A declaration of independence

January 26, 2023

On January 26, 1930, Mohandas Gandhi raised a tricolor flag, signaling an independent India. Weeks earlier, the Indian National Congress had declared its commitment to complete independence from the British, and all across the subcontinent men and women took pledges of support.

The action was as symbolic as America's own Declaration of Independence. It was largely ignored by the rest of the world; no foreign nations recognized them, certainly not the British. But as a symbol, the flag made of the native homespun cloth khadi carried a wave of excitement across India. What would the next move be?

The Congress had delegated the strategy to their elder statesman, Gandhi. Gandhi had no ideas. He confessed, “I am furiously thinking day and night, and I do not see any light.” But then, in the middle of February, inspiration struck like a bolt of lightning; the campaign should be about salt.

A year later, he had succeeded. On January 26, 1931, he was released from the prison cell that had been his home for most of a year. Tens of thousands clogged jails across the nation – estimates are as high as 100,000. In the coming weeks, the Gandhi-Irwin Pact would be negotiated as an agreement between equals, and the nonviolent prisoners would be released.

As Louis Fischer wrote in Gandhi: His life and Message for the World, “India was now free. Legally, technically, nothing had changed.... It was inevitable... [after the Salt March] that India would some day refused to be ruled, and more important, that England would some day refuse to rule.” The beginning of the end was on January 26, 1930.

What day in your own personal history marks the beginning of a life-altering change?