Gandhi and individual satyagraha

On 2 October 1941 Mahatma Gandhi turned 72. At the Sevagram ashram near Wardha, in central India, activists from all over the country brought him a birthday gift: according to his biographer D.G. Tendulkar, thirty million yards of hand-spun yarn and twelve thousand rupees. Much of the yarn came from the prisons holding participants in the campaign Gandhi was leading against India’s involvement in the war. Gandhi replied with a short speech. Some people, he said, kept asking him what the present struggle would achieve, since it was making no impression on the government. His answer was that he was entirely satisfied with the movement’s present pace and had no wish to speed it up for the time being. The movement, he added, would develop in accordance with the law of non-violence, and those waiting for an immediate miracle would wait in vain.

Some chronologies state under 3 October 1941 that Gandhi called on his followers to begin passive resistance against British rule in India. No new campaign began that day. The passive resistance that Gandhi called satyagraha had already been going on for almost a year: its “individual” form had begun on 17 October 1940. The date most probably reflects reports of the birthday speech of 2 October, in which Gandhi announced that he would continue the campaign, neither expanding it nor calling it off.

India at war without its consent

The war divided British rule in India and the national movement from its very first days. The Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, declared on 3 September 1939 that India was at war with Germany, without consulting a single Indian politician. The Indian National Congress condemned Nazism but demanded that London say whether a war for democracy also included freedom for India. When it received no answer, its ministries in eight provinces resigned in the autumn of 1939. Gandhi took a position of his own in this dispute: as an advocate of absolute non-violence he did not want Congress to support any war, but neither did he want to exploit Britain’s difficulties to win independence. In the summer of 1940, during the Battle of Britain, he even appealed to the British to resist the Germans without arms.

The situation was frozen for a long time by the so-called August Offer. On 8 August 1940 Linlithgow announced the expansion of his Executive Council with more Indians, the creation of a war advisory body and the convening after the war of an Indian assembly to draw up a constitution. At the same time he assured the minorities – above all, that is, the Muslim League – that power would not be transferred to anyone whose authority was not accepted by “large and powerful” elements of Indian society. The Congress Working Committee rejected the offer on 21 August. In mid-September 1940 the All-India Congress Committee, meeting in Bombay, passed a resolution entrusting Gandhi with the direction of the struggle against the government. The resolution rejected participation in the war and demanded for Indians at least the right to say so openly.

Why “individual”

Some activists, especially the Congress left, wanted mass civil disobedience on the model of the Salt March of 1930. Gandhi opposed this. A mass movement in wartime, in his view, risked violence and riots between Hindus and Muslims, and might moreover paralyse Britain at a moment when it was fighting for survival, which Gandhi wished to avoid. He proposed a limited and symbolic form. Satyagraha was to be offered only by individuals chosen by him, one after another, each informing the authorities in advance of the time and place. Each was to declare publicly a slogan of opposition to the war: “It is wrong to help the British war effort with men or money. The only worthy effort is to resist all war with non-violent resistance.” The aim, then, was not to force the British to give way but to assert the right of free speech against a war in which India was fighting without the consent of its representatives. The candidates had to believe in ahimsa, or non-violence, to spin and wear hand-made cloth, and to carry out the so-called constructive programme: work for the villages, against untouchability and for harmony between the religious communities.

As the first satyagrahi Gandhi chose the 45-year-old Vinoba Bhave, his long-standing disciple, little known outside the ashram circle. On 17 October 1940 Bhave made a speech against the war in the village of Paunar near Wardha, and for the next three days he went from village to village repeating it. On 21 October he was arrested and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. The authorities forbade the press to report his speeches without the approval of the censor in Delhi. Gandhi regarded this as a gag and suspended publication of his weeklies, including Harijan, which then remained silent for more than a year.

The second was to be Jawaharlal Nehru, scheduled for 7 November. He never got the chance: on 31 October he was arrested at a railway station on his way back from Gandhi and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for speeches made at the beginning of October – an exceptionally harsh sentence for a few speeches.

From leaders to the rank and file

In mid-November 1940 the second stage began, which Gandhi called representative satyagraha: members of the Congress leadership and its members of the legislatures went before the courts. Vallabhbhai Patel was arrested on 17 November, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari on 3 December, and the Congress president, Abul Kalam Azad, on 31 December; Azad was sentenced to eighteen months. According to Tendulkar, by the end of 1940 the prisons held 11 members of the Working Committee, 176 members of the All-India Committee, 29 former provincial ministers and more than 400 legislators. Over Christmas and the New Year Gandhi suspended the campaign as a gesture of goodwill.

On 5 January 1941 the third stage began, open to activists approved by Gandhi from lists drawn up by local committees, and in April the fourth, for ordinary members of Congress. Satyagrahis who were not arrested were to walk from village to village towards Delhi, repeating the slogan. According to Tendulkar, more than 20,000 people had been convicted by mid-1941, with up to 14,000 in prison at any one time. Judges increasingly imposed fines instead of imprisonment. The movement was strongest in the United Provinces and weakest in the North-West Frontier Province, and in Bengal satyagrahis were usually simply not detained.

The Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, told the House of Commons on 22 April that the campaign of “civil disobedience by instalments” was proceeding listlessly and arousing little interest. Gandhi replied that satyagraha was not meant to harm the war effort, only to express a moral protest, and accused London of using the divisions between Congress and the Muslim League to justify its own rule. Rabindranath Tagore also answered Amery’s speech, though not directly: in a message for his 80th birthday on 14 April the poet wrote that he could no longer respect a parody of civilisation that believed in rule by force. He died on 7 August 1941. Congress also had a rival in its former president, Subhas Chandra Bose, who in January 1941 escaped police surveillance in Calcutta and, travelling through Afghanistan and the USSR, reached Berlin in the spring, counting on the Axis powers to help liberate India. Gandhi considered that path mistaken.

The war changes, London does not

In the summer of 1941 the war changed its face. After the German attack on the USSR the Indian communists, hitherto opponents of the “imperialist war”, in time began to call it a “people’s war” and to support it. In July Linlithgow announced the expansion of his Executive Council, in which Indians gained a majority, and the creation of a National Defence Council. Gandhi judged that the changes met none of Congress’s demands, since the defence, finance and home portfolios remained in British hands.

London’s position was shown even more clearly by the Atlantic Charter. Its third point spoke of the right of all peoples to choose their form of government, and in India people immediately asked whether it applied to them too. On 9 September 1941 Winston Churchill told the House of Commons that at Placentia Bay the concern had been primarily with the nations of Europe under Nazi occupation, and that the declaration did not alter policy on the development of constitutional government in India, Burma or other parts of the empire. This time Gandhi did not argue. He said he sincerely believed that his silence was more eloquent than any words: what counted was action, and his action was before the whole of India.

October 1941

The birthday speech of 2 October was thus a confirmation of the chosen path, not a call to a new struggle. On 17 October the campaign marked its first anniversary. Besides the convicted satyagrahis, thousands of people were held in prison without trial under the Defence of India regulations. At that time the authorities published intercepted letters from the socialist Jayaprakash Narayan, who from prison had been urging sabotage and underground action. Gandhi defended Narayan’s patriotism but called his method extremely harmful: no underground movement, he wrote, could become a mass movement.

At the end of October Gandhi issued his most important statement of this period. The campaign, he wrote, could not turn into a mass movement, because mass action in wartime would embarrass the government, and “at this stage, without unity between the communities, it would be an invitation to civil war”. Nor must it be abandoned. Even if only ten satyagrahis remained, or two, they would represent the whole of Congress – “does not one ambassador represent his nation?” Civil disobedience in this case meant defending the right to speak out against this war and every war, and the authorities could avoid embarrassment simply by recognising that right. “The bond between Congressmen and me,” he added, “seems unbreakable.”

The end of the campaign and Gandhi’s withdrawal

In reality that bond soon weakened. At the end of 1941 the Germans were at the gates of Moscow and Japan was preparing for war in Asia, which made the mobilisation of India an urgent necessity. On 3 December the Government of India announced that it would release prisoners whose offences had been “formal or symbolic in character”, among them Nehru and Azad. The releases began the next day. According to Tendulkar, more than 25,000 satyagrahis had been imprisoned in the fourteen months of the campaign. Gandhi declared that the government’s gesture evoked no response in him and that the campaign must go on until the Congress leadership decided otherwise.

A few days later Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and Malaya, and the war arrived at India’s borders. When the Congress Working Committee met at Bardoli in Gujarat at the end of December 1941, most of its members took the view that a free India could join in defence against aggression if Britain agreed to a national government. Gandhi realised that he had read the Bombay resolution differently from his colleagues: he opposed all war on principle, they opposed a war waged without India’s freedom. He therefore asked to be relieved of the leadership, and the committee agreed. In mid-December Gandhi had also published the pamphlet Constructive Programme, an exposition of his vision of independence built from below. On 15 January 1942, at a meeting of the All-India Committee in Wardha, he said that his successor would be Jawaharlal Nehru.

Place in the war

Individual satyagraha did not harm the British war effort, nor was it meant to. From London’s point of view it was an inconvenient but contained protest; from Gandhi’s, a testimony that India was not taking part in the war of its own free will. Meanwhile thousands of volunteers were flowing into the Indian Army, whose soldiers were already fighting in East and North Africa, in Iraq, Syria and Iran, and since the first winter of the war also in Europe. By 1945 it had grown to some 2.5 million men and is regarded as the largest volunteer army in history.

The calm did not last long. After the fall of Singapore in February 1942 and the Japanese advance into Burma, Churchill sent Stafford Cripps to India with an offer of dominion status after the war. Congress rejected it, and on 8 August 1942 in Bombay, on Gandhi’s initiative, it launched the Quit India movement with the call “Do or Die”. The next day Gandhi and the entire Congress leadership were imprisoned. The authorities answered the wave of unrest, which Linlithgow called the most serious rebellion since 1857, with mass arrests. The movement was suppressed within a few months, but it showed that after the war the British would not be able to hold India. In 1947 the country gained independence, partitioned into India and Pakistan.