Dandi - symbol of the new India?

S. Pathiravitana

Visually, it looks as if Gandhi rhymes with Dandi. Whether in fact it does, I know not. But politically speaking Dandi has a great link with Mahatma Gandhi. It is the place by the sea on the Gujerat shore to where Gandhi went to break the salt laws. Indians had declared themselves independent from British rule on the 26th of January 1930. And a month or two later Mahatma Gandhi made a move to prove it.

On March 2, 1930 Mahathma wrote to the Viceroy of India, Lord Irwin, the following note: "If my letter makes no appeal to your heart, on the eleventh day of this month I shall proceed with such co-workers of the Ashram as I can take, to disregard the provisions of the Salt Laws.

I regard this tax to be the most iniquitous of all from the poor man's standpoint. As the Independence movement is essentially for the poorest in the land, the beginning will be made with this evil."

And so the Salt March began. Apparently, Gandhi's letter had made no impression on the Viceroy's heart. The distance the marchers had to travel was 241 miles from his Ashram in Sabarmati. He started out with 78 of his fellow workers walking at a speed of roughly ten miles a day and reached Dandi in about 22 days.

On the way many enthusiasts joined the procession and at one stage it was two miles long. After resting for a day the next thing was to gather a handful of salt. And that fistful he took was to shake the British Raj in India and eventually led to the freedom of the Indians. Overnight Dandi became a national symbol of India's fight for freedom.

But today, as an Indian journalist from the Times of India found when he visited the place recently; one local he met told him he knew nothing about what the Salt March was all about. The place where Gandhi lodged the night before he broke the salt tax law is now in ruins.

The other place where he stayed on for some time before the armed police came to arrest him is another dilapidated ruin. The surrounding area is now dotted by bungalows that have been put up by the dollars earned abroad by India's newly rich middle class. There is illegal ferrying of illicit liquor in Dandi.

As the Indian journalist noted, it was the 'The best open bar in Gujerat.' Another visitor to the place was the great grand daughter of the Mahatma. The place is so neglected, she says, that she is greatly embarrassed to take visitors around Dandi.

The ritual genuflexion that is made before the image of the Father of the Nation at any national occasion was made this year by the current Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the 60th anniversary of India's national day's celebrations.

But it was not the kind of thing that Mahathma Gandhi would have liked to hear a Prime Minister speak. Referring to the industrial progress that India is now making the Prime Minister said that industrialisation was critical for India and added - "The day is not far off when half a billion people will be living in cities.'

In other words the urbanisation of India will increase beyond belief. Contrast this with what Gandhi longed for India throughout his life. "If the village perishes India will perish too.

It will be no more India. Her own mission in the world will get lost." And the next quotation shows us where Gandhi and where the present government of India stand: "We have to make a choice between India of the villages that are as ancient as herself and India of the cities which are a creation of foreign domination.

Today the cities dominate and drain the villages so that they are crumbling to ruin. My Khadi mentality tells me that cities must sub serve villages when that domination goes. Exploiting of villages is itself organised violence. If we want Swaraj to be built on non-violence, we will have to give the villages their proper place."

In this context we can see that when the cities grow as the Prime Minister promises, the - 'dominating and draining the villages' will continue under the expansion of industrialisation.

And then, India will be no more, as Gandhi foresaw. Gandhi's economics is also very different from what the Congress is pursuing now and the orthodox Indian economists of our time may scoff at the Gandhian way under their breath.

They will never, however, openly say that in today's context Gandhi's economics is the economics of a crackpot. Gandhi's answer to that would be, I think, that today's orthodox economics lacks a spiritual dimension.

Once in conversation with Birla, the multi millionaire Indian industrialist, the following dialogue took place between the two on how useful money can be: "Why not," asked the multi millionaire, "make large collections and spread your work over a large area?"

"No I do not believe in collecting more than I need." "But supposing you constructed twenty, even ten model villages?" "If it is such an easy thing, you might do so with your money. But I know it is not easy. You cannot bring a model village into being by the magic wand of money."

This brings us now to see what is actually happening in India under the vast strides it is making in its economic expansion. The new phenomenon that is visible in some Indian cites today is the rise of Finishing Schools.

The New York Herald Tribune drawing our attention to the rise of this new phenomenon in India reports that it has come up to meet a new need in the new India. "According to data from Google, says the Herald Tribune, findings on a per capita basis, Indians search for 'finishing schools,' 'communication skills,' and 'English training' are more than in any other citizenry."

And no wonder. For without attending a finishing school the most a student could earn, if he is lucky enough to get a job, is a $150 a month. But a finishing school student can get double that amount at a minimum, and even treble that amount at a maximum, depending on the type of finishing he or she has been to.

"The methods at the finishing schools," the Herald Tribune reports, "can be unconventional. At Let's Talk (the name of a finishing school) teachers prescribe jaw exercises to help students overcome what the school quaintly calls the 'MTI' - the 'mother tongue influence.'" At Veta, a school in the same building, the principal once told a student to fix a stammer by speaking with a toffee under his tongue; for that that may be how an Englishman sounds when he is speaking. The idea generally is to produce a cultured brown Englishman or Englishwoman.

There is a similar rush in our country to learn English, but that is only to read and write English. The closest thing we have to the 'finishing schools' of India are the 'international schools.' that have suddenly cropped up everywhere. Those parents who send their children do so in the hope that their pretty little darlings will emerge speaking 'good English'.

But the demand in India is not merely to read and write and speak good English, they want more things like deportment, manners, the English accent and so on. And at the end become English to the core and freed from the debilitating influence of the MTI - 'the mother tongue influence.'

An Indian paper, deploring this trend towards Anglicisation (or is it Americanisation) commented that a trend now, among Indians returning from the US, is to answer the 'namaste' greeting with 'Hi baby.'

So, to where is the new India heading? But to end this piece on the development and prosperity in the new India, the best thing I can do is to recall what happened to the English peasants. You may remember from the history books you read how they were evicted from the land they traditionally held and were forced to seek refuge in the slums of English cities.

They were used as 'cogs' to turn the wheels of the English industrial revolution which in turn became the founding father of pollution and global warming in the world today.

Oliver Goldsmith, the English poet, who lived around that time, wrote a prophetic poem which he called The Deserted Village referring to England Here is an appropriate extract from it which the late Mahatma would have greatly appreciated: Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey.

Where wealth accumulates, and men decay....And a bold peasantry a country's pride When once destroyed can never be supplied.