Salt March
In March 1930, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi led a march of roughly 240 miles across Gujarat to the Arabian Sea, where he openly broke British colonial law by making salt from seawater. The act was small in itself, but it turned a routine tax into a symbol of foreign rule and launched the Civil Disobedience Movement, one of the largest campaigns of nonviolent resistance in modern history.
The background lay in the Indian National Congress's long struggle for self-government. In December 1929, Congress had declared purna swaraj, or complete independence, as its goal, and it authorized Gandhi to plan a campaign. Gandhi chose salt because it was essential to every household, rich or poor, yet British law gave the government a monopoly on its production and imposed a tax on it. Indians were forbidden to collect or manufacture salt even along their own coastline. The tax fell hardest on the poorest, and the issue could be understood by anyone, which made it a far more unifying target than constitutional disputes. Gandhi reportedly wrote to the viceroy, Lord Irwin, before setting out, and received no concession.
The march began on 12 March from Gandhi's ashram at Sabarmati, near Ahmedabad, with a few dozen disciplined followers; the number is commonly given as 78. Over about three and a half weeks, they passed through villages, where crowds gathered, and Gandhi gave speeches urging people to join the struggle and to practice self-reliance. The numbers swelled along the route, and journalists, including foreign correspondents, followed closely. On 6 April, at the coastal village of Dandi, Gandhi picked up a lump of salty mud and thereby technically violated the salt law.
His act inspired mass imitation. Across India, people made salt illegally, boycotted foreign cloth, and withdrew from government service. Authorities responded with mass arrests, and Gandhi himself was jailed in May. Tens of thousands were imprisoned in total, with estimates varying. One of the best-known episodes came at the Dharasana Salt Works, where unarmed volunteers were beaten by police; the account of American journalist Webb Miller carried the scene to readers around the world and drew sympathy for the movement.
The campaign did not win independence, and historians debate how much it directly achieved. Gandhi was released in early 1931 and negotiated the Gandhi–Irwin Pact with the viceroy, which freed many prisoners and allowed limited salt production for coastal communities, but the salt laws remained. Its deeper significance was political and moral: it showed that mass, disciplined, nonviolent defiance could shake the legitimacy of an empire, and it drew in women and rural people on a new scale. The march later influenced civil rights movements elsewhere, and India achieved independence in 1947.