Who was the prominent participant in the Satyagraha at Dharasana in the Civil Disobedience Movement ?

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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.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 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.  (b) 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.  (c) 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2024 Q3 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q3 — History PYQ with Answer