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While delivering a speech at Madras in August 1934, Sarojini Naidu referred to the Dandi March of Mahatma Gandhi undertaken on 12th March, 1930 in the following words:

`Has the world in the modern age seen a greater miracle than was accomplished by one little man that any of you could crush, a man so small and frail who set out, with everyone`s laughter against him, with a staff in hand saying: `I will cross into the sea in three weeks and I will break some law as token`. Everyone laughed and I laughed too. I said: `How will this little man, this foolish little man with a staff in his hand, with a straggling batch of volunteers who will weary with hunger in the sun, how will this little man fight the most powerful empire in the world?` And as the march continued, as days broke into dawn and dawn ripened into dusk, we saw before our very eyes the history of the world changing. We saw the whole of India rising up with rekindled enthusiasm and faith.`

Those hectic days in the 1930s were days of great men and great events. Gandhi and Motilal Nehru, Patel and Rajaji, Rajendra Prasad and Khan Abdul Gafar Khan (Frontier Gandhi), Jawaharlal Nehru and Sarojini Naidu and several other great fighters for our freedom adorned the public stage of India.

In their place in the 58th year of our independence, we have Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi, Jagdish Tytler, Sajjan Kumar, Lallu Prasad Yadav, Ram Vilas Paswan, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Dayanidhi Maran, Anbumani and the like - what a galaxy of outstanding men and women who are suffering and sacrificing for the greater good of all of us in so self-effacing and selfless a manner? They are creating and making history which will be written about and become a `secular` part (by no means sacred) of the text books (?!) being so ably produced, printed and published under the clairvoyant vision of another incomparably great son of India called Arjun Singh.

As a flash back let me get back to the days of the Dandi March to save my soul and self respect if not my condemned nation. The Congress at Lahore in December, 1929 had decided to launch the Civil Disobedience Movement for the attainment of Poorna Swaraj. The enthusiasm with which the Independence Day was celebrated on 26th January, 1930 showed the people`s readiness for the `movement`. On 2nd March 1930 Gandhiji sent a letter to Lord Irwin, the Viceroy, listing out the wrongs done to India, holding the British Rule to be a curse. He gave an ultimatum that in the absence of a positive response from the Viceroy, he would proceed to violate the Salt Laws. He got no reply. Gandhiji wrote again to the Viceroy: `On bent knees I ask for bread and received a stone instead. The only public peace the nation knows is the peace of the Prison-house. India is a vast Prison-house. I repudiate this law and regard it as my sacred duty to break the mournful monotony of compulsory peace that is choking the heart of the nation`. He launched the movement with the historic `Dandi March`.

On March 12, 1930, Gandhi and approximately 78 male satyagrahis set out, on foot, for the coastal village of Dandi some 385 kilo metres from their starting point in Sabarmati, a journey which was to last 25 days. The 25-day long march created a tremendous enthusiasm in the country. Virtually every resident of each city along this journey watched the great procession, which was at least two miles in length. On April 6th, 1930 Gandhi raised a lump of mud and salt (some say just a pinch, some say just a grain) and declared, `With this, I am shaking the foundations of the British Empire.` He then boiled it in seawater to make the commodity which no Indian could legally produce `salt`.

The breaking of the salt laws symbolized the people`s defiance of the British Rule. In Tamilnadu Rajaji led the Salt Sathyagraha and headed a march - similar to the Dandi March - from Tiruchirapalli to Vedaranyam in Thanjvur District. There was massive participation by women and children. Those were the stirring days of the great Congress Party under the inspiring leadership of Mahatma Gandhi.

Let me now come down from the sublime to the ridiculous. I mean from Mahatma Gandhi to Sonia Gandhi. To commemorate the Great Salt March, the Mahatma Gandhi Foundation staged a sordid political reenactment on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Dandi March from 12 March, 2005 to 7 April, 2005. This recent event has become famous in world history as the `International Walk for Peace, Justice and Freedom.` Mahatma Gandhi`s great-grandson Tushar Gandhi and several hundred fellow marchers followed the same route to Dandi and took the same amount of time to walk and cover the distance. The start of the march on 12 March, 2005 in Ahmedabad was blessed and graced by Sonia Gandhi (spiritual heir of Mahatma Gandhi if not his filial heir), Chairperson of the National Advisory Council, as well as nearly half of the Indian cabinet, many of whom walked for the first few kilometres only. The commemoration ended on 7 April, with the participants finally halting at Dandi on the night of 5 April.

In my view, the Congress party under the directionless leadership of Sonia Gandhi has only succeeded in achieving the intended result of trivialisation of the Dandi March and nominalisation of the National Movement on the occasion of the 75th Anniversary of the Dandi March. She converted the occasion into a petty party affair instead of making it a national function transcending all differences. But then in her current scheme of things, she is more sensitive to the urges, hopes and aspirations of leftist parties and a few other individuals like Lallu Prasad Yadav, Shibu Soren, Ram Vilas Paswan, Karunanidhi and such other national giants.

The only way of escape for me from this current enervating atmosphere of psycho fancy, hypocrisy, overweening political corruption and political servility in the country as a whole is to take a deep breath and recall the beautiful words of Rabindranath Tagore about Mahatma Gandhi: `He stopped at the threshold of the huts of the thousands of dispossessed, dressed like one of their own. He spoke to them in their own language. Here was living truth at last and not only quotations from books. For this reason the Mahatma, the name given to him by the people of India, is his real name. Who else has felt like him that all Indians are his own flesh and blood? At Gandhi`s call India blossomed forth to new greatness, just as once before, in earlier times, when the Buddha proclaimed the truth of fellow-feeling and compassion among all living creatures`.

V.Sundaram

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