Gandhi Walked 240 Miles to Pick Up a Lump of Salt. By the End of 1930 Some 60,000 Indians Were in British Jails.

By the morning of 21 May 1930, about 2,500 volunteers had gathered in thatched sheds near the Dharasana salt works, about 150 miles north of Bombay. Gandhi had been in Yerawada jail since the night of 4 to 5 May. Sarojini Naidu, the poet and Congress leader who had taken charge of the raid, had the whole crowd kneel in prayer. “You will be beaten but you must not resist; you must not even raise a hand to ward off blows,” she told them.

Webb Miller of the United Press watched them go. The salt pans lay behind water-filled ditches and a barbed-wire stockade, guarded by 400 Surat policemen with five-foot clubs tipped with steel, under half a dozen British officials. The volunteers walked up in columns and were clubbed down. “From where I stood I heard the sickening whacks of the clubs on unprotected skulls,” Miller wrote later in his memoir, and in his dispatch he put it more plainly: “During the morning I saw and heard hundreds of blows inflicted by the police, but saw not a single blow returned by the volunteers.”

How many were hurt depends on who counted. The official government version, which Miller quoted, estimated from Congress sources that 170 were injured and only three or four seriously. Miller counted more than 200 in the camp’s temporary hospital at noon, and in his memoir the figure is 320, with two dead.

Gandhi was not there. The salt tax, and the thorn hedge the British grew to protect it, are the subject of The Tax on Salt, and this piece does not retell them. It follows the man behind the volunteers, from a magistrate’s order in Champaran in 1917 to a prayer ground in Delhi in 1948, and it includes the decisions that angered people on his own side. He was born on 2 October 1869. Since 2007 the United Nations has observed that date as the International Day of Non-Violence.

A lawyer told to leave Champaran

Motihari, the district town of Champaran in Bihar, was where Gandhi arrived on 15 April 1917. The peasants there lived under the tinkathia system, which made tenants grow indigo for European planters on “3/20, and sometimes up to 5/20, of their holdings,” in the words of the Swarthmore database of nonviolent campaigns. That is 15 to 25 percent of a family’s land.

A notice on 16 April ordered him to leave the district by the first available train. He wrote to the district magistrate that he would not go, and on 18 April he stood in the Motihari court and read out a statement explaining why, and the case had been withdrawn by 21 April.

He and his helpers then collected the peasants’ own testimony, and by 12 June they had recorded more than 8,000 statements. The planters pushed back, and on 8 June the secretary of the European Association urged that Gandhi be removed from Champaran altogether. Two days later the Bihar government announced the Champaran Agrarian Enquiry Committee, and Gandhi sat on it, although the Bihar Planters’ Association wrote on 14 June to protest against his place there. The committee agreed on 10 August that tinkathia should be abolished. The Champaran Agrarian Law (Bihar and Orissa Act I of 1918) was implemented in March 1918.

Twenty-one policemen and watchmen at Chauri Chaura

Gandhi launched the Non-Cooperation movement on 1 August 1920, the year after Jallianwala Bagh. On 1 February 1922 he wrote to the Viceroy that Bardoli, in Gujarat, would begin mass civil disobedience unless the government declared a policy of non-interference with non-violent activity. Three days later a crowd at Chauri Chaura attacked a police station. The GandhiServe chronology counts twenty-one policemen and watchmen killed. Nehru, writing in 1936, remembered “half a dozen or so” burned in the building.

Congress workers at Bardoli heard Gandhi say on 10 February that he was stopping civil disobedience at once. On 12 February the Working Committee passed a resolution suspending it, and he began a five-day fast as penance. Young India ran his article of 16 February under the heading “The Crime of Chauri Chaura.”

Nehru wrote in his Autobiography that the suspension was “resented, I think, by almost all the prominent Congress leaders,” Gandhi excepted, and that Gandhi tended to act by instinct and then, “for the benefit of his surprised and resentful colleagues, tries to clothe his decision with reasons.” Yet by 1936 Nehru had changed his mind. At the time, he wrote, the movement “in spite of its apparent power and the widespread enthusiasm, was going to pieces.” Almost all the good men were in prison, and “large numbers of undesirable men, including agents provocateurs, came to the front.” His verdict was hedged: “it may be, therefore, that the decision to suspend civil resistance in 1922 was a right one, though the manner of doing it left much to be desired and brought about a certain demoralisation.”

Arrest came at 10 p.m. on 10 March 1922, and he was charged the next day with promoting disaffection through his writing in Young India.

Twenty-four days to the sea

On 12 March 1930, at 6:30 in the morning, Gandhi left Sabarmati Ashram near Ahmedabad with 78 volunteers. The evening before, at his prayer meeting, he had told the crowd: “Either we shall win the goal for which we are marching or die in the attempt to win it.” Vallabhbhai Patel had already been arrested.

Britannica puts the walk at some 240 miles (385 km). Each night the party stopped in a different village, where larger crowds gathered to hear him on the unfairness of the tax. They reached Dandi on 5 April, and on the morning of 6 April Gandhi and his followers picked up salt along the shore. The chronology records that the salt law was broken the same day at Ahmedabad, Surat, Broach, Kheda, Bombay and Delhi. No arrests were made at Dandi that day.

The arrests came afterwards. Thousands were jailed in the weeks that followed, Britannica says, Nehru among them in April, and the news of Gandhi’s own detention, it adds, “spurred tens of thousands more to join.” He was taken at Karadi on the night of 4 to 5 May, after telling the Viceroy he meant to march on the Dharasana works.

The jail numbers do not agree. Some 60,000 people were in jail by the end of 1930, according to Britannica. TIME, naming Gandhi its Man of the Year for 1930, said some 30,000 members of his movement were “caged” when it went to press. Neither names a source for its count. Yerawada held Gandhi until 26 January 1931.

The threat to fly to Persia

Miller was the only foreign correspondent at Dharasana, and the government had already tried to keep him away. His train from Bombay skipped his station, and the stationmaster at Bulsar told him he had instructions from Bombay to put him off. He reached the sheds by freight train and then about six miles on foot.

The nearest telegraph office was at Bulsar, and from there he sent five messages of about 100 words each. Three and a half reached his London office, which then heard from the cable office that the Government of India wanted them cancelled as sent “by error.” London refused. The 2,000-word dispatch he filed from Bombay was held back. At the government headquarters of the Bombay Presidency a young official told him there was no censorship, and Miller told him he would fly to Persia and send the story from there. After an hour’s argument the official agreed to pass everything except three points about the conduct of the police. The Government of India, Miller noted, “had consistently maintained that it imposed no censorship upon outgoing messages.”

The story reached London and New York about ten days later by air mail, along with an account of the censorship. It “caused a sensation,” Miller wrote, “when it appeared in the 1,350 newspapers served by the United Press throughout the world. Senator Blaine read the text of my story into the records of the United States Senate.” Representatives of the Gandhi movement in the United States printed it as a leaflet and distributed more than a quarter of a million copies.

Miller was not a convert. “The Western mind finds it difficult to grasp the idea of non-resistance,” he wrote, and he admitted to “helpless rage and loathing” at the scene, some of it aimed at the men who submitted without a fight. The dispatch added: “In eighteen years of reporting in twenty-two countries, during which I have witnessed innumerable civil disturbances, riots, street fights and rebellions, I have never witnessed such harrowing scenes as at Dharasana.”

A pact, and three hangings

On 5 March 1931 Gandhi and Lord Irwin signed the pact that suspended civil disobedience, cleared the way for Congress to attend the Round Table Conference in London, and let villagers next to the salt-making coast make salt for use or sale inside their own villages. The Tax on Salt sets out what it did and did not change. The pact said nothing about Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru, who were under sentence of death.

Gandhi raised their case at the end of a long talk with Irwin on 18 February. Irwin’s note of it is printed in volume 45 of Gandhi’s Collected Works: “In conclusion and not connected with the above, he mentioned the case of Bhagat Singh. He did not plead for commutation, although he would, being opposed to all taking of life, take that course himself. He also thought it would have an influence for peace. But he did ask for postponement in present circumstances.”

Once the pact was signed, Gandhi raised it again on 19 March. Irwin recorded his answer: “I told him I had considered the case with most anxious care, but could find no grounds on which I could justify to my conscience commuting the sentence.” A journalist asked Gandhi on 21 March whether he hoped Bhagat Singh might be saved at the last minute. “Yes,” he said, “but it is a very distant hope.”

Again he wrote to Irwin on the morning of 23 March. “Popular opinion rightly or wrongly demands commutation,” the letter says. “When there is no principle at stake, it is often a duty to respect it.” And: “Execution is an irretrievable act.” Irwin replied that he could not see his way to take the action Gandhi requested. The three men were hanged that day, a story told in the piece on Bhagat Singh. In a statement the same day Gandhi wrote: “We must realize that commutation of the sentences was not a part of the truce.”

The critics’ case is set out by A. G. Noorani, whose book The Trial of Bhagat Singh reads Irwin’s notes closely, writes that Gandhi “never for a moment claimed that he had tried to make clemency for Bhagat Singh or his release a condition to the Pact and failed,” and that “had Gandhi taken such a stand on February 19, he might have succeeded in saving Bhagat Singh’s life.” Subhas Chandra Bose, who differed with Gandhi on the case, acknowledged that Gandhi “did try his best” but would not “go so far” as to break with the Viceroy.

The answer came at Karachi. “I might have made the commutation a term of the settlement,” he said. “It could not be so made. And to threaten withdrawal would be a breach of faith. The Working Committee had agreed with me in not making commutation a condition precedent to truce.” Both accounts rest on documents. He appealed in person and in writing, he did not make commutation a condition of the pact, and Irwin’s own notes show a request for postponement more than for commutation in that talk.

When Gandhi reached Malir station outside Karachi on 25 March, young men shouted “Gandhi go back” and “Down with Gandhism” and handed him flowers made of black cloth. “I am not surprised that young men are angry with me for not having been able to save them,” he told the Congress the next day. The session’s resolution of 29 March, which appears in his Collected Works, disapproved of “political violence in any shape or form” and placed on record “its admiration of the bravery and sacrifice of the late Sardar Bhagat Singh and his comrades,” and it called the triple execution “an act of wanton vengeance.” The next day Congress endorsed the pact and authorised Gandhi to represent it at the conference.

He reached London on 12 September and sailed home after the conference closed on 1 December, landing in Bombay on 28 December. The Viceroy refused to discuss the new ordinances with him on 31 December. The Congress Working Committee resolved on 1 January 1932 to resume civil disobedience, and on 4 January Gandhi was arrested at three in the morning and taken back to Yerawada.

The fast at Yerawada

In August 1932 the British government’s Communal Award, which the piece on divide and rule places in its longer history, gave the Depressed Classes, the official name then for what are now called Dalits, separate electorates. Gandhi, in Yerawada jail, told Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald by 18 August that he would fast unto death from 20 September unless the decision was withdrawn, and he began at noon that day.

The Poona Pact was signed on 24 September and Gandhi broke his fast on 26 September at 5:15 p.m. It replaced separate electorates with joint ones and reserved 148 seats for the Depressed Classes in the provincial legislatures, roughly double what the Award had offered. The Constitution of India project, which publishes the text, records that Ambedkar and other Dalit leaders were not happy with it. The Award had given Dalits two votes, one in a separate electorate and one in the general electorate, and Ambedkar saw the second as a political weapon beyond reckoning. Gandhi viewed separate electorates as a danger that would de-link untouchables from the Hindu community, and he fasted in prison until they were dropped. The pact also reserved 18 percent of the general seats for British India in the central legislature for the Depressed Classes.

”Do or die”

On 8 August 1942, in Bombay, the All India Congress Committee passed the Quit India resolution, and Gandhi spoke to the committee that day. “Here is a mantra, a short one, that I give you,” he said. “You may imprint it on your hearts and let every breath of yours give expression to it. The mantra is: Do or Die. We shall either free India or die in the attempt; we shall not live to see the perpetuation of our slavery.”

He was arrested early on 9 August with the Working Committee and taken to the Aga Khan Palace in Poona, and every Congress committee was declared illegal. What followed was recorded in the Government of India’s own telegrams to London. One, dated 5 September, said railway sabotage “began simultaneously in widely separated localities on August 11th,” and that 65 police stations and posts had been attacked, 40 of them destroyed, in figures it called “very incomplete.” Police firing, it said, had caused “to (? exceed) 340 killed and 630 wounded but true total must be considerably higher.” Another, of 6 September, said 553 post offices had been attacked, 28 of them burned down and 237 seriously damaged.

The Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, had telegraphed Churchill on 31 August: “I am engaged here in meeting by far the most serious rebellion since that of 1857, the gravity and extent of which we have so far concealed from the world for reasons of military security.” Linlithgow’s yardstick was the rising of 1857. The leaders who had issued the call were in jail by then.

An official count came in the Commons on 18 February 1943, in answer to the MP Reginald Sorensen. The Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, said that from 9 August to 30 November “1,028 persons lost their lives in connection with the disturbances and 3,215 were more or less seriously injured,” and that 958 sentences of whipping, “or as it should be described, of caning,” had been imposed in British India, excluding the United Provinces. Gandhi, in detention, wrote to Linlithgow on the last day of 1942: “Convince me of my error or errors and I shall make amends.”

The one-man boundary force

Gandhi spent 15 August 1947, the day of independence, in Calcutta, fasting, spinning and praying, in a house in a riot-hit quarter where angry Hindus had demonstrated against him two days earlier. Lord Mountbatten described him in a letter of 30 August as a “one-man boundary force.” On 1 September violence broke out in Calcutta and Gandhi began a fast at 8:15 p.m., to be given up “only if and when sanity returned to Calcutta,” and he broke it on 4 September after assurances from the leaders of all communities.

His last fast began in Delhi on 13 January 1948. In his written announcement of 12 January he said: “I yearn for heart friendship between Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims.” The fast, he wrote, would end “when and if I am satisfied that there is a reunion of hearts of all communities brought about without any outside pressure, but from an awakened sense of duty.” The Government of India announced on 15 January, the third day, that it would carry out its financial agreement with Pakistan, which it had held back over Kashmir, as a gesture of goodwill. Gandhi’s announcement does not mention the payment. More than a hundred representatives of Delhi’s communities signed a declaration of seven conditions on 18 January, and he ended the fast.

A bomb went off near the prayer meeting on 20 January while he was speaking, and he carried on. On 21 January security at Birla House was tightened and he turned down a suggestion that people coming to the prayers be searched.

What King and Mandela took from him

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in Stride Toward Freedom in 1958: “Christ furnished the spirit and motivation, while Gandhi furnished the method.”

Nelson Mandela, who followed Gandhi’s methods “for as long as I could,” made a different point in TIME’s People of the Century issue: “Gandhi himself never ruled out violence absolutely and unreservedly. He conceded the necessity of arms in certain situations.” Mandela quoted Gandhi as saying that “where choice is set between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence,” and wrote that he and others had founded Umkhonto we Sizwe because “the brute force of the oppressor could no longer be countered through passive resistance alone.”

Birla House

On 30 January 1948 Gandhi had his evening meal at 4:30 p.m. while a discussion with Vallabhbhai Patel carried on. Manibehn Patel interrupted to remind him it was time for prayer. He set out for the prayer ground between Manu Gandhi and Abha Gandhi. Nathuram Godse fired three shots at close range, and Gandhi died at 5:17 p.m.

Clement Attlee, the British Prime Minister, said in his tribute: “For a quarter of a century this one man has been the major factor in every consideration of the Indian problem.”