Gandhi's Salt March
Mohandas Gandhi walked 240 miles from his ashram at Sabarmati to the coastal village of Dandi between 12 March and 6 April 1930, and picked up a lump of natural salt from the mud, breaking the law. The British salt monopoly made it illegal to produce or sell salt without paying a tax, in a hot country where every household needed it and the poorest paid the same as the richest. Gandhi chose it precisely because it looked trivial to the government and mattered to everyone. He had written to the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, announcing exactly what he intended and inviting him to remove the tax instead. Irwin did not reply personally, and the Congress leadership, which had wanted a campaign over something weightier, was unconvinced. He set out with seventy-eight followers and arrived with thousands, walking through villages where he spoke each evening, followed by the world press and by newsreel cameras. The breach of the law was then repeated across India by millions of people making and selling salt, and the campaign widened into a boycott of British cloth and liquor. Around sixty thousand people were imprisoned, Gandhi among them. At Dharasana in May, several hundred marchers advanced in columns on a salt works and were clubbed down without raising a hand, which the American reporter Webb Miller described in an account carried worldwide. It did not end the tax, and it made Indian independence a question of when. Gandhi was released in 1931 and went to London for the Round Table Conference as the sole Congress representative. The tax itself survived until independence, when it was among the first things repealed.
- Category: Social
