In 30 Seconds
Story
In 1928, in a Gujarat taluka of some eighty seven thousand peasants, the freedom movement conducted the perfect satyagraha, the campaign textbooks have taught from ever since, and the peasants of Bardoli, having beaten the Government of Bombay to a standstill, gave their commander the title the nation ratified for life. Vallabhbhai Patel entered the taluka in February as a Congress organiser of proven worth. He left it as the Sardar.
The grievance was an assessment. The revenue settlement of 1926 had raised Bardoli’s land revenue by rates the government put at twenty two percent overall and the peasants’ inquiries showed steeper still in many villages, the enhancement resting, the movement’s investigation established, on a settlement officer’s report of slender evidence, rising prices read from railway freight registers, prosperity deduced from the remittances of emigrants to Africa, and the taluka, schooled by a decade of Gandhian constructive work in its ashrams, resolved to refuse. The Bardoli Satyagraha Patel organised upon that resolve became the model of disciplined mass struggle. The taluka was divided into camps under trusted workers, Patel’s daily speeches, earthy, humorous, in the peasants’ own Gujarati, were carried by a cyclostyled bulletin into every village by the movement’s couriers, intelligence ran ahead of every government move, and the community’s own sanctions enforced the pledge, the social boycott, complete and nonviolent, of any who paid or helped collection, the village barber, priest and washerman withdrawing their services from the compliant, a discipline that critics then and since have called coercion and the movement called the community defending its vow.
The government’s counterattack broke on the organisation. Collection parties found villages emptied, cattle driven into the houses behind barred doors, carts dismantled and hidden, no labourer at any price to drive an attached buffalo, no buyer at any auction, the confiscated lands finding purchasers only among distant speculators whom the boycott then found. Pathan strongmen imported for the seizures, jail for the movement’s workers, the forfeiture notices multiplying, none of it moved a taluka that had, in effect, seceded from the revenue system, and the campaign’s discipline held so completely that through six months the government could cite no act of violence against it. The women of Bardoli, organised by the ashram workers, Mithuben Petit and Bhaktiba among them, held the households to the pledge, and it was the women, the tradition records, who first called Vallabhbhai by the peasant title for a chief, Sardar, the name Gandhi took up and the country never dropped.
The endgame drew in the empire’s politics. The Bombay legislature’s Indian members resigned in sympathy, the railway unions weighed refusing to move attached goods, all India watched a taluka’s ledger become the test of the Raj’s word, and the Viceroy pressed the Bombay government to find the exit its prestige demanded. The settlement of August 1928 gave the movement the substance and the government the form, the enhancement’s operation suspended, prisoners released, lands and cattle restored, upon condition of the old assessment’s payment, and an independent inquiry conceded, the committee of Broomfield and Maxwell, whose report the following year found the enhancement unjustified and cut it to a fraction, the movement’s case, in the government’s own commission, proved.
Bardoli’s yield ran far past the taluka. It restored the national movement’s confidence in mass struggle after the ebb decade, at the precise season of Simon boycott and rising temperature, and Gandhi, who had chosen Bardoli in 1922 for the campaign Chauri Chaura cancelled, read in its success the country’s readiness, the line from Bardoli to the Salt March of 1930 being direct and short. It demonstrated the repertoire, the camps, the bulletins, the boycott, the women’s front, that Civil Disobedience would deploy nationally. And it produced the movement’s organiser in chief, the Sardar whose Bardoli methods, applied to a subcontinent, would one day integrate five hundred states, the peasants of a Gujarat taluka having discovered for India, in the campaign of 1928, both a weapon and the man to wield it.
