The Salt March and civil disobedience

What the specification asks for

“Salt March” — examined through significance and consequence. Incandio is aligned to specification 4HI1; it is not published by, endorsed by or affiliated with Pearson.

1 · Understand it

The choice of the law

After Lahore, Congress authorised Gandhi to begin civil disobedience and left the choice of issue to him. The Congress leadership expected something constitutional. He chose salt, and Nehru wrote afterwards that they had been bewildered.

The salt laws gave the government a monopoly on manufacture and levied a tax. The selection is a piece of political engineering of a very high order. Everybody needs salt, so the tax fell on the poorest hardest and on everybody at all. It could be made by anyone from seawater, so the law could be broken in public by an old man with a handful of mud. Breaking it injured nobody, damaged no property and stole nothing, so the state had to choose between ignoring open lawbreaking and arresting people for picking up salt. And the tax was small enough that the government could not argue the revenue was essential and large enough for the poor to feel.

Dandi and after

Gandhi left Sabarmati on 12 March 1930 with 78 followers and walked about 241 miles to the coast at Dandi, arriving on 5 April. He picked up a lump of natural salt on the morning of 6 April. The march took twenty-four days deliberately: it was reported daily, foreign correspondents followed it, and the crowd grew at every village.

Civil disobedience then spread far beyond salt. There were boycotts of foreign cloth and liquor, refusals of land revenue in Gujarat and the Bardoli region, and a mass movement in the North-West Frontier under Abdul Ghaffar Khan's Khudai Khidmatgar. About 60,000 people were imprisoned in 1930–31, including Gandhi and almost the entire Congress leadership. Women participated on a scale not seen before, with Sarojini Naidu leading the raid on the Dharasana salt works in May 1930, where police beat lines of unresisting volunteers in front of the American journalist Webb Miller, whose despatch was carried worldwide.

The Gandhi–Irwin Pact and the Round Table Conferences

In March 1931 the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, negotiated with Gandhi as an equal — a fact that Churchill, then out of office, denounced in the phrase about a seditious fakir striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace. The Gandhi–Irwin Pact suspended civil disobedience, released prisoners not convicted of violence, permitted salt-making for personal use on the coast, and secured Congress attendance at the Second Round Table Conference.

Measured in concessions the Pact was thin, and Congress radicals said so. Measured as recognition it was substantial: the government of India had negotiated a truce with a man it had imprisoned, on terms, in public.

The Second Round Table Conference in London in late 1931 failed, mainly on the communal question — Gandhi claimed to represent all India and the Muslim, Sikh and Depressed Classes delegates disputed it. Civil disobedience resumed in 1932 and was met with much harsher repression; Congress was declared illegal and over 80,000 were imprisoned. It was formally abandoned in 1934.

What the march achieved

It repealed nothing. The salt tax survived until 1946. Judged by legislation the campaign failed twice, in 1931 and 1934.

What it achieved was visibility and legitimacy. It put Indian nationalism on front pages across the world in a form nobody could describe as sedition, it made the moral position of the Raj internationally difficult, and it established a repertoire — a small symbolic law, broken in public, without violence, with arrest accepted — that the movement used for the next seventeen years. It also produced the negotiation of 1931, which is the first time a British Viceroy treated Congress as a party to be dealt with rather than an agitation to be managed.

2 · Learn it — the notes

The dates that earn marks

12 March – 5 April 1930

The march from Sabarmati to Dandi: 241 miles in 24 days with 78 initial marchers. Why this date: The duration was the design. A short march is an event; a long one is a daily news story.

6 April 1930

Gandhi picks up salt at Dandi. Why this date: The moment of illegality, and the date to quote precisely.

May 1930

Dharasana: police beat unresisting volunteers; Webb Miller's despatch is carried worldwide. Why this date: The international effect, and the clearest example of the tactic converting repression into evidence.

March 1931

The Gandhi–Irwin Pact suspends civil disobedience. Why this date: Negotiation as equals, which is the concession that mattered more than the terms.

The figures, and how far to trust them

• 241 miles in 24 days — The Dandi march, with 78 marchers at the start and thousands by the end.
• About 60,000 — Imprisoned during civil disobedience in 1930–31.
• Over 80,000 — Imprisoned during the harsher second phase from 1932. (Estimates vary; both figures should be given as approximations.)
• 1946 — The year the salt tax was finally abolished — sixteen years after the march against it.

The people to place

• Mohandas Gandhi — Chose salt, walked to Dandi, and negotiated the 1931 Pact.
• Lord Irwin — Viceroy who negotiated with Gandhi as an equal in 1931.
• Sarojini Naidu — Led the Dharasana raid after Gandhi's arrest; the campaign's most prominent woman leader.
• Abdul Ghaffar Khan — Led the Khudai Khidmatgar in the North-West Frontier, a Muslim non-violent mass movement.

What students say — and what is actually the case

Not this: The Salt March forced the British to abolish the salt tax.

This: The tax survived until 1946. The march's achievement was international attention, mass participation and the negotiation of 1931, not the repeal of the law it broke.

Not this: Salt was chosen because the tax was crushing.

This: It was a small tax. It was chosen because it was universal, breakable in public by anyone, and harmless to break — a law selected for its properties as a target, not for its severity.

Two things students merge

Blurred: The Salt March and civil disobedience.

The distinction: The march is a single 24-day action in March–April 1930. Civil disobedience is the campaign it opened, running to 1934 in two phases, including revenue refusal and boycott. The march is the ignition, not the campaign.

Blurred: The Gandhi–Irwin Pact and the Round Table Conferences.

The distinction: The Pact (March 1931) is a truce in India that got Congress to London. The Conferences (1930–32) are the constitutional negotiations there. Congress attended only the second, and it failed on the communal question.

What a Grade 9 answer holds here

A Grade 9 answer treats the selection of the law as the achievement. Anyone can break a law; Gandhi found the one that could be broken by everybody, in public, without hurting a soul, in front of the world's press — so the government's only options were to look weak or to look brutal, and it chose both in turn.

3 · How it is examined

This strand is genuinely set through: Paper 1 (a) (6 marks — “What impression does the author give about …? You must use Extract A to explain your answer.”); Paper 1 (b) (8 marks — “Explain two effects of … on ….”); Paper 1 (c)(i) or (c)(ii) (16 marks — “'[A statement about the period.]' You may use the following in your answer: • [prompt] • [prompt]. You must also use information of your own. How far do you agree? Explain your answer.”).

What earns marks: The reason for choosing salt, stated as a set of properties. It is the difference between narrating a walk and explaining a strategy, and it can be done in two sentences.

4 · Prove it — the questions

Answered inside Incandio, where a marker checks what a correct answer must contain and tells you which half was missing. The marking stays in the app; the questions are here.

1. Explain two reasons why Gandhi chose the salt laws for civil disobedience in 1930. [8 marks · Paper 1 (b)]
2. Explain two effects of the Salt March on India. [8 marks · Paper 1 (b)]
3. What impression does the author give about the Salt March? You must use Extract A to explain your answer. [6 marks · Paper 1 (a)]
4. 'The Salt March achieved very little.' How far do you agree? Explain your answer. [16 marks · Paper 1 (c)(i) or (c)(ii)]
5. 'Gandhi's leadership was the main reason for the growth of the nationalist movement in the years 1929–35.' How far do you agree? Explain your answer. [16 marks · Paper 1 (c)(i) or (c)(ii)]

Decide it

This lesson feeds a Decide History judgement — a position you commit to, an objection you answer, a criterion you name: Did non-violence win India's independence?.

Carry on through the option

• Previous lesson: The Simon Commission
• Next lesson: The Government of India Act (1935) and the 1937 elections
• Key topic 3 · Key developments, 1927–39 · Colonial rule and the nationalist challenge in India, 1919–47 · the option's timeline · Incandio History
• The other key topics of Colonial rule and the nationalist challenge in India: The Rowlatt Acts, Amritsar and the Government of India Act, 1919 · Gandhi and Congress, 1919–27 · The impact of the Second World War on India · Communal violence, independence and partition, 1945–47