Take a walk on the wild side (X.) by X.

Gandhi launched a nationwide revolution in India by walking to the beach. Does that sound ridiculous? The struggle for Indian independence lasted decades. Many lives were lost to the ruthless brutality of the British Empire. It was a hard and painful road to win that freedom. But the first step to victory came when Gandhi realized the people could shake the system to its foundations with a long, peaceful stroll to the shore.

The British had set up a colonial system to control all aspects of Indian life. They rigged the rules to exploit the people and their land. Those who resisted were arrested, beaten or killed. One typical colonial law said that only the British could produce or sell salt. Salt had always been easy to find on India’s long coasts. People would collect it for free on the beaches. Now they were forced to buy it from the colonial government.

Indians were denied so many rights – who would care about salt? But salt, it turns out, plays a very important role in Indian culture. It has a powerful symbolic meaning (to “eat someone’s salt” means to have a duty of loyalty towards them). Gandhi’s brilliance was that he figured out the salt laws were a critical weakness in the English colonial system.

On March 12, 1930, Gandhi and a few dozens of his followers began a 240-mile march to the coast. They walked for 23 days, going through dozens of villages. Thousands of others joined them along the way until they reached the beach on April 5. From wikipedia:

“The following morning, after a prayer, Gandhi raised a lump of salty mud (with reports varying as to how much) and declared, "With this, I am shaking the foundations of the British Empire." He then boiled it in seawater, illegally producing the controversial commodity. He implored his thousands of followers to likewise begin to make salt along the seashore, wherever "was most convenient and comfortable" to them, not to the British Empire.”

The Salt March sparked a nationwide explosion of civil disobedience as thousands of Indians made and bought “illegal” salt. Caught by surprise, the British government threw over sixty thousand people in jail trying to stop the rising movement. In complete panic, a maniacal general ordered his British troops to shoot down nonviolent demonstrators in the city of Peshawar, killing hundreds of innocent people (the Indian soldiers had refused to open fire). For of its vicious repression of a mass movement, the British drew international condemnation. And although it took another 17 years and many more hardships for India to gain its independence, the Salt March was a turning point in the struggle: For the first time made it possible for thousands of Indians from all walks of life to defy the illegitimate rule of the British Empire.

Through years of practice and study, Gandhi and his fellow organizers developed a most revolutionary understanding of the Indian people and of British colonial rule. Gandhi grasped that the colonial system was not invincible and that its laws could be bent to the point of open rebellion: What was needed was for masses of people to subvert the system at its weakest point. To make this possible, he devised a mass direct action deeply rooted in the cultural, social, political and economic life of the people of India.

Some severe shortcomings of the Gandhian movement must be acknowledged regarding its lack of internal democracy (especially discrimination against women). But these shortcomings do not take away from the inspiring legacy of the Salt March as a revolutionary democratic event:

• It successfully united people across all regional, class, religious and ethnic boundaries that were all affected by the illegitimate and frankly absurd salt laws.

• It was a simple, culturally and socially legitimate event that almost anyone could participate in and yet it was a most subversive event that directly challenged the system’s legitimacy.

• It was a mass popular action that both radicals and moderates could support and yet it struck at the heart of the system’s political and economic authority.

• It empowered the Indian people to continue challenging the system on their own as they sold and bought salt, earning or saving a little money through continuous acts of civil disobedience that reaffirmed their legitimate cultural heritage.

• It demonstrated the system’s inability to stop masses of organized people and thereby established the beginning of nationwide dual power: the power of the people continually negotiating with the power of the system, until the system was overcome.

No one in India would have ever believed that a nationwide rebellion could begin over salt until the march occurred. Revolutionary Democracy assumes that a mass, popular direct action of this magnitude is equally possible under any other oppressive system, including in the US. It is up to us to figure out how to do it…