The famous 1930 "salt march" by India's independence hero Mahatma Gandhi to defy British colonial rule is being re-enacted for its 75th anniversary. His book Gandhi: A Spiritual Biography was released in paperback last fall.Cabinet ministers joined the start of the re-enactment march In this warfare, dying was more potent than killing.Īrvind Sharma is the Birks Professor of Comparative Religion at McGill University. Gandhi had devised this unique form of warfare, which was now on display during the Salt Satyagraha. So what made it non-violent? What made it non-violent was that Gandhi’s volunteers would die but they would not kill. In terms of the casualties then too it was like an armed raid, inasmuch as this non-violent raid also produced casualties as in a war. And so it went on until the weather became too hot for the action to continue. Then another column advanced to meet the same fate. There was no fight, no struggle, the marchers simply walked forward till struck down.” As Miller describes the scene, “the police rushed out and methodically and mechanically beat down the second column. According to the account of Webb Miller, the American journalist who was an eye-witness to the event, Gandhi’s volunteers “went down like ten-pins.” After one column had thus been moved down, as it were, and the wounded removed on stretchers, another picked column advanced and was similarly knocked down. They did not even raise their hands to fend off the blows. And when the policeman attacked them, Gandhi’s volunteers did not retaliate. But Gandhi’s volunteers did no such thing. Am armed raid involves a violent attack by the raiders. What happened next, however, was quite inconsistent with an armed raid. So far the setting had been just like that of any armed raid. Then all at once the policemen, upon a word of command, advanced towards them, and started beating them with their steel-shod sticks, called lathis, upon their heads. Gandhi’s volunteers were ordered to retreat but they refused to do so. It waded across the ditches surrounding the Salt Works and then approached the stockade guarded by the policemen. Gandhi’s volunteers halted a hundred yards from the stockade and then a picked column moved forward. About 2,500 of Gandhi’s volunteers faced a force of about four hundred policemen commanded by the British, who protected the Salt Works. She, according to one biographer, even “resembled to an extraordinary degree the ancient Rajput, princesses who led their armies into battle.” And just as an armed force is led be a general, the volunteers were led by Mrs. And just as an army has its engineering core and its medical core, Gandhi’s volunteers were carrying ropes to scale the barbed-wire fence surrounding the Dharsana Salt Works, and stretchers with blankets to carry away the comrades who might fall in battle. Just as an army fights for a cause, the Gandhi volunteers were also fighting for a cause-that of India’s freedom. Just as soldiers in an army wear a uniform, Gandhi’s followers also were dressed in their own livery, consisting of white dhotis and Gandhi caps.
Just as an army usually consists of volunteers, they were all volunteers. A raid is usually associated with an armed force and what is remarkable is that Gandhi’s followers indeed prepared for it like an armed force, except that they were unarmed.
The series of events, as they actually unfolded on provide an answer to our question. But a non-violent “raid” almost sounds like an oxymoron. A raid is usually a violent act, but this was to be a non-violent “raid”. This non-violent “raid” was a remarkable event, as the phrase itself might presage.