The Salt March
After remaining away from active politics during much of the latter 1920s, Gandhi returned in 1930 to protest Britain’s Salt Acts, which not only prohibited Indians from collecting or selling salt—a staple of the Indian diet—but imposed a heavy tax that hit the country’s poorest particularly hard. Gandhi planned a new Satyagraha campaign that entailed a 390-kilometer/240-mile march to the Arabian Sea, where he would collect salt in symbolic defiance of the government monopoly.
“My ambition is no less than to convert the British people through non-violence and thus make them see the wrong they have done to India,” he wrote days before the march to the British viceroy, Lord Irwin. Wearing a homespun white shawl and sandals and carrying a walking stick, Gandhi set out from his religious retreat in Sabarmati on March 12, 1930, with a few dozen followers. The ranks of the marchers swelled by the time he arrived 24 days later in the coastal town of Dandi, where he broke the law by making salt from evaporated seawater.
The Salt March sparked similar protests, and mass civil d