Gandhi’s choice of salt as a symbol of protest had amused many. The British had laughed while the Congress intellectuals were bewildered by the strange idea. This, once again, proved Gandhi’s genius for seizing the significance of the seemingly trivial but essential details of daily living which are relegated to the woman’s sphere. Salt is one of the cheapest of commodities which every woman buys and uses as a matter of routine, almost without thought….
To manufacture salt in defiance of British laws prohibiting such manufacture, became a way of declaring one’s independence in one’s own daily life and also of revolutionizing one’s perception of the kitchen as linked to the nation, the personal as linked to the political. This was another campaign in which women in large numbers were galvanized into action, precisely because the action, though simple, appealed to the imagination. Its symbolic value was such as to touch the everyday life of women.
On the famous Dandi march through the villages of Gujarat, Gandhi originally started off with 79 satyagrahis. People from the villages on route and around spontaneously joined the march. When the procession neared Dandi, there were thousands of people walking with Gandhi. Among them were many women. Some of them were wealthy women from cities but a majority were ordinary village women …
Thus, on the one hand, emphasis on women’s participation in satyagraha sought to ensure that the movement stayed non-violent, while on the other hand, emphasis on non-violence made it possible for larger numbers of women to participate. In fact, Gandhi’s non-violence was a powerful revolutionary weapon because it created a favorable atmosphere for participation of very large numbers of people, especially women, giving them all a meaningful place in the struggle.104
As Kishwar’s conclusion indicates, the politicization of women in the movement carried beyond the salt satyagraha: it was part of Gandhi’s program of social reform. Judith Brown believes that a “great social issue with which Gandhi felt bound to grapple in his grass-roots work for swaraj was the place and treatment of women in Indian society.” For this reason, she concludes, “it must never be forgotten that in him the women of India found a very considerable champion.”105
Despite the inclusive approach of the salt satyagraha, Gandhi lost the support of one major group—the Muslims. This was a devastating loss in view of the consequences ahead of civil war. Muslim leaders, who had participated in the noncooperation campaign, were largely estranged by 1930. At the end of 1929 the Muslim Conference Executive Board decided not to follow the Congress lead into civil disobedience and this policy was restated three months later as Gandhi began the salt march.106 In 1920–21, Gandhi had toured India with the Muslim leader, Shaukat Ali, calling him his “brother.” Now Ali denounced civil disobedience and urged a Muslim boycott because the campaign could lead only to the substitution of Hindu for British rule. Most Muslims followed this advice and, with the exception of those in the North-West Frontier Province, noncooperated with Gandhi throughout the salt satyagraha.107
Gandhi’s anxiety over this was evident in his writings. On the day that the salt march began, Young India carried two articles by him on the same subject, the disaffection of the Muslims. In the first, he denied reports in the Muslim press that certain Muslims had been prevented from joining the march because of a ban on Muslims, noting that two Muslims would be among the marchers.108 In the second, longer article, Gandhi refuted Shaukat Ali’s “grave charge” that this “is a movement not for swaraj but for Hindu raj and against Mussalmans.” Gandhi was obviously stung by Ali’s charge and took pains to stress his inclusive spirit, expressing his earnest hope that:
Mussalmans, Sikhs, Christians, Parsis, Jews, etc. will join it. Surely all are equally interested in securing repeal of the salt tax. Do not all need and use salt equally? That is the one tax which is no respecter of persons. Civil disobedience is a process of developing internal strength and therefore an organic growth. Resistance to the salt tax can hurt no single communal (religious) interest.
He appealed for united action against the Government in the spirit of the earlier noncooperation campaign and concluded:
I am the same little man that I used to be in 1921.1 can never be an enemy of Mussalmans, no matter what any one or more of them may do to me or mine, even as I can never be any enemy of Englishmen, even though they may heap further wrongs upon the Everest of wrongs their representatives have already piled. I am too conscious of the imperfections of the species to which I belong to be irritated against any single member thereof. My remedy is to deal with the wrong wherever I see it, not to hurt the wrong-doer, even as I would not like to be hurt for the wrongs I continually do.109
The ideas expressed in this article articulate Gandhi’s inclusiveness as well as any that he wrote. They combine his characteristic appeal for Indian unity with his personal credo of perceiving no one as an enemy, opposing the sin and not the sinner. In this case, the sin is clearly separatism. Certain instances of satyagraha, such as the Calcutta fast, which will be examined in chapter 5, did demonstrate Gandhi’s ability to reach Muslims, convincing them of his right motives. Yet, in the broad sense, Muslim separatism prevailed with the partition of India and creation of Pakistan. Why did his inclusivism fail to produce the result, which he so ardently desired, of a united India? To the extent that Gandhi’s ideas and leadership may be held responsible for the partition of India, it appears with hindsight that the strength of his Hindu symbols, so evident in his ingenious use of language, proved also a weakness when it came to recruiting Muslims. It spoke to them of a Hindu Raj, as Shaukat Ali claimed, that would enforce perpetual domination of Muslims as second-class citizens. Gandhi’s passionate reassurances and actions failed to persuade them otherwise. At the end of his life, as India attained independence with civil war, Gandhi saw the national movement as not simply a failure, but as his failure, as a verdict on the way that he had misused satyagraha and on India’s inability to achieve true swaraj. It was a harsh judgment yet one characteristic of the way he saw his quest.110
If one criticism of Gandhi during the salt satyagraha was that the Hindu style of his thought and action alienated Muslims, another is that his class allegiances sold out the poor peasantry to capitalism and thus deprived India of an economic revolution. The origins of this critique have been discussed above in the context of M. N. Roy’s theory. During the 1920s and 30s, Roy viewed Gandhi and the Congress as tools of India’s bourgeois interests. Recent Marxist analysis is more sophisticated. It describes “the nature of Gandhian leadership” as not a “mere bourgeois tool” but with “a certain coincidence of aims with Indian business interests.” These Indian “bourgeois groups” exerted a controlling influence on the salt satyagraha from start to finish. Although “considerable sections of the peasantry” were mobilized in the struggle, the capitalist forces ultimately prevented a full-scale agrarian class revolution. Gandhi served throughout as an agent of capitalism. Because of his restraining influence on the civil disobedience movement, “the bang ended in a whimper.” But the Indian bourgeoisie got what it wanted: “unlike China or Vietnam, there was no development in the course of the nationalist movement of an alternative, more radical leadership capable of mobilizing the peasant masses” and so achieving a communist-style revolution.111 Another historian of this period follows this same line of analysis and in the specific context of the salt satyagraha argues that Gandhi’s protection of bourgeois interests is evident in his choice of the salt instead of property tax as the main issue of the campaign because it served as one of those “safely general issues which did mobilize large numbers of poor peasants in some areas but which also inhibited a further broadening and deepening of the movement.” Again, this “broadening and deepening” might have led to a Maoist-type class revolution against the zamindars and landed elite.112
A major question left unanswered by this criticism of Gandhi is: given the powerful omnipresence of the Raj, how could any leadership have achieved a “broadening and deepening of the movement” that mi
ght have produced an agrarian revolution? Lenin’s argument against Roy on this point remains valid, that no nationalist movement under those circumstances could have simultaneously mobilized against both the Indian landed elite and the British imperial forces.113 Gandhi’s effectiveness came, first, from the ethical appeal of satyagraha that allowed him to seize the moral high ground from the Raj, and, second, from the precise historical circumstances of India, in stark contrast to China. These circumstances dictated objective constraints imposed by the extent and nature of British power. Gandhi emerged as a leader whose principal asset was a persistent determination to translate ideas into action. He generated a theory and practice of change ideally suited to the particular context of India, a way of action that transformed the apparent limitations of the struggle into its strengths. He caught the Raj badly off guard in a manner that it never anticipated. As Bipan Chandra says, “The dilemma in which it [the Government in 1930] found itself was a dilemma that the Gandhian strategy of non-violent civil disobedience was designed to create. The Government was placed in a classic ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ fix…”114 The dynamics of this strategy as the British perceived them deserve close scrutiny.
The Raj Hesitates: A Study in Ambivalence
What exactly was the effect of Gandhi’s method on the power of the Raj as it reacted in 1930 to his civil disobedience? On February 6, the Times of India, generally a firm supporter of Government policy, began a series of editorials on the bankruptcy of Gandhi’s leadership, condemning especially the “impracticable nature of his demands.”115 The next day, Lord Irwin spoke at Lucknow on the theme of civil disobedience, saying that it “could not fail to involve India in irreparable misfortune and disaster.” He stated firmly that “Government would clearly never be justified in permitting the development of any such situation so heavily fraught with danger to the whole body politic and there can, therefore, be no question but that law and order must without reservation be maintained.”116 This public address is in accord with Irwin’s views set forth in private correspondence on the eve of Gandhi’s march. On March n, for example, he wrote to the King of his conviction that:
Government could not bargain or parley in regard to a considered and announced intention of law-breaking. Meanwhile Mr. Gandhi has announced his intention of starting off on his march tomorrow, and his march is calculated to take him five days.117 We have considered the whole situation very fully, and I am quite satisfied that, though it will have regrettable repercussions on our Moderate friends, we cannot afford to let the would-be law-breaking forces gather momentum, and that therefore, if and when Gandhi reaches the point of breaking the law, we shall have to arrest him.118
Irwin’s firm resolve was in accord with that of Governor Frederick Sykes. In January, Sykes put his position on civil disobedience in the sharpest terms, cabling to the Viceroy that it was “essential” that “any overt steps taken in pursuance of the Congress resolution (on civil disobedience)…should be met and checked immediately…. The Government of India will no doubt agree that what is most important in such circumstances is firm action at the outset of the movement, giving a clear lead and assurance to the loyal population.”119 Yet, Gandhi began his campaign on March 12, exhorted his people to join the movement, himself broke the salt law at Dandi, and then led a national civil disobedience campaign of hundreds of thousands of volunteers until May 5, when he was finally arrested. Why did the Government of India act in such patent contradiction to its public and private pronouncements? It will be suggested here that the Government’s response may be explained in part through an examination of Gandhi’s method, and the effect it seems to have had on his Government adversaries, by creating an ambivalence in the Government’s response which it found difficult to resolve.
During the week before the march, the Times of India assumed a hard line on Gandhi similar to that of Irwin and Sykes.120 Sarder Patel’s early arrest on March 5 was applauded, and the Times of India quoted favorably from British press statements calling for Gandhi’s immediate arrest.121 It also notes Sir James Crerar’s comment in the Legislative Assembly: “I cannot myself believe that breaches of the law, from whatever motive committed, that represent a course of action which is likely to bring contempt for the authority of law can possibly be in the political or economic or any other interest of India.”122
However, the call for severe action toward Gandhi, including his immediate arrest, was not nearly as affirmative and unanimous as the above accounts might indicate, either in the Government or in the English-language press. In many circles there was ambivalence and confusion. This ambivalence may be appreciated to some extent by focusing on the figure at the apex of British authority in India, Lord Irwin. The shakiness of Irwin’s resolve before Gandhi’s arrest reflects in a sense the mixed emotions and indecisive attitudes permeating British authority in India at this time. Gandhi’s method of satyagraha played on these attitudes in such a manner that it managed to exacerbate Government ambivalence, whereas violence would have resolved it.
Irwin’s administration had been badly shaken in 1928 by the Bardoli defeat. Yet it is remarkable that less than two years later, the same sort of hesitation that undercut it there should again bedevil its response to the salt march. This pattern is so significant that it prompts another look at the Government’s problem with the Bardoli satyagraha. During the height of the Bardoli resistance, Irwin wrote to his father, the Viscount Halifax, that it posed “a very threatening situation” and hoped that he could “cut the gordian knot.”123 However, this was not easily achieved. As the Government’s position in Bardoli worsened, Irwin received increasingly harsh cables from his Secretary of State, Lord Birkenhead, who wrote in July 1928: “It is humiliating to think that the prestige of British rule has sunk so low that any individual or body should dare to deliver to any British Governor an ultimatum” as that given at Bardoli. Then, after a heated session with the Cabinet, Birkenhead asked Irwin if he had any “general plan of campaign to deal with the movement and its possible extension? We simply cannot afford to be supine in the matter or to acquiesce in an insolent assumption of functions of Government. At present only a small part of the prairie has caught fire, but there are other and very inflammable prairies in the vicinity.”124
This warning, coming twenty months before the salt satyagraha began, was appropriate and Irwin knew it. After the Government’s capitulation in Bardoli a month later, Irwin’s concern deepened and he pressed his Governor there for advice. Leslie Wilson replied at length, sounding the alarm of another satyagraha on the horizon. He concluded that “the most important lesson” is “that the organisers should themselves be dealt with great promptitude…before any such movement had had time to grow, it should be possible for any Provincial Government to make it definitely illegal for anyone to organise a campaign advocating non-payment of taxes.”125
Irwin seemed to take this lesson to heart. He immediately dispatched that August a general report to all of his Governors that he had “taken counsel with Leslie Wilson” and concluded that the real culprit in Bardoli was the local government’s hesitation. He found it essential that “a movement like this must be dealt with … as soon as a definite campaign of nonpayment of taxes or revenue is launched it would be feasible to declare the organization unlawful… the important thing seems to me to be to apply promptly the powers we already possess.”126
Birkenhead seemed satisfied with this firm resolution, writing soon after to Irwin that “in India directly law-breaking begins the hand of Government should descend on the breakers.”127 Whereupon Irwin reassured him that the problem at Bardoli had surely been delay, that Government power “if vigorously applied in the beginning should suffice,” reiterating now to his Secretary of State in London the main lesson just emphasized to his Governors in India, that “The important thing seems that the powers we already possess should be promptly invoked.”128
As the end of 1929 approached, Irwin stressed, in the manner noted
above, the decisive action he must take in the face of civil disobedience.129 “I propose to take an early opportunity,” he wrote to his father, “of making it plain that, if and when the extremists try any policy of what they call Civil Disobedience, we shall lose no time in jumping on their heads.”130 Three months later, as Gandhi was about to march, Irwin wrote again to Halifax:
We have begun to have our troublesome time, but I feel pretty certain that it is right to jump on Gandhi and other leaders at once as soon as they do anything illegal, and though this will make a great row, I think it would make as big a row later when the conditions might probably be worse. In any case, whether it is right or wrong, it is a great relief to have reached a pretty clear decision in one’s own mind.131
But Irwin obviously had not made up his mind. He was ambivalent. He did not order Gandhi’s arrest until almost two months after this letter. Why did he hesitate? First, because despite all the firm resolve expressed above in his letter to the King, Irwin found unwelcome the consequences of arresting Gandhi. He knew that the Government was in a predicament. Twenty-four hours after Gandhi began the march, Irwin confided his uncertainty in a report to Wedgwood Benn:
Most of my thought at the moment is concentrated upon Gandhi. I wish that I felt sure what the right way to deal with him is. I think it depends upon the effect produced by his three weeks’ march and the probability, or at least possibility, of his going on hunger-strike if we put him in prison. This last is embarrassing, and I have no doubt he knows this as well as we do.132
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