycott of foreign cloth. By the time the movement came to an end, some sixty thousand Indian disobedients had graced the empire’s jails.
To allow them to confer over the terms of a possible settlement, the British released Gandhi and the other imprisoned members of a key Congress committee in early 1931. In February and March, Gandhi and Irwin negotiated face-to-face. They reached an agreement, commonly known as the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, in early March. By not calling for the outright repeal of the salt laws, the pact allowed the government to save face. The Indians realized many of their goals, however. In return for discontinuing disobedience and the boycott of British goods, the government would interpret the law to allow Indians to make and sell salt in their villages. Moreover, the government agreed that additional talks on constitutional reform would be held and would include representation from the Congress. In addition, imprisoned nonviolent disobedients would be released, pending prosecutions of nonviolent disobedients would be withdrawn, uncollected fines would be waived, some village officials who had resigned in protest would be reinstated, ordinances restricting civil liberties would be withdrawn, some confiscated properties would be restored to their owners, and lawful picketing could continue.
M.K. Gandhi, Attorney at Law Page 2