Civil Disobedience Movement and the Poona Pact

A real question on this chapter rarely stops at "Gandhi broke the salt law in 1930". It tests a specific, checkable distinction that trips up otherwise well-prepared candidates: the Communal Award of 1932 gave the Depressed Classes separate electorates, a roll on which only Depressed Class voters chose Depressed Class candidates, while the Poona Pact that overturned it a month later gave them reserved seats in a joint electorate, filled by a two-stage election in which Depressed Class voters first shortlisted a panel of candidates and the whole general electorate then elected the winner from that panel. Getting "separate" and "reserved" backwards, or assuming the Poona Pact simply restored the Communal Award's separate-electorate scheme under a different name, is the single most common way this chapter is missed, and it is exactly where this note ends.

Gandhi's Early Satyagrahas: Champaran and Kheda mentions the 1930 Salt Satyagraha only in passing, as the era's bookend; this note develops that campaign, and everything that grew out of it through 1932, in full.

The Salt Satyagraha and the Dandi March, 1930

On 2 March 1930, Gandhi wrote to Viceroy Lord Irwin laying out eleven demands, spanning the salt tax, land revenue assessments, military spending, the rupee-sterling exchange rate, and a tariff on foreign cloth, and warned that he would begin civil disobedience within ten days if they went unmet. The letter, addressed "Dear Friend" and delivered by a British Quaker sympathiser, was a deliberate signal that this was not framed as an Englishman-versus-Indian dispute. Irwin's office responded only with regret that Gandhi intended to break the law. Of the eleven demands, abolishing the salt tax was, in Gandhi's own account, the one he expected to resonate most: salt was a necessity used in every Indian household regardless of class, caste, or religion, taxed and monopolised by the state, which made it, in his words, "the most iniquitous of all from the poor man's standpoint" and therefore the single best-understood grievance around which to build a mass campaign.

Gandhi set out from the Sabarmati Ashram near Ahmedabad on 12 March 1930 with 78 handpicked satyagrahis, chosen to represent India's religious and regional diversity: Hindus from several provinces, two Muslims, a Christian, and two Harijans among them. The march covered roughly 240 miles (about 390 km) over 24 days, halting at some twenty-odd villages along the way where Gandhi addressed local crowds, and reached the coastal village of Dandi in Gujarat, near Surat, on 5 April 1930. On the morning of 6 April, Gandhi walked to the seashore and picked up a handful of natural salt left by the tide, technically "manufacturing" salt in defiance of the government's monopoly and formally breaking the law.

The immediate political effect was not the act itself so much as what it authorised: within days, ordinary Indians across the country began making, selling, and buying illegal salt in open defiance of the police, well beyond anything Gandhi's small party at Dandi could have managed alone. Gandhi was arrested in the early hours of 5 May 1930, near Karadi, under a colonial-era regulation that allowed detention without trial; by then, and through the rest of 1930, tens of thousands of Indians, estimates run from roughly 60,000 to 100,000, had been jailed for salt-law violations and related civil disobedience.

The Civil Disobedience Movement's spread

The campaign did not stay confined to salt. Foreign cloth was burned in public bonfires and boycotted so thoroughly that its trade came to a near standstill for the rest of the year; liquor shops and foreign-cloth shops were picketed; cultivators in Gujarat withheld land revenue payments; and in the Central Provinces, villagers defied forest regulations by cutting grass and felling trees on reserved land. In Bihar, breaking liquor laws became a common form of protest. Women joined the movement in large numbers for the first time in Indian nationalist politics, moving the protest beyond its earlier urban, male-dominated base into both cities and villages together.

Regional leaders staged their own salt marches to extend the symbolism beyond Gujarat. C. Rajagopalachari led a march from Trichinopoly to Vedaranyam on the Tamil Nadu coast; K. Kelappan led one through Malabar from Calicut to Payyanur. After Gandhi's arrest, Sarojini Naidu led roughly 2,500 volunteers in a raid on the Dharasana Salt Works on 21 May 1930, where police beat the non-resisting satyagrahis with lathis, an episode reported internationally by the American journalist Webb Miller and one of the clearest illustrations of the movement's disciplined non-violence set against organised state force.

In the North-West Frontier Province, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan's Khudai Khidmatgars, a non-violent volunteer movement popularly called the Red Shirts, mobilised Pashtun support for the cause. His arrest on 23 April 1930 triggered mass protests at Peshawar's Qissa Khwani Bazaar; when troops were ordered to fire on the crowd, two platoons of the Garhwal Rifles, under Chandra Singh Garhwali, refused the order, an act of military disobedience that shook colonial confidence in the loyalty of Indian troops. Peshawar remained effectively outside government control for over a week before order was restored.

The Gandhi-Irwin Pact and the Round Table Conferences

The British government had already convened the First Round Table Conference in London, 12 November 1930 to 19 January 1931, to discuss constitutional reform, but the Indian National Congress boycotted it outright while civil disobedience was still underway, leaving the conference to proceed with princely and other minority representatives alone and without the Congress's participation carrying much weight.

To bring Congress into the constitutional process, Irwin opened direct talks with Gandhi, eight meetings over three weeks beginning in mid-February 1931, which produced the Gandhi-Irwin Pact (also called the Delhi Pact), signed on 5 March 1931. The government agreed to release political prisoners not convicted of violence, withdraw the emergency ordinances and pending prosecutions used against satyagrahis, restore confiscated properties that had not already been sold on, permit peaceful, non-coercive picketing of liquor and foreign-cloth shops, and allow residents of coastal villages to manufacture or collect salt for their own domestic use, though not for sale or trade. In return, Gandhi agreed to suspend civil disobedience and to attend the Second Round Table Conference as the Congress's representative. Two things Gandhi asked for were refused: an independent inquiry into police conduct during the movement, a point he raised and then let go rather than break the agreement over it, and clemency for Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, and Sukhdev, who were executed on 23 March 1931, just over two weeks after the pact was signed, a sequence of events that drew lasting criticism of Gandhi from within the nationalist movement itself.

Gandhi duly travelled to London and attended the Second Round Table Conference, 7 September to 1 December 1931, as the sole official Congress delegate, alongside Sarojini Naidu, Madan Mohan Malaviya, and others. It collapsed over exactly the same question that would recur through 1932: representation of India's minorities in a future constitution. Gandhi insisted that Congress alone spoke for the whole of India, "all interests", not a communal one among several; the other delegations rejected that claim outright. Representatives of the Depressed Classes, Muslims, Sikhs, Europeans, Anglo-Indians, and Indian Christians formed a united front, the so-called Minorities Pact, demanding separate safeguards of their own, which Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald publicly endorsed in a speech to the conference's Minorities Sub-Committee on 13 November 1931. With the minorities unwilling to accept Congress as their sole spokesman and Congress unwilling to concede separate representation on the scale being demanded, the conference closed on 1 December 1931 without any agreement on the communal question. MacDonald warned that if Indians could not agree among themselves, the British government would settle the matter itself, a warning that became the Communal Award nine months later.

The Third Round Table Conference, 17 November to 24 December 1932, went ahead without Congress, whose leaders including Gandhi were back in prison after civil disobedience resumed in January 1932, and without the British Labour Party or most of the Indian princes either. Its limited discussions still fed into the 1933 White Paper, which in turn became the basis for the Government of India Act, 1935.

Communal politics: the Communal Award and the Poona Pact

On 16 August 1932, MacDonald announced the Communal Award, extending separate electorates, in which only members of a given community could vote for that community's own reserved seats, to Muslims, Sikhs, Europeans, Anglo-Indians, Indian Christians, and, most controversially, the Depressed Classes. For the Depressed Classes specifically, the Award went further still: it gave them a double vote, one in their own separate electorate and a second in the general electorate, an arrangement due to lapse after twenty years.

Gandhi, by then back in Yeravda Central Jail near Poona after civil disobedience resumed, saw the Depressed Classes' inclusion as a permanent, state-sanctioned fracture of Hindu society, arguing that Sikhs, Muslims, and Europeans could reasonably "remain as such in perpetuity" but that treating the Depressed Classes as a permanently separate political community, rather than working to end their social exclusion altogether, entrenched untouchability instead of ending it. On 18 August 1932 he wrote to MacDonald that he would fast unto death from noon on 20 September 1932 unless the government abandoned separate electorates for the Depressed Classes, a position distinct from opposing reserved seats or even generous representation for them, both of which he repeatedly said he would accept.

The fast began, as announced, at noon on 20 September 1932. Over the following days a rotating conference of political and social leaders, Madan Mohan Malaviya, Tej Bahadur Sapru, M.R. Jayakar, C. Rajagopalachari, Ghanshyam Das Birla, Rajendra Prasad, and others, negotiated intensively with B.R. Ambedkar, who insisted on separate electorates as the only secure guarantee against absorption and neglect by the caste-Hindu majority. Agreement was reached on the fast's fifth day, and the Poona Pact (also recorded at the time as the Yeravda Pact, after the jail where it was signed) was concluded on 24 September 1932 at Yeravda Central Jail.

The Pact replaced separate electorates for the Depressed Classes with reserved seats within the ordinary joint electorate, filled through a two-stage process: for each reserved seat, registered Depressed Class voters would first elect a panel of candidates by primary vote, and the general electorate, Depressed Class and caste-Hindu voters together, would then elect the actual representative from that panel. This is the exact distinction the exam turns on: a separate electorate excludes other communities from voting on a seat altogether, while a joint electorate with reserved seats and a primary panel keeps every voter in the same electoral roll while still guaranteeing the seat's occupant belongs to the reserved community. The number of reserved seats in the provincial legislatures rose sharply, from 71 under the Communal Award to 148 under the Pact, and the Depressed Classes were guaranteed 18 per cent of the general-electorate seats in the Central Legislature. The primary-election panel system itself was set to lapse after ten years unless the parties agreed to end it sooner, a compromise reached after Gandhi pressed for a five-year sunset and Ambedkar's side held out for longer.

The British Cabinet accepted the Pact's terms in place of the Communal Award's provisions for the Depressed Classes, announced simultaneously in London and India on the morning of 26 September 1932. Gandhi broke his fast that evening, at 5.15 pm, taking orange juice from Kasturba Gandhi in a ceremony at Yeravda jail attended by, among others, Sarojini Naidu, Vallabhbhai Patel, and Mahadev Desai. He immediately made clear that the Pact was, for him, only a political settlement, and that the deeper social work of ending untouchability itself was still to be done; the country observed an "Untouchability Abolition Week" from 27 September to 2 October 1932 in response.

Quick revision points

• Salt Satyagraha, 1930: letter to Irwin with eleven demands, 2 March 1930; march from Sabarmati Ashram, 12 March 1930, roughly 240 miles (390 km) over 24 days, with 78 satyagrahis; reached Dandi, 5 April 1930; salt law broken 6 April 1930; Gandhi arrested 5 May 1930.
• Spread beyond salt: foreign-cloth bonfires and boycott, liquor and cloth-shop picketing, no-revenue campaigns in Gujarat, forest-law violations in the Central Provinces; regional marches led by C. Rajagopalachari (Vedaranyam) and K. Kelappan (Payyanur); the Dharasana raid, 21 May 1930, led by Sarojini Naidu; the Peshawar/Qissa Khwani Bazaar protests after Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan's arrest, where Garhwal Rifles troops refused to fire.
• Round Table Conferences: First, 12 November 1930 to 19 January 1931 (Congress boycotted); Second, 7 September to 1 December 1931 (Gandhi's only RTC, collapsed over communal representation); Third, 17 November to 24 December 1932 (Congress absent; fed into the 1933 White Paper and the Government of India Act, 1935).
• Gandhi-Irwin Pact, 5 March 1931: prisoner releases, salt concession for personal coastal use, picketing rights, civil disobedience suspended in exchange for Congress attending the Second RTC. Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, and Sukhdev were executed 23 March 1931, shortly after.
• Communal Award, 16 August 1932: separate electorates for several minorities, including a double vote for the Depressed Classes, lapsing after 20 years.
• Poona Pact, 24 September 1932, following Gandhi's fast from noon, 20 September, broken 5.15 pm, 26 September 1932: replaced separate electorates with joint electorates and reserved seats filled by a two-stage primary and general election; reserved seats rose from 71 to 148 in the provinces, with 18 per cent reserved in the Central Legislature; the primary-election system was to lapse after ten years unless ended sooner by agreement.
• The exam trap in one line: separate electorate (Communal Award) means only the reserved community votes for its own seat; reserved seat in a joint electorate (Poona Pact) means every voter chooses the final winner from a panel the reserved community shortlisted first.

Hold that one distinction and the dates around it, and the statement-based questions this chapter is built around stop being guesswork.