It might seem today as one reflects on the smooth execution of the 1930 civil disobedience campaign that the outcome of the whole operation was a foregone conclusion from the time Gandhi was charged by the Lahore Congress to lead the movement. In fact, there was uncertainty surrounding it from the outset, partly because in the months before the march Gandhi was receiving much advice from trusted friends who urged patience rather than provocation. Close political allies in Britain called for caution, imploring him not to risk rebellion but to accept the terms offered by the Government. Fenner Brockway, a staunch Labourite, cabled Gandhi: “Beg you cooperate [with Wedgwood Benn, Secretary of State for India] thus opening door friendship.”21 Horace Alexander, who would remain until Gandhi’s death an intimate Quaker friend, wrote on behalf of the British Friends Peace Committee to implore cooperation with Irwin by attending the Round Table Conference to discuss future political reforms. It is, Alexander advised, “a sound pacifist rule that when two groups of men are preparing for war whether with or without weapons of violence the peacemaker must try to bring the leaders together in conference.”22
Gandhi’s old friend from South Africa, Henry S. L. Polak, was even more emphatic. In a series of letters and telegrams from London, Polak insisted that he knew the mind of Wedgwood Benn to be conciliatory, that Benn “has the solid backing of the [Labour] Cabinet,” and “there is no doubt that there is a complete and fundamental change in the attitude towards the India problem on the part of the Labour Party. They most earnestly want a settlement in India and a very friendly one. They do not intend to take up the attitude of superiors towards inferiors.” Polak commended Wedgwood Benn’s “intense earnestness and sincerity,” and concluded that the only rational and successful approach to Britain must be not civil disobedience but “mutual cooperation.”23
This advice from abroad was reinforced by some of Gandhi’s respected friends in India. On the eve of the salt march, M. A. Ansari, a Delhi Nationalist Muslim, wrote a lengthy letter to Gandhi pleading with him to desist. He reports a conversation with a friend, a “God-fearing and deeply religious Gujarati Hindu,” who saw the outbreak of smallpox that had recently occurred in Gandhi’s ashram as “a sign from God” that Gandhi must postpone civil disobedience. Ansari noted further that Muslims were generally not supportive, and that “your direct action today would only appeal to a very small section, i.e., those who are and have been always with you; but a considerable position of the Hindu population, an overwhelming number of Muslims and Sikhs would not be touched by your movement. Rather, these would be used as a counterfoil against you. The impatient and the impetuous youth of the country are sure to break out in violence. Your whole movement would then fail.”24
At the same time that Dr. Ansari was diagnosing potential disaster and the youth as being a dangerous element, Asaf AH, another Delhi Nationalist Muslim, saw the situation in more positive terms. “The youth of the country,” he wrote Gandhi on February 25, “are anxious for a ‘trial of strength,’ both violent and nonviolent, driven by economic causes. But the Congress has yet to yoke their energy….”25 Gandhi had already determined on a “trial of strength” and it may be that the torrent of letters that he was now receiving from young people all over the country proved decisive.26 One young woman, writing from Ahmedabad, presciently perceived the enthusiasm of women for the movement. She suggested organizing “a band of women as Peace-volunteers” who may inject a special element of nonviolence into the struggle because “Women who bring life into the world are the greatest haters of bloodshed, for life is too precious to them. Give the women a chance therefore to show what they can do.”27 Student leaders from a youth league in Madras wrote in terms that must have moved Gandhi:
We are determined to join your campaign, but we are disallowed by our parents. So we have come to a definite conclusion that our holy nation’s call is to be responded to more than our parents wish. We are under a firm belief that our service to humanity will outweigh the sin of disobeying our parents. [But] we must get an order from you. Please allow us to join your volunteer corps. We request you not to let our parents know that we have written you …. 28
A young man writing from Bengal offered: “my humble services as a Satyagrahi in the coming struggle.” He then managed to express precisely the ideas behind the campaign:
Your decision to launch civil disobedience led me to believe that you are trying, once and for all, to establish the supremacy and efficacy of nonviolent methods over violent means. Politics in India today has been confused with anjjnholy mixture of nonviolence and violence. I regard nonviolence as a much greater and cleaner political weapon because nonviolence blesses him who wields it as well as him against whom it is wielded. In Bengal there is a school of politics who believe in violence, but terrorism is now an exploded theory in the West. If we could only establish the truth of our way in the public mind with our own blood, we will have achieved our end.
He added that he knew “hundreds of trained workers [who] will rally around our nonviolent banner. Women are anxious to join.”29
These excerpts from the numerous letters that Gandhi received indicate that for at least some Indian students the message was clear and compelling. Satish Kalelkar, one of the students who was eventually selected to join Gandhi on the salt march, later reflected on that moment and said that before 1930, many college men and women had dismissed Gandhi as at worst a silly old fool or at best, “a saint who cannot lead us.” But once the clarion call of civil disobedience was sounded, they suddenly felt that only Gandhi could lead them.30 The details of the campaign, its main demands, and its precise method of attack could be left to the leader; what now emerged was an urgent appeal for the power of nonviolence. When Gandhi later remarked that he made his decisions on listening to his “inner voice,” the appeal from India’s youth must have come across loud and clear. Yet, trained and practiced as a lawyer, he was never one to defy the law lightly; and he worried over the criticism now expressed by Chimanlal Setalvad, a leader of India’s Liberal Party: “if you inculcate in the minds of the younger generation the idea of direct action, the idea of disobeying laws, what will happen to your Swaraj when you get it?”31 Gandhi responded to Liberals in India as Martin Luther King, Jr. would some thirty years later to liberals in America: that respectful obedience to law must always remain the norm, but that it remains the citizen’s responsibility to discern and if necessary disobey nonviolently those laws that violate standards of morality and justice. It was a principle that both had learned from Thoreau.
Why did Gandhi choose the salt tax as the issue?32 Its abolition had been advocated in India generally, and by Gandhi in particular, decades before the salt satyagraha. Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Gandhi’s mentor, roundly condemned the salt tax in 1902 before the Imperial Legislative council in Bombay. Gokhale dwelt on the “unquestioned hardship” that the salt tax “imposes upon the poorest of the poor of our community.” Then he buttressed his case by citing evidence from British officials who had themselves conceded as early as 1888 their “greatest reluctance” in imposing this particular tax. Gokhale quoted from none other than Lord Cross, Secretary of State for India, 1886–1892, who had then expressed “great regret” for placing this “burden on the poorest classes of the population, through the taxation of a necessity of life.”33 However sincere these officials were at the time, this was precisely the language that Gandhi was to adopt as he began to oppose the salt tax. In 1905, Gandhi wrote from South Africa that the tax should be abolished immediately, and the demand is repeated, though not stressed, over the years.34 In his blanket indictment of British rule in Hind Swaraj, Gandhi makes a special point of commenting that “The salt-tax is not a small injustice.”35 By January 1930, the issue of the salt tax had been elevated to one of Gandhi’s primary concerns, being listed as fourth in his eleven demands for basic reforms presented to Lord Irwin.36 However, it was not until February 5, only five weeks before the march, that the press reported that Gandhi would undertake
civil disobedience “in connection with the salt tax.”37 It struck even the most loyal of Gandhi’s followers as a poor choice for an issue to fight the campaign. Manufacture of salt occurred mainly along the coast and it was difficult to imagine how a nationwide protest might be organized. When Gandhi proposed it to the Working Committee of the Congress in mid-February, the response was incredulity.38
Gandhi did not explain his position publicly until February 27. In the first extensive comment that he had ever made on the salt tax, he outlined the reasons for his choice of this particular tax in characteristically inclusive terms: “Next to air and water, salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life. It is the only condiment of the poor…. There is no article like salt outside water by taxing which the State can reach even the starving millions, the sick, the maimed and the utterly helpless. The tax constitutes therefore the most inhuman poll tax that ingenuity of man can devise.” The issue, then, had by now acquired its essential components: the indispensable moral emphasis, including special stress on the suffering of a “helpless” population, and the suggestion that resistance to the tax must touch virtually everyone, but certainly “the starving millions.” In this article, Gandhi proceeds to wax eloquent on some of his favorite themes: the way in which Government monopoly of salt production and distribution has killed the native Bengal salt industry; the exorbitantly unfair charge of the salt tax compared to the cost of production; the ability of India to manufacture all the salt it needs without unnecessary foreign imports from Liverpool; and the insinuation that if an illegality exists in this instance, it rests with the Government and not those who must legitimately resist this immoral law:
When therefore the time comes, civil resisters will have an ample opportunity … to conduct their campaign regarding the tax in a most effective manner. The illegality is in a Government that steals the people’s salt and makes them pay heavily for the stolen article. The people, when they become conscious of their power, will have every right to take possession of what belongs to them.39
Gandhi’s inclusive leadership in his choice of the salt tax is evident and has been noted by other commentators.40 But the symbolism of the issue deserves to be underlined: the image appears of an outrageous injustice, in which already destitute millions are made to carry an unjust burden; a tax not on a superfluous item (such as tea), or on an object of privilege (land), but on a primary need, a commodity equivalent to air and water that belongs to all and which everyone has a natural right to consume. The Government “steals” and then exploits; “the people” must therefore assert their “right” and rise with all their “power” in order “to take possession of what belongs to them.”41
If the issue of the salt tax represented an inclusive target, then the method of the march constituted an inclusive means of attacking it. The very notion of the march to Dandi exuded a “come, join me” call for recruitment. Gandhi’s methodical procedure of walking through dozens of villages, pausing regularly to hold public meetings, and covering a remarkable distance of more than 200 miles in 24 days, may be seen, quite apart from the strength of the issue, as a massive political campaign. The gradual cumulative force of this leadership converted the streams of “volunteers” who converged around it into a human tide, quickly rising and eventually sweeping the movement to the sea. The way in which this floodtide grew, carrying such diverse elements in its flow, is phenomenal; but to understand its force, one must go to its source, the idea behind it.
How and when did the conception of a march form in Gandhi’s mind? During his stay in South Africa, he had used the technique of the march before, in 1913. As part of a strike of Indian laborers, he had led a large contingent from Natal into the Transvaal. The “Great March” as it came to be called, took five days, from November 6 to 10 and involved 2,037 men, 127 women, and 57 children.42 Its purpose was to register a mass protest against repressive legislation and to assert the self-respect of the Indian community. It was similar to the Dandi march in its dramatic use of a powerful means of nonviolent action, the dominant leadership of Gandhi, its ultimately successful outcome, and the mutual respect that eventually emerged between Gandhi and his chief adversary, in this case, General J. C. Smuts.
Yet there were significant differences between the two marches. The much larger size of the South African group gave it an unwieldy and untrained character that the press derided as a “pathetic Indian army” or “a long struggling line of weary and footsore travellers” that fell into the waiting arms of the police.43 Moreover, the relatively short period of five days did not allow for the same buildup of suspense and publicity. Gandhi had not acquired an international reputation in 1913 and so the event received no attention in the world press. As the protesters moved through hostile territory, they must have felt, unlike the Dandi marchers, that they were unnoticed, certainly unacclaimed. However, the most striking difference between the two marches came with the contrasting responses of the respective governments. The South African government did not hesitate to arrest Gandhi on the first night of the march. Although he was subsequently released on bail, he was rearrested and the government thus demonstrated its unequivocal determination and total control of the situation. The campaign was deprived of its leadership and the protesters were sent back home. Only later, in the aftermath of the march, when the government went too far in its repression, did the movement ultimately succeed.
The overall contrast between the marches of 1913 and 1930 reveals how much Gandhi’s leadership and power had matured in seventeen years. When he was asked, at the outset of the Dandi march, to compare it with the earlier one in South Africa, he said that here in India would be easier because of its “hospitable environment.”44 He knew that he was swimming in friendly waters and there was power in that knowledge. The Gujurat area had been carefully prepared as Natal and the Transvaal could not have been. The entire force of the movement was now concentrated on that route to Dandi. As events would show, Irwin and the Raj now encountered a much more difficult challenge than faced earlier by the government of South Africa. The difference, therefore, between these two marches is that Gandhi’s leadership by 1930 had gained dramatically in self-confidence and political control: satyagraha had acquired a degree of political power that measured favorably against the imperial government of India. Gandhi’s whole attitude conveys now—as it did not in South Africa—a mature awareness that he possesses a method of action ripe for use.
Whatever the influence on Gandhi’s mind of his South African precedent, it seems that the precise idea of a march to the sea coast at Dandi to “manufacture salt” was not conceived until only days before the march actually began. In late January 1930, Gandhi told the press that he had retreated to Sabarmati ashram because he was “not yet sure of the form it [civil disobedience] will take. I have come here and in my seclusion I hope to evolve a plan of civil resistance….” He said that he was listening intently, to “keep himself in tune with the voice of his followers.”45 By the end of February Gandhi had still not mentioned anything about a “march,”46 but in his article on the salt tax (cited above), he does show how closely he is listening to “the voice of his followers.” He reports on two letters that he has received and the theme of both is that large salt deposits exist on the Bombay Presidency shore from Cambay to Ratnagiri: “If the people had freedom they could pick up salt from the deposits made by the receding tides” and “if a band of volunteers began the work all along the coast, it would be impossible for the whole strength of the police and customs staff to prevent them from collecting natural salt…. The poor people on the coast will join in the collection of salt spontaneously in these days of unemployment.”47 Within a week of writing this article, Gandhi had made his decision to undertake a march into the area and along the lines suggested in these letters. He announced his plans at a prayer meeting at Sabarmati ashram in the beginning of March.48
Another factor that helped set the stage for the event appeared with Gandhi’s choice of those who would
accompany him on the march. At Lahore, Gandhi had struggled with those in the Congress like Subhas Bose, who accepted the use of political violence. He managed ultimately to persuade the Congress to adopt nonviolent action not because they believed in it as a creed, but because most admitted its efficacy as a political policy. This was not enough for Gandhi as he planned the march. He wanted a group of followers scrupulously disciplined in his mode of nonviolent conduct and unequivocally committed to ahimsa as a creed.49
Even for some of Gandhi’s own ashramites, a total belief in ahimsa did not come easily. D. R. Harkare, another of the eighty-one marchers, related a personal odyssey that began with a youthful involvement in terrorism and contempt for nonviolence. This ended only when he joined Sabarmati ashram and could observe Gandhi closely. He witnessed in Gandhi an absolute fearlessness (initially in the Mahatma’s calm handling of poisonous snakes), together with an intense identification with the poor through consistent adoption of their lifestyle.50 In a manner representative of most ashramites interviewed, Harkare said that only after watching Gandhi’s behavior each day did he gain the trust and affection that had made him adopt all aspects of nonviolence, personal and political.
Emphasis on the development of self-discipline in the ashram was met with a range of responses. Some reflecting back on the experience of ashram discipline from a vantage point of forty-five years, stated that it was the most joyful moment of their lives because they felt involved in an exhilarating spiritual quest led by a revered man of action.51 Madeleine Slade, an English woman who had joined the ashram three years earlier and whom Gandhi named Mira Behn, seemed to welcome the strict code of personal conduct and four months before the march extolled the ashram for having “reached its zenith in physical energy and moral strength.”52 Others, however, noted the difficulty in meeting some of Gandhi’s rigorous standards. Youth from high castes or wealthy families found onerous the requirement of daily spinning, cleaning latrines, and other forms of manual labor.53 Most of the marchers interviewed agreed with Satish Kalelkar (a 19-year-old college student who entered Sabarmati ashram a year before he joined the march) that the training steeled them not only for the trek to Dandi, but perhaps more importantly for the months of rigorous imprisonment that would follow. One invaluable result of the discipline seemed to be a discovery of unexpected personal reserves, and this in turn produced a fearlessness for which satyagraha became renowned in the face of government assaults. When Kalelkar reflected back on his experience, he concluded that Gandhi’s genius lay not only in his famed ability to arouse the masses but, even more, to evoke the best from his immediate followers by revealing qualities that they would not have dared believe they possessed.54
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