Civil Disobedience and the Salt March, 1930-1934

The late 1920s brought a new generation into politics. The Simon Commission, appointed in 1927 to review constitutional reform, contained no Indian members and was boycotted across the country; Lala Lajpat Rai died in 1928 after being injured in a police lathi charge during a protest against it. In 1928 the Nehru Report, drafted by Motilal Nehru, proposed dominion status for India, and in December 1929 the Congress, meeting at Lahore under Jawaharlal Nehru, adopted the goal of purna swaraj, complete independence, and fixed 26 January 1930 as Independence Day.

Gandhi launched the Civil Disobedience Movement in March 1930 with the Salt March. Salt was a government monopoly, taxed at a rate that burdened the poorest, and Gandhi chose it as a symbol every Indian could understand. On 12 March 1930 he set out from Sabarmati Ashram with seventy-eight followers, walking about 240 miles to the coastal village of Dandi, where on 6 April he broke the salt law by picking up a lump of natural salt. The act was copied across the country, with people making salt, boycotting foreign cloth, and refusing to pay taxes.

The government responded with mass arrests, including Gandhi himself, and with violence against protesters, most famously at Dharasana in May 1930, where unarmed marchers were beaten as they approached the salt works. The movement was suspended after the Gandhi-Irwin Pact of March 1931, under which Gandhi agreed to attend the Second Round Table Conference in London, but the conference failed, and civil disobedience resumed in 1932 before fading by 1934. The Poona Pact of September 1932, between Gandhi and B. R. Ambedkar, settled the question of separate electorates for the depressed classes by providing reserved seats within joint electorates instead.

Civil disobedience did not win independence, but it made British rule look morally indefensible to a world audience and it brought women into the movement in large numbers, as picketers, marchers, and organisers. It also showed the limits of negotiation: the Round Table Conferences produced discussion without a settlement, and the movement's energy was spent before a constitutional answer was found.