Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
India →
Gandhi’s campaigns →
the salt march
It’s possible that if enough affluent Americans stopped participating in the economy, the politicians would sit up and notice.
It probably would not have worked much if at all in a Gandhian context; the British Raj’s sleep would have stayed quite blissfully untroubled if a few million poor Bengalis had decided to quit, and hence to starve.
Actually a big hunk of Gandhi’s program was in fact “economic secession” of this sort.
The salt march was all about encouraging people to (illegally) replace their taxed consumption of imported salt with untaxed domestic salt.
Similar was the Gandhian insistence that everyone in the independence movement should wear (and should personally take time every day to help create) homespun cloth rather than wear imported fabric (imported from Britain and taxed).
The boycotts and pickets of liquor stores and opium dens were only partially aimed at the intoxicating effects of the drugs, but were also directed at the British monopoly on alcohol and opium.
The raj was worried enough that the viceroy sent troops out who beat people senseless just for harvesting salt.
I’ve said elsewhere why I’m not a Gandhian pacifist, but I was very much influenced by his insistence that the way to throw off the chains of the tyrant is by withdrawing the everyday economic support it thrives on.
I realized that the Empire did not deserve loyalty.
I felt that it deserved sedition.
Hence I have made sedition my dharma.
I try to explain it to others that while sedition is our dharma, to be loyal is a sin.
To be loyal to this Government, that is to say to wish it well, is as good as wishing ill of the cores of people of India.
We get nothing in return for the cores of rupees that are squeezed out of the country…
To approve the policy of this Government is to commit treason against the poor.
You should free yourselves from this latter offense.
I believe I have done so.
Hence I have become ready to wage a peaceful war against this Government I am commencing it by violating the salt law.…
No one says that the salt tax is just.
No one says that the expenditure on the army and the administration is justified.
No one holds that the policy of collecting land is justifiable, nor indeed that it is proper to extort 20 to 25 cores from the people after making them drunkards and opium-addicts or breaking up their homes.
Both foreigners and British officers to the fact that all this is true.
However, what can be done about it?
Money is required.
For what purpose is it required?
In order to repress the people.
I gave my opinion that violent struggle for political change in the United States was unwise and likely to be counterproductive.
But I also expressed frustration at the ingrained ineffectiveness of today’s nonviolent protests, and tried to imagine what an effective nonviolent resistance might look like.
I’m not a doctrinaire pacifist the way Gandhi was.
I can imagine causes I would kill for as well as those I would die for.
And yet it seems to me that we’re more likely to reach the goal worth aiming for — and I’m speaking here practically and not just idealistically — through nonviolent means.
I recommended yesterday that “[p]eople who are committed to (or who prefer) nonviolence and who regret the rise of the ‘black bloc’ and other violent protesters should ask how Gandhi prevented the Indian National Congress from choosing the tactics of those in India who were advocating armed insurrection.”
“The answer,” I suggested, was that Gandhi “was more hard-core than they were, and he demonstrated results.”
But I decided to take my own advice and take a closer look, since I’m not a scholar of the Indian independence movement.
I picked up some facts of interest, both about the practical appeal of Gandhi’s program to an Indian National Congress with lofty and concrete goals, and about the importance of, yes, tax resistance in that program.
If we step into the Wayback Machine, we’ll see an India that was fighting for its independence against a hypocritically blind and openly imperalist British empire.
Jawaharlal Nehru remembered:
I have always wondered at and admired the astonishing knack of the British people for making their moral standards correspond with their material interests and for seeing virtue in everything that advances their imperial designs.
[SNC 160]
The violent struggle for independence in India, which Nehru initially supported, predates Gandhi’s nonviolent satyagraha techniques.
In fact Gandhi’s first use of these new tactics in India were in response to the British administration’s draconian anti-terrorist laws which had in turn been designed to fend off the violent independence movement (and which sound awfully familiar):
In the Rowlatt Bills were promulgated.
Their intent was to control a few wartime manifestations of terrorism and to prevent their recurrence during the postwar period… They incensed Indians and provided a focal point for resistance.
The bills made trial without jury permissible for political offenses and extended to the provincial authorities the right to intern suspected terrorists without trial.
On the day they were to become law, Gandhi, fresh from a victorious campaign in Champaran… proposed a nationwide hartal.
[SNC 163]
The hartal was something akin to a general strike.
The “victorious campaign in Champaran” was Gandhi’s first Indian satyagraha campaign, conducted when he was a newcomer on the political scene without a lot of “cred.”
He had been acting independently of existing resistance organizations as the founder of his own group called the “Satyagraha Sabha” because, in his words, “all hope of any of the existing institutions adopting a novel weapon like Satyagraha seemed to me to be in vain” [GAA 456]
The Raj responded to Gandhi’s new national campaign and the outrage over the Rowlatt Bills with violent reprisals, which included perpetrating the vicious Amritsar massacre and imprisoning Gandhi for .
Gandhi’s first national campaign of non-cooperation went nowhere.
Yet the Indian National Congress decided against a violent revolutionary movement and chose Gandhi as its commander-in-chief for the coming independence struggle.
One of Gandhi’s first acts in this capacity was to lead “what amounted to both a training exercise and a preliminary skirmish” [SNC 166] in Bardoli:
The farmers and peasants of Bardoli were being asked to pay a 22 percent land tax increase after a particularly bad agricultural year.
[Vallabhbhai] Patel led them in withholding all taxes until the increase was rescinded.
Solidarity was enforced in part through a social boycott of nonresisters.
The movement lasted , and ended with the resisters paying the tax into a government escrow account, pending an investigation of the fairness of the tax.
The investigation found that the tax was not justified, and it was withdrawn.
The Bardoli experiment demonstrated the power of disciplined collective action.
Nonpayment of taxes was an extremely aggressive act and subject to harsh penalties.
[SNC 166–7]
Gandhi and the Indian National Congress took heart at this victory.
Gandhi wrote about the British: “You have great military resources.
Your naval power is matchless.
If we wanted to fight with you on your own ground, we should be unable to do so, but… we cease to play the part of the ruled.
You may, if you like, cut us to pieces.
You may shatter us at the cannon’s mouth.
If you act contrary to our will, we shall not help you; and without our help, we know that you cannot move one step forward.”
[PNVA 84]
The key, according to Gandhi, was in withdrawal of cooperation.
“We recognize… that the most effective way of gaining our freedom is not through violence.
We will therefore prepare ourselves by withdrawing, so far as we can, all voluntary association from the British Government, and will prepare for civil disobedience, including nonpayment of taxes.
We are convinced that if we can but withdraw our voluntary help and stop payment of taxes without doing violence, even under provocation, the end of inhuman rule is assured.”
[PNVA 84]
The goals of the Indian National Congress were lofty.
“This was the first campaign in which immediate and unconditional independence for India emerged as the explicit objective and it mobilized more Indians for direct action in the service of that objective than any other single campaign” [SNC 157].
And the rhetoric was correspondingly confrontational.
Gandhi wrote: “sedition has become the creed of the Congress… Noncooperation, though a religious and strictly moral movement, deliberately aims at the overthrow of the Government, and is therefore legally seditious in terms of the Indian Penal Code” [PNVA 85].
Gandhi felt that “civil disobedience, once begun this time, cannot be stopped and must not be stopped as long as there is a single resister left free or alive.”
This was not a pastime for hobbyists or cowards.
Tens of thousands were arrested.
Hundreds killed.
Protesters had to be willing to be beaten with steel-tipped canes without even raising a hand to ward off the blows.
The first concentrated target of these protests was the Salt Act:
The existence of a government monopoly on salt, resulting from the Salt Act, perfectly exemplified the perceived evils of colonial rule.
Paying the tax on salt (and thereby providing much of the revenue to run the colonial regime) was more a mild irritant than a desperate hardship for most.
But why pay the bill for their own subjugation?
[SNC 172]
Gandhi also tried to extend this campaign to a boycott of foreign liquor and fabric.
Wearing homespun clothing (and thereby damaging the economy of occupation while at the same time encouraging self-reliance) became a symbol of resistance.
The Salt March, the Dharasana salt factory confrontation (one of the climactic scenes you may remember from Gandhi the movie), and “also the entire Salt Satyagraha campaign, were, technically, utter failures” when seen from the point-of-view of the lofty goals — that is, complete independence.
“Yet now we know that this bloody climax made India’s freedom inevitable, because it showed what the Satyagraha volunteers were made of, and what the oppressive system of government that the British had imposed on India was made of” [ITNOW 113]
Perhaps this is an example of the tendency of losers to use clever fantasy redefinitions to turn their losses into victories, a tendency I complained about on The Picket Line .
But it’s true that India did gain its independence, though , and it’s hard to look at the historical record and not conclude that Gandhi’s campaigns made Indian independence inevitable.
And it’s also true that Indians like Jawaharlal Nehru, who was not initially a proponent of nonviolent resistance, came to have respect for the effectiveness of the technique:
We had accepted that method, the Congress had made that method its own, because of a belief in its effectiveness.
Gandhiji had placed it before the country not only as the right method but as the most effective one for our purpose… In spite of its negative name it was a dynamic method, the very opposite of a meek submission to a tyrant’s will.
It was not a coward’s refuge from action, but a brave man’s defiance of evil and national subjection.
[PVNA 87]
Would that we could say the same for the nonviolent resistance movement in the United States today.
I was happy to see this bit of news from the Associated Press today:
Actor Ben Kingsley and U.S. philanthropists unveiled an Arabic version of the film Gandhi on , hoping to bring the legendary Indian revolutionary’s message of nonviolent resistance to Palestinian towns, villages and refugee camps.
The release of the Academy Award winning film, dubbed into Arabic by 129 Palestinian actors, comes at a key moment in the Mideast conflict.
Many Palestinians are exhausted after of violence but say they have no intention of abandoning their fight for an independent state.
I’ve discussed Gandhi’s tax resistance and satyagraha theories before:
— “I have made sedition my dharma,” said Gandhi; also, nonviolent resistance in Palestine takes the form of tax resistance in Beit Sahour.
— An overview of Gandhi’s role as the commander-in-chief of the Indian National Congress.
— Gandhian nonviolence not only can be an effective technique of political force, but it has certain built-in safeguards that make it difficult to use, even inadvertently, in the service of injustice.
— The spirit of Gandhi is interviewed by a clairvoyant and telepathic tapeworm living in the digestive tract of an imaginary friend of mine.
— Could home-brewing beer be the American tax resister’s equivalent of Gandhi’s homespun cloth?
Excerpts from the Pittsburgh Sentinel
SALT RAIDING IN INDIA TO BE ENDED
Far More Serious Menace Now — Tax Resistance
GREAT ANXIETY
BOMBAY, (AP) —
In Peshawar, beset by a three-fold threat of civil resistance, wild tribesmen and communism, Britain made the outstanding move in the strategy that is advancing her arm across the map of India.
…Peshawar City itself today was quiet, as was most of the rest of India, in nearly every center of which Mahatma Gandhi’s “day of silence” was as usual made the order of .
Salt raiding came to a virtual end with ’s enmasse attack upon the Wadala depots, in which police and military charged 15,000 volunteers and 150 or more persons were injured.
There were no reports of the use of firearms.
The officers belabored the raiders with their bamboo staves.
Troops stood by but did not charge the raiders.
This kept the casualties to a minimum.
Some of the congress members were turned back, others broke thru the embattled salt zone and made off with handfuls of the contraband product.
the coming of the rainy season ended salt raids.
The raiding was succeeded by a far more serious menace, tax resistance.
To meet its eventualities, the government put forth a new regulation providing grave penalties not only for refusal to pay taxes, but for inciting to tax disobedience.
Government agents began at once to attempt tax collecting, but in most cases found the natives had departed from their lands.
The situation was viewed with great anxiety, as continued maintenance of the tax strike would seriously hamper government revenues at the end of .
Gandhi’s salt march campaign was ridiculed by some at the time for focusing on what was seen as an insignificant, unimportant tax.
One parenthetical remark inserted editorially at the end of a contemporary news report on the campaign read:
[Instead of being the “crushing burden” that it is frequently alleged to be, the salt tax, which is one of the few methods open to the Government of India to obtain money from the bulk of the native population is calculated to be equal to two fifths of 1 percent of the average amount spent on food a head.]
Another dispatch helpfully explained that there was a perfectly good reason why Indians should be prohibited from harvesting or trading their own salt — of course, this policy was only for their own good:
It is necessary that the production of salt should be highly organised and controlled by a single authority in order that there can be an equitable distribution of the supply over so extensive an area.
If Gandhi’s plan for salt production as a home industry were adopted vast and densely crowded areas where there are no local deposits of brine would have to import salt from other countries at great cost.
Other pro-British news reports at the time ridicule the salt marchers for making only tiny amounts of “by no means palatable” salt that was then seized by the authorities, ostensibly “on the grounds of public health.”
But Gandhi understood the symbolic significance of the campaign, and his opponents did as well, as the following article shows.
This comes from The Canberra Times on :
Gandhi and his followers are likely to be given little opportunity of
breaking the salt tax as part of their campaign of civil disobedience.
The Government has employed hundreds of labourers who are guarded by
police and are engaged in destroying the salt crystals which are lying on
the seashore near Danmi, the spot where Gandhi proposes to inaugurate his
campaign by gathering the salt tax [sic] without the
payment of revenue.
The police and labourers are boycotted by the villagers in the neighbourhood
and have to journey to a village ten miles away to procure food. Large forces
of police are concentrating at Julalpur where Gandhi is due to arrive in a
few days.
Importance is attached to the departure of the Sikhs to discuss with the
Viceroy the future action of the Bombay Government with regard to Gandhi.
That’s right: the government was so afraid of Gandhi’s campaign that they
employed hundreds of people to destroy naturally-occurring salt
deposits on the seashore rather than let his satyagrahi army
harvest it when they arrived.
The shunning of these official saboteurs and of the police by neighborhood
villagers is another interesting note, and shows how the march was also being
used as a rallying point to promote solidarity in the nonviolent insurrection.
And here are a couple of notes from Gandhi’s salt tax resistance campaign.
The first was carried in The Argus in :
The salt tax controversy continues.
The leader of the Democracy party in a manifesto says that it is absurd to speak of the party’s objections to the tax as purely sentimental or political.
A severe blow had been dealt at reforms by certification, and the cumulative effect of such an exercise of executive authority would render the position of the people’s representatives under the reformed constitution wholly illusory.
The president of the Liberal Association has sent a cable message to the Secretary of State for India (Viscount Peel), asking for Parliamentary intervention with the view of allaying the discontent caused by the Viceroy’s certification, stating that it has weakened the Indian Government’s prestige and the position of those who loyally supported the Government in making the reforms a success.
The Bengal extremists, by an overwhelming majority, passed a resolution proposing that non-co-operators should refuse to pay the enhanced salt tax, and requesting the All India Congress to empower the Bengal congress to order mass civil disobedience of the certification.
The second is a United Press dispatch from Bombay dated (excerpts):
A new move in which a woman will lead the followers of Mahatma Gandhi in opposition to the government was announced today in plans for fresh attacks on the Dharsana salt works.
Shortly after martial law had been established at the terrorized city of Sholapur, Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, who succeeded yesterday to the leadership Gandhi was forced by his arrest to abandon, started enlisting volunteers for the salt works raid.
Both Gandhi and his first successor, Abbas Tyabji, were arrested when they prepared to raid the Dharsana works.
Mrs. Naidu’s determination to force the policy of Gandhi to the limit was demonstrated in violations of the salt laws at Shiroda and Belgaum last night and today.
She expected to enlist about 300 volunteers.
There was also danger at Karachi where a hartal was declared in protest against sentencing of Abbas Tyabji, noted jurist, to three months in prison.
All Hindu shops and markets were closed.
Moslems were not affected.
A mass meeting was arranged for tonight after several peaceful parades had been held.
An accompanying article by UP’s Webb Miller included these notes:
Dissatisfaction with the salt tax as a result of agitation inspired by Gandhi — although the salt tax actually amounts to only a small sum per head yearly.
The followers of Gandhi, however, claim it is iniquitous because it hits the poverty stricken comparatively harder than the rich.
Salt is a vital necessity for the poor, who, with big families, must eat as much as the wealthy.
Furthermore, dissatisfaction has existed in certain districts as a result of the land tax, the only levy with which millions are familiar.
The government collects the land tax in accordance with the area in crops.
The rent production tax is often revised in accordance with alterations of the fertility and productiveness of the land.
By a colossal system of accounts, every cultivated field in India’s 500,000 villages is registered and taxed.
Revisions, or absence of revisions, was responsible for the outbreak at Bardoli, where the followers of Gandhi recently said they would not pay the tax unless Gandhi instructed them to do so.
The Indians object to the government’s payment of 30,000,000 to 40,000,000 rupees a year (about $8,500,000 to $11,500,000) in pensions to retired officers.
They also object to the fact European businesses take great sums out of the country instead of investing here.
The claim was made during these conversations that a widespread practice has come into existence, namely, shipping raw materials from India abroad and then buying products manufactured from these raw materials for sale in India.
This, the Indians complain, forces them to pay freight two ways and allows several profits.
The Indian leaders insist they must build their own industries.
One occasional tactic of tax resistance campaigns involves choosing a particular tax or portion of a tax to resist, not because that tax or that portion is particularly offensive, but because it is easier to resist or the ramifications of resistance are less frightening.
This, in theory anyway, will encourage more people to begin resisting.
Today I’ll give some examples.
The American war tax resistance movement for a long time targeted the excise tax on telephone service — both because it was a tax that had historically been instituted and raised to help fund war spending, and because it was a small and easily-resisted tax, so that people could start resisting quickly and without having to fear terrible government reprisals.
The small amounts resisted also meant that government action against any particular resister would be unlikely to be cost-effective.
War tax resisters in Denmark have a similar campaign of refusal to pay a small portion of their radio and TV tax (equivalent to the military spending percentage of the Danish budget).
Individuals pay this tax, while income taxes are withheld automatically under a pay-as-you-earn scheme, so this is a concrete way war tax resisters can resist.
Gandhi’s salt march and the salt-tax resistance campaign is now recognized as momentous, but at the time, many commentators ridiculed all of the fuss being made over a piddling little tax.
War tax resister Joanne Sheenan notes:
Gandhi’s Salt March initially involved only 80 people, but the act of picking up the salt from the sea and making their own salt in defiance of British taxed salt was revolutionary.
The power of the Salt March was that it became a massive campaign — there was something everyone could do.
Some packaged the salt, some sold it, all could refuse to buy the taxed salt and buy the alternative.
The British occupation government knew that this piddling little tax had big symbolic value.
At one point they hired hundreds of people to destroy natural salt deposits on a beach near Damni where Gandhi planned to try to harvest salt in violation of the ban.
There are periodic attempts in the American war tax resistance movement to try to get people to resist at least some tiny, symbolic part of their income taxes.
For instance:
In , the group War Tax Resistance encouraged people to withhold and redirect $10–$50 from their income taxes — a small amount because “the expense to collect the tax that is not being paid is far greater than the additional penalty imposed for the delinquent action.”
In , a set of anti-war groups tried to get people to withhold and redirect at least a single dollar from their taxes.
More recently, a “$10.40 for Peace” campaign asked people to withhold $10.40 (a sort of tribute to the IRS 1040 form used by people to file their income taxes) as “a small act of witness against war and for the rights of conscience.”
Most pathetically, a group of Quakers is now begging people to, if they are going to pay their taxes, at the very least “Pay Under Protest.”
One tactic tax resisters have used from time to time is to pack up and leave when the tax collector comes calling.
Here are some examples:
Around the time of the Dharsana salt raids in Gandhi’s independence campaign in India, the government there was also stymied by mass migrations.
Here are some news accounts from the period:
Government agents began at once to attempt tax collecting, but in most cases found the natives had departed from their lands.
The situation was viewed with great anxiety, as continued maintenance of the tax strike would seriously hamper government revenues at the end of the year.
The evaders lock their doors and flee when tax collectors appear or hide in the fields, so attachment was resorted to.
The anti-tax campaign which it was said would replace the campaign against the salt laws already has been initiated in the Bardoli district where officials are arriving to post signs warning the peasants that their lands will be forfeit if they refuse to pay the dues.
Thus far they have found the villages deserted.
All-India national congress reports say that 50,000 peasants of the Bardoli region [population ~88,000] have left their homes resolved not to pay land taxes until swaraj, or home-rule is established.
Many left their household goods, chattels, crops behind, the government confiscating and auctioning them off.
[Though another account said “The inhabitants had left, taking everything movable, including the newly harvested rice crop, household goods, and cattle.
It was discovered that the villagers had been secretly removing goods and crops by night across the border into Baroda State territory, where the Baroda villagers harboured and helped them.”]
The peasants are said to have for their slogan, “No swaraj, no revenue.”
The leaders of the movement declare the peasants do not desire to evade payment, but simply will not pay until Mahatma Gandhi is released from jail and has ordered them to pay.
The congress characterizes the peasants’ actions as “an unrivaled example of a migration movement on the part of the people who are resolved to forfeit their all in the interest of the Gandhi cause.”
There is a movement of sorts nowadays that goes by the initials “P.T.” — often said to stand for “permanent tourist,” but also “prior taxpayer,” and a handful of others.
One advocate explained:
In a nutshell, a PT merely arranges his or her paperwork in such a way that all governments consider him a tourist.
A person who is just “Passing Through.”
The advantage is that being thought of by government officials as a person who is merely “Parked Temporarily,” a PT is not subjected to taxes, military service, lawsuits, or persecution for partaking in innocent but forbidden pursuits or pleasures.
Terry Gilliam, Monty Python’s Yankee animator and director of such masterpieces as Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Brazil and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, told an interviewer he renounced his American citizenship to become a taxpatriate: “I got tired of my taxes paying for exciting little wars around the world.
Then I discovered that when I died, my wife would probably have to sell our house to pay for the taxes in America.
The fact that Bush was [in office] there made it easier.”
Jeff Knaebel left his life as an American entrepreneur to become a stateless mendicant in India in order to stop paying for American military adventures:
Having made the decision to cease filing and paying income tax, I undertook a radical reorganization of my life.
I would have to emigrate, to become a “tax exile.”
It would not be right to benefit from the facilities and protection of my country while not paying my share.
I made the decision to leave my own, my native land forever.
I would become a man without a country, separated by a vast ocean from friends, family and my young adult children.
No more would I smell the rain on high desert sagebrush, nor hear wolves howl across moonlit tundra, nor watch the Northern Lights dance in Arctic sky.
I would owe allegiance to all of humanity and to no State.
I would be the indentured servant of no gang of murderers sitting in any legislative body.
By paying no tax to any State would I finally make a farewell to arms. I would seek peace and brotherhood.
I would attempt Satyagraha, that strong adherence to truth which is love.
I would aspire to a life of Ahimsa — nonviolence — which is the active force of love.
When the tax inspector came to town during the Poujadist uprising in France in , there might be nothing left to inspect — the business district having been abandoned in anticipation of the inspector’s arrival.
One account put it this way:
The tax inspector rapped on steel curtain after steel curtain, demanding to be let in to see the books.
Nowhere did he get an answer.
When they found that even the bistros were locked, the hapless inspector and his guards gave up their mission and beat a humble retreat…
Leaving the United States for tax reasons seems to be a growing trend.
One “taxpatriate” wrote:
I sleep much better knowing I no longer fund the military-industrial-banking complex.
Anybody can get mugged, but every U.S. taxpayer is a constant patsy for the political establishment.
The rip-offs are so unthinkably big and endemic, there’s nothing an individual can do to stop them.
If you fall for the political fallacy that “the government is the people,” you end up with the faulty conclusion that America must be overrun by war-crazed, lawsuit-happy, debt-addicted criminals.
How could anybody buy this after even a moment of clear thought?
There’s certainly no resemblance to the American people I know.
These problems stem from the military-industrial-banking complex, the dark heart of the U.S. political machine.
Why continue being the stooge that supplies the money to run it?
Looking at the world with fresh, open eyes isn’t easy.
One of the great benefits of liberating yourself from the grip of the U.S. political system is that the world becomes your oyster.
You’re free to embrace places that welcome individuals who seek to live peaceful and prosperous lives.
In Sierra Leone in , collectors of a new imperial government “hut tax” found fewer huts than they expected:
The trouble in Sierra Leone has arisen by the enforcement by the Government of a tax of 5s each annum on native huts.
In many cases the huts are not worth 5s, and when the tax collectors went round in many of the people knocked down their huts and slept under trees.
The tax collectors in Mytilene, Turkey, were so rapacious that much of the rural Greek population there abandoned their farms and “emigrated to the towns and cities in the hopes of subsisting on private charity” in rather than risk losing their farms to the tax collector before harvest time.
This passive resistance was the precursor to a more active tax resistance campaign that swept Turkey starting in .
And here is an example from the Boston Evening Transcript on :
J.F. Hathaway of Somerville Says He Will Move Rather Than Pay Tax Assessed.
A long-standing controversy between James F. Hathaway of Somerville, president of the Sprague & Hathaway Company, engaged in the manufacture of portraits, and the board of assessors of that city has culminated in a statement by Mr. Hathaway regarding his attitude in the matter.
It seems that in the principal assessors taxed Mr. Hathaway for corporation stock which he was supposed to own.
Mr. Hathaway and business friends made strong efforts to induce the assessors to abate the tax.
Acting upon the advice of the city solicitor, the board refused an abatement, and turned the bill over to the city collector for collection.
Mr. Hathaway says he will remove the plant from Somerville if the collector forces payment.
It appears from the statement he has given to the press that he made the same threat in , and that on , he packed up his furniture and prepared a move from the city rather than pay a tax.
Why he did not carry out his intention he explains as follows:
“While my household goods were being loaded on a wagon in order to get them out of Somerville before , I received a message to come to the City Hall at once on important business.
When this message came over the telephone the wagon had not been at my house more than fifteen minutes.
Evidently they had someone watching my movements; they did not think I intended to move out of the city.
I went down to City Hall and fond the full board of assessors there, the city solicitor, the mayor and several others, who were probably never there at that time in the morning except by appointment.
When I arrived, they asked me what I wanted, and I said: ‘Gentlemen, this is a nice time to ask me what I want.’
They proposed that I should pay one-half the tax, which I refused to do.
Then they proposed that I pay one-third of the tax.
I said: ‘Gentlemen, I will never pay one cent of it; if any part of it is just, it is all just.’
“They were all very anxious to find some way out of the difficulty and keep me in Somerville.
The city solicitor told them then and there they had no right to abate the tax; it had been legally assessed, and there was no legal way out of it.
But in a very few minutes they told me they would drop it; they were anxious that nothing more be said about it, and desired to let the matter drop out of sight as quietly as possible; they said they would never force the collection of the tax.
The day this matter of the tax of was settled the chairman of the board of assessors brought me home in his private carriage.
On the way, he said: ‘Mr. Hathaway, I am very sorry this ever occurred, and I am glad to find some way out of it.’
I asked him how about the future, and told him that if this thing was to be repeated next year or at any future time, my goods were all on the wagon then, and I might just as well get out of Somerville immediately.
He said: ‘This taxing of foreign corporations never has come up before, and probably never will again.
I assure you that so long as I have anything to do with the assessing of the taxes in this city you will never hear from it.’ ”
Hathaway went to jail in for refusing to pay the tax, but emerged victorious, as the Somerville Board of Aldermen voted to rescind his taxes.
“He had threatened to take his business out of Somerville if this was not done,” a news account says.
And here are a couple of notes from Gandhi’s salt tax resistance campaign.
The first was carried in The Argus in :
The salt tax controversy continues.
The leader of the Democracy party in a manifesto says that it is absurd to speak of the party’s objections to the tax as purely sentimental or political.
A severe blow had been dealt at reforms by certification, and the cumulative effect of such an exercise of executive authority would render the position of the people’s representatives under the reformed constitution wholly illusory.
The president of the Liberal Association has sent a cable message to the Secretary of State for India (Viscount Peel), asking for Parliamentary intervention with the view of allaying the discontent caused by the Viceroy’s certification, stating that it has weakened the Indian Government’s prestige and the position of those who loyally supported the Government in making the reforms a success.
The Bengal extremists, by an overwhelming majority, passed a resolution proposing that non-co-operators should refuse to pay the enhanced salt tax, and requesting the All India Congress to empower the Bengal congress to order mass civil disobedience of the certification.
The second is a United Press dispatch from Bombay dated (excerpts):
A new move in which a woman will lead the followers of Mahatma Gandhi in opposition to the government was announced today in plans for fresh attacks on the Dharsana salt works.
Shortly after martial law had been established at the terrorized city of Sholapur, Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, who succeeded yesterday to the leadership Gandhi was forced by his arrest to abandon, started enlisting volunteers for the salt works raid.
Both Gandhi and his first successor, Abbas Tyabji, were arrested when they prepared to raid the Dharsana works.
Mrs. Naidu’s determination to force the policy of Gandhi to the limit was demonstrated in violations of the salt laws at Shiroda and Belgaum last night and today.
She expected to enlist about 300 volunteers.
There was also danger at Karachi where a hartal was declared in protest against sentencing of Abbas Tyabji, noted jurist, to three months in prison.
All Hindu shops and markets were closed.
Moslems were not affected.
A mass meeting was arranged for tonight after several peaceful parades had been held.
An accompanying article by UP’s Webb Miller included these notes:
Dissatisfaction with the salt tax as a result of agitation inspired by Gandhi — although the salt tax actually amounts to only a small sum per head yearly.
The followers of Gandhi, however, claim it is iniquitous because it hits the poverty stricken comparatively harder than the rich.
Salt is a vital necessity for the poor, who, with big families, must eat as much as the wealthy.
Furthermore, dissatisfaction has existed in certain districts as a result of the land tax, the only levy with which millions are familiar.
The government collects the land tax in accordance with the area in crops.
The rent production tax is often revised in accordance with alterations of the fertility and productiveness of the land.
By a colossal system of accounts, every cultivated field in India’s 500,000 villages is registered and taxed.
Revisions, or absence of revisions, was responsible for the outbreak at Bardoli, where the followers of Gandhi recently said they would not pay the tax unless Gandhi instructed them to do so.
The Indians object to the government’s payment of 30,000,000 to 40,000,000 rupees a year (about $8,500,000 to $11,500,000) in pensions to retired officers.
They also object to the fact European businesses take great sums out of the country instead of investing here.
The claim was made during these conversations that a widespread practice has come into existence, namely, shipping raw materials from India abroad and then buying products manufactured from these raw materials for sale in India.
This, the Indians complain, forces them to pay freight two ways and allows several profits.
The Indian leaders insist they must build their own industries.
Today I’ll continue our look at the violent side of tax resistance campaigns by giving some examples of attacks on police and soldiers when they attempt to enforce tax laws or to take reprisals against resisters.
, a crowd of people on the Greek island of Hydra attacked local police after they detained a restauranteur for tax evasion:
[T]he inspectors wanted to transport the restaurant owner to Athens, an hour’s ride away by fast boat.
They were set upon by a local crowd, which also attacked the boat’s crew.
The police, along with the restaurant owner, had to retreat to the island’s police station, which was besieged until riot police arrived .
Locals cut off the station’s electricity and water supplies.
a police bus on fire in Zhili, China
In , protesters in China “overturned police cars and blocked roads over plans to more strictly enforce payment of taxes.”
In another mob of tax protesters in China destroyed ten police vehicles including an armored car.
There were battles between police and protesters during the Poll Tax rebellion in the Thatcher years.
In Bristol, the crowd charged the police and rescued arrested demonstrators.
“One police officer was kicked unconscious when he tried to make an arrest.
Six more were dragged out of their van.”
In London, “As the police baton-charged the crowd… they were resisted by a hail of bricks, bottles, and stones.”
Police brutality turned a peaceful demonstration into a riot in Trafalgar Square.
“Mounted riot police baton-charged the crowd.
The crowd, angered by this violent provocation, retaliated by throwing sticks, banner poles, bottles — anything they could find.
Young people, armed only with placards, fought hand to hand with police.
… As the missiles began to rain down the police retreated:
…Pedestrian isles were being torn up and real serious lumps of concrete being thrown at the romper-suited police.
I found myself with rock in hand.
The first I threw was aimed at a group of police.
I watched it bounce off a shield.
My second rock was more specifically aimed at their front line.
Again, it was well-deflected.
I saw a rock strike a policeman’s visor and he didn’t even blink.
The police were shielding themselves from the missiles raining down, but they were vulnerable to rocks aimed at their legs and midriffs.
The police were taking a battering.
Every now and then a policeman would crumple to his knees and the crowd would roar.”
More than 100 police officers would be treated for injuries sustained during the riot.
A spokesman for the police said, “I have never seen such sustained and savage violence used directly against the police.”
During the Poujadist tax rebellion in France in , “unabashed Poujade vigilantes went right on chasing tax collectors down the roads, mobbing police and defying troops assigned to escort them.”
At the tail end of the Dharsana Salt Raid, some Indian nationalist sympathizers, disregarding Gandhi’s guidelines and “abandoning, it was said, all pretenses at non-violence, stoned guards and police.
Five police and three excisemen were injured by the pebbles.
Six police who went to the rescue of some hardly pressed excisemen were themselves surrounded by the mob and obliged to retire.”
In Spain in , when guardsmen tried to disperse protesters angry at the arrest of a tax resisting cattleman, the crowd fought back — “two persons were killed and five wounded.
Among the latter is a Sergeant of the Civil Guard.”
After the Russian duma-in-exile issued a tax resistance manifesto, the government said that if people refused to pay taxes, it would send in troops who would show no mercy.
“Without waiting for soldiers to put the threat of the government into execustion the peasants have inaugurated a campaign of guerrilla warfare against the troops already in the province.
… Within the last few days a number of military sentinels have been shot down in ambush or attacked by the peasants.”
In , the military were called in to Guerrero, Mexico, to put down a tax rebellion.
Instead, the rebels defeated the troops and took General Ranjel prisoner.
“Half-breeds” (people of mixed European immigrant and Native American parentage) in the Dakota Territory refused to pay taxes in .
When the Sheriff tried to collect, “the half-breeds assembled from all directions, and pressing about the Sheriff and his one man they forced him to surrender his well-earned pittance of taxes … and say they will resist to the last man.
Sheriff Flynn has been notified that he will be shot on sight if he again makes a similar attempt.”
“When a deputy sheriff went to make seizures” against Irish settlers in Canada who were resisting taxes in , “the residents threatened to string him to the nearest tree.
Finally, they compelled him to eat the writs he had, and then gave him a limited time to get out of the township.”
A sheriff trying to enforce the “foreign miners tax” in California “in attempting to compel the foreigners to yield, was killed by them, and one or two of his posse wounded.”
The Rebecca Rioters in Wales targeted the constables who tried to stop or investigate the riots, or to conduct tax seizures:
Two or three hundred Rebeccaites met at a Pontyberem village, and while there “made some special constables promise not to serve, and took away their staves.”
“They then attacked the house of the blacksmith, who had previously said he would face fifteen of the best Rebecca boys, and who also had been sworn in as a special constable; according to his own statements he was a man devoid of fear.
The smith — fearless man of Vulcan — had, however, departed; but smash! went in his door and windows, and his deserted smithy was practically destroyed.”
“At the outset of these proceedings the toll-man ‘Dick’ contrived, by running over ditch and dell, to warn a parish constable, one Evan Thomas, otherwise ‘The Porthyrhyd Lion,’ of his own mishap, as well as the peril to which he thought him exposed, Evan being somewhat unpopular in the neighbourhood.
On receiving this hint, away bolted ‘Ianto,’ scampering over the ditches and fields until he found a cow-house where he lay concealed in anxious suspense the remainder of the night.
Notwithstanding the retreat of ‘Ianto,’ about seventy of the tribe visited his domicile, smashed in his windows and doors, destroyed his shelf and dresser, and all his crockery, as well as the spokes of a new cart, put a cheese on the fire, cut down some of the trees in the garden, and then simultaneously raised the cry, ‘Alas! poor Ianto!’
… Evan the constable… if found, was to have his ears cut off.”
“These riotous proceedings caused considerable excitement and alarm… The different persons in the neighbourhood who were sworn in as special constables… gave up their staves, with the determination of refusing on any future occasions to interfere with the movements of Rebecca or the protection of the toll-house.”
“John Evans and John Lewis, two Sheriff’s officers from Carmarthen, were sent… to make a distress on the goods and chattels of William Philipp… They were attacked by about twenty-five of the ’Beccas, and beaten in a dreadful manner.… John Evans was compelled to go on his knees before them, and put the distresses and authority to distrain in the fire.
He was then made to take his oath on the Bible, which one of them put in his hands, that he would never again enter the premises to make another distress.
He was compelled to make use of the following words: ‘As the Lord liveth, and my soul liveth, I will never come here to make any distress again.’
After taking the oath, he was set free, and the two bailiffs returned to town.”
William Chambers, who led a police unit that wounded and arrested some Rebeccaites, was targeted multiple times.
On one occasion, a stack of his corn was burned, on another, a stack of straw met the torch.
Later his farm and outbuildings were all engulfed in flames.
A horse of his that had been rescued from another of his farms as it burned down was later shot.
This panel from the Carrickshock memorial depicts an attack on British troops during the Irish Tithe War.
During the Tithe War in Ireland, British troops killed 18 resisters who were trying to reclaim distrained livestock.
In return, the resisters killed 18 troops in an ambush:
A number of writs against defaulters were issued by the Court of Exchequer, and intrusted to the care of process-servers, who, guarded by a strong force, proceeded on their mission with secrecy and despatch.
Bonfires along the surrounding hills, however, and shrill whistles through the dell, soon convinced them that the people were not unprepared for hostile visitors.
But the yeomanry pushed boldly on: their bayonets were sharp, their ball-cartridge inexhaustible, their hearts dauntless.
Suddenly an immense mass of peasantry, armed with scythes and pitchforks, poured down upon them — a terrible struggle ensured, and in a few moments eighteen police, including the commanding-officer, lay dead.
The remainder fled, marking the course of their retreat by their blood… In the mêlée, Captain Leyne, a Waterloo veteran, narrowly escaped.
A coroner’s jury pronounced “Wilful murder.”
Large Government rewards were offered, but failed to produce a single conviction.
In Issoudun, France in , a general who was sent to try to quell a tax rebellion there “entered the town only through a capitulation; the moment he reached the Hôtel-de-Ville a man of the Faubourg de Rome put his pruning-hook around his neck, exclaiming, ‘No more clerks where there is nothing to do!’ ”
During the Fries Rebellion in the early United States, “it came to the knowledge of the authorities that several of the magistrates themselves were disaffected, and others were prevented doing their duty through fear of injury.”
During the French Revolution, when the people of Peronne and Ham got wind that an order had been issued to rebuild destroyed toll-houses, they destroyed the soldiers’ barracks.
In another case: “M. de Sauzay, commandant of the ‘Royal Roussillon,’ who was bold enough to save the [tax] clerks, is menaced, and for this misdeed he barely escapes being hung himself.
When the municipal body is called upon to interpose and employ force, it replies that ‘for so small a matter, it is not worth while to compromise the lives of the citizens,’ and the regular troops sent to the Hôtel-de-Ville are ordered by the people not to go except with the butt-ends of their muskets in the air.”
Today I’m going to cover another tactic in the same ballpark: the use of
smuggling to get consumer goods to market while evading a tax or a
government-enforced monopoly. Smuggling can serve a tax resistance movement in
multiple ways:
Smuggling can deprive the government of revenue.
Smuggling can raise money for resistance activities.
Smuggling can forge bonds between a variety of people in a geographically
distributed, semi-organized underground, in a way that can later be
capitalized on for resistance activity.
Here are some examples of smuggling being used in the course of tax resistance
campaigns:
In the years leading up to the American Revolution, “the restrictions on
imports from the West Indies were systematically and persistently ignored,
producing a condition of smuggling so universal and well-nigh respectable
as to raise the question whether the operations of the merchants could
properly be designated by that term.”
Indeed the economy of the American colonies relied on smuggling to such an
extent that the government’s threat to crack down on the evasion of duties
on imported molasses did more to fan the flames of revolution than any of
its other saber-rattling. Revolutionary John Adams wrote later:
I know not why we should blush to confess that molasses was an essential
ingredient in American independence. Many great events have proceeded
from much smaller causes.
The burning of
the Gaspée — a ship that the government was
using to track down smugglers — in
ratcheted up the tension between the colonists and Mother England soon
before the Revolutionary War broke out.
The U.S.
government tried to defeat the Whiskey Rebellion by purchasing as much
taxed whiskey as it could get its hands on (ostensibly as requisitions
for the Army) while at the same time trying to interrupt the black market
for untaxed whiskey by seizing what they could find of it. This didn’t
work as planned, as the rebels shifted to smuggling their goods out of
the state, “to the territory northwest of the Ohio [river],” where the tax
law did not apply.
A Colombian anarchist recently published a guide to
“Contraband as a Strategy of Tax Avoidance”
to help potential tax resisters in countries where a value-added or sales
tax is the primary funder of the national treasury.
Gandhi’s salt march and salt raids promoted the harvesting, distribution,
and sale of salt illegally produced outside of the approved government
monopoly.
One tactic that has been used from time to time by tax resisters and tax resistance campaigns is to attempt to make tax enforcement, or government reprisals against tax resisters, costly for the government — for example by clogging the jails or the court system.
If accomplished successfully, this can force the government into a checkmate, where if it fails to take action it loses, but if it takes action it loses.
But by forcing resisters to throw themselves onto the gears of the machine, this tactic can be costly to them as well, and so this tactic can turn into a game of chicken (or a war of attrition).
Here are a handful of examples:
John Brown Smith was a British citizen living in Massachusetts.
Not, as an alien, being entitled to vote, he decided to test the American “no taxation without representation” motto, and stopped paying his $2 poll tax.
In the town threw him in jail.
There he stayed… for almost a year!
The town had to pay about $1.75 a week just to feed him.
The question of martyrdom in this case hinges on the board bill, for which the Town of Belchertown is liable.
Some of the frugal tax-payers of Belchertown object to being assessed for their proportion of Smith’s weekly board bill.
They think that they are the real martyrs, since they maintain in idleness a man who will nto pay a poll-tax, the proceeds of which would scarcely suffice to pay the cost of maintaining him one week in Northampton Jail.
Some nobler spirits, however, express their willingness to pay their share of the cost of Smith’s prison fare until the crack of doom, if Smith should hold out so long, in order that the majesty of the law shall be vindicated.
Smith, on his part, exultingly declares that he is better housed and fed than a majority of the voters of Belchertown who are paying his board.
This aspect of the case detracts somewhat from the heroism of the martyr to the poll-tax.
Nevertheless, as Smith adds that he would rather spend the rest of his days in jail than give up the principle for which he is contending, we may concede that he is a real hero, unaffected by the mercenary considerations of his board bill.
Smith was eventually released when someone came forward to pay his tax and fines (a total of $5.62) for him (leaving the government about $75 behind on the deal).
J.J. Keon refused to pay his poll tax in Grafton, Illinois, in :
J.J. Keon, a Socialist of this city, is in the city jail, having the time of his life, so he says, because he is forcing the city to spend $125 to punish him for failure to pay a poll tax of $1.50… He says he finds nothing in the state constitution which makes a poll tax legal, so he insists that the city keep him in jail for six months, which is the longest term possible for his “offense.”
He believes that it will not alter his principle and that it may make the city tired of forcing its male population to pay a poll tax.
“You’re losing $4.50 a day [Keon’s usual salary] while you are in jail,” pleaded the mayor.
“In six months that will amount to more than $500.”
“Money is nothing to me when compared with a principle,” replied Keon.
“And let’s see what I am costing the city.
Meals, 150 days, at sixty cents a day, $108; night watchman, $5; chicken fence wire, $2; miscellaneous, $10. Total, $125. The entire poll taxes for the year are only $325.…”
You may remember the newspaper articles about Maurice McCrackin I posted , in which he refused to cooperate at his tax resistance trial — to the point even of having to be carried or wheeled into the courtroom.
headline from the Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania Sunday Independent
Resisters to an unpopular wage tax in Pennsylvania in discovered that if they refused to pay the tax entirely, the government could quickly hit them with fines or jail time… but if they paid some minimal fraction of the taxes due, the government couldn’t move against them without doing a complicated assessment first to determine how much extra was owed.
This could be a long and dreary legal procedure for a school district or council, especially if there is more than one such delinquent.
Therefore, many residents are beating the wage tax levy by simply clunking a single coin on the tax collector’s desk.
Clogging the courts was an important tactic of the campaign to resist Thatcher’s Poll Tax.
Danny Burns writes:
Bristol City Council issues summonses to 120,000 people, Leeds summoned 110,000 and the numbers in almost all other big cities were comparable.
In order to get through this number of cases, councils had to hope that defendants wouldn’t turn up.…
The strategy of the Anti-Poll Tax Unions was to make sure that as many people as possible came to court.
In law everyone had a right to have their case heard individually.
The calculation was that even if only a small percentage of people had their cases heard, the courts would be blocked for years.
Initially, neither the councils nor the courts took the judicial procedure seriously because they didn’t expect anyone to turn up… South Tyndale Council summoned 3,500 to appear on two afternoons.
A total of five hours was allocated to hear all these cases — an average of four secons per hearing.
When people heard this they were furious, because it was obvious that both the council and the courts saw the process as rubber stamping exercise.…
The Anti-Poll Tax Unions publicised the strategy to block the courts, with leaflets and posters and articles in the local newspapers.
Mass demonstrations were called for the first day of the hearings, and in some areas the courts were brought to a standstill.
In Warrington on , 1,000 people took over the court and all the cases were postponed.
Similar events took place in Southwark:
1,500 people, mostly women and children, turned up at Southwark court and occupied the building.
It was absolute chaos, the courts couldn’t handle the numbers.
The police were stopping people from coming into their own court cases.
The crowds didn’t move until the court declared all 5,000 cases adjourned.
…People were given ideas about how they might disrupt or delay the court proceedings.
These included simple things, like asking for a glass of water because their throat was dry, demanding to see the identity cards of everyone present in court, to fainting in court or arranging for fire alarms to go off.
People were told to demand their rights to see and read every document which was produced as evidence against them.
They were also given briefings on the basic technical arguments.
…Throughout England and Wales over a thousand people were trained to do court support work and could quote the relevant legislation.
Experience showed that the most effective way of wasting time, for those who were not familiar with the law, was to relate direct experiences of hardship.
People talking in their own language about their own circumstances were much harder for the magistrates to dismiss than legal technicians.
Many people made political speeches which lasted for as long as ten minutes, others outlined their financial circumstances.
They all took up valuable time, and sometimes made a powerful and moving impact on the public gallery.
Using the government’s own defenses against it can be a powerful strategy.
And I’ve even got an example in my archives of when the government managed to foil nonviolent tax resisters by using their own tactics against them.
During the Salt Raids in the Indian independence campaign, a group of policemen blockaded the road in front of an assembly of salt raiders, and then sent another group to cut off their escape route.
Then, rather than attacking the raiders, the police used satyagraha tactics to force a standoff:
“You cannot proceed.” the superintendent informed Mrs. [Sarojini] Naidu.
“We will not go back,” the poetess and leader replied.
“We will stay here.”
“We are going to stay here, too, and offer Satyagraha ourselves as long as you stay,” the superintendent said, ordering his men to stand their ground.
They parleyed for a short time and then Mrs. Naidu ordered a chair brought from a nearby house.
She sat down and wrote letters and talked jovially with her friends.
Her followers squatted on the ground nearby, many of them engaged in spinning cloth.
Beginning on , The Spectator published a few articles that touched on tax resistance in the Indian independence struggle.
Here are some excerpts from these articles.
First, from the issue (though the dispatch itself is dated ), the dismissive and condescending voice of colonial orthodoxy speaking from within the Bombay bubble:
Has the world for centuries witnessed anything comparable to what is occurring in India to-day?
From his Ashram at Ahmedabad, where eighty devoted followers submit themselves to a discipline so iron that none can write a letter without his permission, Mr. Gandhi has issued his edict to the Viceroy, demanding that certain things shall be immediately done, under pain of challenge to all authority in the country.
Here is a manifestation of a truth often forgotten in England — that whilst some Indians speak in terms of democracy, all think in the language of autocracy.
Mr. Gandhi speaks for none but himself.
He has secured complete immunity, even from such authority as the National Congress may wield.
His edict needs only the stroke of the Vermilion Pencil and the words — fully intended — Tremble and Obey, to carry us back to the most despotic days of the Manchu Emperors.
The Edict was borne to Delhi by a young Oxford graduate called Reynolds, of whom none heard before yesterday.
He has gone in a Gandhi cap and cotton homespun; picture the Carpenter from Alice in Wonderland with his box cap and clad in “shorts,” and you have the scene.
What is in this edict?
It is a long tirade against “the curse” of British Rule, with not a word of the peace it wrought; of the one and sixpenny ratio, of which Mr. Gandhi knows no more than of Chinese metaphysics; of the land revenue, centuries old, and cast on an equitable basis in Lord Curzon’s days; and of The Salt Tax, which averages five annas per head yearly.
There is not one concrete proposal not a single justification for the revolution which Mr. Gandhi intends to inaugurate.
The scene of action will probably be the coast of Surat; where the British Factors had their first settlement; the objective will probably be to encourage the villagers to make salt from sea water and thereby to break the law under which the Salt Tax is collected.
Many young folk will go to gaol, and then the movement will peter out.
That is to imagine the most favourable situation.
In less fortunate circumstances there will be riot and bloodshed, strikes and disturbances, from which many innocent people will suffer.
What does India think of this?
To that inquiry none but the very ignorant would attempt a dogmatic answer.
India is not Europe; the Hindu mind has little in common with the West.
Most of the Indians with whom you come in contact say that Mr. Gandhi must completely fail; they think that the land wants peace and quiet in order to recover from the industrial depression and prepare for the Free Conference which will consider the report of The Simon Commission.
In short, they regard Mr. Gandhi as an annoying megalomaniac, who is disturbing men’s minds without the possibility of success, particularly the minds of the young men, so apt to be swept by gusts of emotion.
But that is not the whole truth.
The Indian, and particularly the Hindu, sees nothing inappropriate, but rather a reversion to tradition, in the individual challenging the State.
Then, remember always that the strongest emotion in India to-day is the emotional surge towards Swaraj, expressed in the yearning for independence — an unreasoning emotion, unchastened by knowledge of the principles of constitutional growth or experience, but not less strong for that.
Even those who differ markedly from Mr. Gandhi, who see the perils of the course on which he has embarked, are not without a hidden sympathy for an Indian who deliberately throws down the gauntlet to the British Raj.
This afternoon it was my good fortune to fall into intimate talk with a wise Indian, long prominent in the public life, who has held high office.
He dwelt on the extraordinary difficulties of the Government of India.
“The Administration,” he said, “stands in the eyes of the people chiefly as the tax-gatherer.
The Government officials seen by the villager are the tax-gatherer and the policeman; in addition to the dues they collect there are the petty exactions of the Native subordinates.
In England if you do not like the Government of the day you can turn it out through the ballot-box; you have to pay the same taxes under the new.
Government, but you have the satisfaction of venting your displeasure.
Here there is no such relief.
Then every evening, when work is done, the rural folk gather round the village banyan tree, and the schoolmaster reads from one of the Extremist newspapers vehement denunciations of the ‘Foreign Government,’ to which all ills, real and imaginary, are attributed.
My wonder is not that the Government is unpopular, but that it is as well liked as it is.”
The 18 April issue included another dispatch, presumably from the same correspondent, dated .
It is another desperate attempt to ridicule, dismiss, and downplay the impact of Gandhi’s movement, and reminds us that the role of journalism has long been to tell us what we want to hear as though it also happened to be true:
My knowledge of and intimate acquaintance with Mr. Gandhi goes back many years.
I recall the days during and immediately after the War when we worked in complete harmony; when he used to sit in my office, and in his own words “pour out his soul.”
He was then an eminently reasonable man.
At the end of these long discussions the feeling uppermost in my mind was the intense desire to agree with him, though that was impossible.
Since we parted company when he launched on non-co-operation, I have been sorely baffled.
Is he the sincere, simple-minded gentleman that I should still like to think him, or is he, as my Indian friends tell me, an ingenious, not to say cunning, politician?
Perusal of the uncensored reports of the speeches he has been making in the Kaira district on his pilgrimage to the sea to violate the Salt Laws removes the last doubt.
They reveal either the revolutionary politician or a monomaniac who is a danger to the State.
Consider the nature of these speeches, made to people who are politically ignorant, made at a time when India is so riven by militant communalism that no District Magistrate can rest secure against the peril of an émeute.
Regardless of facts which show that by every test which can be applied to modern societies India has made immense progress in all that indicates national growth, he declares that British rule has brought about the moral, material, cultural, and spiritual ruination of the land: “I have made it my religion to destroy this government as early as I can do it.
I pray God day and night that this system of Government may be destroyed once and for all.
I appeal to you to make it your dharma to destroy this satanic government… this Government is so Monstrous that it is a sin to allow it to exist any longer.”
And so on — one long unqualified hymn of hate.
And this in a programme launched in the name of love and non-violence.
Doubt is no longer permissible.
If there is a spark of sincerity left in Mr. Gandhi — if he really believes that language of this character can be used to untutored villagers without producing violent reactions of the most virulent character — he is no longer sane.
The kindest act towards him and to the country is to put him under the restraint the law imposes on dangerous lunatics.
The grave menace which lurks in this propaganda is its complete nihilism.
Nowhere in his writings or speeches can you find a trace of constructive imagination.
When Mr. Gandhi is tackled on the subject of the system of government he would establish in place of that which exists, he takes refuge in the excuse that this is the business of the politician.
That is not simplicity; it is cunning, because he knows full well that the moment the stage of construction emerges immense problems arise.
That is illustrated by the unbridgeable differences that stamp the report of the Indian Committee which was appointed to co-operate with the Simon Commission.
His doctrine is one of political anarchy, and that in a land beset with religious, racial, and communal feuds.
Were the issue less serious, there would be an element of grim humour in the mountain of hate he seeks to rear and the significant duty on which it is based.
The actual incidence of the Salt Tax is a little less than sixpence per head of the population.
In the history of civilization is there a more grotesque disproportion between cause and effect?
What has induced this development of splenetic hate in the man who at the Lahore Congress fought a losing battle with the forces of youthful revolution?
Already Mr. Gandhi has found that his followers are too few.
He has had to lower the standards for admission into the ranks of volunteers and to agree to a simplified form of pledge.
The volunteer now agrees to accept the creed of the National Congress — “the attainment of Purna Swarajya (complete independence) by the people of India by all peaceful and legitimate means”; to express his willingness to suffer imprisonment and to refuse if he is sent to jail to seek any monetary help for his family from the Congress funds.
Unlike the old pledges, this simplified form makes no mention of the wearing of khaddar, of the promotion of communal unity and the removal of the stain of untouchability.
For years Mr. Gandhi has written as though each of these aims was a cardinal factor of his political philosophy.
Is it possible that the man who has told no one what is to be done when he has won complete independence for India is ready to sacrifice his principles merely to win more recruits for his new campaign?
It was at one time possible to understand Mr. Gandhi’s attitude to the political future of India.
But now it appears that Mr. Gandhi advocates anarchy because he is himself suffering from a complete anarchy of thought.
The movement will probably soon cease to be non-violent.
For this Mr. Gandhi’s lack of prescience is to blame.
The All-India Congress Committee is ready to act as soon as Mr. Gandhi manufactures salt at Dandi.
The breaking of the Salt Act is to be nothing more than a ritual, and Mr. Gandhi no more than a master of ceremonies.
The future of the movement belongs not to Mr. Gandhi but to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and the younger men who control the Indian National Congress, if the Congress can be said to be controlled at all.
They have made preparations in various parts of the country.
Congress supporters in Bombay propose to manufacture salt at Juhu, “the Brighton of Bombay.”
The proceedings will bring thousands to Juhu; and Bombay, which has had more than its share of communal riots and industrial discontent within the last two years, does not like the new menace.
Mr. Gandhi is old and far from well.
He refuses to return to the Ashram until he has won the war with the “Satanic” Government.
He will die or be arrested.
No one knows what gesture he will make when the movement comes into the control of revolutionaries fed on pamphlets from Moscow and when even the pretense of non-violence is given up.
What an atmosphere in which to launch the report of the Simon Commission!
Sir John and his colleagues have kept their counsel well; none has an inkling of the tenor of their proposals.
But this careful secrecy does not affect the realities of the situation.
With the Congress directly committed to revolution, and the Indian Liberals outbidding the Congress by demanding almost immediate Dominion status, the issue is fast clarifying itself.
There seem to me to be only two alternatives — everything or nothing.
Either Parliament must face the tremendous risks involved in virtual responsible government or dig its toes in and maintain the strong central government which must be predominantly British.
Halting between these two will induce nothing but failure and confusion.
The “Simon Commission” was Britain’s attempt to mollify Indian protests by setting up a committee to study the grievances and make recommendations for reform.
Independence-minded Indians were largely unimpressed with the idea of a reform of their country’s Constitution as decided upon by a commission of seven British parliamentarians, and had been dismissive of the commission from the start.
The news from India is still grave, but better than might have been expected.
On , Mr. Gandhi was arrested in his camp at Jalalpur.
Receiving every consideration; he was removed by train, and then in a car with the blinds drawn, to Poona, where under an ancient regulation — issued by the East India Company in — he is being detained “during the Government’s pleasure.”
The Governor of Bombay has thus hit upon an ingenious way of avoiding the clamorous demonstrations which would have attended a political trial, and Mr. Gandhi’s treatment as a guest rather than as a prisoner should atone for a revival of the raison d’état.
In a Press note the Bombay Government charges Mr. Gandhi with “incitement to withhold payment of land revenue” and with having threatened to raid salt which was the property of salt manufacturers.
We must congratulate the Government of India on a forbearance which is duly appreciated throughout the world, but which also confers on the Government a certain tactical advantage.
The careful plans of the Congress leaders for a campaign of resistance to succeed the arrest of the Mahatma are in disarray, since several of the organizers are already under restraint and out of mischief.
The Government’s arrangements were much the better.
History didn’t quite play out in the way the author suggested it should.
Indians didn’t shrug their shoulders at Gandhi’s “treatment as a guest” but, more realistically, were infuriated at his arrest and detention without trial.
The Dharasana salt raids continued under new leadership, and when those leaders were arrested, new ones took their places.
Salt raiders who peacefully submitted to savage beatings by soldiers guarding the salt depots became the face of the Indian independence movement in the international press, and helped to strengthen and radicalize the Indian independence movement.
A year after his imprisonment, Gandhi would be negotiating on behalf of the Indian independence movement in London.
The issue contained an article that began “The purpose of this page is to ventilate that moderate Indian opinion which, recognizing all the difficulties, yet believes in the continued association of Great Britain and India within the loose framework of the British Commonwealth of Nations” — which shows how far the goalposts had moved by that time.
That article praised Gandhi as a moderate and even “a conservative by nature” and urged the government to get out in front of him by enacting some inevitable reforms by fiat.
Thousands of old newsreels from the British Pathé archives have been posted to YouTube.
Here are a handful that show some rare motion picture footage of tax resistance actions of the past:
The nicest way of being Arrested
“Tired of waiting — women councillors arrange by telephone with Sheriffs Officer to be taken to prison altogether at 3 o’clock!”
This was part of the Poplar Rates Rebellion of (silent):
Les obsèques des ouvriers de l’usine Krupp…
Footage of the funerals of (and commemorative parade for) of Krupp factory workers killed during the strikes of the Ruhrkampf in (silent):
Footage of Gandhi
Here’s some footage released in soon after his imprisonment for sedition.
It shows him addressing an outdoor Indian National Congress meeting (silent):
This comes from , at the time of the Salt March, and shows Gandhi addressing a crowd and large groups of people in “Gandhi caps” walking along with him (silent):
Rideaux Baissés et Portes Closes
Parisian shopkeepers and businesses shut down one afternoon in in a hartal to protest against new taxes (silent):
Footage of Irish Blue Shirts
This comes from a point in when the quasi-fascist Blue Shirt party had launched a tax strike.
One person was killed by police during an attempt to stop a tax auction of seized cattle, and this newsreel shows footage of the funeral (silent):
Tax & Taxis!
Parisian taxi drivers blockade the streets outside the Chamber of Deputies in a tax protest:
Farmers Protest
Belgian farmers drive their tractors into the provincial capital in to protest a new tax, and a pitchfork-waving, paving-stone-throwing, tire-burning riot ensues:
Footage of a large meeting with Pierre Poujade speaking
From , by which time Poujade was trying to transform his regional tax protest into a national political party (silent):
Some tax resistance news from here and there:
The Spanish war tax resistance movement has issued its annual report on war tax resistance in Spain which includes the number of resisters who registered with the campaign, how many euros total they resisted, and where they redirected their money.
The number of objectors has dropped somewhat from totals, which the group suggests is probably from two causes: underreporting by resisters and the government’s insistence that people file electronically, which discourages some resisters who do not know how to register their resistance using the filing software.
They break the numbers down by region, too, which may help them figure out where to concentrate more of their outreach in the coming year.
Around , a flurry of
articles began to appear in the English-language press about the possibility of
a tax resistance campaign in India in service of the nationalist independence
campaign there. Here are some examples.
From the
Devon and Exeter Gazette:
Indian Boycott.
Passive Resistance Projected.
The All-India Congress Council, following the failure of the talk between the
Viceroy and Congress leaders, has drafted a resolution declaring that Swaraj,
in the Congress creed, shall mean complete independence. As a preliminary step
towards organising the campaign for independence, the resolution declares a
complete boycott of the Central and Provincial Legislatures, and calls upon
Congressmen to abstain from participating, directly or indirectly, in future
elections, and upon present members of the Legislature to tender their
resignations. It also authorises the All-India Congress Committee, whenever it
deems fit, to launch a programme of civil disobedience, including non-payment
of taxes.
The resolution will come immediately before the Congress for consideration.
The Bardoli tax
strike had taken place the previous year and had proven the power of the
tactic for wresting concessions from the government.
Lord Irwin, Viceroy of India
under the British imperial government, had been negotiating with the Indian
National Congress, but those negotiations collapsed on
.
Here’s another report, from the Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail:
The outlook in India has taken a turn for the worse. The Working Committee of
the All-India National Congress has drafted an extreme resolution rejecting
the round table conference proposed by the Viceroy. The resolution advocates
complete independence and the Dominion status scheme is dropped. The Committee
proposes to boycott the Central and Provincial Legislatures from which
Congressmen will be asked to resign. The Congress Committee seeks power to
launch at any moment a programme of passive resistance including the
non-payment of taxes. Possibly the majority of Congress do not accept these
views but the general feeling in India appears to be that the rank and file
will drop into line with the leaders.
And here’s how the Albuquerque Journal reported
the news (via a United Press wire report):
Revolt Talk in India Growing; 80,000 Gather to Take Action
Sunday May See, at Lahore, Declaration of Independence From the Rule of
Great Britain
Refuse to Pay Tax; Passive Resistance
That Is Suggestion of Mahatma Ghandi [sic]; But Hot Heads
Want to Proclaim Open Warfare
Lahore, India,
(UP) — Eighty
thousand Indians, about to proclaim their country free and independent of
Great Britain, jostled and fought their way to the meeting place of the Indian
national congress . The declaration
of independence, which will be followed by refusal to pay taxes, participate
in the legislative assembly under British rule, and by a general policy of
passive resistance, probably will be introduced at the first plenary session
.
The weather was bitterly cold, but the delegates, inspired by their religious
beliefs, suffered willingly. Many delegates from the Punjab were observed to
had [sic] added a warm coat — obviously made in England — to
their turbans and wide trousers. However, many from the south, thinly clad,
suffered intensely, in compliance with the boycott against foreign cloth
ordered by Mahatma Gandhi.
The ascetic and spiritual leader of the hopes and aspirations of millions of
Indians added merely a strip of cloth across the shoulders to his loin cloth.
Talk of Revolt
While Gandhi is opposed to violence and has consistently urged an attitude of
merely passive resistance, hot heads in the convention muttered of revolt.
At ’s session of the subjects
committee,
N.C.
Kelkar of Bombay led the opposition to Gandhi’s resolution proclaiming
the policy of the congress. Kelkar moved an amendment urging the president of
the congress, Jawaharlal Nehru, to call another convention of all parties,
similar to the one which framed the famous Nehru report, before finally
changing the creed of the congress.
The first open rupture came , when
Subhas Chandra
Bose, of Bengal, resigned from the working committee and walked out with
[24?] followers. His action was in protest against a ruling [made?] by
Motilal Nehru (the
elder) in the Bengal election dispute, which took control of the party in
Bengal from Bose.
From the
Devon and Exeter Gazette:
Indian Trouble Launched.
Congress Adopts Gandhi Resolution.
Passive Resistance.
Lahore,
. Mr. Gandhi’s resolution
was adopted by the All-India Congress
by an overwhelming majority.
The resolution expresses appreciation of the efforts of the Viceroy towards a
peaceful settlement of the National movement; declares that no good purpose
would be served by attending a round-table conference; declares that Congress
shall in future mean complete independence; calls for a complete boycott of
the Central and Provincial Legislatures; calls for present members to tender
their resignations; and authorises the All-India Congress Committee to launch
a programme of civil disobedience, including non-payment of taxes. — Reuter
The edition of the paper
suggested that the campaign hadn’t gotten off to a very good start:
Indian Passive Resisters.
A Poor Start.
Calcutta,
. The non-tax movement
started in Bandabila has practically collapsed. Its leader has been further
charged with attempted murder in connexion with an assault on a collecting
agent. — Reuter
The following report, from the Western Morning News and Mercury
concerns an action that predated the Congress resolution and was a spontaneous,
grassroots satyagraha that gained Gandhi’s support after it was
launched. It seems to have been about local grievances rather than about the
independence struggle:
Farmers Satisfied
End of Forced Labour Dispute in India
Bombay,
. Following the settlement of
the dispute at Khakharechi, a village in Kathiawar, those taking part in the
“civil disobedience” campaign have resolved to cease further activities with
regard to the dispute.
The leader of the local farmers, who was arrested for his part in the
resistance to the system of “forced labour” and certain taxes which were
thought to be unjust, has now been released, and declares that the farmers are
quite satisfied with the settlement.
When the passive resistance campaign began Mr. Gandhi expressed his approval
of it. — Reuter.
The cherry on top of this campaign would be Gandhi’s famous salt march. The
following report, from the
Yorkshire Post, touches on the salt tax angle for
the first time:
Civil Disobedience in India.
Mr. Gandhi Plans Along Two Lines.
Defiance of Salt Tax.
Ahmedabad,
. Mr. Gandhi’s concrete
proposals for the campaign of passive resistance with the Government have
been tentatively formulated, and will be informally explained to the members
of the Congress Working Committee, which meets
.
Mr. Gandhi’s one object has been to evolve a plan of action which should not
run the risk of being interrupted by a repetition of
the tragedy at
Chauri Chaura, which led to the suspension of his non-co-operation
movement, and it is stated that he has arrived at a suitable formula.
His proposal seems to be that Congress should not directly control or lead a
campaign of civil disobedience, but should agree to give moral support to the
Council of War which should conduct the operations in selected areas in the
country. It is learned that Mr. Gandhi is prepared to meet the contingency
which may arise if Congress refuses to play a merely passive part. His move
then will be to start a campaign without the authority of Congress.
Alternative Methods.
Mr. Gandhi seems to be inclined to favour alternative methods, to be adopted
according as best suits the area selected. A no-tax campaign on the lines of
Bardoli may be adopted where the atmosphere has been prepared, while concerted
defiance of the Government salt monopoly may be decided in other places. Later
a proposal will be carried out along two lines; firstly the production of salt
by the people wherever natural facilities offer; secondly the organisation of
the dock-workers at Calcutta and other ports, with a view to securing their
united refusal to handle imported foreign salt. — Reuter.
The Western
Morning News and Mercury brought us up to date as the Salt March was
about to begin:
India No-Tax Campaign
Lack of Success in Some Districts
Mr. Gandhi’s March Propaganda
Ahmedabad,
. It is understood that Mr.
Gandhi contemplates leading the first batch of volunteers from the Sabaramathi
Ashram (seminary) on foot so soon as the period of notice given to the Viceroy
expires. This procedure is regarded by Mr. Gandhi and his followers as
calculated greatly to help on his propaganda.
The Congress Committee of the Tamilnadu district, north of Madras, meeting at
Vellore , says a Madras message,
passed a resolution welcoming the Congress Working Committee’s decision
authorizing Mr. Gandhi to initiate civil disobedience, calling upon the
Tamilnadu people to give every assistance and co-operation to the campaign,
and authorizing Mr. Raja Gopala Chari, one of Gandhi’s lieutenants, to
determine when and in what manner the campaign shall be started in this
province. — Reuter.
Mr. Benn Questioned
Commons Statement on Tax Resistance
Replying to Mr. Wardlaw Milne
(Con., Kidderminster), in
the House of Commons , Mr.
Wedgewood Benn, Secretary for India, said that in certain districts in Bengal
attempts had been in progress for some weeks to organize resistance to the
payment of the Union Board Tax with the assistance, or at the instigation of,
the local Congress Party.
According to his latest information, except in the one district of Bandabilia,
they had met with no success. At Bandabilia the movement began as long ago as
, but the tax was now being
collected with less difficulty in certain villages in Burmah.
There had been a recrudescence of the resistance to the capitation tax, but
this had now collapsed. He had no information as to any instances in
connection with the salt tax.
Finally, the march began, and an Associated Press was there to file this
report, which I take from the Reading [Pennsylvania]
Times of :
Gandhi Starts on Rebel March
150,000 See India Mystic Leave ‘College’ with 70 Followers
Ahmadabad, India,
(AP) — Mahatma
Gandhi, Indian leader and mystic, led his pioneer band of volunteers out of
his quarters here at
and started his march to the Gulf of Cambay, opening his campaign
of civil disobedience to the Indian government.
As Gandhi, with a firm step despite his 61 years, emerged from his “Ashram,”
or college of devotees, at the head of his volunteers a great shiver of
excitement ran through the throng. Almost the whole population of Ahmadabad,
nearly 150,000 normally and swollen by visitors that have been flocking here
for days to see Gandhi depart, was present.
Gandhi will address the villagers at Asali, through which he will pass at
about .
Refuse to Pay Tax; Demand Independence
The departure of Mahatma Gandhi and his 70 volunteers on their 20-day march to
Jalalpur, not only opens their civil disobedience campaign against the Indian
government, but begins in earnest the latest struggle of Indian Nationalists
for emancipation from British rule.
The history of their demands shows a constant increase in the measure of
emancipation sought. Until this year they had asked first, for home rule,
then for Dominion status within the British empire, and finally for complete
independence. It is now the last that they are fighting for.
“Civil disobedience” embraces the non-payment of taxes and similar resistance
to the government.
The Taunton Courier of
told the story this way:
India Peril.
500,000 Demonstrate at Bombay.
Salt Tax Effigy Thrown Into Sea.
Rebel Leaders Sent to Jail.
Crowds, estimated at 500,000, including thousands of women and children,
thronged into Bombay on to take part
in the demonstration announced by Mahatura [sic] Gandhi to be
the last day of the so-called National Week, when the salt tax was formally
“killed and buried.”
From sunrise the dense throngs trailed out to Chaupatti sands, carrying pots
to take sea-water home, and the streets resounded with patriotic songs, and
catch-phrases as “The salt law has been broken.”
The proceedings culminated towards sunset, when crowds went out to the beach,
and an effigy of the Salt Act was thrown into the sea.
Obviously actuated though the crowds were by some sort of mysterious
enthusiasm, their behaviour was orderly, and the day was not marked by any
untoward incident.
Gandhi’s volunteers observed the day as a partial fast, eating once only in
36 hours, and they refrained from collecting or disposing of salt.
Gandhi appealed to a large crowd of men and women who had gathered in a dry
creek under a blazing sun, “to pass through the heat of misery,” and not to
throw stones at Government officials.
Meanwhile, there came a report from Bombay that two bomb outrages had occurred
in connection with the Great Indian Peninsula railway strike.
Extremist Leaders Imprisoned.
Police Rounding Up Salt Law Breakers.
Events moved swiftly in India on
with the imprisonment of two extremist leaders.
Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru, president of the All-India Congress, was arrested at
Allahbad on a charge of infringing the Salt Law.
He was seized at the railway station on the point of leaving for Raipur, and
taken to gaol.
News of his arrest spread through Bombay like wildfire, and within a few
minutes the cotton, bullion, seeds, and share markets had suspended business.
Members of the Bombay Congress Committee immediately decided to observe a
“hartal” (day of mourning).
Later the pundit was brought up at Naini and sentenced to six months’ simple
imprisonment. There was a demonstration in front of the gaol, where a large
number of people gathered waving national flags.
Meanwhile, at Calcutta, Mr. Sen Gupta, the Mayor, and five students, were
sentenced to six months’ rigorous imprisonment for sedition, conspiracy,
and obstructing the police.
The Swarajist Mayor was arrested while reading proscribed literature to a
meeting of students.
Sixteen persons were also arrested at Lucknow on
and five in Bombay for offences
against the Salt Law.
Gandhi’s Sons Arrested.
Mr. Gandhi’s son, Ram Das, who was arrested for breach of the salt laws at
Bhimrad, has been sentenced to six months’ rigorous imprisonment. Mr.
Jarunalal Bajaj and two other volunteers have each been sentence to two
years’ rigorous imprisonment and fines of £20. They were accused of
inciting a crowd to lawbreaking.
While his father was looking in vain for a policeman who would lock him up
on , another of Mr. Gandhi’s
sons, Davi Das Gandhi, and Mr. Shanker Lal, president of the district
congress, were arrested for making salt at Salumpur. Altogether 25 volunteers
were arrested and 13 of them were detained in custody.
Gandhi himself was arrested in the wee hours of and would be held without trial until
.
Another article on the same page said that “untouchables” in India were going
to start their own passive resistance campaign to interfere with Gandhi’s march
by blockading it as a way of highlighting their own struggle. This is the first
I’d heard of this.
Finally, this comes from the
Mason City, Iowa Globe-Gazette, also via Associated
Press:
Refuse to Pay Tax to British
“No Swarage, No Revenue,” Say 50,000 Indian Peasants.
Bombay,
. (AP) — Non-payment
of taxes, one of the planks of the civil disobedience campaign platform,
appears to be gaining ground in some sections of India.
All-India national congress reports say that 50,000 peasants of the Bardoli
region have left their homes, resolved not to pay land taxes until Swaraj, or
home-rule is established. Many left their household goods, chattels, crops
behind, the government confiscating and auctioning them off.
The peasants are said to have for their slogan, “No Swaraj, No Revenue.” The
leaders of the movement declare the peasants will not pay until Mahatma Gandhi
is released from jail and has ordered them to pay.
The Bardoli district has an area of about 222 square miles containing 123
villages with a total population of 88,000 of whom 82,000 are rural. The
annual land revenue exceeds $133,000.
