meditation, and economic production.
Similarly, Gandhi’s famous 1930 Salt March has great symbolic as well as
practical value. He organizes a 400 kilometer march from Ahmedabad to the seashore at
Dandi to make salt himself in defiance of a British tax on this basic element of life in a
warm climate. Thousands join him in the march and in creating a parallel industry of salt-
making that deliberately rejects British control over Indian economics; thousand are
arrested, but the movement continues with its leadership in jail until finally the Viceroy,
Lord Edward Irwin, negotiates a settlement in 1931 that brings the civil disobedience to
an end, sets free the prisoners, and leads to the Round Table Conference in London,
where Gandhi is invited as the representative of the Indian National Congress.
The Salt March is paradigmatic of Gandhi’s nonviolence: it is dramatic and
symbolic noncooperation, strategically focused on a specific goal, mobilizes mass
participation, involves civil disobedience, and had profound cultural resonance. These
elements become part of the cultural tool kit of every nonviolent social movement in the
following decades, from civil rights and human rights movements to prodemocracy,
environmental, and other movements.
The Salt Satyagraha involves both resisting an existing regime and empowering
people to create alternatives; it not as an end in itself, but a means for organizing and
mobilizing further resistance. Above all, it demonstrates the power of the people to resist
a violent regime without violence. Not only does the march rivet the attention of the
Indian and international media for an extended period of time, but the protestors arrive at
the seashore on the anniversary of the most vivid symbol of the violence of the British
Empire, the Jallianwala Bagh (or Amritsar) massacre of 1919 when the British Indian
Convention