Individual beatings are applied, in the main, to extort
from the victim his land tax. Mr. Brailsford traveled through
district after district where the peasants had taken and kept
this vow:
"We will pay no taxes until Gandhi is released from jail."
For Mr. Gandhi, for the Mahatma, for St. Gandhi, for
Jailbird Gandhi not thousands but millions of individual Indians
are taking individual beatings which they could escape by paying
what His Majesty's Government call, quite accurately, "normal
taxes."
Physical extortion, even of taxes, is in law virtually
everywhere a crime. Briton Brailsford reports that the Indian
agents of the British Government have pursued tax evaders out of
British India into the native State of Baroda and beaten them
there. This is a crime for which the Man of the Year in Yerovila
Jail at Ponna is to blame.
He is to blame because, although His Majesty's Government
have got him in a jail staffed by British jailers, they have not
yet stopped him from producing writings which are smuggled out
somehow, week after week, to his people.
