Today is our Salt Day


At six-thirty on the morning of April 6, 1930, Gandhi challenged British rule of law on the beach at Dandi, a small town in Gujarat, on the coast of the Arabian Sea. It was a simple but powerful act. The Mahatma waded into the ocean and gathered some water with the intention of allowing it to dry in order to produce salt from it. It was illegal to do so. It was also a challenge to Britain’s salt monopoly and a powerful reminder to Indian citizens that, in the end, they should be the masters of their own country. Six months earlier, the Indian National Congress had first raised the tricolour flag in the now-Pakistani city of Lahore, proclaiming the beginning of the struggle for independence. Indian independence would finally arrive on 15 August, 1947, at the cost of the territory’s partition into two states, India and Pakistan.

The gesture of making salt was a direct challenge to British rule over Indian citizens; its fallout involved the imprisonment of eighty thousand people and made it impossible to govern India from London. The campaign showed the empire and the world that the government of British India was entirely dependent on the consent of Indian citizens. And it made the British see clearly that if they were to lose this consent, the path to independence for its largest colony would be unstoppable. The repression that followed the Salt March only increased the number of Indian citizens committed to challenging British rule to such an extent that, for the first time, London was forced to consider accepting independence as the only possible solution to the situation.

For the citizens of Catalonia, today is our “salt day”. Today, our parliament it set to solemnly declare that the laws and rulings issued by Spain’s Constitutional Court no longer constitute the applicable legality in Catalonia. Over and above this solemn declaration, parliament will proceed to review the laws in effect which it deems incompatible with the country we Catalans want to create: In addition to taking measures to combat energy poverty, ensuring universal access to health care, and defending the citizen rights threatened by Spain’s public-safety law, today parliament will establish, among other measures, a defence of Catalonia’s education law that will counter Spain’s education law, it will force the Spanish government to provide municipalities with tools to override the Spanish law on local governments (which grants the central government power over certain aspects of local law-making and taxation), and it will urge Spain to accept the maximum number of refugees and to obey Catalonia’s abortion law.

Up until today, Spain has needed the consent of the Catalans to uphold its government. And it has obtained it. It has relied on a consent based on the belief that coexistence was the best route, as well as on a consent based on fear of the consequences of challenging coexistence. Today, however, all of this will be over. Because today, the elected representatives of the people of Catalonia will signal to leaders in Madrid that they have lost the consent they had enjoyed for generations. When with seventy-two expected votes, parliament approves the resolution introduced today, we will have made our own salt for the first time in many years and we shall see the future in a different light.

Today, therefore, is the time to say, as the Indians did in 1930, that ‘we believe that it is the inalienable right of [our people], as of any other people, to have freedom and to enjoy the fruits of their toil and have the necessities of life, so that they may have full opportunities of growth’. And, furthermore, that ‘we believe also that if any government deprives a people of these rights and oppresses them the people have a further right to alter it or to abolish it’.

Let it be so.