Two things distinguish resistance on this coast. The first is that Gandhian method was not merely practised here but worked out here — Bardoli in 1928 was the campaign that took a district-wide refusal of land revenue all the way to a government enquiry and won, and the salt march of 1930 was routed deliberately through these villages before it reached the shore at Dandi. The second is that the movement had two constituencies with different demands. The Patidar cultivators of the Bardoli plain were fighting a revenue assessment. The Raniparaj and Halpati communities of the slope above them were contending with bonded labour, liquor and access to the forest, and were organised through ashram schools and balwadis rather than through revenue agitation. Daman, inside the region, was Portuguese territory, and none of this applied there.
The Bardoli Satyagraha12 February – August 1928
A district-wide refusal of land revenue across Bardoli taluka in Surat district, after the assessment was raised by 22 per cent following the calamities of 1926. Vallabhbhai Patel organised it with Narhari Parikh, Ravi Shankar Vyas and Mohanlal Pandya, village by village, with Gandhi keeping a deliberate distance.
परिणाम: The Maxwell–Broomfield enquiry found the justified increase to be about 6 per cent. Confiscated land and property were restored and the enhancement suspended. The women of Bardoli gave Patel the title Sardar.
The salt march to Dandi12 March – 6 April 1930
Gandhi walked 387 kilometres from Sabarmati through 48 villages and four districts, most of them in south Gujarat, to the shore at Dandi in Navsari district, and made salt from seawater there on 6 April. He started with 78 volunteers and arrived at the head of a column kilometres long.
परिणाम: Breaking of the salt law spread across India. Gandhi was arrested on the night of 4–5 May 1930.
The Dharasana Satyagraha21 May 1930
Volunteers advanced in columns on the Dharasana salt works, about forty kilometres south of Dandi. Abbas Tyabji and Kasturba Gandhi were arrested before reaching it, and Sarojini Naidu and Abul Kalam Azad led the action. Police struck the advancing lines with lathis. The journalist Webb Miller counted two dead and 320 injured at the hospital.
परिणाम: Miller's despatch was carried in some 1,350 newspapers worldwide and read into the record of the United States Senate, which made the campaign an international story rather than an Indian one.
The Raniparaj constructive-work movementfrom 1926
Jugatram Dave's Raniparaj Vidyalaya, founded at Bardoli in 1926 and afterwards moved to Vedchhi, built ashram schools, balwadis and spinning work among the Raniparaj communities and the bonded halpati labourers of the Surat and Valsad slope.
परिणाम: It brought the forest slope into the national movement on its own terms, around land, bondage and forest access rather than around revenue, and left an institutional network that outlasted every individual campaign.