A Pinch of Salt Rocks An Empire

Chapter - 2

The salt law affected every Indian, rich or poor, old or young, educated or illiterate.
In 1835, a commission had recommended that Indian-made salt could be sold in India. The Salt Act gave the government the sole right to manufacture salt. No one else could make it. If anyone made salt, the salt could be confiscated and the offender sentenced to six months' imprisonment. A tax of 2400 per cent of the price of salt was also levied.
Writing in his weekly journal Young India, Gandhiji pointed out the injustice of it: "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 necessary consequence of salt monopoly is the destruction, that is closing down, of salt works in thousands of places where the poor people manufactured their own salt. The illegality is in a government that steals the people's salt and makes them pay heavily for it. The people will have every right to take possession of what belongs to them."
Many fair-minded Englishmen in Britain and India knew that the salt law was unjust. Before coming to power the British Prime Minister, Ramsay Macdonald, had denounced the salt law. By choosing to flout the law, Gandhiji brought India's desire for freedom to the notice of the world and soon everyone was talking about it.
Gandhiji had got the Working Committee of the Indian National Congress to agree that the Salt Satyagraha would be launched, controlled and guided only by those who believed in non-violence. He said, "For me there is no hope save through truth and non-violence. I know that they will triumph when everything else has failed."
The plan was for Gandhiji to go to some place and pick up salt, thus breaking the law. He was to take with him only a chosen group of people from the Sabarmati ashram. Everyone else was to wait until he had broken the law. After that, he expected the movement to spread.
He said, "We must conquer or be wiped out. If we are wiped out, that very act would shake the Empire.... If people ask what would happen if the government should shower bombs, the answer is, "If innocent men, women and children should be thus reduced to ashes, from out of those very ashes would rise a fire which would react on the Empire."
On his return from South Africa in 1915, Gandhiji had established Satyagraha Ashram on the banks of the Sabarmati. In the beginning the ashram had only 25 members and they lived like one family. Gandhiji made it a laboratory for his social experiments and a place where he could train workers for the service of the country.
Right from the start he admitted untouchables, or Harijans, as he called them, to the ashram and he made it clear that he would not tolerate the social evil of untouchability. Food was made in a common kitchen and cleaning of latrines was everyone's task, not that of Harijans alone. Spinning on the charka was essential for all inmates of the ashram.
Gandhiji named the ashram Satyagraha Ashram because he wanted to practice in India the methods of Satyagraha he had found so successful in South Africa. Since Gandhiji lived among them, the inmates were fully aware of his views on non-violence and Satyagraha.
For this reason he decided that only they should accompany him when he set out to break the salt law.
Before starting the Salt Satyagraha, Gandhiji sent a letter to the Viceroy, Lord Irwin. Addressing him as "Dear Friend," he wrote:
"Before embarking on Civil Disobedience and taking the risk I have dreaded to take all these years, I would fain approach you and find a way out. My personal faith is absolutely clear. I cannot intentionally hurt anything that lives, much less human beings, even though they may do the greatest wrong to me and mine. Whilst, therefore, I hold British rule in India to be a curse, I do not intend to harm a single Englishman.... And why do I regard British rule to be a curse? It has impoverished the dumb millions by a system of progressive exploitation and by a ruinously expensive military and civil administration which the country can never afford.
"It has reduced us politically to serfdom. It has sapped the foundations of our culture.... I fear there..... never has been any intention of granting Dominion Status to India in the immediate future....
"Let me put before you some of the salient points.... The whole revenue system has to be revised as to make the peasant's good its primary concern. But the British system seems to be designed to crush the very life out of him. Even the salt he must use to live is so taxed as to make the burden fall heaviest on him.... The tax shows itself still more burdensome on the poor man when it is remembered that salt is the one thing he must eat more than the rich man. The drink and drug revenue too is derived from the poor....
"The iniquities sampled above are maintained in order to carry on a foreign administration, demonstrably the most expensive in the world. Take your own salary. It is over 21,000 rupees per month. The British Prime Minister gets £5,000 per year, that is over 5400 rupees per month. You are getting over seven hundred rupees per day against India's average income of less than two annas per day. The British Prime Minister gets only 180 rupees per day against Britain's average income of nearly two rupees per day. Thus, you are getting much over five thousand times India's average income. The British Prime Minister is getting only ninety times Britain's average income. On bended knees I ask you to ponder over this phenomenon....
"What is true of the Viceregal salary is true generally of the whole administration. A radical cutting down of the revenue, therefore, depends on an equally radical reduction in the expenses of administration.
"If India is to live as a nation, if the slow death by starvation of her people is to stop, some remedy must be found for immediate relief.
"The conviction is growing deeper and deeper in me that nothing but non-violence can check the organized violence of the British Government....This non-violence will be expressed through Civil Disobedience, for the moment confined to the inmates of the Sabarmati ashram, but ultimately designed to cover all those who choose to join the movement.
"My ambition is no less than to convert the British people through non-violence and then make them see the wrong that is done to India.... If my letter makes no appeal to your heart, on the 11th of this month, I shall proceed with such co-workers of the ashram as I can take to disregard the provisions, of the salt law. I regard this tax to be the most unjust of all from the poor man's standpoint. As the independence movement is for the poorest in the land, the beginning will be made with this evil. The wonder is that we have submitted to this cruel monopoly for so long. It is, I know, open to you to frustrate my design by arresting me. I hope that there will be tens of thousands ready, in a disciplined manner, to take up the work after me....
"This letter is not in any way intended as a threat, but is a simple and sacred duty peremptory on a civil resister. Therefore, I am having it specially delivered by a young English friend who believes in the Indian cause and is a full believer in non-violence.... I remain, your sincere friend, M. K. Gandhi."
The young English friend who carried the letter was Reginald Reynolds, who was living in the Sabarmati ashram. Dressed in khadi and with his head covered by a sun helmet (being an Englishman, he felt the heat of the sun greatly) he entered Viceroy's House to deliver the letter.
The Viceroy had just returned from Meerut. He did not reply to the letter. Instead, his secretary wrote: "His Excellency.... regrets to learn that you contemplate a course of action which is clearly bound to involve violation of the law and danger to the public peace."
Gandhiji was sad to get this reply. He wrote, "On bended knees, I asked for bread and received a stone instead. The English nation responds only to force and I am not surprised by the Viceregal reply. The only public peace the nation knows is the peace of the public prison house. I repudiate this law and regard it as my sacred duty to break the...compulsory peace that is choking the heart of the nation."
Lord Irwin refused to see Gandhiji, but he did not order his arrest. Gandhiji remarked, "The Government is puzzled and perplexed."