Salt March

In the spring of 1930 Mahatma Gandhi walked for 24 days from his ashram at Sabarmati, near Ahmedabad, to the coastal village of Dandi in Gujarat, a distance of about 385 kilometres, and there broke the British monopoly on salt. The march, from 12 March to 6 April 1930, launched a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience against British rule in India. It turned Gandhi into a world figure and showed how nonviolent protest could put an empire on the defensive.

On 26 January 1930 the Indian National Congress, led by Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, proclaimed Purna Swaraj, the goal of complete self-rule, and asked Gandhi to lead the first act of civil disobedience. His choice of target, the Salt Act of 1882, puzzled many colleagues, and the viceroy, Lord Irwin, did not take it seriously. The law gave the government a monopoly over making and selling salt and imposed a tax on it, so that even people living by the sea had to buy it from official depots. Gandhi reasoned that salt was a necessity for everyone, that the tax fell hardest on the poor, and that the grievance united Hindus and Muslims alike. The salt tax made up about 8.2 per cent of the tax revenue of the British Raj.

Gandhi built his method, which he called satyagraha, or "truth-force", on earlier campaigns, especially the successful Bardoli protest of 1928. On 2 March 1930 he wrote to Irwin listing eleven demands, including the abolition of the salt tax, and promising to call off the march if they were met. Irwin ignored the letter and declined to meet him. To ensure strict discipline, Gandhi picked his marchers from among people trained at his ashram rather than from Congress members. Journalists and newsreel crews from India, Europe and America followed the route.

Gandhi set out on 12 March with 78 companions, most of them young men from many regions, castes and faiths. The marchers covered set stages each day, passing through four districts and dozens of villages, where Gandhi spoke against the tax and village officials resigned their posts in protest. The column grew as others joined, among them the poet and Congress leader Sarojini Naidu. On the morning of 6 April, after prayers on the shore at Dandi, Gandhi picked up a lump of salty mud and boiled it in seawater, producing illegal salt, and called on Indians everywhere to do the same.

Millions responded by making or buying contraband salt, and the campaign widened into boycotts of British cloth, refusals to pay taxes and defiance of forest laws. Women took part in large numbers for the first time. The authorities banned Congress organisations, censored mail and made mass arrests; more than 60,000 people were jailed. In Peshawar on 23 April soldiers opened fire on an unarmed crowd of the nonviolent Khudai Khidmatgar movement in the Qissa Khwani Bazaar, killing an estimated 200 to 250 people. Gandhi himself was arrested around midnight on 4 to 5 May and held without trial.

The planned raid on the Dharasana Salt Works went ahead without him, led first by the retired judge Abbas Tyabji with Gandhi's wife Kasturba and then by Naidu. Police beat the unresisting volunteers with steel-tipped lathis. The American journalist Webb Miller's account, which he got past British censors only with difficulty, appeared in more than a thousand newspapers worldwide. Time magazine named Gandhi its Man of the Year for 1930.

The campaign continued until early 1931, when Gandhi was released to negotiate with Irwin. The resulting Gandhi–Irwin Pact led to his attendance at the Second Round Table Conference at the end of that year. The march brought no immediate constitutional gains, and Congress formally ended the satyagraha in 1934. Yet it shifted opinion in India, Britain and beyond towards the legitimacy of Indian self-rule, and Nehru likened the popular response to a spring suddenly released. Decades later Martin Luther King Jr. cited the march as a major influence on the American civil rights movement.

Our 1930 map shows British India at the time of the march, and our 1945 map shows it shortly before independence and partition.