LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

in England and America, elevating the whole campaign to a moral plane which would embarrass the raj.”¹²

      Gandhi dramatized his disobedience by staging a huge buildup to it. He would undertake a long march to the sea with a band of dedicated supporters and, only after he arrived there, break the law by making salt. Before the march, Gandhi wrote to Lord Irwin sharing the details of his planned disobedience and offering a negotiated settlement.

      When the British declined to settle, Gandhi and seventy-eight compatriots set off on the morning of March 12, 1930, from Gandhi’s Ahmedabad ashram for the seashore at Dandi—some 220 miles away.¹³ A huge crowd—one British newspaper’s estimate was 100,000—lined the immediate road ahead. The plan was to stop at a different village each night and each morning. At each stop, Gandhi would speak not only against the salt tax, but for the adoption of the ideal of village life as a path toward freedom and a good in its own right. The crowds for these talks were superb, ranging from the hundreds in small villages to the tens of thousands in larger towns.

      The delegation reached Dandi on April 5. The next day, Gandhi defied the empire by very deliberately stooping over and gathering up a concoction of mud and salt. His followers then boiled seawater from which they extracted salt in defiance of the law. Gandhi used the first days after this initial salt-making to speak about the injustice of the salt laws. In the meantime, illegal salt-making erupted all across the country. Many thousands were arrested.

      

      For weeks after the Dandi conclusion to the march, Gandhi mounted a vigorous, highly public campaign against the salt law. As he did so, government officials simply did not know what to do with him. If they arrested him, they would help transform him into an even greater hero than he already was. If they let him continue his defiance, the power of the government would be progressively diminished. Gandhi had plans to make matters more difficult for the government by raising the stakes; he intended to lead a nonviolent raid on the Dharasana Salt Works. The government, with its continued credibility at stake, felt forced to act. It arrested Gandhi just past midnight on May 5. Nonetheless, the raid went on. The disobedients endured exceptionally violent treatment by the lathi-armed police. There were multiple results flowing from this violence: injuries to hundreds of peaceful disobedients—with at least two of the injured dying; journalist Webb Miller’s moving reporting of Indian bravery in the face of police brutality; the inspiration for many other Indians to participate in subsequent raids; and the generation of enormous sympathy from the West for Gandhi’s cause.

      Even with Gandhi and his co-workers in jail—or perhaps because they were in jail—civil disobedience against the salt laws continued. Thousands of localized civil disobedience movements around the country broke out over the course of the next year, accompanied by a widespread boycott of foreign cloth. By the time the movement came to an end, some sixty thousand Indian disobedients had graced the empire’s jails.

      To allow them to confer over the terms of a possible settlement, the British released Gandhi and the other imprisoned members of a key Congress committee in early 1931. In February and March, Gandhi and Irwin negotiated face-to-face. They reached an agreement, commonly known as the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, in early March. By not calling for the outright repeal of the salt laws, the pact allowed the government to save face. The Indians realized many of their goals, however. In return for discontinuing disobedience and the boycott of British goods, the government would interpret the law to allow Indians to make and sell salt in their villages. Moreover, the government agreed that additional talks on constitutional reform would be held and would include representation from the Congress. In addition, imprisoned nonviolent disobedients would be released, pending prosecutions of nonviolent disobedients would be withdrawn, uncollected fines would be waived, some village officials who had resigned in protest would be reinstated, ordinances restricting civil liberties would be withdrawn, some confiscated properties would be restored to their owners, and lawful picketing could continue.

      

      Nonviolent discipline was essential to the success of the Salt Campaign. But more important, the campaign worked because the participants engaged the dynamic that leads to social and political change. It did so in a way that revealed the two basic ways disobedience can be understood to lead to change. The salt campaigners made the sacrifice to endure jailings, beatings, and even death. When their suffering was seen by the public, including the international public, the public sympathized. This created pressure on the British government, which in turn led to curative institutional reaction. At the same time, the Salt Campaign was a massive withdrawal of consent to the salt laws as tens of thousands of people all across the subcontinent broke the laws governing the manufacture and sale of salt.

      The salt disobedience is as clear an instance of success in creating change as there is in the Gandhian portfolio of disobedience. It resulted in a liberalization of the administration of the salt laws and in the withdrawal of ordinances restricting civil liberties. Even more important than a new understanding of the law, it created a new respect for the power of the Indian independence movement. As Gandhi scholar Thomas Weber has described it, the campaign “was about empowerment; it told people that they were stronger than they thought and that the rulers were weaker than they imagined.”¹⁴

      After World War II, Britain calculated that maintaining its rule was more trouble than it was worth. It finally gave India its independence in 1947, and at the same time consented to the establishment of Pakistan, a separate Muslim state, created from Indian territory. Gandhi was deeply distressed by this partition of India and his failure to ultimately bridge Hindu-Muslim differences.

      Just months later, a bullet fired by a disgruntled Hindu nationalist brought his life to an end.

      GANDHI’S SIGNIFICANCE TODAY

      Because neither the Salt Campaign nor any of Gandhi’s other civil disobedience campaigns brought about the immediate liberation of India, scholars argue about the weight to give Gandhi’s contribution to the struggle for independence. Some give Gandhi the lion’s share of the credit, while others severely discount his role. In some respects the criticism is quite unfair because immediate liberation was not always Gandhi’s goal. His most successful campaign, the Salt Campaign, had the more limited goal of raising India’s stature in the eyes of Britain and the world and of providing Indians with a sense of their own considerable power. The Salt Campaign achieved these goals and more by engaging the dynamic that connects suffering to social and political change.

      In other instances the criticism is more justified. Judith Brown observes that the failure of Gandhi’s civil disobedience during World War II casts “doubt on the viability of non-violence as a political mode except in very restricted, small-scale situations, where its exponents could be carefully disciplined and deployed.”¹⁵

      Professor Brown is correct to emphasize the need for nonviolent discipline. The history of civil disobedience movements is littered with the debris from campaigns that foundered on lack of discipline. Campaigns lacking nonviolent discipline play right into the hands of the oppressor, who wants the disobedients to use violence. The use of violence delegitimizes the resistance in the world’s eyes, practically eliminates the possibility of sympathy for the disobedients, and places the contest directly on grounds where the oppressor invariably has an overwhelming advantage.

      The leadership of the American civil rights movement understood this reality when it imported Gandhi’s thinking in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. James Lawson, a colleague of Martin Luther King, Jr., who had spent time in India, helped introduce Gandhian thinking and tactics into the movement at large and the lunch counter sit-ins in particular. The sit-ins were extremely successful in desegregating southern lunch counters in the early 1960s in no small part because of the stress Lawson put on nonviolent discipline when he prepared sit-in participants for their disobedience. Lawson’s influence also extended to the Freedom Rides, another campaign that relied on strict nonviolent discipline and one that succeeded in desegregating bus depots throughout the American South.

      The leading civil rights figure of his time, King more than once acknowledged Gandhi’s influence on his thinking. In a radio broadcast during his 1959 visit to India, he said: “Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever . . . that . . . nonviolent

Скачать книгу