Chapter 6: History: Mahatma Gandhi and the National Movement
On 2 March 1930, at Sabarmati Ashram near Ahmedabad, Mahatma Gandhi finished a long letter to Lord Irwin, the Viceroy of India. The Viceroy was the Crown’s chief representative in India and the head of its government here. The letter set out eleven demands. Some concerned land revenue, some the size of military spending, some the licensed liquor shops. The last of them asked for the tax on salt to be abolished. Gandhi added a warning. If the demands were ignored, he would break the salt law, taking with him as many companions as would come. The reply, when it arrived, was short. The Viceroy regretted that Gandhi was contemplating a course of action likely to break the law and disturb the public peace. So on 12 March Gandhi walked out of the ashram gate with a column of volunteers and turned towards the sea. Almost nobody understood the choice. Congress leaders had expected a campaign about land revenue, or about the constitution, or about political prisoners. Officials in Delhi did not think a march about salt was worth stopping. Several newspapers treated the whole plan as an anticlimax. Within a month that judgement had collapsed. Villagers were boiling seawater in open pans, shops selling foreign cloth stood picketed, and the government was arresting people in tens of thousands.
Diagram
Fig. 6.0-1 Caption: Gandhi walking at the head of the column that left Sabarmati Ashram on 12 March 1930. Brief: Source a documentary photograph of the Dandi March in progress. Show the walking column on an unpaved road, Gandhi in front with his staff, volunteers in khadi behind him, onlookers at the roadside. Label the year and the place. No modern elements.
6.1 Gandhi And The Method Of Satyagraha
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi returned to India in January 1915, aged forty-five. He was already known to Indian newspapers as a lawyer who had led a long struggle in South Africa. What he brought back was not a party or a programme, but a method of protest.
That method had to be tested in India before it could be trusted. Between 1917 and 1918 Gandhi tried it in three local disputes. Only after those tests did he turn it on the colonial government itself.
6.1.1 Where The Method Was Formed
Gandhi was born in 1869 at Porbandar in Gujarat. He went to England in 1888 to study law, and in 1893 he sailed to South Africa to handle a legal case for an Indian firm. He stayed for twenty-one years.
Indians in South Africa lived under laws written for them alone. They paid special taxes, carried registration certificates, and were kept out of certain trains, hotels and streets. Gandhi himself was thrown off a train for travelling in a first-class compartment with a valid ticket.
In 1894 he helped found the Natal Indian Congress to petition against these laws. Petitions alone changed little. Over the next twenty years Gandhi built a different kind of campaign, in which Indians openly disobeyed a law they held to be unjust and went to prison rather than pay a fine.
He gave this method a name: satyagraha, from satya (truth) and agraha (firm insistence). A satyagrahi refuses to obey an unjust law, refuses to use violence, and accepts the punishment that follows. By 1914 the South African government had withdrawn several of the disputed laws.
Gandhi reached Bombay in January 1915. On the advice of Gopal Krishna Gokhale, whom he regarded as his political teacher, he spent his first year travelling the country and speaking very little.
6.1.2 The First Experiments In India
Gandhi’s first test came in 1917 at Champaran in north Bihar, an indigo-growing district. Under the tinkathia system, tenants were obliged to plant indigo on three parts in twenty of their holding and to sell it to European planters at prices the planters fixed. When cheap chemical dyes destroyed the market for indigo, the planters recovered their losses through additional levies on the same tenants.
Local men invited Gandhi to see the conditions for himself. The district authorities ordered him to leave. He refused, appeared before the court, and said that he would accept whatever punishment the law provided. The order was withdrawn, an official enquiry was appointed, and the compulsion to grow indigo was ended.
The planters and the tenants told the story quite differently, and both versions were put before the enquiry.
The second test came in 1918 at Ahmedabad, where mill workers demanded higher wages and the mill owners refused. Gandhi supported the workers and, when the strike began to weaken, undertook a fast. The owners settled, and the workers received a wage increase of thirty-five per cent.
The third came the same year at Kheda in Gujarat. The crop had failed, and the revenue rules allowed a suspension of land revenue in such a year, but the government insisted on collecting it. Gandhi and Vallabhbhai Patel organised the peasants to refuse payment, and the government eventually agreed to collect only from those able to pay.
These three campaigns were small and local. Their importance was that they brought Gandhi into direct contact with peasants and industrial workers, and showed that his method could be worked by people who were not lawyers or newspaper editors.
6.1.3 Satyagraha, Ahimsa And Swadeshi
Gandhi’s method rested on three connected ideas. The first was satyagraha itself, already described. The second was ahimsa, non-violence, which he understood not merely as refusing to strike an opponent but as refusing to injure anyone by thought, word or deed.
For Gandhi, non-violence was not the caution of the weak. He argued that it demanded more courage than fighting, because the satyagrahi had to face force without returning it, and had to keep the door open to the opponent throughout.
The third idea was swadeshi, the use of goods made in one’s own country. Gandhi urged Indians to spin thread on the charkha, the spinning wheel, and to wear khadi, hand-spun and hand-woven cloth. Buying Indian cloth reduced the earnings of British mills, but Gandhi valued swadeshi chiefly because it gave village households work and a part to play in a national campaign.
Gandhi also drew a sharp line between satyagraha and what was then called passive resistance, a phrase used loosely for any protest that stopped short of armed struggle. The distinction is set out below.
The table sets out a distinction Gandhi himself drew, and that is also its limit. It records what he asked of his followers; it cannot tell us how many understood the difference, or held to it once a crowd had gathered. That gap becomes the central problem of the two movements this chapter describes.
6.2 Causes Of The Non-Cooperation Movement
India came out of the First World War poorer and angrier than it went in. The war had been paid for out of Indian taxes and Indian loans, and the prices of everyday goods roughly doubled between 1913 and 1918.
The years that followed brought more trouble. Crops failed in several regions in 1918–19 and again in 1920–21, and an influenza pandemic swept the country between 1918 and 1920. Estimates of the deaths differ widely, but every estimate runs into millions.
Indians had also been told that loyalty in wartime would be rewarded with a share in governing themselves. What arrived in 1919 was a set of limited reforms and, alongside them, a law that removed ordinary legal protection. Three events in that single year turned Gandhi from a supporter of the government into its opponent.
6.2.1 The Rowlatt Act, 1919
During the war the government had ruled with emergency powers that let it arrest and detain people without the usual procedure. As the war ended, it appointed a Sedition Committee under Justice Sidney Rowlatt to advise on what should replace those powers.
The committee recommended that some of them be kept permanently. Two bills were introduced in the Imperial Legislative Council in February 1919, and one was passed as an Act in March. Every elected Indian member voted against it, and several resigned in protest.
The Act allowed the government, in cases it classed as political, to arrest a person without a warrant, to hold a trial in secret rather than in open court, to restrict a person’s movements, and to detain a suspect without the safeguard of habeas corpus. Habeas corpus is the rule that requires the state to produce a prisoner before a judge and justify holding him.
Indians summed the Act up as ‘no appeal, no vakil, no daleel’ — no appeal, no lawyer, no argument. Gandhi asked the Viceroy to withhold his assent. When that failed, he called for a hartal, a complete suspension of work and business as a mark of protest, to be observed across India on 6 April 1919.
The response was the first all-India protest Gandhi had led. Shops closed and work stopped in cities from Bombay to Delhi, though the villages were barely touched. The government answered with arrests, and in the Punjab with force.
6.2.2 The Jallianwala Bagh Tragedy
In Amritsar the protest was sharpened by the arrest of two popular local leaders, Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew and Dr Satyapal, who were taken out of the city on 10 April. Crowds that gathered to demand their release were fired on, and rioting followed in which several Europeans were killed.
Command in Amritsar passed to Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer. He banned public meetings, but the ban was not widely known in the surrounding countryside, and 13 April was Baisakhi, when villagers came into the city for the fair.
That afternoon a large gathering assembled in the Jallianwala Bagh, an enclosed piece of open ground. It was reached through one narrow lane and was walled in on the other sides by the backs of houses. The plan below shows why this mattered.
Diagram
Fig. 6.2-1 Caption: The ground at Jallianwala Bagh was enclosed on every side except one narrow entrance lane. Brief: A simple plan view of the Bagh as it was in 1919, based on the recorded layout of the site. Show the rectangular open ground, the high walls formed by the backs of surrounding houses, the single narrow entrance lane, and the well inside the enclosure. Label the entrance clearly. No figures of people and no depiction of the firing.
Dyer entered with a party of about fifty riflemen, blocked the narrow entrance, and ordered his men to fire without first calling on the crowd to disperse. The firing continued until the ammunition was nearly used up. Many people were killed and many more were wounded.
The numbers were disputed then and are disputed still. The Hunter Committee, appointed by the government later that year, recorded 379 dead. The enquiry conducted by the Congress put the figure far higher, and no complete list of the dead was ever compiled.
Martial law followed in the Punjab, and under it people were publicly humiliated. In one Amritsar street Indians were ordered to crawl along the ground. The Hunter Committee found that Dyer had gone beyond his duty and he was relieved of his command, but a section of opinion in Britain treated him as a hero and raised a public fund for him.
That last fact mattered almost as much as the firing. Rabindranath Tagore returned the knighthood the British Crown had conferred on him, saying that he wished to stand beside his countrymen. For many Indians who had believed in British justice, 1919 ended that belief.
6.2.3 The Khilafat Movement
The third cause came from outside India altogether. Turkey had fought against Britain in the war and had been defeated, and the Ottoman Sultan was also the Caliph, the figure many Muslims across the world regarded as the head of their religious community.
The peace settlement of 1920 broke up the Ottoman Empire and stripped the Caliph of territory and authority. Indian Muslims had been assured during the war that the Caliph’s position and the holy places would not be disturbed, and that assurance now looked worthless.
A Khilafat Committee was formed to press three demands: that the Caliph should retain his empire; that he should be left enough territory to defend the faith; and that the Arab lands containing the holy places should remain under Muslim control. Its leaders included the brothers Mohammed Ali and Shaukat Ali, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Hakim Ajmal Khan and Hasrat Mohani.
Khilafat Day was observed across India on 17 October 1919. In November Gandhi was elected president of the All-India Khilafat Conference, and he advised the Khilafat leaders to answer with non-cooperation rather than with petitions.
Gandhi’s own reason was a national one. He saw in the Khilafat cause an opportunity to bring Hindus and Muslims into a single struggle, and he argued that a plea for unity meant little if Hindus stood aside when Muslim interests were at stake. On 31 August 1920 the Khilafat Committee launched non-cooperation, and within months the two campaigns had become one.
6.3 The Non-Cooperation Movement
Non-cooperation was a simple idea with a large claim behind it. Gandhi argued that a government of a few thousand foreign officials could rule three hundred million people only because those people cooperated with it every day.
Indians staffed its offices, argued in its courts, sat in its councils, studied in its schools, bought its imported cloth and accepted its titles. If that cooperation were withdrawn, Gandhi said, the government would find it hard to function. Non-cooperation, he added, was as much a duty when facing wrong as cooperation is when facing good.
The Congress adopted the programme at a special session held at Calcutta, now Kolkata, in September 1920. Its regular annual session at Nagpur in December 1920 confirmed the decision.
6.3.1 Objectives Of The Movement
The movement set out to achieve three things, and the order in which they were listed mattered less than the fact that all three were pressed together.
- The attainment of swaraj, meaning self-rule — within the British Empire if that were possible, and outside it if it were not.
- The redress of the Punjab wrong: the annulment of the Rowlatt Act, and an admission of regret by the government for what had been done at Amritsar.
- The redress of the Khilafat wrong: a lenient settlement with Turkey that restored the position of the Caliph.
Two of the three demands were about specific injuries and one was about the shape of the future. This mixture was deliberate, because it allowed people with quite different grievances to march under one banner.
6.3.2 The Programme Of The Movement
The programme had two halves. The first was negative: a boycott, meaning an organised refusal to use, buy or take part in something as a form of protest.
- Surrender of titles and honorary offices conferred by the government.
- Boycott of government schools and colleges, and of the law courts, by lawyers and litigants alike.
- Boycott of the elections to the new legislative councils set up under the reforms of 1919.
- Resignation from nominated seats in local bodies, and refusal to attend official functions.
- Boycott of foreign goods, especially imported cloth.
Refusal to pay taxes was held in reserve as the final stage. It was never reached.
The second half was constructive, and Gandhi thought it the more important of the two. A boycott only empties an institution; something has to be built in its place.
- Popularising swadeshi and khadi by reviving hand-spinning and hand-weaving.
- Setting up national schools and colleges, and panchayats to settle disputes by arbitration instead of in the courts.
- Working for Hindu-Muslim unity.
- Working for the removal of untouchability, the practice by which people of certain castes were kept apart and denied the use of wells, temples and schools.
- Encouraging the participation of women in public life, and campaigning against liquor.
6.3.3 The Country Responds
The response went far beyond what the Congress leadership had organised. Lawyers with large practices, among them Chittaranjan Das, Motilal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad and C. Rajagopalachari, gave up their work in the courts.
Students left government colleges, and new national institutions were founded to receive them, including the Jamia Millia Islamia, the Kashi Vidyapith, the Gujarat Vidyapith and the Bihar Vidyapith. Titles and honours were returned. Bonfires of foreign cloth were lit in market places, and spinning wheels were made and sold in large numbers.
The Congress boycotted the council elections by putting up no candidates. When the Prince of Wales landed in Bombay in November 1921, his visit was met with a hartal; the crowd turned violent, the police opened fire, and days of rioting followed.
Elsewhere, local grievances attached themselves to the national campaign and moved in their own direction.
- In the Awadh countryside, tenants organised against high rents and evictions.
- In forest villages of central India, people defied the forest laws that restricted grazing and the collection of firewood.
- In Assam, plantation labourers left the tea gardens.
- In Malabar, tenant discontent among the Mappila peasantry grew into an armed uprising against landlords and the administration; it also took a communal turn, with attacks on Hindu families, and it was suppressed with heavy force.
Gandhi’s name travelled faster than his instructions. In many villages people spoke of the coming of ‘Gandhi Raj’ and gave the word swaraj a meaning of their own — the end of rent, of revenue, or of the landlord. This was the strength of a mass movement and also its danger, because the leadership could not control what it had set moving.
The government answered with arrests. The Ali brothers were tried for sedition in 1921, the Congress and Khilafat volunteer organisations were declared illegal, and by the end of that year most of the senior leaders were in prison.
The Nagpur session had already given the Congress the machinery to work at this scale.
The Nagpur reorganisation explains something the resolutions alone cannot. The movement reached districts the Congress had never entered because there was now a committee in each of them, and a fee low enough for a cultivator to pay.
6.3.4 Suspension And The Chauri Chaura Incident
By the beginning of 1922 Gandhi was preparing the final stage, a refusal to pay taxes, to be launched from Bardoli in Gujarat. Then came news from the United Provinces.
On 5 February 1922, at Chauri Chaura in Gorakhpur district, a procession of about three thousand people marched to the local police station. They were protesting against a police officer who had beaten volunteers picketing a liquor shop, that is, standing outside it to persuade customers not to enter.
The police fired on the procession. The crowd then set the police station alight, and twenty-two policemen inside it were killed.
Gandhi’s response was immediate and, to most of his colleagues, incomprehensible. He held that a movement built on non-violence could not continue once its own followers had killed. On 12 February 1922 the Congress Working Committee, meeting at Bardoli, suspended the mass campaign and turned the organisation to constructive work.
The criticism was sharp. Motilal Nehru and Lala Lajpat Rai objected strongly, and Subhas Chandra Bose later described the decision as a national calamity. Jawaharlal Nehru, in prison at the time, recorded his bewilderment that a movement at its height should be called off over an incident in one small town.
Gandhi’s answer was that the incident was not small. If volunteers could burn men alive at Chauri Chaura, the discipline that made satyagraha different from an ordinary revolt did not exist, and a movement without it would end in violence on a far larger scale.
Gandhi was arrested on 10 March 1922 and tried for sedition at Ahmedabad, where he pleaded guilty and invited the heaviest penalty. He was sentenced to six years and released early, in 1924, after an operation for appendicitis. The Khilafat cause meanwhile disappeared from under the movement: in Turkey itself a new government abolished the Sultanate, and the Caliphate followed in 1924.
6.4 Impact Of The Non-Cooperation Movement
Judged by its own three demands, the Non-Cooperation Movement failed. Swaraj was not attained, though Gandhi had spoken of winning it within a year. No apology was made for the Punjab, and the Rowlatt Act stayed on the statute book until 1922.
The Khilafat demand disappeared for reasons no Indian movement could control. Turkey’s new government abolished the Sultanate and then the Caliphate itself, so the office the campaign had been defending no longer existed.
Yet almost every historian treats 1920–22 as the turning point of the national movement. The reason is that the movement changed who took part in Indian politics, and what those people believed was possible.
A Movement Of The Whole Country
Until 1920 the national movement had been the work of lawyers, teachers, journalists and traders in a few cities. After 1920 it included peasants in Awadh and Gujarat, plantation workers in Assam, students, shopkeepers, and women who left their homes to picket liquor shops and to spin.
The change was uneven. Most large industrialists and landholders stayed away, since their profits and their rents depended on the government’s goodwill. But for the first time the Congress could claim to speak for more than the educated few, and that claim was hard to answer.
Fear And Confidence
The second change was in what people were willing to risk. Tens of thousands went to prison in 1921 and 1922, and going to prison stopped being a disgrace. Gandhi’s argument that a jail sentence honestly earned was nothing to be ashamed of took hold widely.
This is easy to state and hard to measure, which is why it is the part of the movement’s impact that historians argue about most. What can be said with confidence is that after 1922 the government could no longer assume that arresting leaders would end a campaign.
An Organisation Instead Of An Assembly
The third change was inside the Congress, and Case 6.1 has already shown how it was done. The point to hold on to is what the change made possible: a body that could pass a resolution in December and have it acted on in a district by February.
Social reform was folded into the political programme rather than left to separate societies. Campaigns against untouchability and against liquor, the founding of national schools, and the spread of hand-spinning all came out of these two years, and khadi became the visible sign of belonging to the movement.
Hindus and Muslims worked together on a scale not seen before or, as it turned out, after. That unity rested on the Khilafat question, and when the question vanished the alliance weakened; the later 1920s saw communal tension rise again in several provinces.
What Followed The Suspension
The suspension left the Congress with nothing to do and an argument about what to do next. One group, led by Chittaranjan Das and Motilal Nehru, held that the councils should be entered and obstructed from within. Another, closer to Gandhi, held that the boycott must continue and the constructive programme be completed.
Neither group won the argument outright, and the movement of the streets did not resume for eight years. When it did, in 1930, the leaders had learnt two lessons from Non-Cooperation: a mass campaign needed a demand that every household could feel, and it needed a form of law-breaking that ordinary people could carry out without a crowd forming.
6.5 Causes Of The Civil Disobedience Movement
Eight years separate the suspension at Bardoli from the march to Dandi. In those years the argument between India and Britain shifted from grievances to a single question: who would write India’s constitution, and when.
Two events settled the mood in which the second great movement began. One was a commission sent from London in 1927. The other was a resolution passed by the Congress at Lahore two years later.
6.5.1 The Simon Commission And The Protest Against It
The reforms of 1919 had provided that their working should be reviewed after ten years. In November 1927 the British government appointed that review early, as the Indian Statutory Commission, under the chairmanship of Sir John Simon.
All seven of its members were British members of Parliament. Not one Indian was appointed to a body sent to decide how Indians should be governed.
The insult was the point of the objection, and it was understood as such on both sides. The Secretary of State for India, Lord Birkenhead, had argued that Indians could not agree among themselves on a scheme of reforms, and the all-British commission was his answer to that supposed failure.
The Congress met at Madras in December 1927, under the presidency of Dr M.A. Ansari, and resolved to boycott the Commission at every stage and in every form. The Hindu Mahasabha joined the boycott. The Muslim League split over the question, with the section led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah supporting the boycott and another section willing to give evidence.
The Commission landed at Bombay on 3 February 1928 and was met by a hartal. Wherever it travelled it was received by silent crowds carrying black flags and by the slogan ‘Simon Go Back’, painted on walls and shouted at stations.
The government broke up these demonstrations by force. On 30 October 1928 Lala Lajpat Rai led a protest at Lahore railway station and was struck during a lathi charge. He died on 17 November. Indians widely held the assault responsible for his death, and the belief did more damage to the government’s standing than any argument about the Commission’s membership.
The Commission’s report appeared in 1930, after the Civil Disobedience Movement had already begun. It proposed abolishing dyarchy and granting autonomy in the provinces while leaving the Governor with overriding powers, enlarging the provincial councils, building a federation that would include the princely states, keeping communal representation, and placing the High Courts under the Government of India. It offered no promise of dominion status — self-government of the kind Canada and Australia already had, with the British monarch as head of state.
By then almost nobody in India was reading it. The refusal to include Indians had already decided the response, whatever the report might contain.
Indians had meanwhile shown that they could agree on a scheme. An All Parties Conference met in 1928, and a committee under Motilal Nehru produced a report proposing dominion status for India. The Congress, at its Calcutta session that December, gave the British government one year to accept it.
6.5.2 The Declaration Of Poorna Swaraj At Lahore, 1929
The year passed without acceptance. When the Congress met at Lahore in December 1929, with Jawaharlal Nehru as its president, the offer of dominion status was withdrawn and the goal was changed.
The session resolved that Poorna Swaraj, complete independence, was now the objective of the Congress, and that the word swaraj in its constitution would carry that meaning and no other. It authorised a programme of civil disobedience, and it called on members of the legislatures to resign.
At midnight on 31 December 1929 the tricolour was hoisted on the banks of the river Ravi at Lahore. The Congress fixed 26 January 1930 as Independence Day, and on that day meetings across the country read out a pledge declaring that it was a crime to submit to a government that had ruined India economically, politically and culturally.
This was a change of demand, not merely of language. Dominion status could be granted by Britain in stages and on conditions. Complete independence could only be conceded or refused, and refusing it left the Congress with nothing to negotiate about — which is precisely why a movement followed.
Two other pressures were building at the same time. The world economic depression that began in 1929 pushed down the prices of Indian crops while land revenue and rents stayed where they were, so cultivators were squeezed hard. And a younger generation, impatient with resolutions, was turning to methods the Congress did not control.
Gandhi’s answer to both was a campaign that ordinary households could join without weapons and without waiting for permission — and a demand so plain that no explanation was needed.
6.6 The Civil Disobedience Movement
In February 1930 the Congress Working Committee met at Sabarmati and placed the launching of the campaign entirely in Gandhi’s hands. It did not decide where the campaign would begin, because Gandhi had not yet told anyone.
Civil disobedience means openly breaking a particular law that is held to be unjust, and accepting the punishment for breaking it. It is different from non-cooperation, which withdraws from an institution without breaking any law at all.
6.6.1 The Dandi March
The law Gandhi chose to break was the salt law. The government held a monopoly over salt: only it could manufacture salt or authorise its manufacture, and a tax was charged on every measure sold. Making salt from seawater, which anyone living on the coast could do for nothing, was an offence.
That choice answered a question the Congress had been arguing over for months — how to find a demand that a peasant, a mill worker and a lawyer would all feel in the same way. Salt was used in every household in India. The tax fell equally on rich and poor, which meant it fell hardest on the poor, and the substance itself lay free on the shore in front of them.
Gandhi left the Sabarmati Ashram on 12 March 1930 with a column of ashram volunteers, and walked south towards the Gujarat coast. The march covered roughly 385 kilometres in twenty-four days.
It was slow on purpose. The column halted at village after village, where Gandhi spoke, took the names of officials willing to resign, and asked for volunteers. Newspapers reported each day’s stage, so the whole country knew where the march had reached and how many days remained.
Map
Map 6.1 Caption: The route of the salt march from Sabarmati to the coast, March–April 1930. Brief: Show the coastal districts of Gujarat as they were within the Bombay Presidency in 1930. Mark Sabarmati Ashram near Ahmedabad as the starting point and Dandi on the coast as the destination, with the route line passing through Aslali, Nadiad, Borsad, Bharuch, Surat and Navsari. Give a distance scale. State on the map that these are the administrative boundaries of 1930 and not present-day boundaries. Do not show any modern state borders.
The column reached Dandi on 5 April. On the morning of 6 April 1930 Gandhi walked to the shore and picked up a lump of natural salt left by the sea. With that act the salt law was broken and the movement began.
The march also settled the question of who the movement belonged to. It had been announced in advance, the government had been told the date, and no one had been ambushed or attacked. That made the arrests which followed look like what they were.
6.6.2 The Programme Of The Movement
The Congress programme had four main parts, and any household could carry out at least one of them.
- Defiance of the salt laws by making or selling salt without a licence.
- Boycott of liquor shops, and picketing them to turn customers away.
- Boycott of foreign cloth and of British goods of every kind.
- Non-payment of taxes and land revenue, and defiance of the forest laws.
Officials were also asked to resign, students to leave government colleges, and members of the legislatures to give up their seats. The difference from 1920 lay in the fourth item and in the first: this time the movement set out to break the law rather than to walk away from it.
The table separates the two movements by method, which is how the Congress itself described the change. What it cannot show is the continuity: the committees, the volunteers and the habit of collective action all came from 1920, and without them the campaign of 1930 could not have spread in weeks.
6.6.3 The Movement Spreads And The Government Answers
Salt was made illegally on coastlines all round India within a month. In the Madras Presidency, C. Rajagopalachari led a march from Tiruchirappalli to Vedaranyam on the coast and broke the salt law there. In Malabar, K. Kelappan led a similar march.
Away from the sea the movement took other forms. Peasants in Gujarat and the United Provinces refused land revenue. In parts of eastern India, villagers refused the chaukidari tax, the levy that paid the village watchman. In the forests of Maharashtra, Karnataka and the Central Provinces, people entered reserved areas to graze cattle and gather wood in defiance of the forest laws.
In the North-West Frontier Province, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan led the Khudai Khidmatgars, or Servants of God, known as the Red Shirts from their dress. They were pledged to non-violence and had been organised before the movement began. When Ghaffar Khan was arrested in April 1930, large demonstrations followed at Peshawar, and soldiers of a Garhwali regiment refused an order to fire on the crowd. They were court-martialled and imprisoned.
Women took part in numbers not seen in 1920. They picketed liquor and cloth shops, made and sold salt, courted arrest, and in several places led the marches themselves. In the Naga hills, a movement led by Rani Gaidinliu resisted British authority during these same years, though it grew from causes of its own rather than from the Congress programme.
The government’s answer was mass imprisonment. More than ninety thousand people were arrested during the movement, including most of the Congress leadership and Gandhi himself in early May 1930. The Congress was declared an unlawful organisation, and severe restrictions were placed on the newspapers.
What the government could not control was the reporting.
6.7 The Gandhi-Irwin Pact And The Second Round Table Conference
While Indians were making salt and going to prison, the constitutional question was being discussed four thousand miles away. The British government had convened a Round Table Conference in London to consider India’s future government, and its first session ran from November 1930 to January 1931.
Princes, Liberals, the Muslim League, the Hindu Mahasabha, representatives of the Depressed Classes and of other groups attended. The Congress did not, because its leaders were in jail and because it had refused to talk while the movement was on.
Cartoon
Cartoon 6.1 Caption: A conference on India’s future, with the largest Indian party absent from the table. Brief: Draw a round table in a London conference room. Several delegates are seated and talking, papers in hand. One chair, drawn noticeably larger and pushed back from the table, stands empty with a card on it reading ‘Indian National Congress’. Through the window behind, a distant Indian street with a small crowd. The exaggeration is the size of the empty chair. No caricature of any community, dress or religion.
The cartoon makes one claim: that a settlement reached without the Congress would not hold in India. That was also the conclusion the British government drew by January 1931, which is why it began looking for a way to bring the Congress in.
A cartoon can only make one point, and this one leaves out a real difficulty. The other delegates were not decorations; they represented interests and communities with claims of their own, and the Congress’s absence did not make those claims disappear. The next session would show exactly how hard they were to reconcile.
6.7.1 The Gandhi-Irwin Pact, 1931
Negotiations were opened by Tej Bahadur Sapru and M.R. Jayakar, two Liberal leaders who were not in the Congress and could therefore talk to both sides. Gandhi was released from prison in January 1931, and he and the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, met over several weeks in Delhi.
The agreement they signed on 5 March 1931 is known as the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, or the Delhi Pact. The government undertook to:
- Withdraw all ordinances issued to suppress the movement and end the prosecutions under them. An ordinance is a law made by the executive without the legislature, and the government had used ordinances heavily since 1930.
- Release political prisoners who had not been convicted of violence.
- Restore the confiscated property of satyagrahis, where it had not already been sold.
- Permit the peaceful picketing of liquor shops and shops selling foreign cloth.
- Permit people living near the sea coast to collect or manufacture salt free of duty.
The Congress, in return, undertook to:
- Suspend the Civil Disobedience Movement.
- Take part in the second session of the Round Table Conference.
- Not press for an enquiry into the conduct of the police during the movement.
The third Congress undertaking was the one its own members found hardest. Dropping the demand for an enquiry meant that what had been done to unarmed volunteers would not be examined, and many in the Congress regarded this as too high a price.
The Congress endorsed the Pact at its Karachi session later that month and nominated Gandhi as its sole representative for the conference in London.
6.7.2 The Second Round Table Conference
The second session ran from 7 September to 1 December 1931, and Gandhi attended it alone on behalf of the Congress. He claimed to speak for the whole of India, and that claim was contested at once.
The conference deadlocked on the question of minorities. Separate electorates — arrangements under which members of a particular community would be elected only by voters of that community — were now demanded not only for Muslims but also for the Depressed Classes, Indian Christians, Anglo-Indians and Europeans.
Gandhi opposed separate electorates for the Depressed Classes on the ground that they would divide Hindu society permanently, and he could not carry the other delegates with him. Meanwhile the British government made it clear that it would not concede immediate dominion status, and the question of a responsible government for India slipped out of the discussion altogether.
Gandhi sailed home in December 1931 with nothing settled. He had been Britain’s guest for three months and had returned without the one thing the Congress had sent him for.
6.8 The Renewal Of The Civil Disobedience Movement
Gandhi landed at Bombay on 28 December 1931 to find that the truce had already collapsed in his absence. The Pact had been made with Lord Irwin; the Viceroy was now Lord Willingdon, and his government had spent the autumn dealing with the countryside by ordinance.
In the United Provinces, peasants hit by the fall in crop prices had begun a campaign against paying rent, and the administration answered with emergency powers. In Bengal, ordinances were used against political activity of every kind. In the North-West Frontier Province, the Khudai Khidmatgars were being broken up.
Jawaharlal Nehru and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan had been arrested while Gandhi was still at sea. Gandhi asked for an interview with the Viceroy to discuss what had happened. The request was refused.
That refusal decided the matter. The Pact had rested on the idea that the government now treated the Congress as a party to be talked to; a Viceroy who would not receive its leader had withdrawn that recognition.
The Congress resumed the movement in the first days of January 1932. Gandhi was arrested on 4 January, before he could address a single meeting.
The government had prepared for this and moved faster than in 1930. It issued a series of ordinances that gave officials powers to arrest without warrant, ban meetings, seize funds and take over buildings. The Congress and its subordinate committees were declared unlawful, their offices were closed, and their property was confiscated.
Tens of thousands were imprisoned within a few months, including almost the entire leadership. Newspapers that reported the movement sympathetically were required to deposit money that could be forfeited, which silenced many of them.
The second campaign therefore never reached the scale of the first. It was fought without leaders, without an organisation that could legally exist, and against a government that had learnt from 1930. It lost force through 1932, was suspended in 1933, and was formally withdrawn by the Congress in 1934. Gandhi then stepped back from active Congress work.
The renewal matters less for what it achieved than for what it revealed. A government that could imprison a hundred thousand people and outlaw the largest political party in the country could stop a movement, but it could not govern with consent afterwards.
By 1934 both sides had reached the same practical conclusion from opposite directions. The Congress turned towards the legislatures and the elections that the next round of reforms would bring. The British government, having decided that force alone would not hold India, began drafting those reforms.
6.9 Impact Of The Civil Disobedience Movement
The Civil Disobedience Movement did not win independence, and by 1934 it had been beaten in the streets. Judged against the Lahore resolution, it failed as completely as its predecessor had failed against the demands of 1920.
Its effects were of a different kind. The movement changed who counted as a political person in India, what the Congress could plausibly demand, and what the British government believed it could hold by force.
Who Came Out
The first movement had brought in peasants and workers. The second brought in the same groups in larger numbers, and added merchants and shopkeepers hurt by the depression, tribal communities defying the forest laws, and whole districts that had stayed quiet in 1921.
The clearest change was the part played by women. Thousands picketed liquor and cloth shops, made and sold salt, went to prison, and in several places led the marches themselves. Until 1930 a woman in public political life was unusual enough to be reported as news; after 1930 she was not.
Diagram
Fig. 6.9-1 Caption: Women picketing a shop selling foreign cloth during the movement of 1930. Brief: Source a documentary photograph from 1930 showing women volunteers standing outside a cloth shop with a banner or placard. Show the street setting and passers-by. Caption with the year. No modern elements and no identification of individuals by name unless the original record names them.
New Ways Of Reaching People
Because the Congress was declared unlawful, the movement had to spread without offices, printed newspapers or public meetings. It did so through methods that needed nothing but people.
Volunteers held prabhat pheris, dawn processions that went through a neighbourhood singing patriotic songs before the day’s work began. Handwritten news-sheets called patrikas were copied and passed on, carrying instructions and news that the press could not print. Children were organised into the Vanara Sena, a volunteer corps that ran messages and helped at meetings.
These were not decorations on the movement. They were how a banned organisation kept in touch with a country, and they left habits of local organisation that outlasted 1934.
What The Government Learnt
The British government could suppress the movement, and did. What it could not do was govern afterwards on the assumption that the Congress would go away.
The Government of India Act, 1935, followed. It gave the provinces autonomy with an elected ministry responsible to an elected legislature, though the Governor kept overriding powers, and it proposed a federation including the princely states that never came into being. The Congress condemned the Act as inadequate, contested the elections held under it in 1937, and formed ministries in most provinces.
The Cost
Two consequences ran the other way, and an honest account has to include them.
The first was exhaustion. Two mass movements in twelve years, each ending in mass imprisonment and neither winning its stated demand, left many workers tired and many younger nationalists convinced that Gandhi’s method could not finish the job.
The second was division. Muslim participation in 1930–34 was far lower than it had been in 1920–22, when the Khilafat alliance held. The Round Table sessions had turned the constitutional question into a bargaining over separate representation for communities, and that argument now sat at the centre of Indian politics rather than at its edge.
What the two movements had settled beyond argument was the goal. After 1930 no Congress leader could offer less than complete independence, and no British government could assume that anything less would be accepted.
6.10 Summary
- Gandhi returned to India in January 1915 with a method rather than a programme. Satyagraha meant openly disobeying an unjust law, refusing violence, and accepting the punishment; ahimsa and swadeshi completed it.
- He tested the method locally before using it against the government, at Champaran in 1917 and at Ahmedabad and Kheda in 1918. These campaigns brought him into direct contact with peasants and industrial workers.
- Three events of 1919 turned Gandhi from a supporter of the government into its opponent, against a background of war taxation, rising prices, crop failure and an influenza pandemic.
- The Rowlatt Act made wartime powers permanent, allowing arrest without warrant, secret trial and detention without habeas corpus. Gandhi answered with an all-India hartal on 6 April.
- At Jallianwala Bagh on 13 April, troops under General Dyer fired without warning on a gathering in an enclosed ground with one narrow exit. The death toll was disputed then and is disputed still.
- The Khilafat question arose from the breaking up of the Ottoman Empire and the stripping of the Caliph’s authority, breaking a wartime assurance to Indian Muslims.
- The Non-Cooperation Movement, adopted at Calcutta in September 1920 and confirmed at Nagpur in December, sought swaraj, redress of the Punjab wrong and redress of the Khilafat wrong.
- Its programme had two halves: a boycott of schools, courts, councils, titles and foreign goods, and a constructive programme of khadi, national schools, arbitration panchayats, Hindu-Muslim unity and the removal of untouchability. Refusal to pay taxes was held in reserve and never reached.
- The Nagpur session gave the Congress linguistic provincial committees, a Working Committee of fifteen and a four-anna membership fee, turning a yearly assembly into a working organisation.
- After twenty-two policemen were killed at Chauri Chaura on 5 February 1922, Gandhi held that a movement resting on non-violence could not continue, and the Working Committee suspended it at Bardoli on 12 February. Motilal Nehru, Lala Lajpat Rai and Subhas Chandra Bose objected strongly.
- The movement won none of its three demands, but it made the national movement a mass movement, reduced the fear of imprisonment, spread nationalism to the villages and produced a brief period of unprecedented Hindu-Muslim cooperation.
- The Simon Commission of 1927 contained seven British members and no Indian. The Congress boycotted it at every stage; the Commission was met with black flags and ‘Simon Go Back’, and Lala Lajpat Rai was injured in a lathi charge at Lahore and died soon after.
- At Lahore in December 1929 the Congress declared Poorna Swaraj, complete independence, to be its goal, hoisted the tricolour on the banks of the Ravi, and fixed 26 January 1930 as Independence Day.
- Gandhi launched civil disobedience by breaking the salt law, marching from Sabarmati to Dandi between 12 March and 6 April 1930. Salt was chosen because it was taxed equally on rich and poor and lay free on the shore.
- The programme was defiance of the salt laws, boycott of liquor and foreign cloth, and non-payment of taxes and revenue. Unlike non-cooperation, it set out to break the law rather than to withdraw from institutions.
- The movement spread to every coast and to the forests, the no-revenue districts and the North-West Frontier, where Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan led the Khudai Khidmatgars. More than ninety thousand people were arrested and the Congress was declared unlawful.
- By the Gandhi-Irwin Pact of 5 March 1931 the government withdrew its ordinances, released non-violent prisoners, permitted peaceful picketing and allowed coastal households to make salt. The Congress suspended the movement, agreed to attend the Round Table Conference, and dropped its demand for an enquiry into police conduct.
- Gandhi attended the Second Round Table Conference alone from September to December 1931. It deadlocked over separate electorates for minorities, dominion status was refused, and he returned with nothing settled.
- The movement was renewed in January 1932 because ordinances and arrests had continued while the Pact was in force and the new Viceroy refused to meet Gandhi. Gandhi was arrested on 4 January, the Congress was outlawed, and the campaign lost force before being withdrawn in 1934.
- Civil disobedience did not win independence, but it brought women into public political life in large numbers, spread new methods of organisation, and convinced the British government that India could not be held by force alone — a conclusion reflected in the Government of India Act, 1935. It also left the movement tired, and left the question of separate representation for communities at the centre of Indian politics.
6.11 Key Terms
- Ahimsa — non-violence; for Gandhi, refusing to injure anyone by thought, word or deed, and not merely refusing to strike.
- Boycott — an organised refusal to use, buy, attend or take part in something as a form of protest.
- Civil disobedience — openly breaking a particular law held to be unjust, and accepting the punishment for breaking it.
- Dominion status — self-government of the kind Canada and Australia already had, with the British monarch as head of state.
- Hartal — a complete suspension of work and business for a day, observed as a mark of protest.
- Khadi — hand-spun and hand-woven cloth, worn as a public sign of belonging to the national movement.
- Ordinance — a law made by the executive without the legislature, having the force of law.
- Poorna Swaraj — complete independence; adopted as the goal of the Congress at the Lahore session of 1929.
- Satyagraha — insistence on truth; disobeying an unjust law openly, without violence, and accepting the penalty.
- Swadeshi — the making and use of goods produced in one’s own country.
- Swaraj — self-rule; used before 1929 to mean self-government within the British Empire if possible, and outside it if necessary.
6.12 Points to Ponder
- Gandhi suspended a movement at its height because one crowd in one town had killed. Was he protecting the method, or abandoning the people who had trusted it?
- Salt worked as a symbol because every household used it. What makes something a good symbol for a mass movement, and what does choosing one demand leave out?
- The government’s enquiry and the Congress enquiry counted the dead at Jallianwala Bagh very differently. When two investigations disagree, how should a historian decide what to write?
- The Non-Cooperation Movement asked students to leave government colleges and lawyers to leave the courts. Is it fair for a political movement to ask people to give up something they may not be able to get back?
- Neither movement won the demands it was launched for. What, apart from winning, can make a movement count as a success?
- Much of what the world learnt about the events of 1930 came from a foreign journalist, because Indian newspapers were restricted. How does the surviving record of an event change depending on who was permitted to write about it?
6.13 Objective Questions
- The Rowlatt Act was passed in
- 1917
- 1919
- 1920
- 1922 [1 mark]
- The Non-Cooperation Movement was suspended after violence at
- Bardoli
- Dandi
- Chauri Chaura
- Dharasana [1 mark]
- Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan organised the
- Natal Indian Congress
- Khudai Khidmatgars
- Vanara Sena
- Swaraj Party [1 mark]
- Assertion (A): Gandhi chose the salt law as the law to be broken in 1930. Reason (R): Salt was used by every household and the tax on it fell equally on rich and poor.
- Both (A) and (R) are true, and (R) is the correct explanation of (A)
- Both (A) and (R) are true, but (R) is not the correct explanation of (A)
- is true, but (R) is false
- is false, but (R) is true [1 mark]
- Assertion (A): The Congress resolved to boycott the Simon Commission at every stage. Reason (R): Not one Indian was appointed to a body sent to report on how Indians should be governed.
- Both (A) and (R) are true, and (R) is the correct explanation of (A)
- Both (A) and (R) are true, but (R) is not the correct explanation of (A)
- is true, but (R) is false
- is false, but (R) is true [1 mark]
- Match the events in Column A with the years in Column B. [1 mark]
| Column A | Column B |
|---|---|
| a. The firing at Jallianwala Bagh | i. 1922 |
| b. The Chauri Chaura incident | ii. 1931 |
| c. The Lahore session declaring Poorna Swaraj | iii. 1919 |
| d. The Gandhi-Irwin Pact | iv. 1929 |
Fill in the blank: Hand-spun and hand-woven cloth, worn as a public sign of belonging to the movement, was called ______. [1 mark]
State whether the following statement is true or false: The Second Round Table Conference ended with the British government conceding dominion status to India. [1 mark]
6.14 Check Your Concepts
Define satyagraha. [2 marks]
State any two provisions of the Rowlatt Act of 1919. [2 marks]
Differentiate between non-cooperation and civil disobedience as methods of protest. [3 marks]
Give three reasons why the salt law was chosen as the point at which to begin the movement of 1930. [3 marks]
Trace the chain of events that turned Gandhi from a supporter of the government in 1918 into its opponent by the end of 1920. [4 marks]
Explain, with an example, how the reorganisation of the Congress at Nagpur in December 1920 helped the movement reach the villages. [4 marks]
State the undertakings given by the government and by the Congress in the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, and explain why one of the Congress undertakings was criticised within the party. [5 marks]
Describe the Non-Cooperation Movement, giving its causes, its programme and its consequences, and evaluate the claim that suspending it in 1922 was a mistake. [6 marks]
6.15 Show Your Skills
- A photograph taken in 1930 shows a line of women standing on a pavement outside a cloth shop in an Indian city. They hold a cloth banner between them. Passers-by have stopped to watch, and a policeman stands a little apart at the edge of the picture.
- Name the activity the women are engaged in and the movement to which it belonged. [2 marks]
- Give two reasons why shops selling imported cloth were singled out for this treatment. [2 marks]
- State one thing this photograph cannot tell you about who took part in the movement, and explain why. [2 marks]
- In a coastal village in April 1930, about forty villagers walk down to the shore each morning and boil seawater in shallow pans. The salt they produce is carried to the weekly market and sold openly. Nobody is armed, and the district officer has been instructed to arrest anyone found doing this. Within a fortnight the same thing is happening on coastlines a thousand kilometres away.
- Which law were the villagers breaking, and what did it provide? [2 marks]
- Explain why this form of law-breaking suited a movement that wanted millions of ordinary people to take part. [3 marks]
- How did the Gandhi-Irwin Pact of 1931 deal with this particular activity, and what did it leave untouched? [2 marks]
- Study a map showing a route that begins at Sabarmati Ashram near Ahmedabad, runs south through Aslali, Nadiad, Borsad, Bharuch, Surat and Navsari, and ends at Dandi on the coast, a distance of about 385 kilometres.
- Name the march this route belongs to, and give the dates on which it began and ended. [2 marks]
- Explain why the march was made slowly and on foot, halting at village after village. [2 marks]
- What did Gandhi do on reaching the coast, and why did that act matter more than the distance walked? [2 marks]