MPSC 2024 Prelims Paper-I · Question 3 of 100

Correct — option (4), Sarojini Naidu. Dharasana was the sequel Gandhi planned to the Dandi march. Having broken the salt law at Dandi on 6 April 1930, he wrote to the Viceroy that he would lead a raid on the government salt depot at Dharasana, in what was then Surat district of Gujarat, and take possession of the salt piled there; the government arrested him in the early hours of 5 May 1930 before he could do it. Leadership then passed down a prepared chain of command. Abbas Tyabji, the seventy-six-year-old former judge who was to take Gandhi's place, was himself arrested along with Kasturba Gandhi on the way, and the raid that finally took place on 21 May 1930 was led by Sarojini Naidu with Gandhi's son Manilal at her side. What made Dharasana famous was not that it succeeded — it did not, the salt pans stayed in government hands — but that it demonstrated non-violent discipline under sustained beating. Column after column of satyagrahis walked up to the stockade and were struck down by police with steel-tipped lathis without raising an arm in defence; Sarojini Naidu's instruction to the volunteers was that they must not resist, not even to ward off blows. The American correspondent Webb Miller was present, and his despatch describing the scene was printed around the world, doing more damage to the moral case for British rule than any single event of the Civil Disobedience Movement. Sarojini Naidu is therefore the name attached to Dharasana in every standard account, and she was herself arrested at the site. Her presence there was also the culmination of a long argument she and other women had made to Gandhi, that women should be allowed to court arrest in the front line rather than confined to picketing and the boycott of foreign cloth.

• (1)Kamaladevi Chatopadhyaya — Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay (the paper prints 'Chatopadhyaya') was one of the women who pressed Gandhi hardest to let women break the salt law rather than merely picket, and she acted on it — but in Bombay, not at Dharasana. She organised salt satyagraha there, made and sold contraband salt publicly, including at the Bombay Stock Exchange, and was repeatedly arrested. Her later fame rests on the revival of Indian handicrafts, handlooms and theatre after independence. She belongs to the same movement and the same year as this question, which is what makes her a good distractor, but the Dharasana raid is not hers.
• (2)Ambika Chakrawarti — Ambika Chakrabarty was a Bengal revolutionary, not a satyagrahi, and was a man — the option is placed here to catch candidates who assume every unfamiliar name in a list otherwise made of women must also be a woman. He was an associate of Surya Sen in the Chittagong armoury raid of April 1930 and fought in the battle at Jalalabad hill; he was sentenced to death and the sentence was later commuted. His method was armed insurrection and his theatre was eastern Bengal, both of them the opposite of the unarmed, publicised, deliberately non-resisting raid staged at Dharasana in the same year.
• (3)Kasturba Gandhi — Kasturba Gandhi was an active participant in the Civil Disobedience Movement and was arrested during it — in fact she was arrested along with Abbas Tyabji in the days before the Dharasana raid, when he was on his way to lead it in Gandhi's place. That is exactly why the option is dangerous: she is genuinely part of the Dharasana story, but as one of those removed by the police before the raid rather than as the person who led it. The leadership that day passed to Sarojini Naidu, and it is her name that the accounts of 21 May 1930 carry.

The Civil Disobedience Movement was built on a chain-of-command principle that the Salt Satyagraha demonstrated repeatedly: every leader nominated a successor, so that arrest could not stop the programme. Gandhi's arrest before Dharasana, Abbas Tyabji's arrest after him, and Sarojini Naidu's assumption of command on 21 May 1930 are the textbook illustration. The second principle Dharasana demonstrated was the deliberate courting of visible violence. Volunteers advanced in columns to be beaten without resisting, precisely because the moral and propaganda effect of the beating was the objective; Webb Miller's eyewitness despatch turned a failed raid on a salt depot into an international indictment of the Raj. Dharasana is also a landmark in the entry of women into the front line of the national movement — Gandhi had initially wanted the Dandi marchers to be men, and the women's insistence on courting arrest themselves changed the movement's composition from 1930 onwards.

MPSC's freedom-struggle questions regularly attach one named person to one named event, and the Salt Satyagraha is dense with such pairs — Dandi with Gandhi, Vedaranyam with C. Rajagopalachari, Dharasana with Sarojini Naidu, the Bombay salt agitation with Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, the Peshawar events of April 1930 with Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and the Garhwali soldiers. The habit worth building is to keep those pairs as pairs rather than as a general impression that 'many leaders took part in Civil Disobedience', and to note that MPSC will mix into such an option list a revolutionary from an entirely different stream — here, a Chittagong armoury raid figure — to test whether the candidate is distinguishing methods and regions or simply recognising freedom-fighter names. Candidates should also place Dharasana in the sequence of the movement rather than treat it as an isolated episode: it belongs to the phase of Civil Disobedience before the Gandhi-Irwin Pact of March 1931, so questions asking what followed it are asking about the pact, Gandhi's attendance at the second Round Table Conference and the resumption of the movement in 1932.

• Gandhi announced a raid on the Dharasana salt works in Surat district and was arrested on 5 May 1930 before he could lead it; Abbas Tyabji, his nominated successor, was arrested with Kasturba Gandhi soon after.
• The raid took place on 21 May 1930 under Sarojini Naidu, with Manilal Gandhi, and volunteers advanced in columns to be beaten by police without offering resistance.
• The American journalist Webb Miller witnessed the raid and his despatch carried the account worldwide, making Dharasana one of the most damaging episodes for British moral authority in India.
• Sarojini Naidu presided over the Kanpur session of the Indian National Congress in 1925, becoming the first Indian woman to be Congress president; Annie Besant had been the first woman president, in 1917.
• After independence Sarojini Naidu became Governor of the United Provinces, the first woman to hold the office of governor of an Indian province or state; she died in 1949.

• Answering 'Gandhi' by reflex because Dharasana was his announced plan — he was arrested on 5 May 1930 and never reached the salt works
• Confusing Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay's Bombay salt satyagraha with the Dharasana raid; both are 1930, both are salt, different places and different leaders
• Reading every unfamiliar name in a list of women as a woman — Ambika Chakrabarty was a male Bengal revolutionary
• Treating Kasturba Gandhi's arrest in connection with the Dharasana march as the same thing as leading the raid

MPSC tests the Salt Satyagraha by location rather than by theme, asking who led at a named place or what happened on a named date, because these are unambiguous single-answer facts. The option list is normally built from four real participants in the same movement, so elimination has to work on the specific event rather than on general credentials, and at least one option is usually drawn from a different stream of the freedom struggle altogether — a revolutionary, or a leader of a later decade — to punish loose recognition. Learning the Salt Satyagraha as a map of named places with named leaders is what makes this family of questions quick.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The eyewitness account of the police beating of satyagrahis at the Dharasana salt works in May 1930, which was carried in newspapers around the world, was written by which journalist ?

  • (a)Webb Miller
  • (b)William Howard Russell
  • (c)Louis Fischer
  • (d)Edward Thompson

  Answer(a) Webb Miller — the United Press correspondent who witnessed the Dharasana raid of 21 May 1930 and whose despatch describing unresisting volunteers being struck down carried the episode worldwide. William Howard Russell reported the revolt of 1857 for The Times, and Louis Fischer is known as a later biographer of Gandhi rather than as a reporter of Dharasana.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Sarojini Naidu became the first Indian woman to preside over a session of the Indian National Congress at which session ?

  • (a)Calcutta, 1917
  • (b)Kanpur, 1925
  • (c)Karachi, 1931
  • (d)Haripura, 1938

  Answer(b) Kanpur, 1925 — Sarojini Naidu presided there, becoming the first Indian woman to be Congress president. Annie Besant had presided at Calcutta in 1917 and was the first woman president, but she was not Indian; Karachi in 1931 was presided over by Vallabhbhai Patel and Haripura in 1938 by Subhas Chandra Bose.