The Salt March: Gandhi Walks to the Sea
1930 · event
On 12 March 1930 Mohandas Gandhi walked out of his ashram near Ahmedabad with seventy eight companions and began a journey of three hundred and eighty five kilometres to the coast. The walk took twenty four days. He spoke in villages along the route, the group grew as it went, and newspapers around the world followed each stage. On the morning of 6 April, on the shore at Dandi, he bent down and picked up a lump of natural salt from the sand.
The gesture was a crime. British law reserved the production and sale of salt to the colonial government and taxed it, which meant that the poorest household in India paid a tax on something it could otherwise have gathered from the sea. Gandhi had chosen the salt law precisely because it touched everyone and because breaking it required no weapon and no wealth.
Within weeks millions of people were making or selling salt illegally along the coasts of India. Tens of thousands were arrested, including Gandhi. At the salt works of Dharasana, columns of volunteers walked forward to be beaten by police without raising a hand, and a report of it by an American correspondent was printed in more than a thousand newspapers. The moral argument moved decisively.
The campaign did not end colonial rule, and independence came seventeen years later. What it did was change the terms. It showed a mass movement that could not be answered by force without the answer being visible everywhere, and it gave later movements a working method. Martin Luther King studied it closely, and the walk to the sea remains the most widely cited example of civil disobedience anywhere.