78 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
ference. They saw it as a ploy similar to Lloyd George’s constitutional
convention for Ireland, which Sinn Féin had rightly spurned. It turned
out, after further talks between Gandhi and Irwin, that the viceroy was
in no position to give any assurance regarding dominion sta tus. The
stage was thus set for his tory to be made on the banks of the River Ravi
in Lahore before the year was out.
When the Congress met for its annual session at Lahore, Mahatma
Gandhi redeemed his promise made a year earlier to become an “in de-
pen dence- wallah.” He proposed the momentous resolution declaring
that purna swaraj (“complete in de pen dence”), based on a severance
of the British connection, was the po lit i cal goal of the Indian Na-
tional Congress. The Congress constitution was amended to re flect this
change. Subhas Chandra Bose put forth a resolution stating that the
Congress’s aim should be the establishment of a parallel government in
the country, with the help of workers, peasants, and youth or ga ni za-
tions. His resolution did not pass, but it was a sign that he was, as al-
ways, a step ahead of his contemporaries. He was sat is fied that the
Congress had accurately described India as a country that was under
an alien army of occupation.
The Congress announced that January 26, 1930, would be observed
as Inde pen dence Day. Unfortunately, Subhas Chandra Bose was not
free to celebrate that occasion. On his return to Calcutta from Lahore,
he had been arrested once again: his birthday present on January 23,
1930, the day he turned thirty- three, was a one- year prison sentence on
charges of sedition and taking part in an unlawful pro ces sion. “We are
all well,” he wrote to Basanti Devi. “We shall joyfully begin our victory
march to the Royal temple.”^68 From behind prison bars, Bose watched
with admiration as Gandhi made his next moves toward civil disobedi-
ence. They were “some of the most brilliant achievements of his leader-
ship” and revealed “the height to which his statesmanship” could rise in
a crisis.^69 Goading his followers to forsake mute passive nonviolence for
“non- violence of the most active type,” Gandhi launched the civil dis-
obedience movement in March 1930 with the violation of the govern-
ment’s salt monopoly. His march to the sea with a small band of
seventy- eight satyagrahis electrified the whole country. Gandhi had
chosen a powerful symbolic issue to start another mass movement