The Quit India Movement (1942)

The Cripps Mission failed and a Japanese invasion loomed. Gandhi responded by launching the Quit India Movement in August 1942, demanding that the British leave India at once. His ringing call was "Do or Die." The government arrested the entire leadership overnight. The movement then exploded into a leaderless, largely spontaneous mass uprising, the most violent and brutally repressed of the freedom struggle. It was crushed within months, yet it placed independence firmly and finally on the agenda. This is a very high-yield topic.

On 3 September 1939, Britain declared war on Germany. The Government of India declared India a belligerent without consulting any Indian opinion. The Congress was hostile to fascism. It offered to cooperate on two conditions: a constituent assembly would frame free India's constitution after the war, and a genuinely responsible government would be set up at the centre at once. The Viceroy Linlithgow rejected these conditions and tried instead to set the Muslim League and the princes against the Congress. In protest, the Congress ministries resigned in October 1939. Some leaders wanted an immediate mass struggle, but Gandhi held that the time was not ripe. Meanwhile, in March 1940, the Muslim League passed its Pakistan (Lahore) Resolution, which called for grouping the Muslim-majority areas of the north-west and east into "independent states."

Hitler's stunning victories in Europe then put Britain in a conciliatory mood. The result was the August Offer (August 1940), announced by Linlithgow:

• Dominion status: declared as the objective for India.
• Executive Council: the Viceroy's council would be expanded to give Indians a majority.
• Constituent assembly: a body mainly of Indians would frame the constitution after the war.
• Minority consent: no future constitution would be adopted without the consent of the minorities, in effect a veto for the League.

The Congress rejected the offer. Nehru declared that "Dominion status is dead as a doornail." The Muslim League welcomed the minority veto. Even so, the British had for the first time conceded the constituent-assembly demand and the inherent right of Indians to frame their own constitution. In July 1941 the Executive Council was enlarged to give Indians a majority, 8 of 12 members, but defence, finance and home stayed in British hands.

Before Quit India came a deliberately limited campaign. After the Congress rejected the August Offer, Gandhi launched the Individual Satyagraha in October 1940. It was individual, not mass, by design. The aims were to affirm the right of free speech against the war, to show that nationalist patience was not weakness, and to avoid embarrassing Britain's war effort with a mass upheaval at that stage. The campaign also asserted that Indians made no distinction between Nazism and the "double autocracy" that ruled India, and it gave the government one more chance to concede the national demand peacefully. The backdrop was repressive: the government refused any advance until the Congress and the League agreed, and it had curtailed the freedoms of speech, press and association.

Each satyagrahi was hand-picked by Gandhi. The protester would publicly deliver an anti-war declaration that it was wrong to help the British war effort with men or money, court arrest, and if not arrested, march towards Delhi. This march gave the campaign the name Delhi Chalo Movement.

• First satyagrahi: Vinoba Bhave, a close disciple of Gandhi, who offered satyagraha on 17 October 1940.
• Second satyagrahi: Jawaharlal Nehru.
• Third satyagrahi: Brahma Datt, an inmate of Gandhi's ashram.

By mid-1941 around 25,000 satyagrahis had been convicted. The campaign kept the flag of protest flying until the larger storm of 1942.

By early 1942 the war had turned grim for Britain. Japan had overrun South-East Asia and taken Rangoon in March 1942. A Japanese invasion of India seemed a real possibility. Under pressure from its allies, the United States, the USSR and China, to win Indian support for the war, Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent Sir Stafford Cripps, a left-wing Labour minister and a member of the British War Cabinet, to India in March 1942 with constitutional proposals. The official Congress negotiators with Cripps were Jawaharlal Nehru and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the Congress president.

The main proposals were:

• Indian Union: an Indian Union with dominion status, free to leave the Commonwealth.
• Constituent assembly: a body partly elected by the provincial legislative assemblies and partly nominated by the princes would frame the constitution after the war.
• Provincial opt-out: any province unwilling to join could keep out and form a separate union, and could sign a separate agreement with Britain about its future status, a blueprint for Partition.
• Defence: in the meantime, defence stayed in British hands and the Governor-General's powers remained intact.

The proposals satisfied no one. Critics dismissed them as merely a propaganda device aimed at the United States and China. The Congress objected to dominion status in place of independence, to the nomination of princely-state representatives, and to the provinces' right to secede, which threatened national unity. Above all, it objected to the absence of any immediate transfer of power and of any real share in defence. The Muslim League disliked the single Union and the constituent-assembly machinery, and objected that Pakistan was not explicitly conceded. The talks finally broke down on the Viceroy's veto. Gandhi called the scheme a "post-dated cheque", a phrase later embellished as a cheque "on a failing bank." Yet the mission mattered: it was the first time Britain put forward a concrete constitution-making body through which Indians would frame their own constitution. Cripps went home, leaving a frustrated and embittered people who felt the time had come for a final assault on imperialism.

The constitution-making body that Cripps sketched on paper took shape only after the war. Under the Cabinet Mission Plan, the Constituent Assembly was elected by the provincial legislative assemblies in 1946. It was not chosen by direct popular vote. Its first session met on 9 December 1946, not in 1947. Jinnah and the Muslim League boycotted the Assembly from the start. The Assembly adopted the Constitution on 26 November 1949, and the Constitution came into force on 26 January 1950. These four anchors, indirect election in 1946, first sitting in December 1946, the League boycott, and the 1949–1950 dates, settle most questions on the Assembly.

After Cripps left, Gandhi framed a resolution for British withdrawal. Several factors drove the decision to strike now:

• the failure of the Cripps Mission showed Britain's attitude was unchanged;
• popular discontent over rising prices and shortages, and fears of a British "scorched earth" policy in the east;
• news of British reverses in South-East Asia, and the way the British abandoned their Indian subjects there (the "Black Road" for Indian refugees, "White Road" for Europeans), shattered British prestige and exposed their racism; and
• the leadership wanted to prepare the masses for a possible Japanese invasion.

The Congress Working Committee met at Wardha in July 1942 and framed the demand for British withdrawal. The Quit India resolution was moved by Nehru and seconded by Patel. It was ratified at the All India Congress Committee meeting at Gowalia Tank, Bombay, on 8 August 1942. The resolution demanded an immediate end to British rule and declared that free Indians would frame their own constitution. It committed free India to defend itself against fascism and sanctioned a civil disobedience movement under Gandhi's leadership. Gandhi then gave the nation his famous mantra: "Do or Die, we shall either free India or die in the attempt." He also issued instructions to every section. Government servants were not asked to resign, only to declare allegiance to the Congress. Soldiers were not to leave their posts, only to refuse to fire on their own people. Students should leave their studies if they felt confident. Peasants should address the question of rent. The one outright demand of sovereignty was addressed to the princely states: the princes were to accept the sovereignty of their own people.

The constitutional demand at the heart of the resolution, a constitution framed by Indians themselves, was an old one. Gandhi had pressed the national case in London at the Second Round Table Conference in 1931, and the talks had failed. Keep the sequence clear for chronology questions: Second Round Table Conference (1931), then Quit India (1942), then the Royal Indian Navy revolt (February 1946). The demand was finally realised when the Constituent Assembly met in 1946. The Assembly did its work through committees. Jawaharlal Nehru chaired the Union Constitution Committee, which designed the structure of the Union. B.R. Ambedkar chaired the Drafting Committee, which prepared the text of the Constitution. Students often confuse the two: Nehru for the Union Constitution Committee, Ambedkar for the Drafting Committee.

The government was in no mood to wait. In the early hours of 9 August 1942, in a single sweep, it arrested all the top leaders and declared the Congress committees unlawful. With the established leaders gone, the initiative passed to younger, militant elements. The relatively unknown Aruna Asaf Ali presided over the Congress session and hoisted the flag.

The movement then erupted:

• The public on the rampage: people attacked symbols of authority, blew up bridges, tore up railway tracks and cut telegraph lines, most intensely in eastern UP and Bihar. Students struck and acted as couriers; workers struck in Ahmedabad, Bombay, Jamshedpur and elsewhere.
• Underground activity: leaders like Ram Manohar Lohia, Jayaprakash Narayan, Aruna Asaf Ali, Usha Mehta (who ran a secret Congress Radio in Bombay), Sucheta Kripalani and others kept the movement alive, distributing arms and guidance.
• Parallel governments sprang up: at Ballia (Chittu Pandey, August 1942), at Tamluk (the Jatiya Sarkar, Midnapore, 1942-44), and at Satara (the Prati Sarkar, Y.B. Chavan, Nana Patil, 1943-45).

Participation was wide. Youth and students were in the forefront. Women such as Aruna Asaf Ali, Sucheta Kripalani and Usha Mehta played a central role. Workers and peasants of all strata were at the heart of it. There were no communal clashes, and Muslims sheltered the underground. However, several groups stayed out. The Communists did not join: after Russia entered the war, they called it a "People's War." The Muslim League opposed the movement, the Hindu Mahasabha boycotted it, and the princely states remained quiet.

The government repression was severe, though martial law was not formally declared. Crowds were lathi-charged and fired upon. About 10,000 people were killed by some estimates. The press was muzzled, villages were fined, and mass floggings were carried out.

An assessment:

• left leaderless, the movement was largely spontaneous and violence became common; its storm-centres were eastern UP, Bihar, Midnapore, Maharashtra and Karnataka;
• students, workers and peasants were its backbone, while the upper classes and bureaucracy mostly stayed loyal; even so, government loyalty suffered serious erosion, showing how deep nationalism had reached;
• its great significance was that it placed the demand for independence on the immediate agenda. "After Quit India, there could be no retreat"; and
• the common people displayed unparalleled heroism under the most brutal repression.

In February 1943 Gandhi undertook a 21-day fast in jail to protest the charge that he was responsible for the violence. The fast raised public morale. The horror of war was deepened by the Bengal famine of 1943, a largely man-made catastrophe. Between 1.5 and 3 million people died. The causes were the diversion of foodstuffs to the army, the stoppage of Burmese rice imports, and gross official mismanagement and profiteering.

With the Congress leadership in jail and the movement crushed, a constitutional deadlock set in between the Congress and the government. Gandhi was released in May 1944 on health grounds, but the British refused to negotiate while the war lasted, and the Muslim League's demand for Pakistan blocked any common Indian front.

C. Rajagopalachari, the veteran Congress leader from Madras who had parted ways with the Congress over Quit India, tried to break the impasse. He issued a pamphlet entitled 'The Way Out', which proposed, in broad terms, a solution for the constitutional deadlock. His concrete scheme was the CR Formula (1944): the League would endorse the demand for independence and cooperate in an interim government, and after the war a plebiscite of the entire population of the Muslim-majority districts of the north-west and east would decide on separation. Gandhi accepted the formula as a basis for talks. The Gandhi-Jinnah talks of September 1944 nevertheless failed: Jinnah wanted the Congress to accept the two-nation theory outright and insisted that only Muslims of the affected areas should vote. Early in 1945 the Desai-Liaqat pact, an understanding between Bhulabhai Desai and Liaqat Ali Khan, proposed equal Congress and League representation in an interim government, but it too came to nothing. The deadlock persisted until the war ended. After the war, the INA trials, three violent mass upsurges and the Royal Indian Navy revolt of February 1946 cracked the loyalty of the armed services and forced the pace towards the final transfer of power.