"Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs... It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany... As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions."
– Mahatma Gandhi, June 1946, in an interview with his biographer Louis Fischer.

DEAR MR. GANDHI:
His Excellency the Viceroy desires me to acknowl-
edge your letter of the second of March. He regrets to learn that you contemplate a course of action which is clearly bound to involve violation of the law and danger to the public peace.
Yours very truly,
G. CUNNINGHAM,
Private Secretary

On April 5 Gandhi carried out his threat. After marching two hundred miles to the Arabian Sea, he and a small group of companions began making salt in defiance of the law. Within a week British soldiers throughout India were using their swagger sticks to flick the white cotton caps off the heads of Gandhi's supporters, ***who were obstructing traffic by lying down on railway tracks and public thoroughfares***, boycotting British goods, and refusing to obey British laws. On the twenty-third of the month troops at Peshawar, in Northern India, shot down twenty N arional- ists, and on April 30 Gandhi's son was sentenced to a year in prison, charged with sedition. On May 3 Gandhi him- self was seized and imprisoned near Bombay, and troops began raiding several provincial headquarters of the Con- gress Party.

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