‘Quit India’: The Last Nail in the Coffin of the British Empire
Praveen Davar
Japan bombed Pearl Harbour, an American base, in December 1941, and this drew the US into the Second World War. Japan’s armies began to march swiftly through Southeast Asia, bringing the war to the very doors of India. If the Japanese had to be resisted, something had to be done to involve the Indians in the war effort.
Realising the gravity of the situation, Winston Churchill, the prime minister of Britain, under pressure from American President Roosevelt, agreed, reluctantly, to consider proposal for a self-government in India. Sir Stafford Cripps, a member of the War Cabinet, was dispatched to India with the proposals of the British government. He met the Congress president Maulana Azad on March 25, 1942, followed by a meeting with Jawaharlal Nehru. They both told him that the viceroy should only be a constitutional head, and the proposed Council should have an Indian as defence member.
But this was rejected by the War Cabinet when the demand was placed before Churchill by Cripps on March 27. Cripps met M.K. Gandhi and showed him the proposal, to which the latter stated: “Why did you come if this is what you have to offer – I would advise you to take the next plane home.” Gandhi was also believed to have remarked that Cripps’ proposals were “a post dated cheque on a crashing bank”. But this statement attributed to Gandhi in Sewagram was denied by him as a “tissue of lies”.
The expected failure of the Cripps Mission showed that Britain was not willing to make any political concessions during the war. But then could Britain defend India? Singapore, a heavily guarded fortress of Britain, had fallen on February 15, 1942 and then Rangoon on March 7. The war was now on the borders of India. The country was seething with frustration. It wanted action. That was also the thinking of Gandhi.
The Congress Working Committee (CWC) decided to meet in April 1942. Gandhi sent a draft for the CWC meeting through Miraben, saying Britain could not defend India, that India had no quarrel with any power including the Japanese, and that British and all foreign troops should be immediately withdraw from India. Gandhi was prepared to leave the Congress with his followers if his draft was not accepted: “The time has come when every one of us has to choose his own course.” Though there was a majority of 11 to 6 in the Working Committee in favour of Gandhi’s draft, to avoid a split, Nehru’s alternative and less militant draft was accepted.
There was a showdown between Gandhi and some of his lieutenants on the one hand, and Nehru and Azad on the other, in the next meeting of the Working Committee meeting which began on July 5, 1942 at Wardha and lasted for several days. Azad felt that if Japan invaded India she should be resisted, for it would be most undesirable to change an old master which, in the course of time, had “become effete and was losing its grip for a new and virile conqueror”. So he opposed Gandhi’s plan of civil disobedience. Nehru supported him. However, a compromised was reached.
On July 14, the CWC passed a resolution calling upon the British to quit India; but adding, at the insistence of Nehru, that after such withdrawal the Congress was agreeable to the stationing of the armed forces of Allied Powers to resist the Japanese aggression. The die was thus cast and there was now no going back. It was also decided to call a meeting of the AICC in Bombay on August 7 to ratify the resolution. The Bombay meeting of the AICC confirmed the Wardha CWC resolution. On August 8, Nehru moved the ‘Quit India’ resolution and Sardar Patel seconded it. The resolution was passed amidst scenes of great enthusiasm and nationalist fervour.
Before the Quit India movement was launched, Gandhi was asked whether he would call off the movement as he did in 1922 in the event of any eruption of violence. He replied, “I am the same Gandhi as I was in 1922, I attach the same importance to non-violence that I did then.”
But, in fact, he was not the same Gandhi. According to historian Sankar Ghose, “He, in his seventies, was an impatient Gandhi who could not wait for Independence, whatever the consequences. So he gave the call, ‘Do or Die.’ ‘I waited and waited,’ Gandhi wrote in the Harijan on June 7, 1942, ‘until the country should develop non-violent strength necessary to throw off the foreign yoke. I feel that I cannot afford to wait …If in spite of all precautions rioting takes place, it cannot be helped.’ He now said that everyone was ‘free to go to the fullest length’, though only under ahimsa. But ‘the fullest length’ could include a general strike if that became a dire necessity. He was even prepared to tolerate ‘fifteen days of chaos’. He was no longer unduly perturbed by violence taking place.”
At 5 in the morning of August 9, a day after the AICC ratified the Quit India resolution, Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Azad and all top Congress leaders were arrested. Though Gandhi, who had been imprisoned at Aga Khan Palace at Poona, was released earlier in May 1944 on grounds of health, Nehru was in prison at Ahmednagar Fort for 34 months, his longest ever, from August 1942 to June 1945. The wholesale arrest of the leaders touched off a spontaneous popular revolt throughout India. For a week all business was paralysed in Bombay, Ahmedabad, Delhi, Bangalore, Calcutta and many other places.
The authorities let loose cruel repression. In Delhi, the police fired on 47 separate occasions on August 11 and 12. In UP there were 29 firings between August 9 and 21, resulting in the death of 76 persons and severe injury to 114. In the Central Provinces the police killed 64, wounded 102 and arrested 11,088 in the first three weeks. In Mysore State about 600 persons were killed by police firing during the first few days of the movement. In Patiala, eight students were killed while trying to hoist the national flag over a public building. Over 100 were shot in a Mysore procession. In Calcutta there were numerous firings, resulting in many deaths. The same was the case in all big cities. In Midnapore (Bengal) and in some parts of Maharashtra, parallel governments were set up which functioned effectively for a short time.
The casualties from August 9 to November 30, 1942 were, according to the Secretary of State for India, 1,008 killed, and 3,275 seriously injured. The popular estimate was however very much higher. The number of people imprisoned was over 100,000. The movement had taken a turn not contemplated by Gandhi and the Congress leaders. Infuriated by the wholesale arrest of their leaders and the cruel repression let loose by the authorities, people in several places destroyed public property like bridges, police stations, etc., and removed even rail tracks, cut off telegraph wires and vented their anger in various other acts of violence.
Acharya Kriplani (who was INC president in 1946-47) writes in his biography of Gandhi: “Had the people had the guidance of the leaders, such wanton destruction would not have taken place. Even if Gandhiji alone were out, he would have undertaken a fast if nothing else had prevailed. It would have cooled down people’s ardour for destruction and the movement would have gone on generally on right lines.”
But Kriplani held the firm view: “It is my opinion that India could not have achieved its independence, but for the accession of strength which the nation received by the successive struggles started by Gandhiji. A nation which could throw a challenge to the Empire at a time when the armies of all the Allies were on Indian soil could no more be held in thralldom.” Even if one is wiser by hindsight, the Acharya’s opinion is difficult to challenge.
(Praveen Davar is former secretary, AICC and the author of ‘Freedom Struggle & Beyond’. Courtesy: The Wire.)
In another article in The Wire on the significance of the Quit India movement, titled “81 Years Ago, Launching the Quit India Movement, Gandhi Had Warned Us of Our Current State”, S.N. Sahu writes that apart from helping India win freedom, it had huge dimensions covering freedom of press and democracy which are in serious danger in our country today. Extracts from the article:
Two days before the Quit India movement was launched, Mahatma Gandhi, while addressing a meeting of the All India Congress Committee on August 7, 1942, very presciently said that apart from helping India attain freedom, the historic movement would usher in democracy too.
He said, “When I raised the slogan ‘Quit India’ the people in India who were then feeling despondent felt I had placed before them a new thing”.
He asserted, “If you want real freedom you will have to come together and such coming together will create true democracy –democracy the likes of which has not been so far witnessed, nor have there been any attempts made for such type of true democracy”.
Gandhi said that he had read a good deal about the French Revolution and went through Thomas Carlyle’s work in jail. He added that Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru had explained to him all about the Russian revolution as well. He held that though those were fights for the people, they were not fights for the kind of real democracy which he envisaged.
“My democracy,” he had remarked, “means every man is his own master”.
“I have read sufficient history and I did not see such an experiment on so large a scale for the establishment of democracy by non-violence”.
“Once you understand these things,” he had said, “you will forget the differences between the Hindus and the Muslims”.
Unity under attack
It is tragic that as we celebrate the anniversary of that epoch making Movement, India is getting polarised by the pronouncement of the top leaders of the ruling regime of our country. These leaders employ binary-based Hindu-Muslim narratives to divide people along religious lines.
The distinctions between Hindus and Muslims which Gandhi hoped would be eliminated with the advent of democracy following the Quit India movement have been accentuated.
The recent communal and sinister happenings in Nuh in Haryana manifested in the form of targeted attack on Muslims by Hindutva forces. The latter organised a religious procession predominantly through Muslim dominated areas and used provocative slogans against them. Hatred was carefully cultivated against Muslims, so that they could be subjected to spiralling violence and exclusion on account of their faith.
The brutal employment of bulldozers by the Haryana government to demolish the homes and other establishments of Muslims rendered hundreds of them homeless. Their sources of livelihood were wiped out in a callous, merciless and unauthorised manner. The havoc wrought on Muslims was of such magnitude that it prompted the Punjab and Haryana high court to take suo motu cognisance of the crisis. It asked if the move was an exercise of “ethnic cleansing.”
So Gandhi’s challenging vision of forgetting Hindu-Muslim differences is now reversed with adverse consequences for the might and majesty of our republic.
Power and faith
In the same speech Gandhi firmly said that work would not finish with the attainment of freedom.
He categorically stated, “There is no place for dictators in our scheme of things”. Such an articulation flowed from his conviction in democracy.
He went on to add, “Our object is to achieve independence and whoever can take up the reins may do so”. He forcefully pleaded that the people decide to whom power would be given and it might be that Parsis or those whose names were never heard within Congress circles would be entrusted with the power to rule.
He made it clear by saying, “You should not feel that the majority of those who fought for it were Hindus and the number of Muslims and Parsis in the fight was small.” Advocating for a change of mentality after getting freedom, he emphasised in no uncertain terms that, “If there is the slightest communal taint in your minds, keep off the struggle”.
In other words, Gandhi’s earnest pleadings that elimination of Hindu-Muslim differences and removal of the slightest communal taint formed the backdrop against which Quit India was launched. Those defining attributes are now being annihilated by those wielding state apparatus in India and they, through their calibrated measures, are spelling ruin to those very founding ideals of the Quit India Movement.
Outlining the core objective of the Quit India Movement as freedom of our country from British rule Gandhi had also said, “Communal unity must follow as day follows night when the night of foreign domination is gone”.
On divisiveness
In the aforementioned speech at the AICC on August 8, 1942, Gandhi, however, referred to “Those Hindus…like Dr. Moonje and Shri Savarkar,” and stated that they believed “in the doctrine of the sword…to keep the Mussalmans under Hindu domination”.
He asserted by saying, “I do not represent that section” and affirmed that he represented the Congress.
“If you distrust the Congress, you may rest assured that there is to be a perpetual war between the Hindus and the Mussalmans, and the country will be doomed to continue warfare and bloodshed.”
Now India is being pushed to the fearsome scenario of war between Hindus and Muslims because of the spewing of communal hatred by the powers that be. The message of the Quit India movement centring around communal amity and unity is the categorical imperative which we can ignore at our own peril.
(S.N. Sahu served as Officer on Special Duty to President of India K.R. Narayan. Courtesy: The Wire.)
