Mahatma Gandhi: Quit India Speech

Context

The chain of events that led to Gandhi's speech and the Quit India Movement began with the resignation of Congress ministries in 1939 following the unilateral decision of the British government to bring India into World War II. After enactment of the Government of India Act of 1935 (which made provisions for the formation of elected government), an election was held in provinces across the country in 1937. The Indian National Congress emerged as the single largest party, and by September 1938 it had formed ministries in as many as eight states. With the unilateral decision of the British government to join World War II, the members of the Congress ministries resigned. Efforts at further dialogue between the Indian National Congress and British authorities proved to be unsuccessful. In reaction to this political stalemate, Gandhi in October 1940 called for members of the Congress to begin personal campaigns based on satyagraha.

Satyagraha, which literally means “truthful request,” was a protest method Gandhi devised that used acts of nonviolent resistance, including peaceful violation of laws, mass arrests, workers' strikes (hartals), and long marches. Satyagraha was grounded in Gandhi's deep faith in the core principles of truth (satya) and nonviolence (ahimsa), as articulated in his 1909 pamphlet Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule). During the 1920s and 1930s civil-disobedience satyagraha campaigns had been huge collective undertakings. During the satyagraha of October 1940 to December 1941, however, only individual Congress members defied British wartime regulations, such as those that limited the right of free speech. The Congress leadership remained deeply divided about launching any kind of movement in defiance of the British in a time of war. At its annual session held at Ramgarh in 1940, the Congress emphasized organizational preparation and moderation in action. The president of the Congress, Jawarhalal Nehru, was deeply concerned that any broad-based movement protesting British authority could harm the Allied forces in their fight against Fascism. Nehru gave his consent to further mass civil-disobedience movements only after much persuasion from Gandhi himself.

Japan entered World War II on December 7, 1941, with the attack on the U.S. naval fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. In less than three months, Japan would become a major threat to the British Empire in South Asia. By March 1942 the Japanese army had made huge inroads into Burma, and its ships and military aircraft had advanced as far as the Bay of Bengal. Japanese conquests elsewhere brought disturbing news of instances of racism toward Indians. Europeans had fled Malaysia, Singapore, and Burma but left Indians living in those areas at the mercy of the Japanese military. Within India itself, the stresses of war were all too apparent; trains were packed with wounded Indian soldiers who had fought for the British, war-weary plantation laborers coming home from Assam on the Burmese border, and hordes of migrant workers returning to their villages in northern India from Calcutta on the Bay of Bengal. All these factors led to widespread predictions of the imminent collapse of the British government. People began to withdraw their savings from banks and started hoarding gold, silver, and coins in their homes. Many had lost confidence in the British system of governance, and their faith in law and order was at its lowest ebb. In this historical context, Gandhi's desperation was at its peak. Yet he still wanted India's freedom regardless and gave it precedence despite growing tensions between religious groups and the Fascist threat to democracy.

An astute reader of the popular pulse, Gandhi well understood the growing wartime discontent over the rising price of food, shortages of staples such as rice and salt, and the economic dislocation of the peasantry. Also, the British government failed to check black-marketing operations on the Indian Subcontinent. Food hoarding and profiteering grew out of control in the early 1940s and directly led to one of the most horrible famines in Indian history, the Bengal famine of 1943. British wartime measures also included the seizure and destruction of boats in the eastern states of Bengal and Orissa in order to ward off the Japanese. Gandhi correctly observed that depriving people in East Bengal of their boats was like cutting off their limbs.

U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt expressed his concern about the situation in India during talks with British prime minister Winston Churchill in Washington, D.C., in December 1941. In February 1942 during a visit to India, Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek expressed his sympathy for India's aspiration for freedom. Owing to pressure from Britain's allies and the need to win Indian support for the Allied war effort, Churchill dispatched Sir Stafford Cripps, a Socialist politician and war cabinet minister, to India in March 1942 with a proposal for the postwar creation of a new Indian union with full dominion status in the British Empire. Under the terms of the Cripps Mission proposal, India would have created its own constitution, and all British members of the ruling Executive Council would have been replaced with Indians. Still, India would have remained part of the British Empire, and the British monarch would have remained its ultimate head of state; moreover, individual provinces would have had the option not to join the union. The opt-out stipulation was included partly in response to the demands of Muslim League leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah for a separate Muslim state. (Jinnah would eventually get his wish with the creation of the Muslim state of Pakistan, of which he would be the first governor-general.) Gandhi and other Congress leaders rejected the Cripps Mission proposal in April 1942.

In the wake of the Cripps Mission's failure, the Congress's Working Committee resolved in a meeting at Wardha on July 14, 1942, to launch a new satyagraha campaign to be known by the slogan “Quit India.” Gandhi's speech of August 8, 1942, was made on the occasion of the AICC's approval of the Quit India Resolution. Upon passage of this resolution in July, the Working Committee had originally emphasized the policy of “nonembarrassment” the Congress had pursued since the outbreak of the war. To keep the spirit of national struggle alive without actually hampering British war efforts, Gandhi had made it clear to the government that he did not wish to embarrass the British state. Hence he launched a program of individual acts of satyagraha instead of mass civil disobedience. Because of this policy, the Congress's leadership had preferred to keep the campaign individually based and deliberately symbolic in nature. But in unambiguous terms, Gandhi also appealed directly to the British on behalf of the Congress that “British rule in India must end immediately” not only because its imperialist subjection of India must cease but also “because India in bondage can play no effective part in defending herself and in affecting the fortunes of the war that is desolating humanity” (Mahatma Gandhi, p. 451). In case Gandhi's appeal failed, the Congress leadership had also agreed to inaugurate a nonviolent civil-disobedience movement on the broadest scale under Gandhi's leadership. Gandhi had already made his stance clear when in May 1942 he said in an interview that the “orderly disciplined anarchy” of British governance should end and “if as a result there is complete lawlessness I would risk it” (Mahatma Gandhi, p. 114).

It was in this context that Gandhi made his influential speech on August 8, 1942. In the early morning of August 9, just a few hours after the speech, British authorities arrested and imprisoned Gandhi together with all the prominent leaders of the Indian National Congress, though they were later released. However, the slogan “Quit India” had already won broad-based popular support and soon gave rise to mass civil disobedience that would last until negotiations for the transfer of power from British to Indian self-rule were finalized in 1947. In the opinion of Victor Alexander John Hope, the 2nd Marquis of Linlithgow, who served as viceroy and governor general of India from 1936 to 1943, the Quit India Movement was the most serious threat to British rule in India since the Indian Rebellion of 1857—a failed revolt against Britain that was begun by Indian soldiers in the service of the East India Company but which soon gathered strength and spread through the country.

After the arrests, the British government declared the Congress illegal and sealed its offices and seized its printing presses. These measures only stoked popular sentiment against the British. Public property and sites of British authority soon became prime targets of the people's discontent. Police stations were attacked, and in different regions parallel governments independent of British governance came into existence. The intensity and violence of the demonstrations distinguish the Quit India Movement from earlier civil-disobedience campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s. The Quit India Movement accelerated the process toward India's independence on August 15, 1947.