Why did Gandhi walk 387 km to pick up a lump of salty mud?

Gandhi chose salt because everyone needed it. Under an 1882 law the British held a monopoly on salt and taxed it, and making it was a crime, even though people on the coast could simply evaporate it from seawater. An item of daily use, the record explains, could resonate with all classes of people more than an abstract demand for political rights. The tax was 8.2% of the Raj's tax revenue and hurt the poorest most.

Not everyone saw it that way. Congress leaders were at first ambivalent, and Sardar Patel suggested a land revenue boycott instead. The Statesman newspaper wrote that it was difficult not to laugh, and Viceroy Lord Irwin wrote to London that a salt campaign did not keep him awake at night.

On 12 March 1930 Gandhi set out with 78 volunteers, walking 387 kilometres from Sabarmati Ashram to the coast at Dandi. The route and each evening's stop had been planned for recruitment, scouts visited each village ahead of time, and Gandhi had prepared the press. On 6 April he picked up a lump of salty mud and said he was shaking the foundations of the British Empire. Then he boiled it in seawater and made illegal salt.

Millions broke the salt laws by making or buying illegal salt, and women joined in as mass participants for the first time. Over 60,000 Indians were jailed. Yet the British did not make immediate major concessions, and Nehru later judged that the real importance lay in the effect on Indians themselves, especially the village masses.