Accompany Resisters to Prison
By accompanying resisters when they go to prison, you stand with them in their ordeal and also demonstrate that you are undaunted and unashamed at being vulnerable to government reprisals. Here are two descriptions of how this can play out:
Example Annuity Tax Resistance
In the 1830s, Annuity Tax resisters in Edinburgh, Scotland, would march to prison in a veritable parade of protesters. One description of such a procession read:
[H]e was marched off to the Calton Jail, accompanied by the usual hasty muster of people carrying flags and poles, having placards on which were a variety of devices and inscriptions… His daughter, a fine young woman, in a fit of heroic indignation which overmastered her grief and the natural timidity of her sex, seized one of the flags, and would have walked before her father to prison with the crowd, but was prevented by him and the interference of the humane bystanders.
Example Bardoli Tax Strike
When resisters were arrested during the Bardoli tax strike, they considered it an opportunity for celebratory defiance. The prisoners did as much to boost the spirits of the onlookers as vice-versa:
Some of the wives of the men who were arrested attended the court, and followed their husbands to the station where they were taken roped and handcuffed in pairs under strong police escort. Sorrow there may have been in the women’s hearts, but there was none on their faces, and they joined in the hearty cheering as the train moved out of the station platform…
[T]he people had by now become adepts in laughing at these displays. The convicts were laughing and joking and saying to people who were annoyed to see them handcuffed: “Never mind: something better than wrist watches.” Immediately the people caught their spirit, lustily cried Vande Mataram, and gave hearty cheers as the train carrying the convicts steamed out of the platform.
Notes and Citations
- “Imprisonment of a Baptist” Tate’s Edinburgh Magazine, #XVIII, September 1833, p. 802.
- Desai, Mahadev The Story of Bardoli (1929) pp. 211–12