Just thinking of it sends a chill up my spine. On 12 March 1930, at the Sabarmati Ashram in Gujarat, 79 men went for a walk. For 23 days, they marched, covering four districts, 48 villages, 400km. On the way, they picked up thousands of other ordinary people, animated by a cause so much bigger than themselves. Then, on 6 April, by the sea at the coastal village of Dandi, Mahatma Gandhi picked up a handful of salty earth and said, “With this, I am shaking the foundations of the British empire.”
The empire shook. The purpose of Gandhi’s march was to protest the oppressive and unfair salt tax and, across the country, people joined the battle. They made their own salt. They bought illegal salt. That year, 60,000 Indians were arrested during these protests. The salt law was not repealed. And yet, “the first stage in ...the final struggle of freedom”, as Gandhi described it, had made an impact.
More than 77 years have passed. We have been free of the British empire for 60 of them. If we were to get inside a time machine, go back to 1930, pull in some of the men and women who marched to Dandi and bring them to this present time, how would they react? Would they think that they were finally in the India that they had fought to achieve?
Or would they set off on another walk?
The story of our freedom struggle was not the story of a Gandhi here or a Nehru there—it was about millions of people who rose up because they wanted to be masters of their own destiny. The British empire was naturally the focus of that struggle and, when we were rid of them in 1947, the relief must have been enormous. The tragedy is that for most Indians, political independence was freedom enough. What else was there to fight for?
Well, plenty. The oppressive empire from a continent away was gradually replaced by an oppressive, omnipresent state, and we did not protest. The lack of economic freedom kept India poor for decades, and we did not protest. Personal freedom was routinely denied to us, and we did not protest. In parts of our country, people are treated worse than the British treated us, and we do not protest. As a nation, we stopped caring for freedom once we gained independence.
It is ironic that we celebrate the Dandi March so much. The taxes that weigh us down today are no less unjust than the infamous salt tax being protested then. Do some math: Calculate the percentage of your income that you pay as tax. Then apply that figure to a year, and see how many months it comes to (for example, 25% tax would come to three months).
For that much time every year, you work not for yourself, but for the government. Add to that an approximation of the other taxes that you pay—everything you buy is taxed, so you are taxed not just while earning money, but also while spending it. You might just find that your “tax-freedom day”, when you actually start working for yourself, comes in May every year, or even later. Do taxes not cause a kind of part-time slavery, then?