The arrest of Gandhi

In the early hours of 9 August 1942, before dawn, the Bombay police knocked at the house of the industrialist Ghanshyam Das Birla on Malabar Hill, where Mahatma Gandhi was spending the night. A few hours earlier the 72-year-old leader had finished a speech in which he called on the British to leave India at once and gave his compatriots a short mantra: “Do or Die”. Now he was allowed to pack and say his prayers. That same morning, in Bombay and across the country, the members of the Working Committee of the Indian National Congress and hundreds of lower-ranking activists were detained. A special train took Gandhi to Poona, where he was confined in the Aga Khan Palace, while the members of the Working Committee were held in the fort at Ahmednagar. Congress was declared an unlawful organisation. The government hoped to cut the movement off from its leaders with a single blow before it could get under way. It achieved the opposite: within days India was engulfed by a wave of demonstrations, strikes, riots and sabotage such as British rule had not seen since 1857.

From Cripps to “Quit India”

Only a few months earlier Gandhi had been pursuing a cautious policy. His individual satyagraha of 1940–1941 was meant to register India’s opposition to a war waged without its consent, but not to paralyse the British war effort. The war with Japan changed that. After the surrender of Singapore in February 1942 and the fall of Rangoon in March, the Japanese army stood on India’s borders; in April Japanese carriers attacked Ceylon and aircraft bombed ports on the east coast, Vizagapatam among them.

Winston Churchill, under pressure from the Labour members of his cabinet and from the Americans, sent Sir Stafford Cripps to Delhi in March. Cripps offered India dominion status after the war, with the right to leave the British Commonwealth and the right of provinces to stay outside the new union; for the duration of the war Indian politicians would sit on the Viceroy’s council, but without real power over defence. Congress rejected the offer. Gandhi is credited with calling it “a post-dated cheque on a failing bank”. The Muslim League rejected it too, since in its view it did too little to safeguard the idea of Pakistan. On 12 April Cripps left India.

From then on Gandhi argued in his weekly Harijan that the British presence was drawing a Japanese attack on India, and that a free India would defend itself better on its own – even by non-violent resistance – or would cease to be a target for Japan at all. The slogan that grew out of this was, in English, “Quit India”. Within Congress it met resistance. Jawaharlal Nehru and the party president, Abul Kalam Azad, feared that a mass movement at a moment when the Germans were advancing on the Caucasus and the Japanese stood in Burma would weaken the common cause with the USSR and China. Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, who advocated an agreement with the Muslim League, left Congress. But Vallabhbhai Patel, Rajendra Prasad and the party’s left wing stood behind Gandhi, and Nehru and Azad in the end accepted his leadership. On 14 July 1942 the Working Committee, meeting at Wardha, adopted a draft resolution demanding an immediate end to British rule and announcing, should this be refused, civil disobedience on a vast scale. The final decision was left to the All-India Congress Committee.

“Do or Die”

The All-India Congress Committee met in Bombay on 7 August, at the Gowalia Tank maidan, under Azad’s chairmanship. On the evening of 8 August, by an overwhelming majority with only a handful of votes against, mostly from communists, it adopted the resolution that became known as the Quit India resolution. It declared that an immediate end to British rule was an urgent necessity both for India and for the success of the cause of the United Nations. A free India would join the Allies, agree to their troops remaining on its soil to fight Japan, and form a provisional government. If the demand were rejected, the Committee sanctioned “a mass struggle on non-violent lines on the widest possible scale” under Gandhi’s leadership. In case the leaders were arrested, the resolution laid down that every Indian who desired freedom and strove for it “must be his own guide”.

Gandhi spoke twice that evening, first in Hindustani and then in English, finishing shortly before midnight. He insisted that he bore no hatred for the British and that the struggle was to be non-violent. “Here is a mantra, a short one, that I give you,” he said. “You may imprint it on your hearts […]. The mantra is: ‘Do or Die’. We shall either free India or die in the attempt.” At the same time he announced that he would not launch the campaign at once: first he wanted to write to the Viceroy and open talks. He never had the chance.

The arrests of 9 August

The Government of India was ready. The Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, and his council had agreed a plan to strike at Congress with London beforehand, and the War Cabinet had approved it in the event that the resolution was passed. The arrests were made under the Defence of India Rules, without trial. Along with Gandhi, the Aga Khan Palace received his secretary Mahadev Desai, the poet and politician Sarojini Naidu and his English disciple Madeleine Slade, known as Mirabehn. Gandhi’s wife Kasturba announced that she would speak in her husband’s place at a rally in Bombay that evening, and she too was arrested. Nehru, Patel, Azad and the other members of the Working Committee spent nearly three years in Ahmednagar Fort. It was there that Nehru wrote The Discovery of India.

The first response to the arrests came in the form of demonstrations in the cities. On 9 August itself, at the Gowalia Tank maidan, Aruna Asaf Ali, then a little-known activist, hoisted the Congress flag, and the police dispersed the crowd with tear gas. In Bombay, Ahmedabad, Delhi, Lucknow, Patna and other cities students and workers took to the streets, and shops and markets closed. The police fired on crowds: according to the returns of those days, at least twenty-odd people were killed in the first two days. The Tata steelworks at Jamshedpur came to a standstill, and in Ahmedabad the strike in the textile mills lasted about three and a half months.

The August uprising

Deprived of its leaders, the movement spread without a plan, and everyone interpreted “Do or Die” in their own way. From mid-August the weight of the struggle shifted to the countryside, especially to Bihar and the eastern part of the United Provinces. Crowds of peasants and students tore up railway lines, burned stations and post offices, cut telegraph wires and attacked police posts. According to figures cited by the historian John F. Riddick, between 9 August and 21 September 550 post offices and 250 railway stations were attacked, 70 police stations destroyed and 85 other government buildings burned or damaged; telegraph lines were cut about 2,500 times. For several weeks Bihar was cut off from the rest of the country, and in some districts British authority simply ceased to exist.

In a few places “parallel governments” arose. In Ballia district in the United Provinces, a crowd took over the government offices and opened the jail in the second half of August, and a local activist, Chittu Pandey, proclaimed his own administration; the British regained the district only after sending in troops. In Midnapore district in Bengal, a “national government” at Tamluk functioned from December 1942 until 1944, and around Satara in the Bombay Presidency a parallel administration survived until the end of the war. Some activists, mostly socialists, went underground: Jayaprakash Narayan, who escaped from Hazaribagh jail in November, Ram Manohar Lohia and Aruna Asaf Ali directed sabotage, and in Bombay a clandestine Congress Radio broadcast for several months.

The movement did not embrace the whole country. Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League stayed out of it and condemned it as an attempt to impose the rule of the Hindu majority on Muslims. The Hindu nationalist party, the Hindu Mahasabha, called on its members to remain at their posts. The Communist Party of India, legalised in July 1942, had supported the “People’s War” since Germany’s attack on the USSR and opposed the Congress campaign. The rulers of the princely states, the administration, the police and the army – to which thousands of volunteers continued to enlist – remained loyal to the British.

Repression

The authorities met the revolt with force. Linlithgow, who had distrusted Congress since the beginning of the war, was convinced that the movement was linked to the Japanese threat and endangered the war effort. Fifty-seven army battalions were sent against the insurgents, at a time when they were also needed on the Burmese frontier. Police and soldiers opened fire on crowds – 538 times, according to government figures cited by Indian historians. In several places in Bihar and Bengal, low-flying aircraft machine-gunned demonstrators blocking the railway lines. Villages where track had been torn up were subjected to collective fines, totalling some 9 million rupees, often collected on the spot by seizing property. Public flogging was used, the huts of suspects were burned, and in some places soldiers committed rape and looting.

On 31 August Linlithgow cabled Churchill that he was facing “by far the most serious rebellion since that of 1857”, whose gravity and extent had been concealed from the world for reasons of military security. Churchill, who had fought Indian self-government all his life, backed the Viceroy without reservation. On 10 September he declared in the House of Commons that Congress did not represent India and that its movement, resorting to violence and sabotage, would be put down with all firmness.

The toll remains disputed. According to government figures, a little over a thousand people were killed in the clashes by the end of 1942, and by the end of 1943 the count stood at 1,060 killed by police and army fire and 91,836 arrested; 63 policemen also died. Congress and later Indian historians put the number killed at 4,000 to 10,000, and a figure of over a hundred thousand detained is also often given. By the autumn of 1942 the government had regained control in most of the country, although sabotage and underground activity continued into 1943.

Echoes abroad

The revolt put Britain’s allies in an awkward position. In the spring of 1942 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had pressed Churchill to reach an agreement with Congress, but after August, when Churchill let it be known that he would sooner resign than give way over India, Washington fell silent. Wendell Willkie, on the other hand, criticised the British publicly after returning from his journey round the world in the autumn of 1942. In China, Chiang Kai-shek, who had visited India in February and talked with Gandhi, feared that the conflict would weaken the rear of the war against Japan.

Britain’s enemies were keen to exploit the opportunity. From Berlin, a radio station run by the former Congress president Subhas Chandra Bose broadcast to India, calling for an uprising, while Japanese propaganda did the same from Tokyo and Singapore. Gandhi rejected their help: he wanted India to be free, but not in order to exchange one master for another.

Place in the war

The imprisonment of the Congress leaders and the suppression of the August uprising secured for the British a quiet rear behind the Burma front until the end of the war. India remained the great Allied base in Asia; the Indian Army grew to some 2.5 million men and in 1944 stopped the Japanese at Imphal and Kohima. Congress, however, found itself out of the political game, and the Muslim League took advantage of its rival’s absence to strengthen support for Pakistan.

Gandhi spent almost two years in the Aga Khan Palace. On 15 August 1942 Mahadev Desai, his secretary for a quarter of a century, died there of a heart attack. In February 1943, in response to the government’s charge that Congress was responsible for the violence, Gandhi undertook a 21-day fast, which he barely survived. On 22 February 1944 Kasturba Gandhi died in detention, and on 6 May 1944 the ailing Gandhi was released. The members of the Working Committee were not freed until June 1945. In 1943 Bose reached Asia by submarine and took command of the Indian National Army, which fought alongside the Japanese. In 1943–1944 Bengal was struck by a great famine which, according to various estimates, claimed between two and three million lives.

In India, August 1942 became the symbol of the last great struggle for independence, the “August Revolution”, and the Gowalia Tank maidan was later renamed August Kranti Maidan (August Revolution Ground). The movement lost in the short term, but it showed that the British could hold India only by force and at a cost they could not afford after the war. After Labour’s victory in 1945 London began to talk about withdrawal, and on 15 August 1947 India gained its independence, partitioned into India and Pakistan.