Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s appeal last week, with its eleven specific requests spanning fuel, gold, fertilisers, cooking oil, solar pumps, and foreign travel, is being read by many as a prelude to administered price hikes. But there is a larger ambition visible in the speech. It is to make forex conservation a genuine national movement, a civic mobilisation comparable in spirit, if not in form, to Mahatma Gandhi’s Salt March of 1930. Gandhi’s genius was to choose salt, an everyday item, universally used and symbolically powerful, to crystallise the case for economic self-reliance into a mass act of participation. Modi is reaching out so that each Indian feels personally invested in the nation’s economic resilience when conserving foreign exchange becomes as much a patriotic duty as flying the flag.

The instinct deserves credit. India’s import dependence on crude oil, fertiliser inputs, gold, and edible oil is a structural vulnerability that has been diagnosed for decades without adequate remedy. Modi is making it vivid and personal, asking citizens to connect their everyday choices to the national balance of payments. This is an act of economic leadership. Lal Bahadur Shastri did something similar with food in 1965, asking Indians to voluntarily fast on Monday evenings as the country faced both a war and a food crisis. Socialist parliamentarian Madhu Limaye pressed the point further in Parliament, arguing that voluntary austerity was a constitutional duty in times of national stress and that the political class must visibly lead rather than merely preach. The tradition of appealing to civic solidarity in times of economic emergency is honourable and has worked before.

Questions raised over equity in burden-sharing

But Gandhi’s salt satyagraha movement’s moral force came partly from the fact that the........

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