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Dandi Modern History Notes for

UPSC Exam
Satyagraha
On March 12, 1930, Mahatma Gandhi launched the Dandi March or Dandi Satyagraha, a nonviolent
protest against the British monopoly on salt manufacture. The Dandi march was a tax protest against the
British salt monopoly that lasted 24 days, from March 12 to April 5, 1930. He led the historic Dandi March
from Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, to Dandi hamlet on the state's coast. It took him 24 days
to get to Dandi.
The march marked the beginning of the civil disobedience movement, which was founded on Gandhi's
ideal of nonviolence, or Satyagraha. After the non-cooperation movement of the early 1920s, the Dandi
march was easily the most major organized protest against the British Raj. It was a true turning moment
in the Indian Independence movement, attracting national and worldwide media attention as well as world
leaders. Study major topics of Modern History from the perspective of UPSC Exams.

Background Behind Organizing the Dandi March

• The 1882 Salt Act established a monopoly on salt manufacturing and delivery for the British.
Despite the fact that salt was readily available along India's coasts, Indians were forced to
purchase it from the colonizers.
• The British imposed a hefty salt tax in addition to having a monopoly on the manufacture and sale
of salt. Despite the fact that the impoverished in India bore the brunt of the tariff, all Indians wanted
salt.
• Gandhi concluded that if there was one product that could be used to launch civil disobedience,
it would be salt.
• Salt is possibly the greatest essential of life, next to air and water.
• The British administration, notably Viceroy Lord Irwin, did not take a campaign against the salt
tax seriously.
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• On March 8, Gandhi announced his decision to defy the salt rules in front of a large crowd in
Ahmedabad.
Also, Check the details on the Cabinet Mission Plan here.

Course of the Gandhi March

• On the eve of the march, Ahmedabad was buzzing with anticipation. A massive crowd gathered
outside the ashram in Sabarmati and stayed all night.
• That night, Gandhi wrote to Nehru, informing him of rumours of his arrest. That did not happen,
and Gandhi awoke the next day as a free man.
• He assembled his strolling companions, a group of 78 genuine ashramites. Manilal Gandhi of
South Africa was among them, as were several others from around India.
• There were 31 marchers from Gujarat, 13 from Maharashtra, and smaller contingents from the
United Provinces, Kerala, Punjab, and Sindh, with Tamilnadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka,
Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa each contributing one man.
• The marchers' diversity was social as well as geographical, with numerous students and khadi
workers, several 'untouchables,' a few Muslims, and one Christian among the chosen marchers.
• Despite the fact that women also wanted to participate in the march, Gandhi intended to keep it
exclusively for men.
• They set out at 6:30 a.m., surrounded by a big crowd who greeted them with flowers, pleasantries,
and rupee notes.
• They stopped in a number of villages along the road, where Gandhi delivered rousing speeches
about the need to boycott the salt tax to enormous [Link] was hailed by adoring crowds
at every visit.
• On April 5, Gandhi arrived in Dandi. He went to the sea with the other marchers the next day,
early in the morning, and picked up lumps of natural salt laying in a little trench.
• The act was symbolic, but it was widely covered in the media, and it sparked a series of additional
acts of civil disobedience across India.

What did Mahatma Gandhi say on the eve of Salt Satyagraha?

• "Let there be not a semblance of breach of peace even after all of us have been arrested"
• "A Satyagrahi, whether free or incarcerated, is ever victorious. He is vanquished only when he
forsakes truth and non-violence and turns a deaf ear to the inner voice"
• "We have resolved to utilize all our resources in the pursuit of an exclusively non-violent struggle"

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• "If, therefore, there is such a thing as defeat for even a Satyagrahi, he alone is the cause of it.
God bless you all and keep off all obstacles from the path in the struggle that begins tomorrow"
Check the Modern History NCERT Notes here.

Spread of Salt Satyagraha in Other Parts of India

• The arrest and incarceration of Gandhiji sparked nationwide protests and strikes. In Bombay,
50,000 textile workers have stopped working.
• The demonstrators were joined by railway personnel. Resignations from honorary offices and
services were announced at regular intervals at Poona, where Gandhi was imprisoned.
• The police in Calcutta opened fire and arrested a large number of individuals. There was also
gunfire in Delhi.
• Peshawar was besieged by the troops on the day Gandhi was arrested. India rose as if it were a
single person.
• People in Solapur took control of the town for a week before martial law was declared. Also hit
were Mymensingh, Calcutta, Karachi, Lucknow, Multan, Delhi, Rawalpindi, Mardan, and
Peshawar.
• Troops, planes, tanks, artillery, and ammunition were all freely employed in the North-West
Frontier Province. Punjabi repression gave birth to the Ahrar Party.
• The Indian situation piqued the curiosity of the West, which had been reawakened by Romain
Rolland.
• A group of one hundred clergymen led by Dr. Holmes petitioned British Prime Minister Ramsay
MacDonald to reach an amicable agreement with Gandhi.

Dharasana Satyagraha
• Mr. Abbas Tyabji was Gandhi's successor and an ex-Baroda Chief Justice. He was getting ready
to march from Karadi to Dharasana Salt Works.
• The volunteers formed a line for the march on May 12, 1930, but Tyabji was detained.
• Abbas Tyabji was followed by Mrs. Sarojini Naidu. On May 21, a group of almost 2,000 volunteers
led by her and Imam Saheb raided the Dharasana salt store, located roughly 150 miles north of
Bombay.
• The multitude marched ahead, headed by Manilal, Gandhi's son, towards the salt pans, which
were now ringed by a barbed-wire stockade and water-filled ditches, guarded by 400 Surat police
and a half-dozen British officers.

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Raids on Salt Works in Other Cities

• Raids on the salt depot in Wadala, a Bombay suburb, were also carried out in quick succession.
• On May 18, 470 satyagrahis who had been dispatched for the operation were apprehended. But
it was on June 1st that the most dramatic attack took place, with 15,000 volunteers and onlookers
taking part in the massive demonstration.
• Mounted cops charged into the crowd, clubs slamming into people's heads. Similar raids on the
Sanikatta salt plant in Karnataka occurred, with 10,000 raiders taking thousands of maunds of
salt under a hail of lathis and bullets.

Gandhiji Composes 'Yeravda Mandir'

• Gandhi addressed weekly letters to the ashram's prisoners in Gujarati, in which he examined the
ashram's main vows: truth, non-violence, brahmacharya, non-possession, bread labour, and so
on.
• These letters were first published in Young India and later collected in the book From Yeravda
Mandir.
• He also translated the hymns and verses from the ashram hymn book, Bhajanavali, which was
eventually published by John Hoyland as Songs from Prison.

Civil Disobedience Continues

• In June, the Congress's Working Committee met in Allahabad and issued resolutions calling for
continued civil disobedience, a complete boycott of foreign cloth, the launch of an n-tax campaign,
weekly violations of the salt law, a boycott of British banking, insurance, shipping, and other
institutions, and picketing of liquor stores.
• To combat picketing, non-payment of taxes, and meddling with the loyalty of Government officials,
the Viceroy issued stringent decrees.

Khadi Boycott and Propagation

• Foreign fabric, whiskey, and all British goods were completely boycotted. Hundreds of
demonstrators were imprisoned, but there were always more to take their place. Picketing
establishments selling foreign goods were women clad in orange Khadi sarees.
• Only a few people went into these stores. The ladies volunteer united her hands in supplication
and pleaded; if all else failed, she would hurl herself across the threshold. However, there were
exceptional shops that refused to sign a vow not to sell any foreign fabric or British items.

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• The majority of Indian stores agreed to take on this task. A motorist can only move his bales past
the Congress sentries if he has a documented permit from the Congress committee. The
Congress in Bombay blocked 30 crores worth of foreign textiles.

Prabhat Pheri
• Imports of cotton piece items had dropped to a third to a fourth of what they had been the previous
year by the autumn of 1930.
• The cigarettes were now worth a sixth of what they used to be. In Bombay, sixteen British-owned
factories were shut down. The mills controlled by Indians, on the other hand, were working double
shifts as a result of the vow.
• Around 113 mills signed a declaration agreeing to avoid mill cloth rivalry with khaddar by not
producing cloth with counts lower than eighteen.

Women Participation
• Women from various walks of life played the most prominent role in the campaign. Picketing
included the elderly Kasturba Gandhi and Mrs. Motilal Nehru.
• Revenue plummeted by nearly 70% as a result of successful picketing. The forest regulations in
C.P. were defined, resulting in a loss of about sixteen lakhs of rupees for the government.

Dandi March's Significance in Indian Freedom Struggle

• The Dandi march's popularity caused the British government to be shaken. By March 31, it had
arrested more than 95,000 people. Gandhi went to the Dharasana salt plant the following month,
where he was arrested and brought to the Yerawada Central Jail.
• Gandhi was released from prison in January 1931. Later, he met with India's viceroy, Lord Irwin,
and promised to call off the satyagraha in exchange for an equal negotiating role at a London
conference on the country's future.
• Similar acts of civil disobedience occurred in other parts of India after Gandhi breached the salt
rules in Dandi.
• Volunteers led by Satish Chandra Dasgupta travelled from Sodepur Ashram to Mahisbathan
village to produce salt, for example.
• Another group of marchers was led by K.F Nariman in Bombay to Haji Ali Point, where they
produced salt in a neighbouring park.
• The boycott of imported fabric and wine was supplemented by the illegal manufacture and selling
of salt.
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• In Maharashtra, Karnataka, and the Central Provinces, forest rules were broken. Land and
chowkidari levies were not paid by peasants in Gujarat and Bengal.
• Acts of violence erupted in Calcutta, Karachi, and Gujarat as well, but unlike the non-cooperation
movement, Gandhi refused to call a halt to the civil disobedience movement this time.
• Only in 1934 did the Congress Working Committee decide to put a stop to the Satyagraha. The
Salt Satyagraha had several long-term implications, despite the fact that it did not immediately
lead to self-rule or dominion status.

Consequences of the 'Dandi Satyagraha'

• Mahatma Gandhi and his companions took 24 days to complete the Dandi March, also known as
the Salt March or the Salt Satyagraha. They trekked 395 kilometres to get to Dandi.
• Bapu's choice of salt as the protest's focal point was dismissed by his own Congress advisers,
notably Pandit Nehru and Sardar Patel. Even Lord Irwin, the Viceroy at the time, thought Gandhi's
protest posed no threat.
• Salt, that essential simple component in every meal eaten by every common man, for which he
was forced to pay an unduly exorbitant tax to the British government, would pique the interest of
millions across undivided India.

Dandi March's Global Impact

• The Salt March to Dandi inspired others as well. In various sections of the country, leaders like
Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Sarojini Naidu, and C Rajagopalachari spearheaded salt
movements.
• The 'Civil Disobedience Movement' and the 'Swadeshi Movement' erupted as a result of these
marches, and the clamour for 'purna swaraj' (full independence) grew stronger.
• People began resisting additional 'unfair, unpopular' British taxes soon after. Finally, the British
had no choice but to submit and repeal the salt tax, as well as relinquish their monopoly on the
manufacturing and sale of salt.
• The March to Dandi inspired American civil rights advocates Martin Luther King Jr, James Bevel,
and others in their campaign for African Americans' and other minority groups' civil rights in the
1960s, 30 years later.

British Reactions to the Dandi March

• The government retaliated by launching a terror campaign. More than 95,000 people had been
imprisoned by March 31.
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• On April 14, Shri Jawaharlal Nehru was arrested and condemned to six months in prison. Violence
erupted in Karachi, Calcutta, Peshawar, and Chittagong on a sporadic basis.
• In Calcutta, Madras, and Karachi, police opened fire, and cruelty was inflicted across the country.
Throughout it all, Gandhi encouraged people to "respond to organised hooliganism with enormous
anguish."
• Gandhi was taken into custody. When Gandhiji prepared to start his march to Dharasana, the war
against the "Black Regime" was at its peak.
• On June 30, the government detained acting president Pandit Motilal Nehru and declared the
Congress Working Committee an illegal organisation. Thousands of individuals have been
imprisoned. Ordinance-based government continued apace.
• The Press Ordinance had shut down 67 nationalist newspapers and around 55 printing factories
by July.
• Young India and Navajivan began to appear in cyclostyle when the Navjivan Press was seized.
• The statutory commission's long-awaited report was released in June. Its suggestions didn't even
go so far as to reaffirm the Viceroy's ambiguous guarantee of dominion status. They aimed to
strengthen the central government while allowing the provinces a few concessions.
• The extension of the notion of communal electorates pushed the "divide and rule" approach even
farther.
• All stakeholders were deeply dissatisfied by these recommendations. Men like Malaviya and Aney
joined the Congress and risked going to jail.
• As a result, a beautiful chapter in our Freedom Struggle came to a close.
• The Dandi March sparked a movement that spread across the country, eventually attaining what
Gandhiji had hoped for at Dandi: ultimate independence for the people of his beloved India.

Dandi March: Important Points for UPSC Exams

• The Dandi March began on March 12 and finished on April 6, 1930, lasting 24 days. From Gandhi
Ji's Sabarmati Ashram to Dandi, it traveled through four districts and 48 villages.
• Mahatma Gandhi led the march in protest of the British-imposed salt ban. This act made it illegal
for Indians to make or sell salt.
• The British not only had a monopoly on salt production, but also imposed a high salt tax. Gandhi
Ji defied the law by producing salt at the Dandi seashore with the assistance of numerous other
Indians.
• Thousands of people joined the march, which drew international attention to the Indian
independence cause thanks to considerable media coverage.
• At 12 a.m. on May 4, 1930, Gandhi Ji was arrested for the unlawful manufacturing of salt.
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• The resistance to the salt tax lasted about a year, and nearly 60,000 Indians were imprisoned as
a result.
• The salt satyagraha resulted in a boycott of British goods and clothing.
• Indians began to reject various laws, such as land revenue, the Chowkidar tax, and others.
• The march has played the most important role in fighting the British since the Non-Cooperation
Movement of 1920–22. On January 26, 1930, the Indian National Congress issued the Purna
Swaraj proclamation.

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