Chapter 7: History: The Quit India Movement
In the last week of August 1942, listeners in Bombay turning the dial of a short-wave set found a station that appeared on no official list. A young voice announced that this was the Congress Radio, calling from somewhere in India. Somewhere in India was the whole point. The transmitter was small enough to be carried up a staircase, and it was shifted from one flat to another every few weeks. Usha Mehta, a student in her early twenties, read out the news that the newspapers were not permitted to print — where the police had opened fire, which towns had stopped work, which leaders were held in which jail. She was doing this because the country had fallen silent in a very particular way. On the morning of 9 August 1942, the government arrested Gandhi and almost the entire Congress leadership, before the movement they had voted for the previous evening could even begin. The press was censored. Meetings were banned. The station lasted until November 1942, when the transmitter was traced and Usha Mehta was arrested and imprisoned. For a historian this is more than a story of courage. It is a warning about evidence. When a government censors the newspapers and jails the leaders, the ordinary record thins out. Much of what we know about August 1942 survives in police files, in court papers, and in what people like her risked their freedom to say aloud.
Diagram
Fig. 7.0-1 Caption: A portable short-wave transmitter of the 1940s could be carried by two people and hidden in an ordinary room. Brief: Draw a 1940s valve-type short-wave transmitter set on a table — a metal cabinet with dials, a microphone on a stand, headphones and a wire aerial running up to a window. Label the aerial, the microphone and the tuning dial. Emphasise the small size by drawing a suitcase beside it for scale. No people, no flags, no slogans.
7.1 India Is Taken Into The War
The Quit India Movement of 1942 did not begin in 1942. It grew out of three years of failed bargaining between the Congress and the British Government, and that bargaining began on the day India was taken into the Second World War.
To follow what happened, it helps to hold one question in mind throughout this section. Both sides wanted the same thing on paper — Indian support for the war effort. Why could they not agree on the price?
7.1.1 The Declaration Of September 1939
Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later, and the Second World War had begun in Europe.
On 3 September 1939, Lord Linlithgow, the Viceroy, announced that India was at war with Germany. The Viceroy was the Crown’s chief representative in India and the head of its government. He made the declaration without consulting the Central Legislative Assembly or the elected ministries running the provinces.
The Congress did not defend Germany. Its leaders had already condemned Fascism and Nazism, and many of them wanted Britain to win. But they asked how a country that was not free could be marched into a war said to be fought for freedom.
The Congress therefore made two demands. Britain should state plainly what it was fighting for and whether that included Indian independence, and India should be given real power at the centre before it fought.
Linlithgow answered in October 1939. He said that Dominion Status — self-government within the British Commonwealth, with the Crown as head of state and full control of one’s own affairs — remained the goal of British policy in India. He also offered to set up a consultative group of Indian representatives.
The Congress found this inadequate. Dominion Status had been named as an objective before, and the offer moved no power into Indian hands while the war was being fought.
7.1.2 The Resignation Of The Congress Ministries
By 1939 the Congress was not only a movement. It was also a party in office. Under the Government of India Act of 1935, elections had been held in the provinces, and in July 1937 the Congress formed ministries in Madras, Bombay, the United Provinces, the Central Provinces, Bihar and Orissa. Assam and the North-West Frontier Province came under Congress ministries a little later.
These governments controlled schools, police, prisons, roads and revenue in most of British India. Withdrawing from them was the sharpest constitutional weapon the Congress held.
In October and November 1939, the Congress ministries resigned in protest against the way India had been taken into the war. Power in those provinces passed back to the Governors, who ruled with the help of officials under the emergency provisions of the 1935 Act.
Who Gained From The Resignations
The resignations removed the Congress from office, but they did not remove the British Government from India. Three consequences followed quickly.
- The government could now run those provinces without an elected ministry questioning its war measures.
- The ministries in Punjab, Bengal and Sind, which were not Congress ministries, stayed in office and continued to work with the government.
- The Muslim League, which had opposed the Congress ministries, welcomed their departure. Jinnah called on Muslims to observe 22 December 1939 as a Day of Deliverance.
The League’s leaders argued that the Congress ministries had governed as a Hindu party and had disregarded Muslim interests; Congress leaders rejected the charge and pointed to their declared policy of equal treatment. Historians still weigh the record of those two years differently, and the evidence is mixed rather than settled.
In March 1940, at its Lahore session, the Muslim League passed a resolution demanding that the Muslim-majority areas in the north-west and the east of India be grouped into independent states. From this point the Congress and the League were asking Britain for two different things — and any British offer would have to answer both.
7.1.3 The August Offer Of 1940
The war itself now forced Britain to try again. In May 1940 Winston Churchill became Prime Minister of Britain, and L. S. Amery took charge as Secretary of State for India, the minister in London responsible for Indian affairs. In June, France fell to Germany, and Britain faced invasion.
Britain needed Indian soldiers, factories and supplies as never before. On 8 August 1940, Lord Linlithgow announced a set of proposals that came to be called the August Offer.
The offer had four main parts.
- Dominion Status was restated as the objective for India.
- A number of Indians would be brought into the Viceroy’s Executive Council, the small body that ran the central government.
- A War Advisory Council including representatives of the provinces and the princely states would be set up.
- After the war, a body mainly of Indians would frame a new constitution — but no constitution would be adopted unless the minorities agreed to it.
The Congress rejected the offer. It gave no power during the war, it postponed everything to an unnamed date afterwards, and the assurance to the minorities allowed any large community to block a settlement indefinitely.
The Muslim League also rejected the offer. It welcomed the assurance about minorities, but the offer gave no commitment to separate states, which by 1940 was the League’s central demand.
The Congress did not answer the rejection with a mass movement. Between 1940 and 1941 it allowed only selected individuals to offer satyagraha — a protest based on truth and non-violence, in which the protester breaks a law openly and accepts arrest. Chosen volunteers made anti-war speeches and were jailed one by one.
So by the end of 1941 nothing had moved. The Congress was out of office and out of the war effort, the League’s demand had hardened, and the British Government had promised much for later and conceded nothing now. It took a military disaster, far to the east of India, to break that stalemate.
7.2 The Cripps Mission Of 1942
Between 1939 and 1941 the British Government could afford to say ‘later’. By the spring of 1942 it could not. The war had arrived at India’s eastern doorstep, and Britain needed India settled and willing within weeks, not after the fighting ended.
This section deals with the first of the two causes of the Quit India Movement named in the syllabus: the failure of the Cripps Mission.
7.2.1 Why Britain Sent Sir Stafford Cripps
Japan entered the war in December 1941 with attacks across the Pacific and South-East Asia. Within ten weeks the British base at Singapore had surrendered, and in March 1942 Rangoon, the capital of Burma, fell to the Japanese army.
Burma shared a land frontier with India. British defeats in Asia had also damaged something less visible than territory — the belief that British power in the region could not be shaken.
Pressure now came from Britain’s allies as well. The United States and China, both fighting Japan, urged Britain to win Indian cooperation, and members of Churchill’s own War Cabinet argued that a political offer could no longer be delayed.
In March 1942 Churchill announced that Sir Stafford Cripps, a member of the War Cabinet, would go to India to discuss a constitutional settlement with all the main parties. Cripps reached Delhi later that month and held talks for about three weeks.
Photographs from those weeks show Cripps meeting Indian leaders and speaking to the press in Delhi. Figure 7.2-1 is one such photograph.
Diagram
Fig. 7.2-1 Caption: Sir Stafford Cripps at a press conference in Delhi during his mission of March 1942. Brief: Source a documentary photograph of Cripps in Delhi in 1942, seated or standing at a press conference with journalists and microphones. Label the figure of Cripps. If no verified photograph is available, use a plain archival portrait of Cripps with the date and place in the caption.
A photograph like this proves that the meetings took place and shows how openly the mission was conducted. It cannot tell us what was said in the closed rooms, what instructions Cripps carried from London, or how far he was free to alter the terms he had brought. For that we depend on letters, official papers and the accounts written afterwards by the people in the room — and those accounts do not always agree.
7.2.2 What The Mission Proposed
Cripps brought a Draft Declaration prepared by the British Government. Its proposals may be grouped under five heads.
- India would become a Dominion after the war, with the same status as Britain and free either to remain in the Commonwealth or to leave it.
- As soon as the war ended, a constitution-making body would be set up to frame India’s new constitution. Its members would be chosen by the lower houses of the provincial legislatures, together with representatives nominated by the rulers of the princely states.
- Any province that was unwilling to accept the new constitution could keep its existing position, and could later receive Dominion Status of its own. This principle was called non-accession — the right of a province to stay out of the new Indian Union.
- A treaty would be negotiated between the British Government and the constitution-making body, covering all matters arising from the transfer of power, including the protection of racial and religious minorities.
- Until the war ended, Britain would keep control of India’s defence. The task of organising India’s military and material resources would rest with the Government of India, working with the people of India.
7.2.3 Why The Proposals Were Rejected
The Congress objected first to the timing. The Declaration offered a settlement after the war, while the war was precisely when Indians were being asked to fight, pay and produce. The Congress wanted a national government with real responsibility at once.
Defence was the sticking point in the talks. The Congress wanted an Indian member of the government to hold the defence portfolio; the British Government insisted that the Commander-in-Chief and the Viceroy must retain control while the war lasted. Various formulas were tried, and none was accepted.
The Congress also opposed non-accession. If provinces could stand out, the Declaration had accepted in advance that India might be divided, and the Congress would not agree to that as a starting condition.
The Muslim League rejected the Declaration for the opposite reason. It allowed provinces to opt out one by one, but it did not concede a separate state for the Muslim-majority regions, and the constitution would still be framed by a single body for the whole country.
Objections From Other Quarters
Other groups objected on their own grounds. The Hindu Mahasabha opposed anything that opened the door to partition. Spokesmen for the Sikhs, the Anglo-Indians and the Indian Christians said the safeguards for their communities were too vague. And the people of the princely states protested that their representatives in the constitution-making body were to be nominated by their rulers, not elected by themselves.
Set side by side, the gap between what was offered and what the Congress was asking becomes clear.
The table shows the shape of the deadlock, not its temperature. Talks broke down in April 1942, and Cripps returned to London with nothing agreed.
Gandhi’s judgement on the offer became the best-remembered line of the episode: he called it a post-dated cheque. A longer version, adding that the cheque was drawn on a failing bank, is quoted very often, but historians are not agreed that Gandhi himself added those words. It is a useful reminder that a famous quotation can grow in the retelling, and that a careful reader asks where a line was first recorded.
The failure mattered more than an ordinary breakdown in talks. It closed the constitutional road. After April 1942 the Congress had no negotiation to wait for — and the Japanese army was still moving west.
7.3 The Japanese Threat
The second cause of the Quit India Movement was not a British offer at all. It was an army moving west across South-East Asia, and the argument that army set off inside India.
How Close The War Came
Japan entered the Second World War in December 1941 and advanced with startling speed. Malaya was overrun, Singapore surrendered in February 1942, and Rangoon fell in March. By the middle of 1942 the Japanese army stood on the hills between Burma and the eastern frontier of India.
The war also touched Indian territory directly. In March 1942 Japanese forces occupied the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. In April a Japanese naval force entered the Bay of Bengal, attacked shipping and shelled points on the eastern coast, and ports and railway towns began preparing for air raids.
Ordinary people felt the retreat before they felt the fighting. Hundreds of thousands of civilians left Burma on foot for Assam and Manipur along forest tracks, and many died on the way of hunger, exhaustion and disease.
In the coastal districts of Bengal and Orissa the government applied a denial policy — the removal of boats and surplus rice from areas that an invader might reach, so that these could not be used by the Japanese. It protected the war effort and stripped fishing and boat-carrying families of their livelihood at the same time.
Map 7.1 shows how far the Japanese advance had come by the middle of 1942.
Map
Map 7.1 Caption: The Japanese advance through South-East Asia to the frontiers of India by the middle of 1942. Brief: Show South-East Asia and eastern India as they were in 1942, with the boundaries of that period only — British India including Burma shown separately as it then stood, Malaya, Singapore, Thailand, French Indo-China and the Netherlands East Indies. Mark Singapore, Rangoon, the Burma–India frontier near Assam and Manipur, and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Use arrows for the direction of the Japanese advance from the east and south-east, and shade the areas under Japanese control by mid-1942. Label a note on the map stating that these are the boundaries of 1942 and not present-day boundaries. Do NOT show any present-day international boundary, and do NOT show the later fighting of 1944.
A map of this kind shows direction and distance, which is exactly what alarmed people in 1942. It cannot show what an invasion would actually have meant, because it never came; nor can it show what Indians in Assam or Bengal believed was about to happen to them. Arrows on paper look decided. At the time, nobody knew where the arrows would stop.
The Argument Inside India
Gandhi drew a conclusion that surprised many of his colleagues. He argued in his writings that Japan’s quarrel was with Britain rather than with India, and that the British presence in India was itself the bait drawing a Japanese invasion. Remove the bait, he said, and the danger to India would shrink.
He argued further that a subject people could not defend itself with conviction. A free India, governing itself, would have a reason to resist an invader that a ruled India did not have.
Not everyone in the Congress accepted this. Some leaders feared that a British withdrawal in the middle of a war would leave the country without an army, an administration or an ally, and open to occupation. Others held that Fascism and Nazism had to be defeated first, and that a movement now would weaken the side India needed to win.
By the summer of 1942, then, two pressures met. The constitutional road had closed in April, and the war had reached the eastern frontier. What the Congress did next was decided in a small town in Maharashtra.
7.4 The Quit India Resolution
Two roads had closed by the summer of 1942. Negotiation had failed in April, and the war had reached the eastern frontier. The Congress now had to decide whether to wait out the war or to act during it.
7.4.1 The Wardha Resolution, July 1942
The Congress Working Committee met at Wardha in July 1942. The Working Committee was the small executive body of the Congress, which framed policy between the larger annual gatherings, and it met near Gandhi’s ashram — a settlement where a teacher and followers lived and worked together — in Maharashtra.
At Wardha the Working Committee adopted the resolution that became known as the Quit India Resolution, the demand that British rule in India should end at once. Its central sentence was blunt: British rule in India must end immediately.
The resolution did not stop at a demand. It set out what would follow, and it dealt directly with the war.
- After British withdrawal, a provisional government of free India would be formed, drawing in the main sections of the Indian people.
- That government would decide how India was to be defended, and Allied forces could remain stationed in India to resist Japanese aggression.
- If the demand for withdrawal was refused, the Congress would launch a mass struggle on non-violent lines, under Gandhi’s leadership.
Notice how much the third clause left unsettled. The Congress was announcing a movement it had not yet organised, led by men and women who could be arrested at any moment.
The resolution was also not the view of every political group in India. The Muslim League opposed it, holding that British withdrawal without a settlement would leave Muslims at the mercy of a Congress majority. The Hindu Mahasabha opposed it. The Communist Party of India opposed it too, arguing that the war against Fascism now had to be won first.
Within the Congress itself there were doubts about the timing, though the Working Committee carried the resolution. A resolution of the Working Committee still had to be placed before the wider body of the party.
7.4.2 The Bombay Session, August 1942
The All India Congress Committee — the larger body representing the provincial units of the party — met at Gowalia Tank in Bombay in the first week of August 1942. On 8 August it passed the Quit India Resolution adopted at Wardha.
Gandhi spoke to the delegates that night. He told them that this was not a bargaining position, and he gave them a phrase to carry away.
The words ‘Do or Die’ have often been read as a call to fight. In the speech itself the meaning runs the other way: the delegates were asked to be ready to die in the attempt, not to kill. In the same address Gandhi insisted that the struggle must remain non-violent and that the quarrel was with British rule, not with the British people.
A speech, however, records what a leader chose to say in public on one night. It cannot tell us how far his listeners agreed, what they intended to do the next morning, or how the words would sound in a district town where nobody had heard him.
The government did not wait for the movement to begin. Early on the morning of 9 August 1942, Gandhi and the members of the Working Committee were arrested under wartime emergency powers, before any programme of action had been issued.
Gandhi was held at the Aga Khan Palace in Pune, and other leaders were taken to Ahmednagar Fort. The Congress was declared an unlawful organisation, its offices were sealed and its funds were frozen.
In a single night the movement lost every leader who might have directed it — and the country was left holding a resolution, a phrase, and no instructions at all. What happened next was therefore decided in the streets and villages rather than in any committee room.
7.5 The Movement And Its Suppression
The Quit India Movement is the only major movement of the national struggle that ran without its leaders. Understanding it means asking a different question from the usual one. Not ‘what did the Congress organise?’, but ‘what did people do when nobody was organising them?’
7.5.1 The August Rising
News of the arrests spread on 9 August 1942, and the response was immediate. In Bombay, Ahmedabad, Delhi, Kanpur, Patna and other cities there were hartals — a complete stoppage of work and closing of shops as a mark of protest — along with processions and student strikes.
Within days the protest moved into the countryside and changed its character. Crowds attacked the visible signs of British authority: police stations, post offices, telegraph lines, courts and railway property. Rails were torn up, wires cut and station buildings burnt, and the national flag was hoisted on public buildings.
Communications were the point of much of this. An administration that could not send a telegram or move a train could not move troops or orders either.
In some districts British authority disappeared altogether for weeks or months, and local people set up a parallel government — an administration run by the movement itself, collecting revenue, settling disputes and organising supplies in place of the official one.
Parallel governments of this kind also appeared at Ballia in the eastern United Provinces, in what is now Uttar Pradesh, and at Tamluk in the Midnapore district of Bengal, where the administration set up by the movement lasted for many months.
The movement’s day-to-day direction passed to leaders who stayed out of custody. Jayaprakash Narayan, Ram Manohar Lohia, Achyutrao Patwardhan and Aruna Asaf Ali worked underground, moving between hiding places, issuing bulletins and keeping contact between the provinces. Much of this underground work was carried out by members of the Congress Socialist Party.
Women took part in large numbers and in visible roles. Matangini Hazra in Bengal and Kanaklata Barua in Assam were both killed in September 1942 while leading processions carrying the national flag, and Rama Devi organised the movement in Odisha.
Gandhi had asked for a non-violent struggle, and in many places the protest stayed within that discipline. In others it did not: property was destroyed, officials were attacked and lives were lost on both sides. Historians have argued about this ever since — over how much of the violence was planned, how much was the response to firing on crowds, and what Gandhi himself would have permitted had he been free.
7.5.2 The Government’s Repressive Measures
The government treated the rising as a wartime emergency and answered it with force. Processions were broken up with lathi charges — baton charges by the police — and crowds were fired upon. In a few districts aircraft were used against gatherings from the air.
Beyond the crowds, the punishment fell on whole communities. Villages held responsible for damage were made to pay collective fines, public floggings were ordered, and troops were stationed in towns where the administration had broken down. Thousands were detained without trial under the wartime rules.
The press was censored heavily, and some newspapers suspended publication rather than print under the restrictions. Public meetings were banned and Congress funds and offices remained under seizure.
How Many Were Killed?
This is where a student of history has to be careful. Official figures issued by the government put the number killed at somewhere over a thousand, with more than sixty thousand arrested by the end of 1942. Nationalist estimates ran far higher, some of them close to ten thousand killed.
The gap is not simply a matter of one side lying. The government counted deaths reported by its own officers, in a period when its officers had lost control of whole districts and the press could not investigate. Nationalist counts drew on local memory and on lists compiled afterwards, which are fuller in some regions than in others.
So the honest statement is that the toll ran into thousands and that the exact figure is not known. A textbook that prints one confident number is hiding the state of the evidence.
By the middle of 1943 open resistance had been crushed in almost every district. Gandhi remained in detention at the Aga Khan Palace, where he undertook a fast of twenty-one days in February 1943 and where his wife Kasturba died in early 1944. He was released in May 1944 because his health had broken down.
The government had won the immediate contest. Whether it had won anything more than that is the question the next section takes up.
7.6 The Significance Of The Quit India Movement
Judged by its own demand, the Quit India Movement failed. The British did not quit in 1942, the movement was crushed within months, and its leaders spent the rest of the war in prison.
Yet historians treat 1942 as a turning point. That is worth pausing over, because it shows how the significance of an event is measured. The question is not only whether a movement won what it asked for. It is whether the situation afterwards could ever go back to what it had been before.
What Changed After 1942
Four changes stand out.
Independence became the only item on the agenda. Before 1942 the Congress had argued about Dominion Status, safeguards, timing and terms. After 1942 the argument with Britain was no longer about whether power would be transferred, but about how and when. Transfer of power — the handing over of governing authority from British to Indian hands — became the working assumption of both sides.
The rising showed how deep and how wide nationalist feeling had spread. It ran without leaders, without funds and without instructions, and it still reached small towns and villages across many provinces. Students, peasants, workers, women, industrial labour and people from the princely states all took part, and it drew in Indians of different religious communities.
It exposed how British rule actually worked. The administration rested on Indian policemen, clerks, station masters, postal staff and soldiers. When whole districts stopped cooperating, the government could recover them only by using the army — and a government that needs an army to collect its own revenue has lost the argument even when it wins the fight.
It strengthened a younger and more radical current inside the national movement. The underground work of 1942 and 1943 was largely done by the Congress Socialist Party, and figures such as Jayaprakash Narayan came out of it with a national reputation.
What It Cost, And What It Left Open
The costs were heavy and immediate. Thousands were killed, tens of thousands were imprisoned, villages paid collective fines, and the country lost its organised political leadership for nearly three years.
That absence had consequences the Congress did not intend. With the Congress banned and its leaders in jail from 1942 to 1945, the Muslim League was left as the one large party free to organise, and it used those years to build its following in the provinces. The demand for separate statehood was far stronger in 1945 than it had been in 1942.
So the movement did not simply hasten independence. It shaped the terms on which independence came, including the terms the Congress liked least.
After the suppression, the constitutional question stayed frozen until the war in Europe ended in 1945. In the same years, the fight for Indian independence was also being carried on outside the country’s frontiers by the Indian National Army under Subhas Chandra Bose — the subject of the chapter that follows.
7.7 Summary
On 3 September 1939 the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, declared that India was at war with Germany, without consulting the Central Legislative Assembly or the elected provincial ministries. The Congress opposed Fascism and Nazism but refused to accept that a subject country could be marched into a war for freedom.
The Congress asked Britain to state its war aims and to give India real power at the centre at once. Linlithgow answered in October 1939 by restating Dominion Status as a goal for the future, which the Congress found inadequate.
The Congress ministries formed in 1937 resigned in October–November 1939, and the provinces passed to rule by the Governors. Two things followed:
- the government could run those provinces without elected ministries questioning its war measures;
- the Muslim League welcomed the resignations and observed 22 December 1939 as a Day of Deliverance.
At Lahore in March 1940 the Muslim League demanded that the Muslim-majority regions of the north-west and east be grouped into independent states. From then on the Congress and the League were asking Britain for two different settlements.
The August Offer of 1940 promised Dominion Status after the war, more Indians in the Viceroy’s Executive Council, a War Advisory Council, and an assurance that no constitution would be adopted without the agreement of the minorities. The Congress rejected it because it transferred no power during the war and gave the minorities a veto; the League rejected it because it promised nothing about separate states.
Japan’s advance in 1941–42 changed everything. Singapore surrendered, Rangoon fell, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands were occupied, refugees walked into Assam from Burma, and the denial policy stripped coastal Bengal and Orissa of boats and surplus rice.
Under pressure from the war and from Britain’s allies, Churchill sent Sir Stafford Cripps to India in March 1942 with a Draft Declaration offering Dominion Status after the war, a constitution-making body, the right of a province not to accede, a treaty covering the transfer of power and minority protection, and continued British control of defence during the war.
The mission failed because it satisfied nobody:
- the Congress wanted power immediately and an Indian hand on defence, and refused to accept non-accession, which conceded division in advance;
- the Muslim League found no clear commitment to separate statehood;
- the Hindu Mahasabha, the Sikhs, the Anglo-Indians, the Indian Christians and the people of the princely states objected on their own grounds.
Gandhi now argued that the British presence was itself the bait drawing a Japanese invasion, and that a free India would have reason to defend itself. Others in the Congress feared that withdrawal in wartime would leave the country undefended.
The Congress Working Committee adopted the Quit India Resolution at Wardha in July 1942. It demanded that British rule end immediately, provided for a provisional government of free India, allowed Allied forces to remain against Japan, and authorised a non-violent mass struggle under Gandhi if the demand was refused.
The All India Congress Committee passed the resolution at Gowalia Tank in Bombay on 8 August 1942, and Gandhi gave the delegates the pledge ‘Do or Die’ — a call to be ready to die in the attempt, not to kill. Before dawn on 9 August the leaders were arrested and the Congress was declared unlawful.
The rising that followed had no leadership. Cities struck work; crowds attacked police stations, post offices, railways and telegraph lines; and parallel governments took over at Ballia, Tamluk and Satara. Underground workers such as Jayaprakash Narayan, Ram Manohar Lohia, Achyutrao Patwardhan and Aruna Asaf Ali kept it alive, and women took part in large numbers.
The government answered with firing, lathi charges, collective fines on villages, floggings, censorship and mass detention. Official figures put the dead in the hundreds above a thousand and the arrests above sixty thousand; nationalist estimates ran far higher, and the true toll is not known.
The movement failed in its stated demand and was crushed by 1943. Its significance lies elsewhere: independence became the only agenda, later negotiations concerned the manner of the transfer of power rather than whether power would pass, and the rising showed that British rule depended on an Indian cooperation it could no longer count on.
The cost included nearly three years without an organised national leadership. In those years the Muslim League, free to organise while the Congress was banned, greatly strengthened its position — so 1942 shaped both the coming of independence and the terms on which it came.
7.8 Key Terms
- August Offer — the proposals announced by Lord Linlithgow on 8 August 1940, promising Dominion Status after the war, Indian members in the Viceroy’s Executive Council, a War Advisory Council, and no constitution without the minorities’ agreement.
- Denial policy — the wartime removal of boats and surplus rice from the coastal districts of Bengal and Orissa, so that they could not be used by an invading Japanese army.
- Dominion Status — self-government within the British Commonwealth, with the Crown as head of state and full control of one’s own affairs.
- Hartal — a complete stoppage of work and closing of shops as a mark of protest.
- Non-accession — the principle in the Cripps Draft Declaration that a province unwilling to accept the new constitution could stay out of the Indian Union.
- Parallel government — an administration set up by the movement itself in place of the official one, collecting revenue, settling disputes and running local affairs.
- Quit India Resolution — the resolution adopted at Wardha in July 1942 and passed at Bombay on 8 August 1942, demanding that British rule in India end immediately.
- Satyagraha — a protest based on truth and non-violence, in which the protester breaks a law openly and accepts arrest.
- Transfer of power — the handing over of governing authority from British to Indian hands.
7.9 Points to Ponder
- If a movement fails to win what it demanded, in what sense can it still be called a turning point?
- The Congress ministries resigned in 1939 to protest against a decision they had no power to prevent. When is walking out of office a stronger act than staying in it?
- Every British offer between 1939 and 1942 promised self-government after the war. Why should the timing of a promise matter as much as its content?
- The government’s count of those killed in 1942 and the nationalist count differ by thousands. How should a historian write about a number that cannot be settled?
- The rising of August 1942 had no leaders, no funds and no instructions, and it still spread. What does that tell us about how a movement travels?
- Gandhi asked for a struggle in which people would be ready to die but not to kill. Can a mass movement of millions be held to a rule that depends on the discipline of each person in it?
7.10 Objective Questions
The Congress Working Committee adopted the Quit India Resolution in July 1942 at
- Bombay
- Wardha
- Lahore
- Pune [1 mark]
The Japanese advance towards India alarmed Indian leaders in 1942 chiefly because Japanese forces had overrun
- Ceylon
- Afghanistan
- Burma
- Nepal [1 mark]
Fill in the blank: Gandhi and the members of the Congress Working Committee were arrested on the morning of __________, before the movement could begin. [1 mark]
State whether the following is true or false: The Quit India Resolution provided that Allied forces could remain stationed in India to resist Japanese aggression. [1 mark]
- The Congress ministries in the provinces resigned in October–November 1939.
- The Viceroy declared India a party to the Second World War without consulting India’s elected representatives. a. (II) contradicts (I) b. (II) is the reason for (I) c. (I) is true but (II) is false d. (I) and (II) are independent of each other [1 mark]
- The August Offer of 1940 was rejected by the Indian National Congress.
- The August Offer promised a transfer of full power to Indian hands during the war. a. (II) contradicts (I) b. (II) is the reason for (I) c. (I) is true but (II) is false d. (I) and (II) are independent of each other [1 mark]
- Match the places in Column A with the events in Column B. [1 mark]
| Column A | Column B |
|---|---|
| a. Wardha | i. A parallel government ran the district for months |
| b. Gowalia Tank, Bombay | ii. The Working Committee adopted the Quit India Resolution |
| c. Satara | iii. Gandhi was held in detention after his arrest |
| d. Aga Khan Palace, Pune | iv. The All India Congress Committee passed the resolution on 8 August 1942 |
7.11 Check Your Concepts
Name the two causes that led directly to the launching of the Quit India Movement in 1942. [2 marks]
What is meant by a parallel government? Give one example from the Quit India Movement. [2 marks]
Give reasons for the resignation of the Congress ministries in October–November 1939. [3 marks]
Explain briefly why the Congress rejected the August Offer of 1940. [3 marks]
Trace the chain of events by which the Japanese advance of 1942 led Gandhi to demand the immediate withdrawal of the British from India. [4 marks]
Explain the reasons for the failure of the Cripps Mission of 1942. [4 marks]
Describe the passing of the Quit India Resolution in August 1942 and the action taken by the government in response to it. [5 marks]
The Quit India Movement did not achieve its stated demand, yet it is described as a turning point in the national movement. Discuss the significance of the movement, and state one cost that it carried. [6 marks]
7.12 Show Your Skills
- Study the description of the photograph given below and answer the questions that follow. A photograph taken in a small railway town in eastern India in August 1942 shows a length of track lifted from its sleepers, a station signboard pulled down, and telegraph wires hanging loose from a pole beside the line. No people are visible in the frame.
- Name the movement during which such damage was caused, and state the month and year in which it began. [2 marks]
- Why did crowds attack railways, telegraph lines and post offices in particular? [3 marks]
- State two things this photograph cannot tell a historian about the events of that week. [2 marks]
- Read the situation given below and answer the questions that follow. In a district of eastern Uttar Pradesh in August 1942, the police withdrew from several thanas after crowds surrounded them. For some weeks afterwards, local volunteers settled disputes, collected small levies from the villages and organised the movement of grain. Officials could enter the area only with an armed escort.
- What name is given to an arrangement of this kind, and name one other region where it appeared in 1942. [2 marks]
- Explain why such arrangements were possible in 1942 when they had not been possible in earlier movements. [3 marks]
- What does the collapse of authority in such districts suggest about how British rule in India actually worked? [3 marks]
- Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow. A student comparing two accounts of 1942 finds that a government report of the time records rather more than a thousand deaths in police and military firing, while a later nationalist account puts the figure at close to ten thousand. Both were written by people who lived through the events, and the newspapers of those months were under strict censorship.
- State one reason why the government’s figure may be incomplete, and one reason why the nationalist figure may be difficult to verify. [2 marks]
- Name two other kinds of evidence a historian could use to test these figures. [2 marks]
- How should a historian write about the toll of the movement when the evidence cannot settle it? [3 marks]