Quit India Movement

• 1. Introduction

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  The Quit India Movement alarmed the Viceroy of India enough that he wrote to Winston Churchill about it on the 31st of August 1942. Lord Linlithgow called it "by far the most serious rebellion since 1857". He admitted that its gravity and extent had been concealed from the world for reasons of military security.

  Mob violence, he reported, remained rampant across large tracts of the countryside. He doubted that September would be calm, and he feared a formidable attempt to renew widespread sabotage of the war effort. Europeans living in remote places, he said, were in danger.

  The campaign behind this alarm demanded an end to British rule in India, and it arrived in the middle of World War II. Why would nationalists press that demand while the empire was at war? Who joined them, who refused, and who actively helped the British? And what did the protests achieve in the years that followed? The answers begin in 1939.

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• 2. Dragged Into War

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  Lord Linlithgow brought India into World War II in 1939 without consulting Indian nationalists, and their anger was immediate. India was a constituent part of the British Empire, so the declaration followed automatically. Had enough Indian states agreed to form a federal government under the 1935 Act, the Viceroy could not have acted alone.

  At Wardha in September 1939, the Congress working committee passed a resolution offering conditional support against the Axis powers. It said India could have nothing to do with a war fought to defend imperial possessions and vested privilege. If the issue was democracy, it argued, India was intensely interested. The text went on: "If Great Britain fights for the maintenance and expansion of democracy, then she must necessarily end imperialism in her possessions." The request for independence in return was rebuffed.

  Gandhi had not backed that initiative. He was a committed believer in non-violent resistance, which he had proposed even against Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Hideki Tojo, and he could not square it with endorsing a war. Yet at the height of the Battle of Britain he declared his support for the fight against racism and for the British war effort. He said he did not seek to raise an independent India from the ashes of Britain.

  The Congress Working Committee met on the 10th of October 1939 and condemned German aggression. The same resolution said India could not associate itself with the war unless it was consulted first. On the 17th of October the Viceroy answered that Britain was fighting to strengthen peace in the world. He promised that the government would modify the 1935 Act after the war, in line with Indian wishes. Gandhi's verdict was blunt: "the old policy of divide and rule is to continue. Congress has asked for bread and it has got stone."

  Congress ministers in eight provinces resigned on the instructions of the High Command. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League, greeted the resignations with great joy. He named the 22nd of December 1939 the Day of Deliverance. Gandhi urged him not to celebrate, but it was futile. At the League's Lahore session in March 1940, Jinnah declared in his presidential address that the Muslims of the country wanted a separate electorate, Pakistan. The League backed the war, while Congress remained divided.

  The war also strained ordinary life. British policy had long limited investment in India and treated the country as a market and a source of revenue. The Indian Army was therefore relatively weak and poorly armed and trained. During the war, taxes rose sharply and the general level of prices doubled. Many Indian businesses profited from increased war production. Even so, business as a whole felt rebuffed, because the British Raj would not give Indians a bigger role in organising the wartime economy.

  Subash Chandra Bose chose a different road entirely. After the war began, he organised the Indian Legion in Germany. With Japanese assistance he reorganised the Indian National Army. Soliciting help from the Axis powers, he conducted a guerrilla war against the British authorities.

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• 3. Offers and Refusals

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  Winston Churchill succeeded Chamberlain as prime minister, and the change had consequences for India. The Marquis of Zetland, who had steered the 1935 Act through over Churchill's displeasure, resigned as Secretary of State for India. With the war worsening, the Conservatives were forced to concede some Indian demands. The Viceroy issued a statement that became known as the August Offer. Congress rejected it, and the Muslim League did the same.

  At a Congress Working Committee meeting in Wardha, Gandhi revealed a plan for individual civil disobedience. He chose Vinoba Bhave, one of his followers, to begin it. Satyagraha, the tradition of non-violent protest, again proved the most acceptable weapon against an unbending British stance. Anti-war speeches echoed across the country as satyagrahis urged people not to support the government's war efforts. Almost fourteen thousand of them were arrested.

  On the 3rd of December 1941, the Viceroy ordered all the satyagrahis acquitted. Then came the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Congress felt it had to reappraise its program, and the campaign was withdrawn.

  In March 1942, Britain sent Sir Stafford Cripps, the Leader of the House of Commons, to India. The subcontinent was taking part in the war only reluctantly. The situation in Europe was deteriorating, and Indian troops and civilians were increasingly dissatisfied. Cripps was to win total cooperation from the Indian National Congress. In return, power would shift from the Crown and the Viceroy to an elected Indian legislature.

  A draft declaration presented on the 22nd of March 1942 proposed dominion status, a constituent assembly, and a right for provinces to frame separate constitutions. All of it would take effect only after the war ended. The talks failed because the offer gave no timetable for self-government and no clarity on which powers would be relinquished. Gandhi's comment on it was sharp: "It is a post-dated cheque on a crashing bank."

  Two other factors fed into Gandhi's call for Quit India. One was the threat of Japanese invasion. The other was the national leaders' growing conviction that Britain could not defend India.

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• 4. Congress Divided

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  On the 14th of July 1942, the Congress Working Committee met at Wardha and adopted a resolution demanding complete independence from the British government. The draft threatened massive civil disobedience if the demand was refused. It was then passed at Bombay. The resolution sanctioned "a mass struggle on non-violent lines on the widest possible scale", drawing on the strength built up over 22 years of peaceful struggle. It also insisted that non-violence was the basis of the movement.

  The decision proved controversial inside the party. Chakravarti Rajgopalachari quit the Congress over it, and so did some local and regional organisers. Jawaharlal Nehru and Maulana Azad were apprehensive and critical, yet they backed the call and stayed with Gandhi's leadership to the end. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Rajendra Prasad and Anugrah Narayan Sinha supported the disobedience movement openly and enthusiastically. So did many veteran Gandhians and socialists, among them Asoka Mehta and Jayaprakash Narayan.

  Allama Mashriqi, head of the Khaksar Tehrik, was invited by Jawaharlal Nehru to join. He was uneasy about the outcome and disagreed with the working committee's resolution. On the 28th of July 1942, he sent a telegram to Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Mohandas Gandhi, C. Rajagopalachari, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad and Pattabhi Sitaramayya. He sent a copy to Bulusu Sambamurti, a former Speaker of the Madras Assembly, and the telegram was published in the press.

  Mashriqi's honest opinion, he wrote, was that the Civil Disobedience Movement was "a little pre-mature". He urged Congress first to concede the theoretical Pakistan to the Muslim League. Only then should all parties make a united demand that the British quit India, with total disobedience to follow if they refused. Less than two weeks later, Gandhi rose to speak in Bombay.

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• 5. Do or Die

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  On the 8th of August 1942, at the Gowalia Tank Maidan in Bombay, Gandhi delivered his Quit India speech. He called on the country to Do or Die. The All India Congress Committee launched a mass protest demanding what Gandhi called "An Orderly British Withdrawal".

  Britain was ready to act despite the war. Within hours of the speech, almost the entire leadership of the Indian National Congress was imprisoned without trial. Most of them spent the rest of the war in prison, out of contact with the masses.

  On the 9th of August, Aruna Asaf Ali presided over the AICC session and hoisted the flag. She was young and, until then, relatively unknown. Later the Congress party was banned, and these actions only built sympathy for the cause among the population.

  The movement's guidelines were broad. They called for disobedience of the law, a general strike among students and another among labour, and the formation of a free government. They also called for breaking communications and refusing to pay taxes.

  On the 8th of November 1942, Congress told people to carry out ten duties "without any risk". People were to do no business with the British or their government. Every home and window was to display the tricoloured flag. Moviegoing was to stop, since that money "goes to the tyrant Government". Courts were to be avoided, along with any business that would send a person to court. Foreign goods were not to be bought, money was to be withdrawn from government banks, and servants of the British government were to be boycotted. The ninth duty was to leave the cities for the villages, which pointed the movement toward the countryside, where much of what followed would happen.

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• 6. Opponents and Outsiders

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  The British government could count on a long list of institutions in 1942. The Viceroy's Council, the Indian Imperial Police, the British Indian Army and the Indian Civil Service all stood behind it. So did the All India Muslim League, the Hindu Mahasabha and the princely states. Many Indian businessmen who were profiting from heavy wartime spending did not support Quit India either.

  Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, then president of the Hindu Mahasabha, wrote a letter titled Stick to your Posts. It told Hindu Sabhaites who were "members of municipalities, local bodies, legislatures or those serving in the army" to stay in their posts and not join the movement at any cost. The party officially boycotted it. Later, after requests and persuasion, and recognising the importance of the larger role of Indian independence, Savarkar chose to join the independence movement.

  Syama Prasad Mukherjee led the Hindu Mahasabha in Bengal, which sat in the ruling coalition under Fazlul Haq of the Krishak Praja Party. On the 26th of July 1942, he wrote to the British government about how to respond if Congress called on the rulers to quit India. Anyone stirring up mass feeling during the war, he argued, "must be resisted by any Government that may function for the time being". He proposed running the provincial administration so that the movement would fail to take root in Bengal.

  Jinnah and the Muslim League opposed the movement, and Jinnah supported the British war effort. The Communist Party of India opposed it too, and backed the war effort once the Soviet Union came under attack. The movement did have an impact in the princely states, but some princes opposed it and funded the opposition.

  The major support from outside came from the Americans. President Franklin D. Roosevelt pressured Churchill to give in to some Indian demands. When Wendell Willkie, an American Republican presidential candidate, and Sherwood Eddy of the YMCA planned to meet Gandhi, Linlithgow called it American interference in "our own business". He asked Churchill to dissuade them.

  Indian nationalists knew that the United States strongly supported Indian independence in principle, and they believed it was an ally. Then Churchill threatened to resign if pushed too hard. The Americans quietly backed him instead, and bombarded Indians with propaganda meant to strengthen public support for the war. The poorly run operation annoyed the Indians it targeted.

  As the movement failed to win quick results, many nationalists grew depressed. Jinnah and the League, along with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Hindu Mahasabha, sought political mileage by criticising Gandhi and the Congress Party.

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• 7. Fires Across the Countryside

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  Between the 9th of August and the 21st of September 1942, according to the historian John F. Riddick, the movement attacked 550 post offices and 250 railway stations. It damaged many rail lines, destroyed 70 police stations, and burned or damaged 85 other government buildings. Telegraph wires were cut about 2,500 times. The worst violence came in Bihar.

  The British had to deploy 57 battalions of troops to restore order. Those battalions spent months putting down protests when they were needed for the war. Airfield construction was delayed by four to six weeks. All of this happened even though the resolution had made non-violence the basis of the movement.

  Without its leaders, the movement struggled to galvanise a national rebellion. Its impact was local, and strongest at Satara in Maharashtra, Talcher in Odisha, and Midnapore. In the Tamluk and Contai subdivisions of Midnapore, local people set up a parallel administration called the Tamluk National Government. It kept functioning until Gandhi personally asked its leaders to disband in 1944.

  Ballia, now the easternmost district of Uttar Pradesh, saw a minor uprising. People overthrew the district administration, broke open the jail and freed the arrested Congress leaders. They then ruled independently, and it took the British weeks to reestablish their authority.

  In Saurashtra, in western Gujarat, the region's baharvatiya tradition of going outside the law abetted the sabotage. In Adas village in Kaira district, police shot into a crowd, killing six people and wounding many more.

  In rural west Bengal, peasants were angry about new war taxes and forced rice exports. Open resistance there ran to the point of rebellion in 1942. Then the great famine of 1943 suspended the movement in Bengal.

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• 8. Prison and Legacy

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  The British answered the unrest with more than 100,000 arrests. They levied mass fines, and demonstrators were flogged in public. Hundreds of civilians were killed, many of them shot by police and the army.

  Many national leaders went underground. They kept up the struggle by broadcasting messages over clandestine radio stations, distributing pamphlets and setting up parallel governments. The underground leadership included Achyut Rao Patwardhan, Aruna Asaf Ali, Sucheta Kripalani, Daljit Singh and Nana Patil.

  The British sense of crisis was strong enough that a battleship was set aside to carry Gandhi and the Congress leaders out of India, possibly to South Africa or Yemen. The step was not taken, because of fear that it would intensify the revolt. The Japanese army had already advanced to the India-Burma border, which had alarmed the British.

  The Congress leadership was cut off from the outside world for over three years. During that time Gandhi's wife Kasturba Gandhi and his personal secretary Mahadev Desai both died within months. Gandhi's health was failing, yet he went on a 21-day fast and held to his resolve. The British released him in 1944 because of his health, and he kept demanding the release of the Congress leadership.

  In 1945, as the war neared its end, the Labour Party won elections in the United Kingdom on a promise to provide independence to India. The jailed political prisoners were released that year, and the movement ended. The British had come to see India as ungovernable in the long run. The question for the postwar era became how to leave gracefully and peacefully. One lasting gain, in the view of the source, was that the Congress stayed united through all the trials that followed.

  The dead included Mukunda Kakati, Matangini Hazra, Kanaklata Barua, Kushal Konwar and Bhogeswari Phukanani. Subash Chandra Bose remarked that a "new chapter in Indian freedom struggle began with the Quit India Movement". In 1992, the Reserve Bank of India issued a 1 rupee commemorative coin to mark the Golden Jubilee of the Quit India Movement.

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