After the salt, the empire makes the oldest mistake a frightened power makes: it tries to put an idea in irons. By the end of 1930 the prisons of India are overflowing — tens of thousands inside, Jawaharlal Nehru among them, Subhas Bose among them. For a strange season the Viceroy's jails hold the most distinguished company in the country, and every arrest only proves the marchers' point more loudly than any speech could.
And then the movement does the thing the empire is least prepared for: it sends in the women. They picket the liquor shops and the cloth shops, they march, they court arrest in numbers no one has ever seen — and the spectacle of an empire dragging women to jail for boiling seawater finishes off whatever shred of moral authority the lathi had left. The world's newspapers carry it every single day: the greatest power on earth, arresting an old man and then a whole generation, over salt.
From inside his own cell, Subhas Bose watches the tide come in and frames it the way only he would — ranking the Salt March, in his own history, with Napoleon's return from Elba. To Subhas this is the decisive moment, the great wave you ride all the way up the beach. He is certain the worst thing the movement could do now is stop.
The political victory could be denied a while longer; the cells were real and the empire still held the keys. But the moral war was already lost the first morning a photograph of a jailed grandmother ran in a London paper. And the man at the front of the march was, at that very moment, getting ready to do the one thing Subhas feared most — to stop.