The Longest August (8 page)

High Congress officials took up the challenge. They invited all non-Congress leaders to an All Parties Conference in Delhi in February 1928. At the second such gathering in May, a committee of ten members was formed to outline broad principles of the constitution. It was chaired by Motilal Nehru, an eminent Congressman. Its nine members included two Muslims—Sir Ali Imam, former Muslim League president, and Shuaib Qureshi—and one Sikh, Mangal Singh. Its unanimously agreed-on draft, called the Nehru Report, was published on August 10. The third All Parties Conference in Lucknow at the end of the month endorsed it.

The salient features of the Nehru Report were as follows. India should be granted the status of a dominion within the British Empire with a federal form of government in which residual powers—that is, the powers not assigned specifically to the center or the provinces—would be vested with the center; Muslims should be given one-quarter representation in the Central Legislature commensurate with their proportion in the population; there should be no separate electorate for any community, but reservation for minority seats could be allowed in the provinces where minorities totaled at least 10 percent; and the official language should be Hindustani, written in Devanagari or Urdu script or in any of the other six major scripts.

The Nehru Report's elimination of separate electorates was rejected by Jauhar, who quit the Congress Party and joined the Muslim League. In late December 1928, two months after his return from a trip to Europe, Jinnah went to Calcutta on the eve of the Congress session to lobby an amendment to the Nehru Report. “Majorities are apt to be oppressive and tyrannical, and minorities always dread and fear that their interest and rights, unless clearly safeguarded by statutory provisions, would suffer,” he said. (He could have referred to the way majority-caste Hindus had oppressed the minority Untouchables for centuries.) He warned that the alternative to a settlement might be “revolution and civil war.”
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His plea fell on stony ground. At most, Congress leaders were prepared to raise the Muslim representation from 25 to 27 percent.

“Jinnah was sadly humbled, and went back to his hotel,” recalled his Parsi friend, Jamshed Nusserwanjee, who would later become mayor of Karachi. “Next morning . . . at the door of his first-class compartment, he took my hand. He had tears in his eyes as he said, ‘Jamshed, this is the parting of the ways.'”
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Jinnah's statement would prove prophetic: it would be seen in retrospect as marking the first of the three milestones leading to the partitioning of the subcontinent.

At the Congress session, Gandhi proposed a resolution accepting the Nehru Report with a rider that the British government must grant India dominion status within one year. If freedom had not been won under dominion status by December 31, 1929, then “I must declare myself an Independence-wala,” concluded Gandhi.
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In March 1929 Jinnah came up with his manifesto of fourteen points,
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the most important of which were the following: India should have a federal form of government in which residuary powers are vested with the provinces; all cabinets at the central or provincial level as well as the Central Legislature should have at least one-third Muslim representation; the separate electorate system should continue; Muslims should be given an adequate share in all the services of the state; and there should be adequate safeguards for the protection and promotion of Muslim education, language, religion, personal laws, and charitable institutions. Despite his position as the Muslim League's president, he failed to win the vote of the League's council for his manifesto. Its meeting in Delhi dissolved into chaotic argument.
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Jinnah received this political setback at a vulnerable point in his life. On February 20, 1929, Ruttie, his twenty-nine-year-old, estranged wife, who had developed abdominal cancer, had died of the disease in Bombay while he was lobbying his manifesto in Delhi, where the League was headquartered. He rushed to Bombay and at her burial could not help weeping—for him a rare display of emotion in public.

In June 1929 Labor leader Ramsay MacDonald became the prime minister of Britain. India's viceroy, Lord Irwin, a balding man with a professorial appearance, spent much of the summer in London. On his return to Delhi he stated on October 31 that the British government envisaged a “Round Table Conference” of British and Indian delegates, and added that “the natural issue of India's constitutional progress . . . is the attainment of Dominion status.” But when Conservative leaders in Parliament opposed the idea, he backpedaled. In his meeting with top-level Indian leaders on December 23, he said that “he was unable to prejudge
or commit the [Round Table] Conference at all to any permanent line.”
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The Indian deputation included Gandhi as well as Jinnah. It would be the last time that the two of them participated in a joint political exercise.
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A week later Congress went into session in Lahore. At the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1929, the conference adopted a resolution, moved by the forty-year-old Jawaharlal Nehru, who was presiding over the session: “The British government has not only deprived the Indian people of their freedom, but has based itself on the exploitation of the masses, and has ruined India economically, politically, culturally and spiritually,” it stated. “We believe, therefore, that India must sever the British connection and attain
purna Swaraj
or complete independence.”
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The convention adopted a green-white-saffron flag with a spinning wheel in the middle white strip as the emblem for independent India. It called on its members and friends to withdraw from legislatures, and it sanctioned civil disobedience and nonpayment of taxes. It authorized the Congress Working Committee to decide how and when satyagraha should commence. In practice, the decision rested with Mahatma Gandhi.

Salt of the Sea

Gandhi was intent on keeping the civil disobedience campaign strictly nonviolent, particularly when, in his own words, “there was a lot of violence in the air.” The most dramatic example of this came in April 1929, when militant nationalists Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt threw two handmade bombs from the visitors' gallery inside the Central Legislative Assembly. Gandhi's focus was to be on the refusal to pay taxes.

In February 1922 in Bardoli the tax protest had been tied to land revenue, a primary source for the Raj's treasury. This time around he needed to choose something less vital but at the same time open to a large section of the Indian society. He hit upon the tax on salt, which the British had imposed since the days of the East India Company in the mid-eighteenth century.

The India Salt Act of 1882 specified a government monopoly on the collection, manufacture, and wholesale sale of salt as well as the tax on it. Possessing salt not purchased from the state monopoly became a punishable crime. Under Viceroy Lord Reading, the tax was doubled in 1923. To make his case, Gandhi fired off a long missive to Viceroy Lord Irwin
on March 2, 1930, dealing generally with the British Raj's iniquitous taxation system before turning to the salt tax and its deleterious effect on the Indian peasant. “The British system seemed to be designed to crush the very life out of him,” Gandhi wrote. “Even the salt he must use to live is so taxed to make the burden fall heaviest on him.”
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He concluded by saying that if the viceroy failed to “deal with this evil,” he would proceed with his coworkers at the Ahmedabad ashram to disregard the Salt Acts on March 11. The viceroy ignored the letter.

Gandhi's epic journey on foot started on March 12. He was joined on this 241-mile-long trip by eighty of his followers.

As usual, Gandhi, now sixty-one, wrapped his actions and words in religion. “My feeling is like that of the pilgrim to Amarnath or Badri-Kedar,” he said, referring to the Hindu holy places in the mountainous region of northwestern India. “For me this is nothing less than a holy pilgrimage.” Motilal Nehru followed suit: “Like the historic march of Ramachandra [Lord Rama] to [Sri] Lanka the march of Gandhi will be memorable.”
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Typically, there was only one Muslim, Abbas Varteji, among the satyagrahis accompanying Gandhi.

Passing through almost three hundred villages, the march ended on April 5 at the village of Dandi, known for its salt pans, 160 miles north of Bombay. At numerous rural stops Gandhi exhorted his audience to wear handspun and handwoven cotton—called
khadi
or
khaddar—
and shun alcohol, child marriage, and untouchability. He made a point of bathing at wells used by local outcastes.

On the morning of April 6, after the ritual of listening to Hindu devotional hymns, he waded into the Arabian Sea and, picking up a handful of salty mud (the salt pans had been stirred up earlier by government agents), symbolically proclaimed his country's full independence as his admirers shouted, “
Kanoon Torhnewala zindaba
d
” (Hindi: Long live Law Breaker).

Given the long shoreline of India, there were ample opportunities to break the Salt Acts. Mass disobedience followed. After his arrest on April 14, Jawaharlal Nehru was sentenced to six months in prison. The port cities of Karachi, Madras, Calcutta, and Chittagong emerged as major sites of nonviolent protest.

Having stayed in the house of a local Muslim, Shiraz Abdullah, in Dandi, Gandhi moved to a specially built palm-leaf hut. It was there that he was arrested after midnight on May 4, 1930, under Bombay Regulation XXV of 1827, which provided for detention without trial.

With this, the mantle fell on seventy-six-year-old Abbas Tyabji, a retired Muslim judge, whom Gandhi had named as the alternate leader of the satyagrahis. Accompanied by Gandhi's wife, Kasturbai, he led the march on Dharasana Salt Works twenty-five miles to the south of Dandi.

En route, Tyabji was arrested and sentenced to three months in jail. The leadership then passed successively to Sarojini Naidu, an Oxford-educated, outspoken poet, and Maulana Abul Kalam Muhiyuddin Ahmed Azad, who had fallen under Gandhi's spell during the Khilafat movement. By then the number of satyagrahis had soared to two thousand. As they approached the salt plant, they were turned back by police. Frustrated, they resorted to a sit-in, which lasted a couple of days. Hundreds were arrested.

On finally reaching their destination on May 21, some of the satyagrahis attempted to remove the barbed wire surrounding the salt works. The police charged them with steel-tipped staves. Obeying Gandhi's strict instruction to the nonresistors to “answer organized hooliganism with great suffering,” they remained passive.

“Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows,” reported Webb Miller, an American correspondent of United Press International.

From where I stood I heard the sickening whacks of the clubs on unprotected skulls. . . . Those struck down fell sprawling, unconscious or writhing in pain with fractured skulls or broken shoulders. In two or three minutes the ground was quilted with bodies. Great patches of blood widened on their white clothes. The survivors without breaking ranks silently and doggedly marched on until struck down. When every one of the first column was knocked down stretcher bearers rushed up unmolested by the police and carried off the injured to a thatched hut which had been arranged as a temporary hospital.

At times the spectacle of unresisting men being methodically bashed into a bloody pulp sickened me so much I had to turn away. I felt an indefinable sense of helpless rage and loathing, almost as much against the men who were submitting unresistingly to being beaten as against the police wielding the clubs. . . . Group after group walked forward, sat down, and submitted to being beaten into insensibility without raising an arm to fend off the blows. Finally the police became enraged by the nonresistance. . . . They commenced savagely kicking the seated men in the abdomen and testicles. The injured men writhed and squealed in agony, which seemed to
inflame the fury of the police. . . . The police then began dragging the sitting men by the arms or feet, sometimes for a hundred yards, and throwing them into ditches.

On his later visit to the hospital Miller counted “320 injured, many still insensible with fractured skulls, others writhing in agony from kicks in the testicles and stomach. . . . Scores of the injured had received no treatment for hours and two had died.”
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His first attempts at wiring the story to his agency in London were censored by the British telegraph operators in India. Only after he had threatened to expose British censorship was his report transmitted uncensored. His story appeared in 1,350 newspapers worldwide. And it was read into the official record of the US Senate by Senator John J. Blaine.
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Miller's report described the tragic event more graphically than the sequence in Attenborough's biopic
Gandhi.
Like his depiction of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, which failed to capture the chaos and terror of the victims, the film's recreation of the Salt March was marred by the sanitized appearance of the nonviolent resistors in freshly laundered and pressed white shirts, pajamas, and Gandhi caps, without the faintest notion of even armpit sweat on their clothes in the dusty, subtropical landscape in the sweltering heat of May before the onset of monsoon.

Viceroy Lord Irwin's note to King George V was a case of describing a moonless night as a penumbra. “Your Majesty can hardly fail to have read with amusement the accounts of the severe battles for the Salt Depot in Dharasana,” he wrote. “The police for a long time tried to refrain from action. After a time this became impossible, and they had to resort to sterner methods. A good many people suffered minor injuries in consequence.”
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