On 12 March 1930, Mahatma Gandhi set out from his Sabarmati Ashram near Ahmedabad with a small group of followers (accounts generally put the number at 78 to 80) on a 24-day, roughly 390-kilometre walk to the coastal village of Dandi in Gujarat (NCERT, "Nationalism in India", p. 39[1]). The march, undertaken to break the British salt laws, opened the Civil Disobedience Movement, Gandhi's first national campaign since the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920–22, and followed the Indian National Congress's declaration, at its Lahore session in December 1929, of Purna Swaraj, or complete independence, as its goal rather than the more limited dominion status Congress had previously sought. It was built differently from that earlier campaign: instead of boycotting British courts, schools and councils, it asked people to break one specific law (Non-Cooperation and Civil Disobedience compared). Gandhi chose salt deliberately: under British law, Indians were forbidden from producing or selling salt independently and required to buy it, taxed, from a government monopoly, even though salt was a daily necessity for rich and poor alike in a hot climate (NCERT, "Nationalism in India", p. 39[1]). The tax's revenue was modest by imperial standards, but Gandhi judged that a law touching every household, regardless of caste, religion, or income, would resonate more broadly than an abstract argument about constitutional representation, and would let ordinary Indians break an unjust law without any need for weapons, English education, or urban connections.
Walking to the sea
Gandhi and his companions walked through Gujarati villages at a deliberate pace, stopping to address gathered crowds each evening, and the group grew steadily as local supporters joined along the route; by the time it reached the Arabian Sea coast at Dandi on 5 April, the march had drawn international press coverage, including from Time magazine, which named Gandhi its Man of the Year for 1930. On the morning of 6 April, Gandhi picked up a lump of natural salt from the beach, breaking the law in a deliberately public act of civil disobedience (Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Salt March"[2]). The gesture triggered a wave of imitation across India: people illegally made or sold salt in cities and villages nationwide, boycotted foreign cloth and liquor, and refused to pay certain taxes, and the British responded with mass arrests (NCERT, "Nationalism in India", p. 40[1]). By most estimates, more than 60,000 Indians were jailed over the following year (Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Salt March"[2]).
Dharasana, arrests, and a negotiated pact
Gandhi himself was arrested on 4 May 1930, before he could lead a planned raid on the government salt works at Dharasana; leadership of that action passed to the poet and Congress leader Sarojini Naidu, and the ensuing Dharasana Satyagraha, in which unarmed satyagrahis advanced in successive lines to be beaten back by police lathis without retaliating, was witnessed and reported by the American journalist Webb Miller, whose widely syndicated account of the volunteers' discipline under violence did significant damage to Britain's international standing (Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Salt March"[2]). Women joined the movement in large numbers for the first time in a mass Congress campaign, both in the salt satyagraha itself and in the associated boycotts, which historians treat as a turning point in bringing women into organized nationalist politics (NCERT, "Nationalism in India", pp. 42–43[1]). The movement did not immediately win self-rule: its first phase ended with the Gandhi-Irwin Pact of March 1931, in which the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, agreed to release political prisoners and permit limited coastal salt production in exchange for Gandhi's agreement to suspend civil disobedience and attend the Second Round Table Conference in London as the Congress's sole representative (NCERT, "Nationalism in India", pp. 40–41[1]). That conference achieved little of what Congress wanted constitutionally. The Salt March had nonetheless shown Indians and a global audience that colonial law could be defied openly, nonviolently, and on a mass scale, and it fixed Gandhi's method of satyagraha as the Congress's central strategy for the remainder of the independence struggle, through to the Quit India Movement of 1942 (Bipan Chandra et al., India's Struggle for Independence[5]; Judith M. Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope[4]).
