Civil Disobedience and the Salt March

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On the morning of 12 March 1930, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi walked out of the Sabarmati Ashram on the edge of Ahmedabad with about eighty companions and began heading south towards the Arabian Sea. The destination was Dandi, a small coastal village in the Gujarati district of Navsari, roughly 240 miles away. Twenty four days later, having walked through village after village and gathered a following that swelled into the thousands, Gandhi reached the shore, waded into the shallows at dawn on 6 April, and picked up a lump of natural salt left by evaporating seawater. In doing so he committed a criminal offence. That single gesture, deliberately small and deliberately illegal, opened the largest campaign of mass civil disobedience the British Empire in India had yet faced.

To understand why salt mattered, you have to understand the colonial tax structure. The British administration held a legal monopoly on the manufacture and sale of salt, enforced through a series of measures consolidated in the Salt Act of 1882. Indians were forbidden to collect or produce salt even where the sea deposited it freely on their own beaches, and were obliged instead to buy it from the government at a price that carried a substantial excise duty. Salt is not a luxury. In a hot country where much of the population did heavy manual labour, it is a physiological necessity, and it was needed for preserving food. The tax therefore fell on everybody, including the poorest, and it fell hardest on those who could least afford it. Gandhi's political genius lay in selecting a grievance that no one had to be educated about.

Why a slow walk was the point

The march itself was the message. Gandhi could have travelled to the coast in a day by train. Instead he walked, stopping at villages along the route, speaking to crowds, and inviting village officials to resign their posts. Hundreds did. The pace gave newspapers time to catch up, and the international press, including correspondents from Britain and the United States, followed the column day by day. By the time Gandhi reached Dandi, the story had been running for over three weeks, and the image of an elderly man in a homespun loincloth walking towards the sea to defy an empire had been printed around the world. This was disciplined political theatre, built on a theory Gandhi called satyagraha, usually rendered as truth force or soul force: the deliberate, public, non violent breaking of an unjust law, accompanied by a willingness to accept the punishment.

What followed was not confined to Gujarat. Once Gandhi had broken the law, the act was repeated up and down the coastline and inland. People boiled seawater on the beaches of Bombay Presidency and Madras Presidency. In Tamil Nadu, C. Rajagopalachari led a march from Tiruchirappalli to Vedaranyam on the Coromandel coast. In Malabar, K. Kelappan organised a parallel march. Elsewhere the campaign broadened into boycotts of foreign cloth and liquor shops, refusal to pay land revenue, and the resignation of Indians from government service. In the North West Frontier Province, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan's Khudai Khidmatgar movement, often called the Red Shirts, mobilised Pashtun volunteers on explicitly non violent lines, a fact that complicates lazy assumptions about the geography and communal composition of the movement.

The repression was severe. Tens of thousands were arrested over the following year, including Gandhi himself in early May 1930 and Jawaharlal Nehru before him. The best remembered episode is the raid on the Dharasana salt works in Gujarat in late May, led after Gandhi's arrest by Sarojini Naidu and Gandhi's son Manilal. Columns of volunteers walked forward towards police lines and were beaten with steel tipped lathis without raising their hands to defend themselves. The American journalist Webb Miller of United Press was present and filed a despatch describing the scene, which was carried widely abroad. That reporting did considerable damage to the moral standing of British rule among audiences who had previously accepted the empire's account of itself as benign.

What it achieved, and what it did not

Measured by its immediate legislative outcome, the Salt Satyagraha looks like a failure. The salt laws were not repealed. The campaign was suspended in March 1931 under the Gandhi to Irwin Pact, negotiated with the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, which released most political prisoners and allowed limited salt production for personal use by people living near the coast, in exchange for Gandhi calling off civil disobedience and attending the Round Table Conference in London later that year. Many within the Indian National Congress, and many outside it, regarded these terms as thin. The younger radicals in particular felt Gandhi had traded a mass movement at its peak for concessions of little substance.

Measured differently, the significance is hard to overstate. The campaign demonstrated that a nationalist movement previously dominated by lawyers, landowners and urban professionals could recruit peasants, women and small traders in very large numbers. Women's participation in public political action expanded markedly during 1930, particularly in picketing and the anti liquor campaigns. The movement also established a repertoire of tactics that would be studied and adapted elsewhere, most famously by the American civil rights movement, where Martin Luther King Jr and colleagues drew explicitly on Gandhian method.

Historians continue to argue about how much the Salt March actually shifted British policy, as opposed to shifting British and international opinion. Some emphasise that independence in 1947 owed more to the fiscal and military exhaustion of Britain after the Second World War, and to the calculations of a Labour government, than to any single campaign of the 1930s. Others note that mass mobilisation of the kind rehearsed in 1930 made continued rule administratively unworkable by making Indian cooperation, on which the whole colonial apparatus depended, conditional and unreliable. Both readings have force. What is not in dispute is that the walk to Dandi turned a technical tax grievance into a moral confrontation, and that it changed the vocabulary of political protest well beyond India.

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