Why did Gandhi choose to protest the Salt tax? One reason is that Motilal and Jinnah had protested the hike in the tax a few years previously. But there may have been another reason. Gandhi may simply have got the facts wrong. He may that thought the tax was ten times higher than what it actually was. Did villagers believe him? No. That's why the Salt agitation collapsed so quickly. It did not represent a popular demand. Moreover, if you made salt for yourself from the sea, the product turned out to be worse in quality and higher in cost. Gandhi may not have appreciated this because he was a very stupid man.
Consider this extract from Gandhi's speech at Aslali
Do not be content with merely wearing khadi and plying the spinning. wheel, thinking that you have done all that you could do.
Take the case of your own village: For a population of 1,700, 850 maunds of salt will be required.
That's over 30,000 kilos. A person should have 2 kg of salt per year. 1700 people should consume 3400 kilos. Cattle need twice as much salt. On the other hand, non acclimatized people who sweat a lot in hot weather would need double or triple what is normally consumed.
For 200 bullocks, 300 maunds of salt will be required.
That would be 800 kg or less than 30 maunds.
That is, total of 1,150 maunds of salt will be required.
4,200 kg of salt would be required. It appears the local maund was about half the 'pukka maund'.
The Government levies a tax of Rs. 1-4 on one pukka maund of salt. Hence, on 1,150 maunds, which is equal to 575 pukka maunds, you pay a tax of Rs. 720.
It would be around 150 Rupees. There were plenty of lawyers who made more than that in a single day.
A bullock must be given two maunds of salt. In addition, there are 800 cows, buffaloes and calves in your village. If you give them salt, or if the tanner uses salt for treating hides, or if you use salt as manure, you would be paying that amount of tax in excess of Rs. 720.
Also, if you build your house out of salt, you will have to pay more in tax.
Can your village afford to pay this amount in taxes every year?
Yes. Obviously. Would they prefer not to pay the tax? Sure. But it was barely noticeable compared to the rents and cesses they had to pay. India still has a salt tax (zero rated under Modi) because it raises revenue without people noticing it too much.
In India, the average income of an individual is calculated at 7 pice
25 Rupees a year. For 1700 people, this would give about 43000 total income. 150 out of that would only be about 2 percent of income.
or, in other words, hundreds of thousands of persons do not earn even a single pice and either die of starvation or live by begging.
Which is why it was important to raise productivity by improving infrastructure. When Gandhi and his followers were marching to Aslali, they decided not to use the Ellis bridge because it was built by a Britisher. Yet, Indian villages needed roads and bridges so as to get things like salt and so as to be able to sell their agricultural and other surplus. Bridges and roads and police men and armies to defend the border all require money. Taxes supply that money. Gandhi was protesting against a tax that nobody greatly cared about because a few years earlier Motilal Nehru and C.R Das had objected to the raising of the salt tax to help cover the deficit. They didn't suggest anything to replace it. Indeed, it remains to this day though there was a brief period when Gandhi got his way and it was abolished- by Liaquat! It was brought back after Independence.
Even they cannot do without salt. What will be the plight of such persons if they can get no salt or get it at too high a price?
What will be their plight if invaders kill them or enslave them? On the other hand, by embracing Gandhi's one sensible proposal- viz. that Indians should give up sex- poor people would no longer have babies and thus poverty would disappear as would the Indian nation.
Salt, which sells at 9 pice a maund in the Punjab, salt of which heaps and heaps are being made on the coast of Kathiawar and Gujarat, cannot be had by the poor at less than Re. 1-8-0 a maund.
The problem with making your own salt is that it costs more than the taxed variety. Liaquat Ali Khan abolished the salt tax. Prices went up. Then the Indian Government quietly brought it back in 1953. Apparently, the Indians hadn't got rid of the Salt Bureau and thus needed to have a tax to justify the bureaucracy. The relevant Act states that 'the levy and collection of a cess on salt (is) for the purpose of raising funds to meet the expenses incurred on the salt organisation maintained by Government and on the measures taken by Government in connection with the manufacture, supply and distribution of salt.' You can get rid of all Taxation but if you don't get rid of the Tax office you will have to reintroduce taxes to pay for the tax-collectors. Since 2016, however, salt is zero-rated under GST. But that could change.
What curses the Government may not be inviting upon itself from the poor for hiring men to throw this salt into mud!
The curse of having to continue to rule India. Indeed, Gandhi was helping the Brits by concentrating attention on a meaningless side issue.
The poor destitute villagers do not have the strength to get this tax repealed. We want to develop this strength.
They didn't have the strength to get Congress to do sensible things. This is because they thought Gandhi was a smart dude.
A democratic State is one which has authority to abolish a tax which does not deserve to be paid.
This can happen in any sort of State.
It is one in which the people can determine when a certain thing should or should not be paid.
Until they get invaded or their civilization collapses.
We, however, do not possess such authority. Likewise, even our supposedly great representatives do not have it. In the Central Legislative Assembly, Pandit Malaviya said that the manner in which Sardar Vallabhbhai was arrested could not be called just; that it was unjust and high-handed.
Patel was arrested to send a signal to Gandhi. He disregarded it and went to jail two months later. The Government banned Congress, jailed a lot of people and started confiscating property. As Nehru says in his 'Discovery of India' this concentrated minds. After 7 or 8 months Gandhi had to come to terms with the Viceroy. Irwin had looked weak earlier. However, Gandhi's attendance of the Second Round Table conference- where he united everybody else against the INC- showed that Irwin had given Gandhi exactly enough rope to hang himself. Henceforth, the Brits would dictate the pace and scope of reform. Moreover, the new Viceroy, Willingdon took a harsh line with Congress. This proved effective. Confiscation of property was a more serious matter than spending a bit of time in jail.
At Borsad, a few days later, Gandhi made a more impassioned speech.
At one time I was wholly loyal to the Empire and taught others to be loyal.
A dozen years previously, he had been trying to recruit soldiers for the Brits. They gave him the Kaiser-e-Hind medal for it.
I sang "God Save the King" with zest and taught my friends and relations to do so. Finally, however, the scales fell from my eyes, and the spell broke. I realized that the Empire did not deserve loyalty. I felt that it deserved sedition.
The penalty for sedition was a bit of time in a comfortable enough prison cell. That of waging war against the King, involved transportation, hard labor or, worse yet, the hangman's noose. Gandhi's loyalty had not been worth much to the Brits. Gujaratis refused to enlist. They chased the old fool away. But Gandhi's sedition was valuable to Viceroys. It made it easier for them to demonstrate to the Indians that they were not ready for freedom. Why? Because their most popular leader was a crack-pot.
Hence I have made sedition my dharma. I try to explain it to others that while sedition is our dharma, to be loyal is a sin.
Also you must not fuck your wife. That is a terrible sin. As for eating beef or wearing foreign cloth- such things are simply to evil too contemplate.
To be loyal to this Government, that is to say to wish it well, is as good as wishing ill of the cores of people of India.
Wishes are worth nothing.
We get nothing in return for the cores of rupees that are squeezed out of the country;
except Defense, Law & Order, infrastructure and Famine Relief and control of contagious diseases and Legislative Councils and a seat at the League of Nations.
if we get anything, it is the range from Lancashire. To approve the policy of this Government is to commit treason against the poor.
Sadly, it turned out that Gandhi's panaceas- khaddar, 'Basic Education, etc. were money-pits. They harmed the poor.
You should free yourselves from this latter offence. I believe I have done so.
He was wrong. Spinning cotton, more often than not, added negative value.
Hence I have become ready to wage a peaceful war against this Government.
Soldiers don't surrender peacefully to the enemy and go meekly into a POW camp.
I am commencing it by violating the salt law. It is for this purpose that I am undertaking this march. At every place, thousands of men and women have conferred their blessings upon it. These blessings are not showered on me but on the struggle.
Our patience has been severely tried. We must free ourselves from the yoke of this Government and we are prepared to undergo any hardships that we may have to suffer in order to secure Swaraj. It is our duty as well as our right to secure Swaraj.
If so, the Gandhi-Irwin pact was treason.
I regard this as a religious movement since sedition is our dharma.
whose God is stupidity.
Every moment I desire the end of the policies of this Government. I have no desire to touch even a single hair of our rulers. But we certainly shall not bow down to them.
Going off, meekly, to jail every now and then may not involve 'bowing down' but it does involve a very high type of obedience. Most people try to avoid being arrested. If this is unavoidable, then they pay a lawyer to mount a vigorous defense. Gandhi's innovation was to cooperate with the police and the magistrates and the penal system while pretending not to cooperate with the British.
Kindly, therefore, become conscious of your responsibilities and wash away your sins against India. Today we are defying the salt law. Tomorrow we shall
stop defying it.
have to consign other laws to the waste-paper basket.
Which ones? If Gandhi had said 'we are going to scrap zamindari. Land will belong to the tiller', then the masses would have got behind Congress. The Brits would have had to transfer power to elected legislatures capable of creating a new agricultural order.
Doing so we shall practice such severe non-co-operation that finally it will not be possible for the administration to be carried on at all.
But everybody knew that Gandhi had tried this once before and had failed miserably. Jailing people or threatening to confiscate their property has a salutary effect.
Let the Government then, to carry on its rule, use guns against us, send us to prison, hang us. But how many can be given such punishment? Try and calculate how much time it will take a lakh of Britishers to hang thirty cores of persons.
But it took very little time to arrest Congress workers and to ban the organization. Why kill obedient people? What greater obedience is required from a Party which meekly lines up to be hit on the head or to be carted off to jail?
But they are not so cruel. They are human beings like us and perhaps we would be doing the same things that they are doing if we had been in their position.
The Mughals had a salt tax. It was 5 percent for Hindus and half that for Muslims.
Man does not have the strength to fight circumstances; the latter could by his actions.
Perhaps this was wrongly transcribed.
Hence I do not feel that they are to be blamed for this. But I find their policy so bitter, that I would destroy it today if I could. It will be destroyed regardless of whether I am put behind the bars or allowed to remain free.
The Salt tax is still with us.
I breathe here before you and with every breath that I take, I desire this very thing. I am fully convinced that there is nothing base in it. I act exactly as I believe.
This was the problem. Gandhi was play-acting.
No one has been able to reply to the complaint I have registered before God and mentioned in my letter to the Viceroy. No one says that the salt tax is just.
Yet, it is still with us today.
No one says that the expenditure on the army and the administration is justified.
The alternative is anarchy- which hadn't worked out too well for Hindus in the past. Invaders enslaved them.
No one holds that the policy of collecting land revenue is justifiable, nor indeed that it is proper to extort 20 to 25 cores of rupees from the people after making drunkards and opium-addicts of them and breaking up their homes.
Gandhi does not mention the cruel British policy of subjecting Indian peasants to incessant fellatio and cunnilingus.
Both foreigners and British officers testify to the fact that all this is true.
Gandhi is lying. Everybody knew that Armies and Police Forces and Education and Sanitation departments have to be paid for by taxes. The alternative is invasion and enslavement.
However, what can be done about it? Money is required. For what purpose is it required? In order to repress the people.
Gandhi was constantly begging for money. Then he'd piss that money up the wall. Still, his financiers- Dalmia in this case- did very well out of it.
Recently the Government has appointed all police officers above the rank of constables as officers dealing with salt. As a result of the authority vested in him, even a policeman can arrest me and perpetrate any indignity on me that he likes; if he fails to arrest me he would be guilty of the offence of cowardice.
Irwin gave Gandhi enough rope. Then he arrested him once everybody could see that he was a silly man. Nehru did go to jail for making salt but he later said ' ‘We were bewildered and could not fit in a national struggle with common salt,’ An article in an Indian newspaper stated, ‘It is difficult not to laugh, and we imagine that will be the mood of most thinking Indians.’ Later, Nehru quietly brought back the salt tax which Liaquat had abolished.
Here we find this offence of cowardice which does not exist in any other Act of the Government.
Gandhi was obsessed with cowardice. But sulking in jail is not the act of a brave man. It is the action of a virtue signalling hypocrite.
Any constable who sees us making salt, who sees us heating a pan of salt water, can arrest us, snatch away the pan and throw away the water. What can he feel in throwing away the salt? In Lansundra near Kapadvanj there is a mound of salt, which has been covered with dust. Why is this so? Why this injustice? It is our dharma to oppose such outrageous conduct and such inhuman policy.
This sort of dharma or drama had led to Hindu enslavement. If you object to foreigners ruling you, kill them or try to kill them. Don't pretend you are a courageous soldier if all you do is throw a tantrum and then go meekly off to jail.
If you feel that I should be grateful to you for the purse you have presented to me, I should say I am grateful. But my hunger will not be satisfied with money.
There we have it! Gandhi wanted money! Money is 'non-violent' politics. But if money is spent on sulking, not fighting, then enslavement will continue.
I desire that all of you men and women should enroll yourselves in this sacrificial movement. It is my cherished desire that all students studying in this high school who are above the age of fifteen, and all teachers too, should enroll themselves.
Gandhi thought education, like modern medicine, was a fraud. But his own 'Nai Talim' was utterly shit. Kids can't earn enough money by spinning cotton to pay for their own education.
Wherever revolutions have taken place, that is, in Japan, China, Egypt, Italy, Ireland and in England, students and teachers have played a prominent role. In Europe, war broke out on the 4th of August in 1914, and when I reached England on the 6th of that same month, I found that students had left colleges and marched out with arms.
Why did students not march out in dhotis to say 'boo to Kaiser! He is violating dharma! We will fast to death unless he stops being so mean.' ? To be fair, Gandhi did offer to enlist on the British side and did try to recruit soldiers for them. By contrast, Bertrand Russell went to jail for his Pacifist convictions.
Here, in this righteous war, truth, nonviolence and forgiveness are the weapons.
In the sense that a powder puff and lipstick are weapons- sure.
The consequence of using such weapons can only be beneficial,
But they hadn't been. India didn't get what Ireland and Egypt and Afghanistan got in 1922. Why? Gandhi cravenly surrendered and went off meekly to jail.
and it is the duty of every student and teacher to take part in such a struggle. At a time when the final struggle is being waged in order to free India from slavery, any student or teacher who takes shelter in his home or in the school will be regarded as having acted as a traitor to his country.
Gandhi was shot by people who considered him a traitor to his country. This was a mistake. A fool is not a traitor. He is merely a fool.
Will you be engaged in learning poems by heart or in doing sums at a time when a person like Sardar is behind the bars?
If you are sensible, yes.
Just as when a house is on fire everyone comes out to extinguish it, similarly you should all come out to put an end to these sufferings of our country.
But Gandhian shite increased the sufferings of the country.
Those who say that Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jews and others have not united speak an untruth.
The Muslims and Hindus had indeed united in 1922. Then Gandhi unilaterally surrendered for a scruple which may exist in Jain-Vaishnavism but which does not exist in Islam or most Hindu sects. Then it was discovered that the Viceroy had been using all his influence on the Khilafati side. In other words, the Viceroy had actually done something for the Indian Muslims while Gandhi had pumped and dumped them. Thus by 1930, Hindus and Muslims had parted ways. Indeed, after the Salt debacle, Gandhi had to attend the Second Round Table Conference where, much to the delight of the 'die-hard' Tories, he succeeded in uniting all the minorities and even the non-Brahmin Madrasis (who were the 97 percent majority in the Presidency) against the INC. The result was that the Brits were able to dictate the scope and pace of constitutional reform. They then unceremoniously dumped people like Sapru.
This salt tax applies equally to all. If it is the case that whereas Hindus have to pay this tax, Muslims can get themselves exempted from it, they may very well do so. If anyone can save himself in this manner, I shall have to modify my dharma. I am prepared to get this tax abolished even if I have to prostrate myself on the ground in order to do so. Why should not everyone unite in order to have that tax abolished from which even a buffalo and a cow cannot escape?
The answer was that if Government revenue went down, then it would reduce military, police and administrative expenditure. This would mean worsening conditions for the poorest in the countryside. Banditry would be pervasive. The Brits would make money selling guns to War lords. India would become like China in the Thirties- civil war, invasion and famine would stalk the land.
By prostrating myself on the ground for the sake of removing the hardships of cores of people was of no avail. I have spared no efforts in drafting appeals. Everyone knows that I know how to use polite language. I have become a revolutionary when politeness and persuasion proved infructuous.
But so did throwing a tantrum and then going meekly to jail. This is not the behavior of a revolutionary. It is the conduct of a hypocritical poltroon.
I find peace in describing myself as a revolutionary
Politicians like telling lies. It gives them peace and tranquility. On the other hand, I find peace in describing myself as a Beyonce impersonator.
and I practice my dharma to some extent. In a revolution which is calm, peaceful and truthful,
and thus not Gandhi's hysterical play-acting
you should get yourselves enrolled regardless of the religion to which you belong.
Only if this will make you more secure and prosperous. But Gandhi wasn't offering that. He was offering an autarkic world where nobody would have sex and there would be no trade or division of labor and no army to expel invaders and no police to kill bandits. Why did Gandhi advocate this shite? The answer is he believed in re-incarnation. If you live a celibate and joyless life you will be reborn on a paradisal planet where there is no sex and no dirty books or indeed entertainment of any type.
If you enlist yourselves with sincerity and if you can keep up your courage, the salt tax will have been abolished, this administration will have come to an end and all the hardships enumerated in the letter to the Viceroy as well as those which have not been so enumerated will have to cease. Then when new administrative policies are to be formulated, the time will be ripe for solving communal disputes and satisfying everyone.
What actually happened? When the Brits left, there was massive ethnic cleaning and population exchange. No 'minority' was satisfied.
I invite you all in the name of God. Even the Britishers will join in this movement. Will they perpetrate many injustices in order to justify one? And will they put innocent men behind the bars, whip them and hang them?
But Gandhi and his crew had the habit of pleading guilty. But their offense was sedition not 'waging war on the King Emperor' and so they were spared any great hardship in jail.
God can never be identified with that which is untruth, that which is injustice.
God can't be identified. Gandhi did not understand theology.
It is as plain as I am speaking to you here and now. I see equally clearly that the days of this administration are numbered and total Swaraj is in sight.
Jinnah had spoken out against the rise in the Salt Tax. By 1930, he had moved to England believing his political future in India was over. Gandhi's stupidity gave Jinnah back his role in India. Jinnah imitated Gandhi's tactics and thus emerged as the more successful politician. We can't say India is Gandhian. We can say Pakistan is the creation of Jinnah more than anybody else.
The Goddess of Independence is peeping in and wished to garland us.
It had peeped in in 1922. Gandhi unilaterally surrendered.
If at such a time we run away, who will be as unworthy as we?
Run away from the oppressor's jail cell. Don't just talk about Revolution. Try to bring it about in Reality. Or rather, don't. You will be shot and, in any case, most Revolutions turn out to be fucking horrible.
Still, there is one lesson from the Salt Satyagraha which 'all who run may read'- viz get your maths right. If the Salt tax represents 2 percent not 20 percent of disposable income, don't bother with it. Find an issue which matters more to ordinary people. Also don't confuse sulking in a jail cell with being a courageous soldier. The thing is simply silly.
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