Raid on the salt works
After he’d concluded the Salt March in April 1930, Gandhi looked for another way to provoke the British. Some local scouting produced a new target. Gandhi announced—to journalists and in a letter to the British Viceroy—that he would lead a nonviolent raid on the Dharasana Salt Works and seize the mounds of white crystals there in the name of the people. Soon after, he was arrested and held without charges, so that he would have no opportunity to present his arguments in a public courtroom.
On May 21, 1930, the raid went ahead without him.
The raid was led by Sarojini Naidu, who had succeeded Gandhi as president of the Indian National Congress a few years earlier. Gandhi’s second son, Manilal, was also there, one of 2,500 satyagrahis sworn to nonviolence who had gathered under the hot sun.
The target of the raid was three heaps of salt, which were protected by ditches, barbed wire, hundreds of policemen and two dozen soldiers with rifles. Recall that on April 6, just before Gandhi made salt, he delivered a message to the gathered press: “I want world sympathy in this battle of Right against Might.”
On May 21, the press delivered. Webb Miller, an American reporter, witnessed the scene play out for hours on end, and sent a vivid story out on the news wires. He wrote:
Suddenly, at a word of command, scores of native police rushed upon the advancing marchers and rained blows on their heads with their steel-shod lathis. Not one of the marchers raised an arm to fend off the blows. They went down like nine-pins. From where I stood I heard the sickening whacks on unprotected skulls…
Then another column formed … They marched steadily with heads up … The police rushed out and methodically and mechanically beat down the second column … The blankets used as stretchers were sodden with blood …
The Gandhi men altered their tactics, marched up in groups of twenty-five and sat on the ground near the salt pans, making no effort to draw nearer … Finally the police became enraged by the non-resistance … They commenced savagely kicking the seated men in the abdomen and testicles …
I do wonder what the “native police” thought as they attacked their countrymen on the orders of their colonizers. But mostly, I’m reminded of the footage of police brutality during the George Floyd protests: an old man who approached officers in New York shoved roughly to the sidewalk, his head thumping against the concrete, body falling limp, blood pouring from his ear as the police ignored him.
Images like these garner world sympathy, but is that comforting for those on the receiving end of the violence? A few men died that day at Dharsana, and independence was still 17 years away. Gandhi would spend several of those in jail.
On a polarized planet, what’s the most recent example of “world sympathy” that you can think of?