In 30 Seconds
Story
When the Lahore Congress handed Gandhi the sanction for civil disobedience and left the weapon to his choosing, the movement’s own councils were baffled by what he chose. Salt. The tax on it was small, the monopoly ancient, and Motilal Nehru wondered aloud whether the government would fall for a pinch of seasoning. The government’s own assessment agreed, the Viceroy writing home that the salt campaign kept him awake not at all. Both had missed what the choice contained, and the march that carried it, from the Sabarmati Ashram to the sea at Dandi between 12 March and 5 April 1930, became the most famous walk of the twentieth century, the campaign in which Gandhi found the point where the empire’s law touched every Indian’s kitchen and broke it there.
The genius of salt was its universality. Every peasant, every widow, every untouchable labourer paid the tax and was forbidden by law to gather free what the sea and the earth offered, and the monopoly thus made the Raj’s presence physical in the poorest household’s food. Gandhi’s letter to Irwin of 2 March, addressed with characteristic courtesy to Dear Friend, itemised the eleven points of the nation’s grievance, named British rule a curse organised around exploitation, announced the law he would break and invited the Viceroy to remove the salt tax and the rest, or arrest him. Receiving in reply a secretary’s regret, he set out at dawn on 12 March with seventy eight chosen ashramites, a company selected from every province and community, the youngest sixteen, upon the two hundred and forty mile road south through Gujarat.
The march itself was theatre, pilgrimage and mobilisation in one, and Gandhi, sixty one years old and setting a pace the young found punishing, conducted all three. Through Aslali, Nadiad, Anand and Broach the column moved village by village, the roads watered and strewn with leaves, the crowds in the tens of thousands at the halts, and at every evening meeting the marcher’s message ran beyond salt, village headmen called upon to resign their offices, and hundreds did, students summoned from colleges, the constructive program preached, khadi, the abolition of untouchability, prohibition, the march gathering followers until the column stretched miles. The world’s press, invited in effect by the spectacle’s slow unfolding, walked alongside, and the cinema newsreels carried the small figure with the staff into theatres on every continent, the empire besieged, as one historian put it, at two and a half miles an hour.
At Dandi on the morning of 6 April, after prayers, Gandhi walked to the tideline and picked up a lump of natural salt from the mud, Sarojini Naidu beside him hailing the law breaker, and with that fistful, he declared, he was shaking the foundations of the British Empire. The signal released the country. Along every coast the villages boiled seawater in defiance, Rajagopalachari marched to Vedaranyam in the south, the Frontier rose behind Ghaffar Khan, and the movement the next article chronicles swept province after province, the arrests mounting toward the tens of thousands, until on the night of 4 May the government, which had hoped ignoring the pinch of salt would starve it, took Gandhi from his cot at Karadi under a regulation of 1827, no trial being convenient, and the campaign answered with the assault on the Dharasana salt works whose story followed the Mahatma’s arrest around the world.
The march’s calculation has been studied ever since as the masterpiece of symbolic politics. It converted a constitutional abstraction, purna swaraj, into an act a child could understand and any villager could imitate, it selected a law whose breach injured no person and whose enforcement made the state ridiculous, arresting sixty thousand Indians for cooking seawater, and it seized the initiative so completely that the government’s every response, inaction, lathi, arrest, published the movement’s case. The salt tax itself survived, trimmed, to be abolished only by free India, and the eleven points went unmet, facts the campaign’s critics have always entered against it. What Dandi purchased was not the tax’s repeal but the demonstration, before the country and the watching world, of who now commanded India’s allegiance, and the beach where the law died of ridicule holds the republic’s memorial to the man with the staff, mid stride, still walking.
