And then Gandhi came. He was like a powerful current of fresh air that made us stretch ourselves and take deep breaths; like a beam of light that pierced the darkness and removed the scales from our eyes; like a whirlwind that upset many things, but most of all the working of people’s minds.
The following selections from this book provide a sense of Nehru’s view of why the Salt March and Gandhi’s work mattered:Nehru on the Salt March:
‘It seemed as though a spring had been suddenly released’
Events were on the move. They were moving politically before our eyes from day to day…
Salt suddenly became a mysterious word, a word of power. The salt tax was to be attacked, the salt laws were to be broken. We were bewildered and could not quite fit in a national struggle with common salt…
Then came Gandhiji’s correspondence with the Viceroy and the beginning of the Dandi Salt March from the Ashram at Sabarmati. As people followed the fortunes of this marching column of pilgrims from day to day, the temperature of the country went up. A meeting of the All-India Congress Committee was held at Ahmedabad to make final arrangements for the struggle that was now almost upon us. The leader in the struggle was not present, for he was already tramping with his pilgrim band to the sea, and he refused to return. The All- India Congress Committee planned what should be done in case of arrests…
…The Congress had to face a situation in which it would be impossible for it to function normally; when it would be declared an unlawful organization, and its committees could not meet for consultation or any action, except secretly.
[My] father and I went to see Gandhiji. He was at Jambusar with his pilgrim band, and we spent a few hours with him there and then saw him stride away with his party to the next stage in the journey to the salt sea. That was my last glimpse of him then as I saw him, staff in hand, marching along at the head of his followers, with firm step and a peaceful but undaunted look. It was a moving sight…
April came, and Gandhiji drew near to the sea, and we waited for the word to begin civil disobedience by an attack on the salt laws. For months past we had been drilling our volunteers, and Kamala and Krishna (my wife and sister) had both joined them…
The 6th of April was the first day of the National Week, which is celebrated annually in memory of the happenings in 1919, from Satyagraha Day to Jallianwala Bagh [known in the West as the Amritsar Massacre]. On that day Gandhiji began the breach of the salt laws at Dandi beach, and three or four days later permission was given to all Congress organizations to do likewise and begin civil disobedience in their own areas…
It seemed as though a spring had been suddenly released; all over the country, in town and village, salt manufacture was the topic of the day…
It was really immaterial whether the stuff was good or bad; the main thing was to commit a breach of the obnoxious salt law, and we were successful in that… As we saw the abounding enthusiasm of the people and the way salt-making was spreading like a prairie fire, we felt a little abashed and ashamed for having questioned the efficacy of this method when it was first proposed by Gandhiji. And we marveled at the amazing knack of the man to impress the multitude and make it act in an organized way.
I was arrested on the I4th of April… I was tried in prison and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment under the Salt Act…
Those were days of stirring news processions and lathee charges and firing, frequent hartals to celebrate noted arrests, and special observances, like Peshawar Day, Garhwali Day, etc. For the time being the boycott of foreign cloth and all British goods was almost complete. When I heard that my aged mother and, of course, my sisters used to stand under the hot summer sun picketing before foreign cloth shops, I was greatly moved…
The breach of the Salt Act soon became just one activity, and civil resistance spread to other fields. This was facilitated by the promulgation of various ordinances by the Viceroy prohibiting a number of activities. As these ordinances and prohibitions grew, the opportunities for breaking them also grew, and civil resistance took the form of doing the very thing that the ordinance was intended to stop. The initiative definitely remained with the Congress and the people; and, as each ordinance law failed to control the situation from the point of view of government, fresh ordinances were issued by the Viceroy. Many of the Congress Working Committee members had been arrested, but it continued to function with new members added on to it…
Nehru on Gandhi
Nehru wrote:
• ‘the dominant impulse in India under British rule was that of fear… fear builds its phantoms which are more fearsome that reality itself, and reality, when calmly analysed and its consequences willingly accepted, loses much of its terror…. suddenly, as it were, that black pall of fear was lifted from the people’s shoulders’
• Gandhi ‘made [the Congress movement] democratic and a mass organization’.
• ‘A new technique of action was evolved which, though perfectly peaceful, yet implied non-submission to what was considered wrong’
• ‘He sent us to the villages, and the countryside hummed with the activity of innumerable messengers of the new gospel of action’.
• ‘he effected a vast psychological revolution not only among those who followed his lead but also among his opponents and those many neutrals who could not make up their minds what to think and what to do’.
• ‘he set about to restore the spiritual unity of the people and to break the barrier between the small westernized group at the top and the masses, to discover the living elements in the old roots and to build upon them, to waken these masses out of their stupor and static condition and make them dynamic’.
• ‘Realizing that the main props of British rule were fear, prestige, the co-operation, willing or unwilling, of the people, and certain classes whose vested interests were centred in British rule, Gandhi attacked these foundations… Titles were to be given up and though the title-holders responded to this only in small measure, the popular respect for these British-given titles disappeared and they became symbols of degradation’.