The Civil Disobedience Movement

After the Lahore Congress of December 1929, with Jawaharlal Nehru as its president, declared purna swaraj the goal, Gandhi launched the Civil Disobedience Movement (1930-34), his second great mass struggle. It opened with the Salt March to Dandi, where Gandhi broke the salt law. From there it spread into a nationwide defiance of British laws. It produced the Gandhi-Irwin Pact and the historic Karachi Resolution on Fundamental Rights. Mass participation, especially of women, was far wider than ever before. This is a very high-yield topic.

Examiners like to test whether you can place the political landmarks of this period against earlier ones. Fix these four anchors:

• 1883: the first National Conference met at Calcutta, an early all-India political gathering that preceded the Congress.
• 1906: the All-India Muslim League was founded at Dacca.
• 1927: the All-India States Peoples Conference was formed to coordinate the movements of the people of the princely states.
• 1932: the Communal Award extended separate electorates to the depressed classes (covered fully later in this topic).

Before the all-India struggle began, a local campaign in Gujarat showed what disciplined peasant resistance could achieve. In 1928 the Bombay government raised the land revenue assessment of Bardoli taluka by about 22 per cent. The peasants held the increase to be unjust and resolved not to pay. They invited Vallabhbhai Patel to lead them.

Patel organised the Bardoli Satyagraha (1928) as a complete no-revenue campaign. Volunteers ran camps in every village, a daily bulletin kept peasants informed, and social boycott was used against anyone who paid. Attempts to confiscate and auction land found no buyers. The grateful women of Bardoli gave Patel the title Sardar, the name by which the nation came to know him. The government finally appointed an enquiry, the Maxwell-Broomfield Committee, which found the enhancement unjustified and cut it to a small fraction. Bardoli proved that organised non-violent refusal could force the Raj to retreat. It served as a dress rehearsal for the national movement that followed in 1930.

The years just before civil disobedience saw a cluster of official committees. Each examined one part of the colonial system, and their subjects are easy to confuse. Keep them distinct:

• Hunter Committee (1919): enquiry into the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and the Punjab disturbances.
• Muddiman Committee (1924): reviewed the working of dyarchy, the divided provincial government set up by the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms.
• Butler Committee (1927): examined the relationship between the Indian States (princely states) and the Paramount Power, the British Crown.
• Hartog Committee (1929): reported on the growth of education in British India and the possibilities of its further progress.
• Whitley Commission (1929-31): the Royal Commission on Labour in India, appointed to report on the existing conditions of labour and to make recommendations for their improvement.

Labour unrest also drew a legislative response. The Trade Disputes Act of 1929 set up a system of tribunals, Courts of Inquiry and Boards of Conciliation, to settle industrial disputes. Alongside this machinery it imposed a ban on strikes: strikes in public utility services without prior notice were made illegal, and general or sympathetic strikes were forbidden. Nationalists saw the Act as a curb on the growing trade union movement rather than a protection for workers.

To carry forward the Lahore mandate, Gandhi presented Eleven Demands to the viceroy with an ultimatum of 31 January 1930. These ranged widely: a 50 per cent cut in army and civil spending, total prohibition, and a lower rupee-sterling ratio. The peasant demand he placed at the centre was the abolition of the salt tax and the government's salt monopoly.

Why salt? As Gandhi said, salt was, after water, the one necessity the government taxed to reach "the starving millions, the sick, the maimed." It linked the ideal of swaraj to a concrete, universal grievance of the rural poor. Unlike a no-rent campaign, it carried no socially divisive edge. It also gave the urban populace a symbolic way to identify with mass suffering.

The Dandi March (12 March - 6 April 1930). With the government unmoved, Gandhi set out from the Sabarmati Ashram with 78 followers and marched 240 miles to the coast at Dandi, where on 6 April 1930 he picked up a lump of salt and broke the salt law. Declaring the open defiance, Gandhi announced that "sedition has become my religion". The act became a symbol of the people's resolve not to live under British-made laws. The government struck back at the organisation behind it: consequent upon the breaking of the Salt Law, the Indian National Congress was declared illegal.

The man now preaching sedition had once worked within the system, and questions often pair the two phases. Two earlier facts matter:

• Indentured labour: Gandhi was instrumental in the campaign against indentured labour, the system that shipped Indian workers abroad on bonded contracts. The system was abolished in 1917.
• War Conference (1918): at Lord Chelmsford's War Conference in Delhi, Gandhi supported the resolution on recruiting Indians for the First World War. He even toured villages as a recruiter.

His turn to open law-breaking in 1930 therefore marked a complete break from this earlier cooperation.

A favourite match-the-pairs question links landmark events to what each directly produced. Keep these anchors straight:

• Morley-Minto Reforms (1909): introduced separate communal electorates for Muslims.
• Simon Commission (1927-28): its all-white composition provoked a country-wide agitation, met with black flags and the cry "Simon, go back".
• Chauri-Chaura incident (1922): the violence there led Gandhi to withdraw the Non-Cooperation Movement.
• Dandi March (1930): opened the Civil Disobedience Movement through the illegal manufacture of salt.

Spread. Defiance spread across the country. C. Rajagopalachari led a salt march to Vedaranniyam in Tamil Nadu. K. Kelappan marched in Malabar. Salt satyagrahas broke out in Andhra, Orissa and Bengal. In the North-West Frontier Province, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan ("Frontier Gandhi") and his Khudai Khidmatgars (Red Shirts) led a powerful movement. Sholapur saw a virtual parallel government. At Dharasana (May 1930), Sarojini Naidu led a raid on the salt works, where an unarmed crowd was brutally lathi-charged. Other forms followed: no-revenue and no-chowkidari-tax campaigns, forest-law violations, and a boycott of foreign cloth. Women entered the public sphere in huge numbers. Gandhi had specially asked them to lead, and they did, along with students, merchants, tribals and peasants. (Workers joined in pockets such as Sholapur, but organised labour as a class largely stayed away, as the evaluation below explains.) (At just 13, Rani Gaidinliu raised the banner of revolt in Manipur and Nagaland.) Muslim participation, however, was nowhere near the Non-Cooperation level.

The government's response in 1930 was repressive but ambivalent. After the publication of the regressive Simon Report, the viceroy Lord Irwin suggested a Round Table Conference. On 25 January 1931, Gandhi and the Congress Working Committee were released, and Gandhi opened talks with Irwin.

The Gandhi-Irwin Pact (the Delhi Pact) was signed on 5 March 1931, placing the Congress on an equal footing with the government. Irwin agreed to release political prisoners not convicted of violence, remit unrealised fines, return unsold confiscated land, allow salt-making for personal use in coastal areas, and permit peaceful picketing. He turned down Gandhi's demands for a public enquiry into police excesses and the commutation of Bhagat Singh's death sentence. Gandhi agreed to suspend civil disobedience and join the Second Round Table Conference.

The Karachi Congress (March 1931) met just days after Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru were hanged. The Congress admired their bravery but disapproved of political violence. It still endorsed the Gandhi-Irwin Pact and reiterated purna swaraj. It then adopted two landmark resolutions. The Resolution on Fundamental Rights guaranteed free speech, a free press, equal rights regardless of caste, creed or sex, universal adult franchise, and state neutrality in religion. The Resolution on the National Economic Programme called for reduction in rent and revenue, a living wage, the right to form unions, and state ownership of key industries. For the first time the Congress spelt out what swaraj would mean for the masses. The Karachi Resolution remained its basic political-economic programme.

After the Second Round Table Conference failed, the Congress resumed civil disobedience in December 1931. The new viceroy, Lord Willingdon, was determined to crush it. Gandhi was arrested on 4 January 1932. A "Civil Martial Law" of ordinances banned Congress organisations and confiscated property. The response was still massive: about 80,000 satyagrahis were jailed in the first four months. But the movement could not be sustained, and Gandhi finally withdrew it in April 1934.

Was the Gandhi-Irwin Pact a retreat? No. Mass movements are necessarily short-lived, and the masses' capacity for sacrifice is limited. There were clear signs of exhaustion by late 1930. The political prisoners released got a hero's welcome.

How CDM differed from Non-Cooperation:

• its stated objective was complete independence, not the redress of two wrongs and a vague swaraj;
• it involved breaking the law from the very start, not merely withholding cooperation;
• there was a decline in participation by the intelligentsia (fewer lawyers and students gave up practice/schools);
• Muslim participation was much lower than in Non-Cooperation; and
• working-class participation was weak. Labour leaders under communist influence regarded the Congress ideology as bourgeois and reactionary, and they kept the organised working class aloof from the nationalist upsurge of the early 1930s.

But the massive participation of peasants, women and business groups more than made up for it. The Congress emerged organisationally stronger.

While the second phase of the movement was being crushed, a constitutional shock arrived from London. In August 1932 the British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald announced the Communal Award, which gave separate electorates to the depressed classes in addition to Muslims, Sikhs and others. Gandhi saw this as a device to split the depressed classes permanently from the rest of Hindu society. From Yerwada jail in Poona he began a fast unto death on 20 September 1932.

The fast forced an agreement. The Poona Pact (24 September 1932) was signed between leaders of caste Hindus, with Madan Mohan Malaviya prominent among them, and B. R. Ambedkar on behalf of the depressed classes. It abandoned separate electorates for the depressed classes. In their place it provided reserved seats within joint electorates, and raised the number of seats reserved for them in the provincial legislatures from 71 to 147. The government accepted the pact and amended the Award accordingly.

The pact marked a turning point in Gandhi's own programme. He had always opposed untouchability, but it was after the Poona Pact that he made the upliftment of the depressed classes, whom he called Harijans ("children of God"), a central plank of his political and social work. He founded the All India Anti-Untouchability League in September 1932, later renamed the Harijan Sevak Sangh. In 1933 he started the weekly Harijan, and in 1933-34 he undertook a country-wide Harijan tour, campaigning for temple entry and the removal of social disabilities.