Of pantomimes and politics

IN Opinion | 13/03/2005

You don’t say!

Darius Nakhoonwala 

It is indicative of the levels of ignorance in the Congress party that it chose to re-enact the Dandi March, led by Gandhiji on March 12, 1930. Had it asked the experts, it would have heard something it may not have wanted to hear: the march was to protest against the government and to ask for liberation from it.

Or, as C R Rajagopolachari had told Gandhiji then, "It is not salt, but disobedience that you are manufacturing."  The march was about civil disobedience, so what in heaven’s name was Sonia Gandhi trying to prove? In 1930 the tax salt was about three annas per head. But it hit the poorest the hardest.

The word salt, by the way, is a close relative of the word salarium because Roman soldiers were paid with a packet of salt so that they could preserve their food. Hence, also, the word salary.

There is also another little known fact. Tushar Gandhi, great grandson of Mohandas and Kasturba Gandhi, and head of the Mahatma Gandhi Foundation, had decided to re-enact the march with a about a 100 volunteers. It was to be simply a descendant’s tribute. But then the Congress muscled in. Then, too, originally, the Congress march and the Tushar Gandhi march were to be separate. But somewhere along the line, they became one.

The media by and large ignored the re-enactment. There were only a handful of editorials and articles. Some were fawning, others not. But by and large the message lay in the refusal to give the event much importance. TV, of course, loves visuals and did the usual thing but the breathless excitement was missing.

Unusually for it, it was the Times of India that asked the most relevant question: why? And it commented acidly that "history can re-enact itself as farce, even if it was not a tragedy to begin with. That`s what we will witness when the Congress party embarks on a repeat of Gandhi`s Dandi March to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the event." 

Then it got it wrong. "The march was all about establishing the right of people over resources," it wrote, which of course it wasn’t unless you want to stretch a point beyond reason. But its punch line was apt and pithy, "the pretenders will participate in the Dandi March."

As might be expected, The Indian Express was more pro-active. It not only wrote an editorial, it also got the noted historian of the freedom movement, B R Nanda, to contribute an article on the march. It was revealing to see from his article how Motilal Nehru, amongst others including the British, had thought poorly of the idea.

"Motilal Nehru was amused by the apparent irrelevance of Gandhi’s move", wrote Nanda. "To him, as indeed to many others, it may have seemed that salt had become like the charkha, another of Gandhi’s hobby horses."

How ironic that his great-grandson’s wife should have flagged off the march - that too without apparently realizing its actual significance.

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