Why Salt was Chosen as the Important Theme

As Gandhi said, “There is no other article like salt, outside water, by taxing which the government can reach the starving millions, the sick, the maimed and the utterly helpless... it is the most inhuman poll tax the ingenuity of man can devise.”

Salt in a flash linked the ideal of swaraj with a most concrete and universal grievance of the rural poor (and with no socially divisive implications like a no-rent campaign).

Salt afforded a very small but psychologically important income, like khadi, for the poor through self-help.

Like khadi, again, it offered to the urban populace the opportunity of a symbolic identification with mass suffering.