The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  Salt of the Sea

  Gandhi was intent on keeping the civil disobedience campaign strictly nonviolent, particularly when, in his own words, “there was a lot of violence in the air.” The most dramatic example of this came in April 1929, when militant nationalists Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt threw two handmade bombs from the visitors’ gallery inside the Central Legislative Assembly. Gandhi’s focus was to be on the refusal to pay taxes.

  In February 1922 in Bardoli the tax protest had been tied to land revenue, a primary source for the Raj’s treasury. This time around he needed to choose something less vital but at the same time open to a large section of the Indian society. He hit upon the tax on salt, which the British had imposed since the days of the East India Company in the mid-eighteenth century.

  The India Salt Act of 1882 specified a government monopoly on the collection, manufacture, and wholesale sale of salt as well as the tax on it. Possessing salt not purchased from the state monopoly became a punishable crime. Under Viceroy Lord Reading, the tax was doubled in 1923. To make his case, Gandhi fired off a long missive to Viceroy Lord Irwin on March 2, 1930, dealing generally with the British Raj’s iniquitous taxation system before turning to the salt tax and its deleterious effect on the Indian peasant. “The British system seemed to be designed to crush the very life out of him,” Gandhi wrote. “Even the salt he must use to live is so taxed to make the burden fall heaviest on him.”58 He concluded by saying that if the viceroy failed to “deal with this evil,” he would proceed with his coworkers at the Ahmedabad ashram to disregard the Salt Acts on March 11. The viceroy ignored the letter.

  Gandhi’s epic journey on foot started on March 12. He was joined on this 241-mile-long trip by eighty of his followers.

  As usual, Gandhi, now sixty-one, wrapped his actions and words in religion. “My feeling is like that of the pilgrim to Amarnath or Badri-Kedar,” he said, referring to the Hindu holy places in the mountainous region of northwestern India. “For me this is nothing less than a holy pilgrimage.” Motilal Nehru followed suit: “Like the historic march of Ramachandra [Lord Rama] to [Sri] Lanka the march of Gandhi will be memorable.”59 Typically, there was only one Muslim, Abbas Varteji, among the satyagrahis accompanying Gandhi.

  Passing through almost three hundred villages, the march ended on April 5 at the village of Dandi, known for its salt pans, 160 miles north of Bombay. At numerous rural stops Gandhi exhorted his audience to wear handspun and handwoven cotton—called khadi or khaddar—and shun alcohol, child marriage, and untouchability. He made a point of bathing at wells used by local outcastes.

  On the morning of April 6, after the ritual of listening to Hindu devotional hymns, he waded into the Arabian Sea and, picking up a handful of salty mud (the salt pans had been stirred up earlier by government agents), symbolically proclaimed his country’s full independence as his admirers shouted, “Kanoon Torhnewala zindabad” (Hindi: Long live Law Breaker).

  Given the long shoreline of India, there were ample opportunities to break the Salt Acts. Mass disobedience followed. After his arrest on April 14, Jawaharlal Nehru was sentenced to six months in prison. The port cities of Karachi, Madras, Calcutta, and Chittagong emerged as major sites of nonviolent protest.

  Having stayed in the house of a local Muslim, Shiraz Abdullah, in Dandi, Gandhi moved to a specially built palm-leaf hut. It was there that he was arrested after midnight on May 4, 1930, under Bombay Regulation XXV of 1827, which provided for detention without trial.

  With this, the mantle fell on seventy-six-year-old Abbas Tyabji, a retired Muslim judge, whom Gandhi had named as the alternate leader of the satyagrahis. Accompanied by Gandhi’s wife, Kasturbai, he led the march on Dharasana Salt Works twenty-five miles to the south of Dandi.

  En route, Tyabji was arrested and sentenced to three months in jail. The leadership then passed successively to Sarojini Naidu, an Oxford-educated, outspoken poet, and Maulana Abul Kalam Muhiyuddin Ahmed Azad, who had fallen under Gandhi’s spell during the Khilafat movement. By then the number of satyagrahis had soared to two thousand. As they approached the salt plant, they were turned back by police. Frustrated, they resorted to a sit-in, which lasted a couple of days. Hundreds were arrested.

  On finally reaching their destination on May 21, some of the satyagrahis attempted to remove the barbed wire surrounding the salt works. The police charged them with steel-tipped staves. Obeying Gandhi’s strict instruction to the nonresistors to “answer organized hooliganism with great suffering,” they remained passive.

  “Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows,” reported Webb Miller, an American correspondent of United Press International.

  From where I stood I heard the sickening whacks of the clubs on unprotected skulls. . . . Those struck down fell sprawling, unconscious or writhing in pain with fractured skulls or broken shoulders. In two or three minutes the ground was quilted with bodies. Great patches of blood widened on their white clothes. The survivors without breaking ranks silently and doggedly marched on until struck down. When every one of the first column was knocked down stretcher bearers rushed up unmolested by the police and carried off the injured to a thatched hut which had been arranged as a temporary hospital.

  At times the spectacle of unresisting men being methodically bashed into a bloody pulp sickened me so much I had to turn away. I felt an indefinable sense of helpless rage and loathing, almost as much against the men who were submitting unresistingly to being beaten as against the police wielding the clubs. . . . Group after group walked forward, sat down, and submitted to being beaten into insensibility without raising an arm to fend off the blows. Finally the police became enraged by the nonresistance. . . . They commenced savagely kicking the seated men in the abdomen and testicles. The injured men writhed and squealed in agony, which seemed to inflame the fury of the police. . . . The police then began dragging the sitting men by the arms or feet, sometimes for a hundred yards, and throwing them into ditches.

  On his later visit to the hospital Miller counted “320 injured, many still insensible with fractured skulls, others writhing in agony from kicks in the testicles and stomach. . . . Scores of the injured had received no treatment for hours and two had died.”60

  His first attempts at wiring the story to his agency in London were censored by the British telegraph operators in India. Only after he had threatened to expose British censorship was his report transmitted uncensored. His story appeared in 1,350 newspapers worldwide. And it was read into the official record of the US Senate by Senator John J. Blaine.61

  Miller’s report described the tragic event more graphically than the sequence in Attenborough’s biopic Gandhi. Like his depiction of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, which failed to capture the chaos and terror of the victims, the film’s recreation of the Salt March was marred by the sanitized appearance of the nonviolent resistors in freshly laundered and pressed white shirts, pajamas, and Gandhi caps, without the faintest notion of even armpit sweat on their clothes in the dusty, subtropical landscape in the sweltering heat of May before the onset of monsoon.

  Viceroy Lord Irwin’s note to King George V was a case of describing a moonless night as a penumbra. “Your Majesty can hardly fail to have read with amusement the accounts of the severe battles for the Salt Depot in Dharasana,” he wrote. “The police for a long time tried to refrain from action. After a time this became impossible, and they had to resort to sterner methods. A good many people suffered minor injuries in consequence.”62

  The mass arrests by the government pushed up the number of political offenders to somewhere between sixty thousand and ninety-two thousand.63

  In his rivalry with Gandhi as the primary spokesman of Indians, Jinnah had a built-in disadvantage. It was not just that as a Hindu, Gandhi belonged to the majority community, but by invoking the symbols and mythology of the religion, he had given himself a Hindu halo.

  By contrast, Jinnah’s di
staste for street politics remained unabated. He and Gandhi lived in totally different worlds, politically and socially. Temperamentally, Gandhi was a man of heart, skillful in pulling emotional strings, creating and applying “moral pressure.” He tried diverse ways to win, particularly when he could not marshal rational argument to support his stance. As his polar opposite, Jinnah was a man of intellect, steeped in logic, unsentimental, a lawyer to his fingertips. He was cold, conservative, constitutionalist, and consistent.

  Jinnah realized that the dramatic events of the Salt March and its aftermath, reported worldwide, had overshadowed his efforts at advancing the cause of Indian nationalism through constitutional means. In his political joust he had lost to Gandhi. He decided to quit India. In October 1930 he sailed to London and returned to practicing law.

  In stark contrast, Gandhi and other Congress luminaries were languishing in dirty, poorly maintained jails. There was therefore no prospect of them attending the first Round Table Conference on India in London later in the year.

  3: The Two-Nation Theory

  A Preamble to Partition

  When the first Round Table Conference on India opened in London on November 12, 1930, it turned out to be anything but round. The eighty-nine delegates sat around an E-shaped configuration. Among the Muslim representatives, Jinnah stood out because of his distinctive hand-tailored suit and his attention-drawing behavior. “Jinnah did not at the opening of the Conference say what his party [Muslim League] had agreed on, and they are a little sore in consequence,” wrote Sir Malcolm Hailey, the Indian government’s consultative official, in a private note to Viceroy Lord Irwin. “He declined to give the Conference Secretariat a copy of his speech in advance as all the others had done. But then Jinnah, of course, was always the perfect little bounder.”1

  In his opening speech Jinnah said that there were four parties involved: the British, the princely states, the Hindus, and the Muslims. Thus he made Muslims a distinct group, rather than Indians with special interests and demands. He made explicit what was implicit in his earlier Fourteen Points.

  Back in India, the League’s acting president, Sir Muhammad Iqbal, also made an original point in his address to the organization’s annual conference in Allahabad in late December. A mustached man with a receding hairline and a middle-distance gaze, he was a Cambridge-educated barrister and poet-philosopher. He stressed the distinction of Muslims in a territorial context. “I would like to see the Punjab, the North-West Frontier Province, Sindh and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single state,” he said. “Self-government within the British Empire, or without the British Empire, the formation of the consolidated North-West Indian Muslim State appears to me to be the destiny of Muslims, at least of North-West India.”2 In retrospect, this would prove to be the germ out of which sprouted Pakistan.

  In London the conference set up eight subcommittees to deal with different subjects, the most important being the federal structure, provincial powers, and minorities. At the end of the deliberations on January 19, 1931, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald said that his government was prepared to “accept devolution of power at the Center if the [central] legislature could be constituted on a federal basis”3—and hoped the Congress Party would attend the next conference.

  Alert to his superior’s cue, Viceroy Lord Irwin released Congress leaders on January 25 on the eve of the party’s Purna Swaraj (Full Independence) Day. He invited Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi for talks.

  The Gandhi-Irwin Pact

  Gandhi had a three-and-a-half-hour, one-on-one meeting with the viceroy in Delhi on February 17, a groundbreaking event. According such privilege to the leader of a party committed to ending the British Raj raised hackles among many British politicians, especially Conservatives. Preeminent among them was Winston Churchill, former chancellor of the exchequer and secretary of state for the colonies. He could not bear “the nauseating and revolting 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 parley on equal terms with the representative of the King Emperor.”4 The viceroy’s game-changing invitation thrust Gandhi into the celebrity stratosphere.

  He and Lord Irwin met several times to hammer out an agreement. During one of these sessions, the viceroy asked his interlocutor if he would like tea. “Thank you,” replied Gandhi as he adjusted his shawl. Holding up a paper bag, he said, “I will put some of this salt into my tea to remind us of the famous Boston Tea Party.” The air rippled with laughter.

  During the hard-nosed bargaining, one of the concessions that Gandhi wrung from Lord Irwin was the permission for Indians to make salt on the seacoasts. Overall, though, this turned out to be a token gesture by the viceroy, who compelled Gandhi to accept a future constitution in which Britain would retain control over defense, foreign relations, minority problems, and financial obligations to foreign countries. This was summed up in Article 2 of the pact.5 Yet, in retrospect, this agreement would prove to be the apogee of Gandhi’s political achievement.

  In exchange for the Congress Party ending civil disobedience, and agreeing to participate in the next Round Table Conference, Lord Irwin pledged to release all political prisoners and return their confiscated lands.

  The Gandhi-Irwin Pact was inked on March 5. Though its terms did not meet the minimum that Gandhi had prescribed for a “truce,” he vouched for the sincerity of Lord Irwin, who was set to retire the next month. Despite grumbling from its younger members about Article 2, the Congress Working Committee (CWC, or Congress high command) endorsed the deal. But the special session of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) at the end of March did not. It instructed Gandhi to disown Article 2 at the Round Table Conference.

  This hiccup in the Congress camp did nothing to douse the fast-spreading rumor in the predominantly Hindu rural areas of India that the great Mahatma had triumphed over the British king and that Ram Raj was now in the offing.

  What transpired at the next conference in London, which opened a fortnight after the collapse of the Labor government of MacDonald, was the exact opposite of the Hindu villagers’ expectations.

  Second and Third Round Table Conferences

  The second Round Table Conference convened on September 7, 1931, against the background of a deepening political crisis in Britain caused by the Great Depression. Mahatma Gandhi was the sole delegate of the Congress Party, claiming to represent 85 percent of all Indians. But he could not sustain his party’s claim in the face of 111 other delegates: nearly three-fifths of them from British India, one-fifth from the princely states nominated by the viceroy, and the rest from the British government.

  Each of the main issues—the federal structure and the minorities—was taken up by a committee. Gandhi was appointed to both. On the thirty-eight-strong Minorities Committee, however, there were more Muslims (13) than caste Hindus (10), with the remaining seats allocated to the Untouchables (Hindi: Achhut)—officially called Depressed Classes, forming 11 percent of the Indian population—along with Sikhs, Christians, Anglo-Indians, Europeans, and women.

  Gandhi presented the (Motilal) Nehru Report, which rejected separate electoral rolls for Muslims, as the solution to the contentious Hindu-Muslim problem. He got nowhere. All other groups, except caste Hindus, lined up behind an agreement with separate electorates for different communities at its core.

  Challenging the official decision to list the Untouchables as a separate community, Gandhi claimed that he represented all the castes of Hinduism “in my own person.” This failed to convince the Untouchables’ leader, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. A young, fiendishly articulate law graduate of Columbia University, he slammed Gandhi’s practice of calling the Untouchables “Harijans” (Hindi: Children of God), an unworthy example of political posturing. As outcastes, the Untouchables stood apart from caste Hindus, he insisted.

  Anticipating failure at the conference, Gandhi spent much time and energy lobbying fo
r India’s total independence by trying to convert the British public to his cause. He stressed that quitting the British Empire would not mean severing ties with the people of Britain. He deployed his charm, wit, and self-dramatizing skills to the hilt. Dressed in his trademark loincloth and shawl, with a dangling watch and sandals, he provided an exotically attractive image for British newspapers. He traveled to Manchester, the textile heart of the empire, and Oxford, addressing altogether different audiences. In London he stayed at Kingsley Hall in the impoverished East End.

  While Gandhi grabbed newspaper headlines and entertained readers with occasional quips—“You, in your country wear plus-fours, I prefer minus-fours”6—Jinnah applied his advocacy talent to enrich himself in London.

  Specializing in India-related cases, he practiced law before the Judicial Committee of the (king’s) Privy Council. “Contrary to my expectations, I was a success,” Jinnah would tell American journalist-author Louis Fischer a decade later, with characteristic British understatement.7 This success amounted to him earning £25,000 (today’s £1.44 million) a year. He lived in a three-story villa in upscale Hampstead with eight acres of garden, where Fatima, his seventeen-years-younger dentist sister acted as his housekeeper and surrogate mother of his daughter, Dinah. He traveled in a chauffer-driven Bentley. In the midst of an economic depression, he purchased several apartments in the posh Mayfair neighborhood.

  Following the October 1931 general election, which Labor lost heavily, MacDonald continued as the prime minister of a national government that was dominated by the Conservatives. Sir Samuel Hoare, the new Conservative secretary of state for India, was ill-disposed toward the Congress Party, a feeling shared by Viceroy Lord Willingdon in Delhi. Within weeks the viceroy proclaimed Emergency Powers Ordinances in the Congress strongholds of Bengal and United Provinces.