The Quit India Movement: Part III

Gandhi’s fast (February 1943):

• Gandhi was imprisoned at the Aga Khan Palace in Pune. Gandhi’s wife Kasturbai Gandhi and his personal secretary Mahadev Desai died in months and Gandhi’s health was failing, despite this Gandhi went on a 21-day fast and maintained his resolve to continuous resistance
• Gandhiji commenced a fast on 10 February 1943 in jail. He declared the fast would last for twenty-one days.
  • This was his answer to the Government which had been constantly exhorting him to condemn the violence of the people in the Quit India Movement.
  • Gandhiji not only refused to condemn the people’s resort to violence but unequivocally held the Government responsible for it.
  • He said that it was the ‘leonine violence’ of the state which had provoked the people.
  • And it was against this violence of the state, which included the unwarranted detention of thousands of Congressmen that Gandhiji vowed to register his protest, in the only way open to him when in jail, by fasting.
• The popular response to the news of the fast was immediate and overwhelming.
  • All over the country, there were hartals, demonstrations and strikes.
  • Calcutta and Ahmedabad were particularly active.
  • Prisoners in jails and those outside went on sympathetic fasts.
  • Groups of people secretly reached Poona to offer Satyagraha outside the Aga Khan Palace where Gandhiji was being held in detention.
  • Public meetings demanded his release and the Government was bombarded with thousands of letters and telegrams from people from all walks of life.
• From foreign countries, the demand for his release was made by several newspapers as well as by the British Communist Party, the citizens of London and Manchester, the Women’s International League and the Australian Council of Trade Unions.
• The U.S. Government, too, brought pressure to bear.
• The severest blow to the prestige of the Government was the resignation of the three Indian members of the Viceroy’s Executive Council, M.S. Aney, N.R. Sarkar and H.P. Mody, who had supported the Government in its suppression of the 1942 movement, but were in no mood to be a party to Gandhiji’s death.
• But the Viceroy and his officials remained unmoved.
• The fast had done exactly what it had been intended to do.
  • The public morale was raised, the anti-British feeling heightened, and an opportunity for political activity provided.
  • A symbolic gesture of resistance had sparked off widespread resistance and exposed the Government’s high-handedness to the whole world.
  • The moral justification that the Government had been trying to provide for its brutal suppression of 1942 was denied to it and it was placed clearly in the wrong.
  • Anti-British feeling was heightened.
  • An opportunity was provided for political activity.
• Although the British released Gandhi on account of his health in 1944, Gandhi kept up the resistance, demanding the release of the Congress leadership.
• By early 1944, India was mostly peaceful again, while the Congress leadership was still incarcerated. A sense that the movement had failed depressed many nationalists, while Jinnah and the Muslim League, as well as Congress opponents like the Communists sought to gain political mileage, criticizing Gandhi and the Congress Party.

Extent of mass participation and support:

• The Quit India Movement marked a new high in terms of popular participation in the national movement and sympathy with the national cause.
• Youth:
  • As in earlier mass struggles, the youth were in the forefront of the struggle.
  • Students from colleges and even schools were the most visible element, especially in the early days of August.
• Women:
  • Women especially college an school girls, played a very important role.
  • Aruna Asaf Ali and Sucheta Kripalani were two major women organizers of the underground, and Usha Mehta an important member of the small group that ran the Congress Radio.
• Workers:
  • Workers were prominent as well, and made considerable sacrifice by enduring long strikes and braving police repression in the streets.
• Peasants:
  • Peasants of all strata were the heart of the movement especially in East U.P. and Bihar, Midnapur in Bengal, Satara in Maharashtra.
• Zamindars:
  • Many small zamindars also participated especially in U.P. and Bihar.
  • Even the big zamindars maintained a stance of neutrality and refused to assist the British in crushing the rebellion.
  • The Raja of Darbhanga, one of the biggest zamindars, who refused to let his armed retainers to be used by the Government and instructed his managers to assist the tenants who had been arrested.
  • A significant feature of the pattern of peasant activity was its total concentration on attacking symbols of British authority and a lack of any incidents of anti-zamindar violence.
• Government officials:
  • Government officials, especially those at the lower levels of the police and the administration, were generous in their assistance to the movement.
  • They gave shelter, provided information and helped monetarily.
  • The erosion of loyalty to the British Government of its own officers was one of the most striking aspects of Quit India struggle.
  • Jail officials tended to be much kinder to prisoners than in earlier years, and often openly expressed their sympathy.
• Muslims:
  • While it is true that Muslim mass participation in the Quit India movement was not high, yet it is also true that even Muslim League supporters acted as informers.
  • Also, there was absence of any communal clashes, a sure sign that though the movement may not have aroused much support from among the majority of the Muslim masses, it did not arouse their hostility either.
• Communists:
  • The hundreds of Communists at the local and village levels participated in the movement despite the official position taken by the Communist Party.
  • Though they sympathized with the strong anti-fascist sentiments of their leaders, yet they felt the irresistible pull of the movement.
• Princely states showed a low-key response. selfstudyhistory.com

Was it a dual revolt:

• It is possible to argue that when the dalit peasants or other poorer classes participated in the Quit India movement, their motivation was different from those of the educated youth and the middle peasant castes.
  • But it is too simplistic to describe the movement as a “dual revolt“, because despite variance in vision, the different classes and communities were also united in common action against the British.
• Watching Patna city on 11 August, a confounded communist leader Rahul Sankrityayana observed in utter astonishment that the “leadership had passed on to the ricksha-pullers, ekka-drivers and other such people whose political knowledge extended only this far-that the British were their enemies“.
• It was this commonly shared dominant tone of anti-imperialism that united everyone in 1942 and in the villages it even overshadowed the anti-feudal tendencies that appeared from time to time in different parts of the country.
• The Quit India movement by promising immediate freedom from an oppressive imperial order had thus captured the imagination of a significant section of the Indian population, notwithstanding their differing perceptions of freedom.

Lessons from QIM and aftermath:

• The Quit India movement also provided important lessons for the Congress.
  • First of all, the defeat discredited the left-wingers who had been demanding action.
  • Gandhi, on the other hand, was in a dilemma.
    • Congress volunteers were justifying violence by referring to his own dictum that it was justifiable in self-defence.
    • He did not condone violence, but did not formally condemn it either; instead, he held the government responsible for the outbreak of violence.
  • Indeed, neither he nor any other Congress leaders had any control over the people and the volunteers, nor any of them had anticipated the kind of response the Quit India movement had generated.
    • To the Indian masses in 1942, Gandhi and Congress were symbols of liberation, not sources of ideological constraint.
  • Gandhi’s twenty-one day fast commencing on 10 February 1943 restored symbolically his centrality in the movement once again, but not as a controlling figure; nor did he insist on the surrender of the underground leaders.
  • Even after his release in 1944, when he gave a call to surrender, not everyone listened.
  • He too was full of praise for those who had evidently deviated from his path of non-violence. “I am one of those”—he told Nana Patil of Satara Prati Sarkar fame—”who feel that the violence of the brave is better than the non-violence of the cowardly!”
  • But the Congress high command, now dominated by the right-wingers, strongly disapproved of this popular militancy and wanted to return to a regime of discipline and order and therefore, urged for a negotiated settlement rather than confrontation.
  • The Congress after the movement steadily drifted away from the path of agitation and leaned towards constitutionalism.
    • Thus by way of fighting the Raj, as D.A. Low had once argued, the Congress itself was in the process of becoming the Raj.
• The British Raj too learned important lessons.
  • They realised first of all, that it was difficult to tackle such militant mass movements without the wartime emergency powers.
    • When war would be over, keeping India by force against such opposition would be an expensive proposition in every sense and hence there was greater readiness to accept a negotiated settlement for a respectable and ordered withdrawal.
  • In these negotiations Congress was to figure prominently, as it was the only political structure that had the potential to mobilise such a mass movement and it was supposed to be the only organisation that could provide India with a stable government.
• The great significance of this historic movement was that:
  • It placed the demand for independence on the immediate agenda of the national movement.
  • After Quit India there could be no retreat.
  • Any future negotiations with the British Government could only be on the manner of the transfer of power.
  • Independence was no longer a matter of bargain. And this became amply clear after the War.
• With Gandhiji’s release on 6 May 1944, on medical grounds, political activity regained momentum.
  • Constructive work became the main form of Congress activity, with a special emphasis on the reorganization of the Congress machinery.
  • Congress committees were revived under different names — Congress Workers Assemblies or Representative Assemblies of Congressmen — rendering the ban on Congress committees ineffective.
  • The task of training workers, membership drives and fund collection was taken up.
  • This reorganization of the Congress under the ‘cover’ of the constructive programme was viewed with serious misgivings by the Government which saw it as an attempt to rebuild Congress influence and organization in the villages in preparation for the next round of struggle.
  • A strict watch was kept on these developments, but no repressive action was contemplated and the Viceroy’s energies were directed towards formulating an offer ( Wavell Offer or Simla Conference) which would pre-empt a struggle by effecting an agreement with the Congress before the War with Japan ended.
• The Congress leaders were released to participate in the Simla Conference in June 1945. That marked the end of the phase of confrontation that had existed since August 1942.