Civil Disobedience Movement

Background: Purna Swaraj

At its Lahore session in December 1929, the Indian National Congress, under Jawaharlal Nehru's presidency, adopted the goal of Purna Swaraj (complete independence) rather than dominion status, and fixed 26 January 1930 as the first Independence Day, to be marked annually by a pledge of independence. The Congress authorized Gandhi to lead a campaign of civil disobedience to press the demand, leaving the precise timing and form of the campaign to his discretion. Gandhi, choosing a tax on salt as his target — a levy that fell on rich and poor alike and touched every household, regardless of income — announced in a letter to Viceroy Lord Irwin that he would march from his ashram at Sabarmati to the coastal village of Dandi in Gujarat and break the salt law by making salt from seawater, framing the letter as a final appeal before the campaign began.

The Salt March and expansion

Gandhi set out on 12 March 1930 with a small group of followers on a roughly 240-mile march to Dandi, reaching the coast and breaking the law on 6 April 1930. The march, covered extensively by the press, drew international attention and triggered parallel acts of civil disobedience across India: illegal salt manufacture, boycotts of British cloth and goods, non-payment of taxes, and picketing of liquor shops and foreign-cloth stores. Participation was not confined to Congress cadres; it drew in students, peasants, urban workers and, notably, large numbers of women, who took on prominent public roles in picketing and marches for the first time in a nationalist campaign of this scale. The movement was uneven regionally — strong in Gujarat, Bombay, parts of the United Provinces and Bengal, weaker elsewhere — and it also intersected with separate agrarian no-tax and no-rent campaigns in some provinces.

Regional flashpoints

The movement produced notable episodes beyond the Salt March itself. In Peshawar, in the North-West Frontier Province, protests in April 1930 led to the Qissa Khwani Bazaar killings, in which troops fired on an unarmed crowd, and in which a platoon of the Royal Garhwal Rifles refused an order to fire on protesters, a rare instance of military disobedience that alarmed the government; the movement in the province was closely associated with Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan's Khudai Khidmatgars ("Servants of God"), a nonviolent Pashtun volunteer movement aligned with Congress. In Gujarat, following Gandhi's arrest in May 1930, Congress volunteers led by the poet and activist Sarojini Naidu carried out a widely publicized raid on the government salt works at Dharasana, where protesters advancing in disciplined ranks were beaten by police without resisting; the American journalist Webb Miller's eyewitness account of the raid, syndicated internationally, did significant damage to British India's reputation abroad.

Repression, the pact, and the Round Table Conference

The colonial government under Viceroy Lord Irwin responded with mass arrests; by mid-1930 tens of thousands of Congress workers and sympathizers, including much of the senior leadership, were imprisoned. Gandhi himself was arrested in May 1930. Despite the repression, the campaign continued into 1931. Facing a stalemate and seeking Congress participation in constitutional talks, Irwin opened negotiations with Gandhi that produced the Gandhi-Irwin Pact of March 1931: the government agreed to release political prisoners and permit peaceful picketing and the making of salt for personal use in coastal areas, and Gandhi agreed to suspend civil disobedience and attend the Second Round Table Conference in London as the sole Congress representative. The London talks in late 1931 failed to produce an agreement on minority representation and the structure of self-government, and Gandhi returned to India empty-handed.

Second phase and suspension

On his return, Gandhi found the new Viceroy, Lord Willingdon, unwilling to continue the truce; the government moved swiftly to arrest Gandhi and other Congress leaders in January 1932 and declared the Congress an illegal organization. Civil disobedience resumed in this harder environment from 1932 to 1934, but with less mass participation than the first phase, as the government used ordinances, press controls and sustained arrests to contain it. By 1934, with the movement exhausted and Congress leadership divided over strategy — a faction led by figures such as Chakravarti Rajagopalachari favoured suspending civil disobedience in favour of a return to legislative politics and council entry — Gandhi formally called off civil disobedience. The campaign did not win independence or force the constitutional concessions Congress sought, but it established civil disobedience as the Congress's primary method of mass mobilization, gave the party a nationwide organizational base it had previously lacked in many provinces, and brought far larger numbers of ordinary Indians, including women, into open political action than any previous nationalist campaign.