Place · satyagraha site · India
Bardoli
The Surat taluka where in 1928 Vallabhbhai Patel organised a refusal to pay a thirty per cent revenue increase, holding some eighty-seven thousand cultivators together through land confiscations and attachments until an inquiry cut the rise to under seven per cent.
- Function
- Social reform & movement
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 21.122, 73.112
Worth knowing
The women of Bardoli gave Patel the title Sardar during the campaign. It was the most complete tactical victory the Congress won in the interwar years, and it made Patel the organisation's chief organiser.
Connections (2)
- Life routeVallabhbhai Patel
Bardoli made Patel. He had run Kheda in 1918 under Gandhi's direction; Bardoli in 1928 was his own campaign, held together through eight months of land attachments and forfeitures against a government that could not collect, and it ended in an inquiry that gave the cultivators nearly everything. The women of the taluka named him Sardar during it, and he ran the Congress organisation from then until independence.
- CampaignMohandās Karamchand Gandhi
Bardoli in 1928 was run by Patel while Gandhi stayed out of it deliberately, which is part of why it worked: a single district, a single specific demand about a revenue assessment, eighty-seven thousand cultivators held together for eight months against confiscations, and an inquiry that gave them nearly everything. It restored the Congress's confidence after the collapse of Non-Cooperation and it supplied the organisational model for the salt campaign two years later.
On these journeys
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi — Porbandar to Rajghat (1869–1948)
- The mass movements — Champaran to Quit India
Sources
Wikipedia, “Bardoli Satyagraha”. Mahadev Desai, The Story of Bardoli (1929); Bombay Revenue Department enquiry papers (Broomfield–Maxwell report, 1929).
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