In 30 Seconds
Story
Gandhi had announced, before his midnight arrest in May 1930, that the campaign’s next step would be a raid, nonviolent and in broad daylight, upon the government salt works at Dharasana, up the Gujarat coast from Dandi. The government took the announcer and left the announcement, and what followed on 21 May, when some two and a half thousand volunteers advanced in ordered columns upon the salt pans and the police who guarded them, produced the single most consequential piece of journalism in the freedom struggle’s history, the dispatch in which the world watched, blow by blow, what the empire’s law looked like when its subjects declined either to obey or to fight back.
The raid’s command told its own story. With Gandhi in Yeravda, the lead fell first to Abbas Tyabji, the seventy six year old former judge, arrested with his column before reaching the works, and then to Sarojini Naidu, poet and past Congress president, who thus led the movement’s most dangerous operation as its commanding officer, an authority no national movement had yet vested in a woman, with Gandhi’s own son Manilal in the front ranks. Naidu’s orders to the volunteers fixed the operation’s terms, they must not resist, must not even raise a hand to ward the blows, and the columns moved on the stockade of barbed wire and ditch behind which four hundred Surat police under British officers waited with steel shod lathis.
What happened then was recorded by Webb Miller of the United Press, who had made his way to Dharasana against official obstruction and whose account went round the planet. Column after column walked in silence to the wire and was clubbed down, the volunteers making no gesture of defence, not so much as an arm raised, until the marchers went down, Miller wrote, like ten pins, the sickening whack of the clubs on unprotected skulls audible where he stood, the stretcher bearers carrying back the bloodied for the next rank to step forward, hour upon hour through the morning, the tactics varying, groups sitting before the ditch to be beaten and dragged, the toll by the day’s end in the hundreds of injured, with deaths in the days following. Miller counted, at the improvised hospital, three hundred and twenty wounded, many insensible, and his dispatch, briefly held up in the telegraph office and threatened with suppression until he forced it through, ran in well over a thousand newspapers worldwide and was read into the record of the United States Senate. The sentence history quotes gave the event its meaning, that in eighteen years of reporting from twenty two countries, through revolutions and riots, he had never witnessed such harrowing scenes as at Dharasana, and its companion observation completed the reversal, that the volunteers’ discipline had made the western mind’s category of rebellion useless, for these rebels conquered by suffering.
Dharasana’s arithmetic of power was thus the Salt March’s carried to the limit. The raiders never took the salt works, in the operation’s own terms it failed absolutely, and the raids continued regardless, at Wadala in Bombay, where crowds in the tens of thousands rushed the pans, at Sanikatta in Karnataka, the beatings and firings continuing down the coasts. What the operation took was something the empire could not fence, the remains of its moral account. The spectacle of shod police methodically breaking the skulls of motionless men, narrated in the plain wire service prose that made denial impossible, accomplished in the world’s press what a generation of nationalist argument had not, Time magazine naming Gandhi its Man of the Year for 1930, and the empire’s friends abroad finding, in Miller’s ten pins, nothing left to defend. The British historian’s verdict that England lost India at Dharasana overstates a single morning, but the overstatement points true, for the doctrine the empire had held since 1857, that its rule rested at bottom on Indian acquiescence in superior force, required the force to produce acquiescence, and at the wire at Dharasana it produced, instead, rank upon rank of men walking forward, and a world changing its mind.
