unsuccessful in uniting the communities, in none of his campaigns—from the campaign against restrictions on Indian civil liberties in the early twenties to the pro-independence “Quit India” movement during World War II—did he succeed on as many levels as he did in the Salt Campaign of the early 1930s, a campaign in which Gandhi capitalized on the lessons he had learned in South Africa about sacrifice, suffering, and civil disobedience.
By the time of the annual Congress meeting in 1928, a split in the Congress had developed between those who favored Dominion status within the empire and those who favored complete and immediate independence. Gandhi brokered a compromise. The Congress would issue an ultimatum to Britain: either India would receive Dominion status by the end of 1929, or Congress would organize “non-violent non-co-operation” in support of complete independence.
Britain responded. In October 1929, the British viceroy in India, Lord Irwin, announced that the government had allowed him “to state clearly that . . . the natural issue of India’s constitutional progress . . . is the attainment of Dominion status.” Moreover, Indian representatives would be invited to a Round Table Conference to discuss “the British-Indian and All-Indian problems.” The Congress saw this statement as a commitment to write the constitution for a new India at the conference; its initial reaction, accordingly, was largely positive. However, in the House of Commons British politicians rose in opposition to the idea, renewed resistance to Dominion status caused a split within the Congress, and Irwin himself was unable to guarantee the Congress that Dominion status would emerge from the conference as the Indians originally anticipated. When the Congress met at the end of 1929, it committed itself to complete independence, authorizing consideration of civil disobedience.
It was up to Gandhi to conceive of and lead the disobedience. He devised a brilliant plan calling for a tightly controlled group of ashram-based supporters to break the laws that imposed taxes on salt and restricted the free manufacture of salt by Indians.11 Gandhi would greatly reduce the chance of violence by keeping the initial disobedience in-house. Disobedience against the salt laws slyly promoted Muslim-Hindu unity by bringing the two communities together around a nonreligious, economic issue. And, as historian Judith Brown has observed, the campaign’s “condemnation of a tax on a necessity of life for all by an exploitative foreign government could serve as a mass rallying cry and would probably rouse sympathy in England and America, elevating the whole campaign to a moral plane which would embarrass the raj.”12
Gandhi dramatized his disobedience by staging a huge buildup to it. He would undertake a long march to the sea with a band of dedicated supporters and, only after he arrived there, break the law by making salt. Before the march, Gandhi wrote to Lord Irwin sharing the details of his planned disobedience and offering a negotiated settlement.
When the British declined to settle, Gandhi and seventy-eight compatriots set off on the morning of March 12, 1930, from Gandhi’s Ahmedabad ashram for the seashore at Dandi—some 220 miles away.13 A huge crowd—one British newspaper’s estimate was 100,000—lined the immediate road ahead. The plan was to stop at a different village each night and each morning. At each stop, Gandhi would speak not only against the salt tax, but for the adoption of the ideal of village life as a path toward freedom and a good in its own right. The crowds for these talks were superb, ranging from the hundreds in small villages to the tens of thousands in larger towns.
The delegation reached Dandi on April 5. The next day, Gandhi defied the empire by very deliberately stooping over and gathering up a concoction of mud and salt. His followers then boiled seawater from which they extracted salt in defiance of the law. Gandhi used the first days after this initial salt-making to speak about the injustice of the salt laws. In the meantime, illegal salt-making erupted all across the country. Many thousands were arrested.
For weeks after the Dandi conclusion to the march, Gandhi mounted a vigorous, highly public campaign against the salt law. As he did so, government officials simply did not know what to do with him. If they arrested him, they would help transform him into an even greater hero than he already was. If they let him continue his defiance, the power of the government would be progressively diminished. Gandhi had plans to make matters more difficult for the government by raising the stakes; he intended to lead a nonviolent raid on the Dharasana Salt Works. The government, with its continued credibility at stake, felt forced to act. It arrested Gandhi just past midnight on May 5. Nonetheless, the raid went on. The disobedients endured exceptionally violent treatment by the lathi-armed police. There were multiple results flowing from this violence: injuries to hundreds of peaceful disobedients—with at least two of the injured dying; journalist Webb Miller’s moving reporting of Indian bravery in the face of police brutality; the inspiration for many other Indians to participate in subsequent raids; and the generation of enormous sympathy from the West for Gandhi’s cause.
Even with Gandhi and his co-workers in jail—or perhaps because they were in jail—civil disobedience against the salt laws continued. Thousands of localized civil disobedience movements around the country broke out over the course of the next year, accompanied by a widespread boycott of foreign cloth. By the time the movement came to an end, some sixty thousand Indian disobedients had graced the empire’s jails.
To allow them to confer over the terms of a possible settlement, the British released Gandhi and the other imprisoned members of a key Congress committee in early 1931. In February and March, Gandhi and Irwin negotiated face-to-face. They reached an agreement, commonly known as the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, in early March. By not calling for the outright repeal of the salt laws, the pact allowed the government to save face. The Indians realized many of their goals, however. In return for discontinuing disobedience and the boycott of British goods, the government would interpret the law to allow Indians to make and sell salt in their villages. Moreover, the government agreed that additional talks on constitutional reform would be held and would include representation from the Congress. In addition, imprisoned nonviolent disobedients would be released, pending prosecutions of nonviolent disobedients would be withdrawn, uncollected fines would be waived, some village officials who had resigned in protest would be reinstated, ordinances restricting civil liberties would be withdrawn, some confiscated properties would be restored to their owners, and lawful picketing could continue.
Nonviolent discipline was essential to the success of the Salt Campaign. But more important, the campaign worked because the participants engaged the dynamic that leads to social and political change. It did so in a way that revealed the two basic ways disobedience can be understood to lead to change. The salt campaigners made the sacrifice to endure jailings, beatings, and even death. When their suffering was seen by the public, including the international public, the public sympathized. This created pressure on the British government, which in turn led to curative institutional reaction. At the same time, the Salt Campaign was a massive withdrawal of consent to the salt laws as tens of thousands of people all across the subcontinent broke the laws governing the manufacture and sale of salt.
The salt disobedience is as clear an instance of success in creating change as there is in the Gandhian portfolio of disobedience. It resulted in a liberalization of the administration of the salt laws and in the withdrawal of ordinances restricting civil liberties. Even more important than a new understanding of the law, it created a new respect for the power of the Indian independence movement. As Gandhi scholar Thomas Weber has described it, the campaign “was about empowerment; it told people that they were stronger than they thought and that the rulers were weaker than they imagined.”14
After World War II, Britain calculated that maintaining its rule was more trouble than it was worth. It finally gave India its independence in 1947, and at the same time consented to the establishment of Pakistan, a separate Muslim state, created from Indian territory. Gandhi was deeply distressed by this partition of India and his failure to ultimately bridge Hindu-Muslim differences.
Just months later,
