How did Gandhi win? -- New Internationalist

How did Gandhi win? -- New Internationalist:

 

History remembers Mohandas Gandhi’s Salt March as one of the great episodes of resistance in the past century and as a campaign which struck a decisive blow against British imperialism. In the early morning of 12 March 1930, Gandhi and a trained cadre of 78 followers from his ashram began a march of more than 200 miles (320 kilometres) to the sea. Three and a half weeks later, on 5 April, surrounded by a crowd of thousands, Gandhi waded into the edge of the ocean, approached an area on the mud flats where evaporating water left a thick layer of sediment, and scooped up a handful of salt.

Gandhi’s act defied a law of the British Raj mandating that Indians buy salt from the government and prohibiting them from collecting their own. His disobedience set off a mass campaign of non-compliance that swept the country, leading to as many as 100,000 arrests. In a famous quote published in the Manchester Guardian, revered poet Rabindranath Tagore described the campaign’s transformative impact: ‘Those who live in England, far away from the East, have now got to realize that Europe has completely lost her former prestige in Asia.’ For the absentee rulers in London, it was ‘a great moral defeat’.

A bas relief at the Aga Khan Palace in Pune, India, depicts Gandhi leading his followers on the Salt March.
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