Mahatma Gandhi: Quit India Speech

Impact

A broad cross section of Indian society participated in the Quit India Movement as a result of Gandhi's careful planning since 1939 as well as widespread dissatisfaction with British wartime policies. The Muslim League, the Communist Party of India, and Hindu fundamentalist parties did not officially support the movement, in the belief that it could weaken the Allied forces and inadvertently help the Axis powers. However, at the local and regional levels, members of these parties often either participated in the movement or at worst were neutral toward it. This allowed for considerable communal harmony. Despite Communist nonparticipation, members of other left-wing organizations shaped the movement's militancy, especially the systematic targeting of public property and communication networks. Socialists such as Jaya Prakash Narayan and Ram Manohar Lohia and other left-wing leaders were particularly active in directing attacks on British installations.

The Quit India Movement began on the morning of August 9, 1942—the day after Gandhi's speech—in Bombay, where a large number of people had gathered to await further instructions from the central leadership of the Indian National Congress. The news of the arrests of Congress leaders sparked the first incidents of unrest. Bombay remained the epicenter during the movement's first few days, with striking laborers playing a leading role in the demonstrations. By the following day, August 10, 1942, hartals were under way in Delhi and other northern Indian cities.

Within a week, massive protests occurred in the eastern United Provinces and the states of Bihar and Bengal, especially around the town of Tamluk in the Midnapur district, where the Jatiya Sarkar regional parallel government was formed in December 1942. In the town of Talcher in Orissa, a regional peasant-labor government known as a chasi-maula raj was established. Large-scale attacks on infrastructure and public property occurred in western India and southern India. Local regional governments similar to those established in Bengal and Orissa also came into being in these areas. Some of these governments proved to be quite effective and implemented economic and administrative reforms. The Jatiya Sarkar government functioned until late September 1944 and had its own armed fighting unit, Vidut Vahini. It also created its own legal system, administered schools and relief activities, and implemented egalitarian measures such as taking away agrarian crops and money from rich peasants and landlords and redistributing them to poor peasants.

In reaction to the Quit India Movement and nationalist activities in the sixteen districts of eastern United Provinces and Bihar, the British government implemented a mass mobilization of the military and police, though underground guerrilla activities still continued sporadically for some time in the frontier regions bordering Nepal. In Orissa, the British resorted to aerial bombardment of movement strongholds in order to thwart guerrilla attacks that continued until May 1943.

One of the major reasons for the scale of the violence against the British was the widespread but erroneous belief that India had already achieved freedom as of Gandhi's speech on August 8. Regardless of Gandhi's advocacy of passive resistance, violence exploded across India in the months following the Quit India Speech. From 1942 to 1944, 208 police stations, 332 railway stations, and 945 post offices or telegraph lines were damaged or destroyed. This same period witnessed 664 guerrilla bomb explosions, in which 1,060 civilians and sixty-three policemen were officially reported as casualties. British authorities responded with an unprecedentedly brutal campaign, carried out mainly by the police and army, with measures that included torture, murder, and rape of the movement's participants as well as aerial bombardment and indiscriminate gunfire on civilians. While in prison with other members of the Congress, Gandhi refused to condemn the violence unleashed by the resisters and instead blamed the government as ultimately responsible, and in February 1943 he launched a twenty-one-day hunger strike. By the time India achieved independence, this legacy of violence had acquired the semblance of legitimacy. After independence, public property would be repeatedly targeted in demonstrations against the state.

The Quit India Movement necessitated the transfer of power from British colonial rule to Indian self-rule. The global context of international war had allowed the British to mobilize extraordinary military force against the movement. In the period immediately following World War II, the likelihood of renewed guerrilla violence remained, in part because of difficulties encountered by the British in releasing prisoners, a sharp increase in unemployment, and general social unrest. Viceroy Archibald Wavell (1943–1947) clearly communicated to the British government his apprehension about further violence in India. In 1945 a new Labour government sympathetic to the cause of Indian self-rule came to power in Britain, and negotiations regarding the transfer of power in India began soon afterward.

Within the Congress, the Quit India Movement helped reestablish the dominance of the Socialists, who had figured strongly in the movement and guerrilla activities, and also right-wing figures, who had become increasingly marginalized owing to their conservative pro-British attitudes. The Communists, on the other hand, lost much of their appeal, since they had prioritized the fight against Fascism over the struggle for Indian independence. One may conclude that the Quit India Movement, despite its mass following, facilitated the consolidation of power in the hands of the Indian bourgeoisie.

Events unfolded quickly beginning in 1945. In June and July of that year, the Shimla Conference was held to discuss Indian self-rule and a new constitution, but the conference broke down because of Mohammed Ali Jinnah's insistence that the Muslim League be granted the exclusive right to represent India's Muslims. From March to June 1946 the Cabinet Mission—a diplomatic initiative formed by British prime minister Clement Attlee—took on the task of conducting negotiations with Indian political leaders about self-rule and drafted a provisional constitution. In August the Muslim League withdrew its acceptance of the Cabinet Mission plan for Indian self-rule, resulting in violence between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. Finally, on June 3, 1947, Indian viceroy Lord Louis Mountbatten announced that the Congress, the Muslim League, and Sikh leaders had accepted his plan providing for two nations, India and Pakistan.

On July 18, 1947, the British Parliament and the Crown ratified the Indian Independence Act, setting August 15, 1947, as the date for partitioning British India and creating the newly independent countries of India and Pakistan. What followed was horror. The partition led to simultaneous mass exoduses of Muslims from India to Pakistan and non-Muslims from Pakistan to India. The number of refugees was at least fifteen million and perhaps as many as twenty-five million. Worse, the partition provoked religious riots in which as many as two million people—Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs—lost their lives and perhaps 75,000 women were raped. Meanwhile, the border between India and Pakistan was somewhat ill defined, and still in the twenty-first century the two nations continue to square off against each other over the province of Kashmir, each claiming it for its own.

The most ironic outcome of the Quit India Movement, other than the violence that accompanied Indian independence, had to do with Gandhi himself, who was released early from jail for health reasons in 1944. During the three years following his release, negotiations involving the transfer of power took place, but he was largely marginalized from the negotiation process. Worse, Gandhi's trusted political allies, armed with the conviction that independence was imminent, began to desert him, and he was left as a lone warrior who sought to advance nonviolence and communal harmony. Still, Gandhi's policy of nonviolent passive resistance has a global legacy and political struggles in the second half of the twentieth century across the globe (from the antiapartheid movement in South Africa, led by Nelson Mandela, to the civil rights movement, led by Martin Luther King, in the United States) has carried strong footprints of his ideology.