Salt March

Background

At its December 1929 session in Lahore, the Indian National Congress, under Jawaharlal Nehru's presidency, adopted the goal of Purna Swaraj — complete independence — and authorized a campaign of civil disobedience. Gandhi selected the colonial salt monopoly as the campaign's opening target. Under the Salt Act of 1882, Indians were barred from producing or selling salt without paying tax to the government, even though salt could be made freely from seawater; the tax fell disproportionately on the poor, for whom salt was a daily necessity. Before setting out, Gandhi wrote to Viceroy Lord Irwin outlining eleven demands, including abolition of the salt tax, and stated that he would begin breaking the salt law if the demands were not met. Irwin did not respond substantively.

The march

Gandhi left Sabarmati Ashram on 12 March 1930 with a group of about 78 followers drawn from the ashram community, walking through a chain of villages in Gujarat — including Aslali, Nadiad, Anand, and Borsad — where he addressed crowds and read out the local implications of British rule, gathering large numbers of additional marchers along the route. Local officials and volunteers organized accommodation and supplies in advance of the march's arrival at each stop. The march received extensive coverage in the Indian and international press, including foreign correspondents who had not previously followed Gandhi's campaigns so closely; Time magazine later named Gandhi its Man of the Year for 1930. On 5–6 April 1930, after 24 days of walking roughly 385 kilometres, Gandhi reached the coastal village of Dandi and, on the morning of 6 April, picked up a lump of natural salt from the shore, symbolically breaking the law. He then encouraged those present to make salt themselves and to spread the practice throughout the country.

Spread of civil disobedience

The act triggered mass, decentralized civil disobedience across India: illegal salt production at the coast and inland, boycotts of British cloth and liquor, non-payment of taxes in some regions, and resignations from government posts. Similar salt-law violations were organized elsewhere in the country, including a march led by C. Rajagopalachari from Tiruchirappalli to Vedaranyam on the Tamil Nadu coast. Tens of thousands were arrested over the following months, and much of the Congress leadership, including Jawaharlal Nehru, was imprisoned during the campaign. A prominent episode was the raid on the Dharasana Salt Works in May 1930, led by Sarojini Naidu and Abbas Tyabji after Gandhi's own arrest on 5 May; the nonviolent discipline of the protesters as they were beaten back by police under lathi charges was reported by American journalist Webb Miller for United Press, and his account was reprinted widely abroad, drawing substantial international attention and sympathy for the movement. The Civil Disobedience Movement continued into 1931 and, after a lull following the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, resumed intermittently through 1933–34 before being formally called off.

Aftermath

Negotiations between Gandhi and Viceroy Lord Irwin led to the Gandhi-Irwin Pact of March 1931: the government agreed to release political prisoners not convicted of violence and to permit limited local production of salt, and Gandhi agreed to suspend civil disobedience and attend the Second Round Table Conference in London later that year as the Congress's sole representative. The pact was controversial within Congress, where some felt the concessions won were too modest against the scale of the campaign, and in Britain — Winston Churchill, then out of government, publicly objected to the Viceroy negotiating with Gandhi at all, famously describing the scene of Gandhi meeting the Viceroy as alarming. The Round Table Conference produced no agreed settlement, and civil disobedience resumed after Gandhi's return to India in early 1932, continuing intermittently for several years under continued government repression before being wound down.

Historiography

Historians differ on how to weigh the salt tax's practical significance against its symbolic value: the revenue involved was modest relative to total colonial tax receipts, but the campaign is generally credited with mobilizing far broader and more geographically dispersed participation than earlier Congress campaigns, and with fixing salt as an enduring symbol of colonial economic control in Indian nationalist memory.