The pinch of salt was proving mightier than a....
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They had been walking for more than three weeks. Day after day, they had trudged over the flat, dry countryside turned brown and dusty by the hot summer sun. And now they stood on the sea shore, at the village of Dandi, with the waves of the Arabian Sea lapping the beach.
They were the 'law-breakers' and that was where they were to break the law, forbidding them to make salt or even pick it up for their use from the deposits left by the sea.
Their leader was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, known all over India as Gandhiji or Mahatma Gandhi. The Dandi march was a part of the movement he called Satyagraha or the pursuit of truth.
Twenty-four years earlier, in South Africa, where he was then living, his satyagraha had forced the government to repeal the law forcing Indians in the Transvaal to register themselves and carry certificates bearing their finger prints to prove that they had the right to live in that country.
In India, he was applying the same tactics of defying the authority of the alien British Government in a peaceful, non-violent way and refusing to co-operate with it.
The British had come to India 330 years earlier, landing at the port of Surat, hardly 50 Kilometers from Dandi, where Gandhiji and his followers stood on April 5, 1930, ready to begin the struggle against them.
It was to trade that the British came, but they stayed to rule. In 1599, the East India Company was formed in London to trade with the East and in 1600 a small ship commanded by Captain Hawkins dropped anchor at Surat. A few years later the British went to the court of the Mughal Emperor, Jehangir, in Agra. The Emperor welcomed Hawkins and gave the East India Company permission to trade and to have trading depots north of Bombay.