We owe our freedom to the salt of our earth

This, the 75th year of India’s Independence, is the year of the Tricolour. As our flag unfurls, our minds awaken; as it flutters, our hearts miss or gain a beat. And images come to us of our leaders, the likes of whom the world has not known.

But our leaders could not have led, our movements could not have worked, our struggle for freedom could not have triumphed without the people of India. When , after the success of the South African satyagraha, Gandhi and his wife Kasturba were being felicitated in London on August 4, 1914, he said, “We… got the limelight in South Africa but if we merited any approbation, how much more did those who went into the struggle with no thought of appreciation! Harbut Singh was 75 when he joined the struggle and entered prison and died there. The young lad Narayanaswami was deported to Madras and on his return, starved and died .... And Valliamma, a girl of 18 went to prison and was discharged only when she took very ill and died shortly thereafter. Twenty thousand workers had left their tools and work and gone out in faith. Violence was entirely eschewed. We are poor mortals before these heroes and heroines.” And he added, “It is on these men and women, who are the salt of the earth that the Indian nation will be built.” Among those listening were persons of present and future fame — Lala Lajpat Rai , Sachchinanda Sinha and Bhupendranath Basu, Sarojini Naidu and MA Jinnah. To all of them, his message about who the real heroes and heroines of the struggle were, went home.

This jubilee year, this year of collective recalling and celebrating, is, therefore, not just about the leaders but about those who made the leaders, powered the movements, gave the struggle its voltage, velocity and — victory. It is about those heroes and heroines, the salt of the earth to whom we owe our freedom, our opportunities, our achievements in the gift of freedom that they have given us. When we falter, fail and go wrong, when our faith wavers and our covenants with our political conscience fray, we let down not just the great Swami, our beloved Vivekananda, the Lokamanya, our cherished Bal Gangadhar Tilak, our Mahatma, our valiant Jawahar whom Tagore described as “the tarun tapasvi”, our indomitable and only one such Sardar Patel, the scholar-nationalist Maulana Azad, our immortal Shaheed Bhagat Singh, our brilliant law-giver, Babasaheb Ambedkar, not just them, but we betray the salt of our earth, of India. The salt satyagraha of 1930 along the coast of Gujarat, which shook the British Raj as nothing else had, therefore, more than the accident of a catchy idea — salt. It was a recognition of the metaphoric salt. The salt of our earth, the masses that make the peoplehood of India.

This year is also the 80th anniversary of the Quit India Movement of 1942. Just as 1857, the year of the First War of Independence, is an unforgettable year, so is 1942. It was on August 8, that the great call to the Raj to quit India was given by the leaders of India, speaking on behalf of its heroes and heroines. At the iconic meeting held in Bombay, the salt of India’s earth spoke through its spokespersons — Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Azad, Kripalani. And the Raj shook. The entire leadership was arrested overnight. Gandhi, with Kasturba, was jailed in Poona. Nehru, Patel, Azad, Kripalani, Asaf Ali, Gobind Ballabh Pant, Shankarrao Deo, the Oriya leader Harekrushna Mahtab, Pattabhi Sitaramayya were locked up in Ahmednagar Fort. Not for a few days or months but for three years. Kasturba died while in that prison. Azad lost his wife, Zuleikha, while he was in jail.

But these were “specifics” before the bigger, larger, and overwhelming truth: Tens of thousands were arrested arrests were made, mass fines were levied and innumerable real heroes and heroines subjected to public flogging during that movement. It is their sacrifice, purity and hope that we celebrate this year. Their ardour, their sense of duty to India. This year, therefore, is a year of the Tricolour at its most fluent, its truest vibrancy. How are the people of struggling India to be honoured by the people of liberated India? By seeing this anniversary as more than a celebration of the past. By seeing it, to adapt a phrase from Abraham Lincoln, as a consecration of the present for the greatness of our future — in equity and freedom.