Dandi yatra or Danda march

When a union cabinet minister or two got showered with police 'dandas' and were pe-remptorily ordered to make themselves scarce, this misconceived, and misnamed Dandi yatra of 1988, got slotted into its correct frame; by becoming what it actually was — a 'danda march'. There is, after all a crucial relevance of time and place, and that is precisely what had been missed by the organisers of this farce.

On 12 March 1930, when Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, at the age of 61, chose to lead a band of 70 odd satyagrahis on foot, over a distance of around 250 miles from Sabarmati to the tiny coastal village of Dandi, the central significance of that gesture did not immediately become apparent; not even to his closest followers. Jawaharlal Nehru then observed in pained distress, in private correspondence, that he could not entirely understand Bapu's action; that at first, he was perplexed by the seeming -irrelevance of going off at what then appeared to him (Nehru) as a tangent; also, as to what role salt could possibly play in our struggle for freedom. Being the man that he was, once he saw the slow, day by day unfolding of the event, he caught the great import of the gesture, the limpid simplicity of a profoundly defiant step.
And truth is always simple. Because that is so, it is also always self evident, therefore, it never needs the crutch of propaganda. In the present instance, during this much publicised hoax, truth was the first casualty, then simplicity, that overwhelming simplicity of the original, drowned entirely in the total artificiality of the duplicate.

In March/April 1988, the 'Danda march' was accompanied by great police bandobast (ask the cabinet ministers), black cat commandos, the usual 'sarkari taam-jham', aeroplanes, helicopters, TV cameras, transistor radios and walkie-talkies: (against the devout simplicity of that original, a perverted opulence of the present.) Full page advertisements were taken out by the government of Gujarat in various convenient newspapers to extol the achievements, not of the original Gandhi but of the present day jeans-clad variety. In fact, one of the advertisements (Hindu, 6 April 1988) entitled, 'Rajiv Gandhi imparts dynamism, life and vigour to the Yatra,' contains this priceless nugget: "Rajiv Gandhi twice walked on (sic) the footsteps of the Mahatma on that day... (He) was quite fresh with no signs of fatigue... His tall white complexioned figure had furried (sic) rosy-reddish on account of direct exposure to scorching heat. He perspired a lot on his forehead because of the red turban he had worn. Encouraged by his bewitching smile to my 'Namaste' I asked him, "Sir, how are you feeling at the end of this walk?" He jocularly quipped, "First of all I am feeling very thirsty,"... Even as he was having one by one (sic) glass of water, I persisted in my query, and asked, "Rajivji are you not tired at all because of this terrible heat?" To this he again smiled and winked his left eye at me, (whereafter) he said, "I perspire a lot because of this heat and the walk." ... After having four glasses of water and a cold drink, I asked him (again), as to why he walk down (sic) so much? He said, "Its a way of dedicating yourself to the Gandhian ideals." How so then enquires our obsequious scribe, "as against Gandhiji's coverage walk (sic) of eight to ten miles you have covered 13 kms distance today. Secondly while Gandhiji used to walk down (sic) in early morning and late evening you have covered the distance of 10 kms in scorching heat." All this drivel is part of an official, commemorative, full page ad, so would someone please tabulate and then inform us what it actually cost the exchequer, who paid for it and why? We have a right to know.