Gandhi & Churchill (60 page)

So when Gandhi finally reached Dandi on April 5, not a policeman was in sight.
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He told the vast crowd that he had been uncertain if the government would let him get this far. But the government was too ashamed to try, he suggested. That sense of shame was proof of the power of nonviolence. “Tomorrow we will break the salt law,” Gandhi announced in a clear voice. If the government did not stop him, it meant the salt tax would have to be abolished. If it was not abolished, it did not matter: “This movement is based on the faith that when a whole nation is roused and on the march no leader is necessary.”

Gandhi said his goal was for every Indian to make salt at home, “as our ancestors did,” until the government’s stock became useless. But he reminded the crowd of a greater goal beyond that: of Swaraj, “the goddess.” “Our minds will not be at peace till we have her
darshan,
nor will we allow the government any peace.”
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For Gandhi, Dandi represented the end of a journey in more ways than one. He was saying goodbye once and for all to his British connection, to his “infatuation” with British rule that for half a century had led him to think it could treat its subjects justly. The days of trust and reasonable negotiation were over, he said. It was time for action and Indian unity.

“This is a struggle of not one man, but millions of us,” he cried out. “My heart now is as hard as stone. I am in this struggle for Swaraj ready to sacrifice thousands and hundreds of thousands of men if necessary.” The hushed crowd listened to he spoke his final words to them: “This is God’s grace; let us remain unmoved and watch His miracles.”
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The next morning Gandhi wandered down to the beach. He had been up as usual since four a.m. Beside him were the poetess Sarojini Naidu as well as Mahadev Desai. Gandhi first waded into the sea to wash himself: April 6 was a traditional day of penance and purification. Besides, Gandhi said, all religious wars begin with a ritual bath. He then waded back, his dhoti dripping wet, and led everyone down to a shallow salt pit. At about six-thirty he stooped down and gingerly gathered up some salt, left by the surf, into a small ball of mud. Naidu exclaimed, “Hail, Deliverer.” According to Desai, Gandhi murmured, “With this salt I am shaking the foundations of the empire.”
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The deed was done. By now others in the crowd were stooping and gathering salt in the palms of their hands, laughing and singing as if on holiday. Gandhi told an interviewer, “Now that a technical or ceremonial breach of the salt law has been committed, it is now open to anyone…to manufacture whenever he wishes” instead of buying it from the government.

“What if the government doesn’t arrest you?” the correspondent from the
Free Press
asked.

“Oh, I shall continue to manufacture illicit salt,” Gandhi blithely replied.
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In fact, the government did not arrest him for almost another month. They arrested every other satyagrahi they could find, as the salt satyagraha spread across India. On that same day, April 6, his son Ramdas was arrested with a large band of ashramites. Later, so were Devadas Gandhi and Mahadev Desai. So was the mayor of Calcutta, when he urged his fellow citizens to boycott foreign cloth, which cost him a six-month sentence. All told there were more than five thousand separate satyagraha acts across India. It was the biggest and most organized protest movement the subcontinent had ever known.

The Gandhi inner circle led the way. Rajendra Prasad was arrested with a large crowd of satyagrahis when mounted police charged them and they lay down in front of their horses’ hooves. Miraculously no one was hurt, but the protesters had to be lifted bodily by constables and thrown onto trucks to be taken to prison.
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On April 16 Gandhi learned that Jawaharlal Nehru had been arrested for breaking the salt law. He sent an ecstatic telegram to Motilal Nehru, congratulating him and his wife as happy parents: “Jawaharlal has earned his crown of thorns.”
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Meanwhile, in the village of Aat, Gandhi personally supervised villagers who were gathering illicit salt and refusing to give it up as police moved in to arrest them. That day was his “silence day,” but as he told a reporter for the Bombay
Chronicle
afterward, “There was no violence. To them their salt was as dear as their blood.” He hoped that by their patience and suffering they would change the hearts even of the police.
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Soon even non-Gandhians joined in. Nirad Chaudhuri was an editor of
The Monthly Review
in Calcutta. An educated Bengali intellectual and a liberal, he had always been a Gandhi skeptic. But news of Gandhi’s march triggered “a sudden conversion.” One afternoon, with birds crying and circling overhead, he wandered down to Calcutta’s saltwater marshes. He watched while a Bengali follower of Gandhi, Satis Chandra Das Gupta, boiled a pot of sea water on a mudflat and extracted the salt. Chaudhuri felt compelled to make a donation and take a small packet of salt—but he never used it. “Perhaps,” he would write many years later, “it [was] too sacred for consumption.”
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Another eyewitness watched as satyagrahis boiled sea water on the Esplanade Maidan in Bombay, surrounded by concentric rings of Congress volunteers linked arm in arm. “On one occasion,” he remembered, “no less than thirty rings were used, three consisted of Sikhs and three of women.” This arrangement forced the police to break through each ring to get at the perpetrator, which involved lots of broken heads and slashing lathis, “so the crowd more often than not became violent and pelted them with stones.”
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Crowd violence was low-level but widespread, in spite of Gandhi’s hopes and warnings. His biographer Louis Fischer’s claim that “Chauri Chaura in 1922 had taught India a lesson” is false. On the night of April 17–18 one hundred armed members of the Hindustan Republican Association stormed an army depot at Chittagong in eastern Bengal, killing a British sergeant. Then on April 23 riots broke out in Peshawar. British and Gurkha troops were sent in and opened fire, killing thirty rioters and wounding thirty-five. The Royal Garwhal Rifles were also ordered into the fray; they refused and had to be disarmed by Gurkha troops.

British troops withdrew and Peshawar descended into ten days of riots. As the British left, Pathan and Afridi tribesmen descended from the hills in pursuit of loot. Far off in England, Churchill told colleagues that the whole incident “marked the lowest ebb yet seen of British authority in India.”
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And yet Irwin still refused to have Gandhi arrested.

Finally, even Gandhi became fed up with Lord Irwin’s inaction. He was keen to show that his arrest would do nothing to halt the campaign’s momentum. So he announced that his satyagrahi would storm the Dharasana Salt Works, some 150 miles north of Bombay. Twenty-five hundred volunteers gathered in the haze of early morning. Leading them was Sarojini Naidu herself, who told the volunteers, “You must not resist; you must not even raise a hand to ward off a blow.”

A United Press reporter described what happened next:

“At a word of command, scores of native policemen” rushed in wielding their lathis. “Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows. They went down like nine-pins. From where I stood I heard the sickening whack of the clubs on unprotected skulls.” The satyagrahi still advanced, wave after wave. Yet there was “no fight, no struggle; the marchers simply walked forward til struck down.” Meanwhile stretcher-bearers carried away a stream of “inert, bleeding bodies.” Later, the reporter visited their makeshift aid station. He counted 320 injured; many were still unconscious. Eventually two died.
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Meanwhile, as the sun rose in the bright clear sky, the temperature reached 116 degrees. The nonviolent but futile assault, the satyagraha equivalent of the first day of the Somme, subsided. Naidu and Gandhi’s son Manilal were both arrested. Gandhi himself was unfazed. As he had said, “In a Satanic Government, innocent persons must suffer.” Irwin realized he could not afford to wait to see what Gandhi planned to do next.

On May 5, just a few minutes past midnight, Gandhi was camping comfortably under a mango tree at Karadi, a village near Dandi. There was a rustle in the bushes, and then thirty armed Indian policemen and the British district magistrate slowly approached his lean-to.

Gandhi woke up and gazed at the solemn figures looming out of the blackness. He asked, “Do you want me?”

“Are you Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi?” the magistrate asked for form’s sake.
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Gandhi admitted he was. He learned that he was to be incarcerated under an obscure 1827 regulation that permitted a state prisoner to be held without trial or even a charge. Irwin had wanted to avoid giving Gandhi his martyr’s halo, but circumstances had forced his hand. Unlike the Noncooperation campaign of 1920, Gandhi’s salt satyagraha had rocked the Raj to its foundations. Arresting Gandhi seemed the only alternative to losing control of the subcontinent.

Gandhi’s arrival at the Yeravda prison was a virtual homecoming. Standing at the gate was a senior police official who remembered Gandhi from eight years before. They greeted each other like old friends; the officer remarked that Gandhi looked healthier and younger than when he’d seen him last. The outdoor life must agree with you, he joked. He gave Gandhi a bar of Sunlight soap and let him take a much-needed bath.
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Gandhi and his jailers settled in for a long stay.

If Irwin and his policemen thought Gandhi’s arrest might end their troubles, as it had done in 1922, they were sorely mistaken. Noncooperation intensified over the next ten months. The coming of the monsoon effectively ended the salt satyagraha.
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But other forms of resistance broke out in every province of India, as tens and even hundreds of thousands joined in. By February 1931 the government could count nearly 24,000 resisters in jail. More than 60,000 were imprisoned over the whole course of the campaign. Some estimates run as high as 100,000.
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Who they were reveals how extensive Gandhi’s activist core had become. Most came from cities like Bombay and the large Hindu provinces. Thanks to Rajaji, the area around Madras had now become a Gandhi stronghold.
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The resisters also tended to be young, sometimes very young. Almost 700 of the 4,700 prisoners in Bengal prisons were under the age of seventeen. Many were also students. In Calcutta their strike forced the university law school to cancel exams. At the Scottish Church College they held the world’s first student sit-in, lying down to form a human blanket in front of the doors so that other students could not go in.
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The other large group were women. Gandhi had come to see them as the heart and soul of his campaign: he believed females had a greater instinct for self-sacrifice than males and “greater courage of the right type.”
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He told the village women in Umber, “If this movement is to succeed, yours will have to be as big a share as men’s if not greater.”
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In his chivalrous way, Gandhi still did not want the women in “the front line,” as it were, where people could get hurt. He wanted male satyagrahis to defend the salt pans and storm the salt works. Instead, he saw women resisters devoting themselves to spinning khadi, boycotting, and picketing. They were to picket liquor stores, among other things, and visit homes of drunkards to plead with them to stop. “I have seen women of the Salvation Army do this,” he said. “Why should not the women of India do the same?”
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Gandhi made alcohol a target of satyagraha not only for moral reasons but because the government relied on a liquor tax for revenue. Narayan Desai remembered joining hands with the ashram women standing outside the Sabarmati village liquor store and chanting, “Drinking has destroyed everything, oh addict. Give it up!” Other ashram women did make it into the front lines. Desai remembered the elderly Gangabehn Majumdar, who had given Gandhi his first charkha and was reputed to be more than a hundred years of age, coming home from an encounter with police with her homespun sari stained pink with blood.
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All in all, Gandhi’s satyagraha gave Indian women a new activist social role, especially as the campaign shifted focus to the cities and the antiforeign boycotts.

Women regularly picketed shops where British-made cloth was being sold. They would follow other women leaving the stores and try to persuade them to return their purchases. More menacingly, they organized
siapa
or mock mournings, in which the effigies of merchants who refused to take the boycott pledge were cremated in front of their homes.
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In Bombay and Gujarat the boycott put Indian businessmen, already hard hit by the world depression, in serious trouble. To the satyagrahis, it didn’t seem to matter. A British official confessed, “The Congress really runs Bombay.” Gandhi caps filled the streets, and pickets were posted with the efficient regularity of police constables.
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As Bombay’s governor-general told Viceroy Irwin, “the population as a whole seems to have been carried away on a wave of semi-hysterical enthusiasm.” Parsis and Christians, women and children, were “all possessed with the mania for martyrdom.” Even the most veteran police officials had never known antigovernment feeling to be so strong or so widespread.
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In Calcutta, middle-class support for Gandhi was also strong, although Bengali nationalist revolutionaries also raised their heads, and civil disobedience sometimes turned violent. In the weeks after Gandhi’s arrest, Nirad Chaudhuri remembered, perpetual throngs of anxious people milled in the streets, breaking like ocean waves as armored cars, with turbaned policemen ready at their machine guns, patrolled the streets.
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Chaudhuri’s fellow editors at the
Monthly Review
were hit hard by Gandhi’s arrest. They ran an editorial quoting the Gospel of Saint Matthew: “When they sought to lay hands on him, they feared the multitude, because they took him for a prophet.”