The day has offered again an opportunity to know about Gandhiji more and also strengthen the deliberation on the continuing role of communalism against our civilisational ingredients, that are diversity and pluralism, against our basic constitutional structure of secular, democratic principles. Assassination of Mahatma itself sets an example of the immensity of threat it posed to the majoritarian Hindutva forces, that he had to be physically annihilated. Despite the fact that the light was thus quenched, the challenge remains as true and formidable as it ever was to the communal ideology.

The attempts to counter the communal lashing, there has always been the struggle unleashed on ideological level which goes even against the state power that tries to contain it with banning books, silencing media, holding back the surging waves with threats of incarceration for years without holding trials, and in many more other ways, though not always succeeding.

After independence, India emerged as a nation striving to keep its multiculturalism alive. Communalism, as a challenge, remained a major threat.

In the era of colonial rule, communal ideology was used as an instrument to promote any initiation based on a politics of divide and rule. It was helped in this effort by the state regime which also used brutal repression to suppress any non-violent civil disobedience that was launched irrespective of the community or creed of those taking part. It’s one major example was Dandi March against the Salt Act, in 1930, launched by Gandhiji, bringing forth his peaceful militancy, or non-violence and fearlessness, the weapons he had conjured for universal peace, of which was struggle for national liberation a part.

Twenty five thousand volunteers, unaware of the community or creed of their comrades in arms, were almost arriving as one at the Dharasana Salt Works, not far from Dandi as part of Gandhi ji led Salt Satyagraha.

In complete silence Gandhi supporters drew up and halted a hundred yards from the stockade. A picked column advanced from the crowd, waded the ditches, and approached the barbed-wire stockade.

Suddenly there was a blunt shout, and the policemen fell upon the advancing marchers raining blows on their heads with their steel-shod lathis. Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows. Skulls were unprotected and the clubs kept raining. The next line of marchers, with bated breath, awaited their turn.

Those struck down fell sprawling, unconscious or writhing with fractured skulls or broken shoulders. The survivors, without breaking ranks, silently and doggedly marched on until struck down.

They marched steadily, with heads up. The police rushed out and methodically and mechanically beat down the second column. There was no fight, no struggle; the marchers simply walked forward till struck down.

What had the Satyagrahis accomplished? They did not take the Works; nor was the Salt Act formally abolished in its entirety. But this, the world began to realize, was not the point. The Salt Satyagraha had demonstrated to the world the nearly flawless use of a new instrument of peaceful militancy.

Gandhiji might have said, Asia could now look Europe in the eye, not more, not less. It was the culmination of Salt Satyagraha, on April 6, 1930. Gandhiji had said the salt tax causes great hardship to the poor. Therefore, wherever salt can be made, poor people may certainly manufacture for themselves and risk the penalty.

He looked at the world and also India as the phenomenon where at the centre is the consciousness of the masses, as essence. This consciousness was to evolve with the strength of fearlessness and non-violence.

The communal clash in Noakhali of Bengal and presence of Gandhiji on the spot was also one example of how he felt one with all the grieving masses. He had said, “It is to demonstrate the efficacy of that way I have come here. If Noakhali is lost, India is lost.” He believed in change and was always torn with despair in this race of keeping up with time.

When replying to Louis Fischer, his biographer, who wrote ‘The Life of Mahatma Gandhi’, and asked him to elaborate on how he actually saw his impending civil disobedience, he had said, “In the villages, the peasant will stop paying the taxes. They will make salt despite official prohibition. This seems a small matter, salt tax yields only a paltry sum to British government. But the refusal to pay will give the peasants the courage to think that they are capable of independent action. Their next step will be to seize the land. In fact land belongs to those who work on it. There could be violence or no violence. There may be fifteen days of chaos, but I think that we could bring that under control. It would be confiscation without compensation to the landlords.”

He also said, “I have presented the working class the truth that true capital is not gold or silver but the labour of their hands and feet and their intelligence. Once labour develops that awareness, it would not need any my presence to enable it to make use of power that it will release.”

That was Gandhiji taking up the essence. (IPA Service)