This fourfold disaster
January 26, 2024
On January 26, 1930, weeks after the Indian National Congress declared complete independence from the British was the only thing that would satisfy them, thousands of tricolor flags were hoisted across the country in public meetings to mark the occasion.
On January 26, 1930, Mohandas Gandhi raised a tricolor flag, signaling an independent India. … 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.
Well, that wasn’t quite correct. Whoops.
In fact, Gandhi had specifically reminded his readers that the “26th is the day not to declare independence but to declare that we will be satisfied with nothing less than complete independence.”1 Instead, mass meetings should be held, not for speeches (there are none recorded for Gandhi on this day in the Collected Works) but for a reading of the declaration, with support demonstrated by a show of hands.
This declaration—written by Gandhi—says the British Government “has ruined India economically, politically, culturally, and spiritually.” This was a fourfold disaster, and the way Gandhi explained it was maybe not the way you expect:
Economically was straightforward: taxes, currency manipulation, and similar.
Politically included the lack of political power and violations of civil liberties.
Culturally was the education system, which trained them to serve the British.
“Spiritually, compulsory disarmament has made us unmanly”!
(Indeed, one of the 11 demands Gandhi would soon make of the Viceroy included “Issu[ance] of licences to use firearms for self-defence.”)
In any case, the waving flag of native homespun cloth khadi generated excitement across India. What would the next move be? The Congress delegated strategy to their elder statesman and waited.
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. Soon after, he set out to make it illegally, determined to disrupt British rule.
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?
Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (January 23, 1930) p. 23407