GANDHI LEADS CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE:

March 12, 1930

On March 12, 1930, Indian independence leader Mohandas Gandhi begins a defiant
march to the sea in protest of the British monopoly on salt, his boldest act of
civil disobedience yet against British rule in India.Britain's Salt Acts
prohibited Indians from collecting or selling salt, a staple in the Indian diet.
Citizens were forced to buy the vital mineral from the British, who, in addition
to exercising a monopoly over the manufacture and sale of salt, also exerted a
heavy salt tax. Although India's poor suffered most under the tax, Indians
required salt. Defying the Salt Acts, Gandhi reasoned, would be an ingeniously
simple way for many Indians to break a British law nonviolently. He declared
resistance to British salt policies to be the unifying theme for his new
campaign of satyagraha, or mass civil disobedience.On March 12, Gandhi set out
from Sabarmati with 78 followers on a 241-mile march to the coastal town of
Dandi on the Arabian Sea. There, Gandhi and his supporters were to defy British
policy by making salt from seawater. All along the way, Gandhi addressed large
crowds, and with each passing day an increasing number of people joined the salt
satyagraha. By the time they reached Dandi on April 5, Gandhi was at the head of
a crowd of tens of thousands. Gandhi spoke and led prayers and early the next
morning walked down to the sea to make salt.He had planned to work the salt
flats on the beach, encrusted with crystallized sea salt at every high tide, but
the police had forestalled him by crushing the salt deposits into the mud.
Nevertheless, Gandhi reached down and picked up a small lump of natural salt out
of the mud--and British law had been defied. At Dandi, thousands more followed
his lead, and in the coastal cities of Bombay and Karachi, Indian nationalists
led crowds of citizens in making salt. Civil disobedience broke out all across
India, soon involving millions of Indians, and British authorities arrested more
than 60,000 people. Gandhi himself was arrested on May 5, but the satyagraha
continued without him.On May 21, the poet Sarojini Naidu led 2,500 marchers on
the Dharasana Salt Works, some 150 miles north of Bombay. Several hundred
British-led Indian policemen met them and viciously beat the peaceful
demonstrators. The incident, recorded by American journalist Webb Miller,
prompted an international outcry against British policy in India.In January
1931, Gandhi was released from prison. He later met with Lord Irwin, the viceroy
of India, and agreed to call off the satyagraha in exchange for an equal
negotiating role at a London conference on India's future. In August, Gandhi
traveled to the conference as the sole representative of the nationalist Indian
National Congress. The meeting was a disappointment, but British leaders had
acknowledged him as a force they could not suppress or ignore.India's
independence was finally granted in August 1947. Gandhi was assassinated by a
Hindu extremist less than six months later.