Quit India, 1942: Do or Die, the Leaderless Revolt and the Indians Who Said No

Saturday, 8 August 1942, Bombay. Gowalia Tank Maidan was an old reservoir long since filled in and turned into a park. That evening it held a huge tent, the delegates of the All India Congress Committee, and a crowd outside that ran into the thousands. Monsoon clouds hung over the city. Somewhere east of Calcutta, a Japanese army stood on the Burma border.

Late that night the Congress passed its resolution. Then a thin man of 72 in a hand-spun dhoti rose to speak, in Hindustani and in English, at length. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi told the delegates that from this moment every Indian should think of himself as free. Then he gave them a mantra of two words: do or die.

We shall either free India or die in the attempt.Mohandas K. Gandhi, Gowalia Tank Maidan, Bombay, 8 August 1942

Beside him sat his secretary of 25 years, Mahadev Desai, taking notes. Within a week Desai would be dead. By dawn Gandhi would be in custody with almost every Congress leader who mattered. What followed was the biggest revolt against British rule since 1857, with nobody in charge of it.

To see why Gandhi gambled in August 1942, look at the map of that spring. On 15 February Singapore fell to Japan, the worst defeat in British military history, and tens of thousands of Indian soldiers went into the prison camps. In March the British pulled out of Rangoon. Refugees were walking out of Burma towards Assam. Japanese planes would bomb Calcutta before the year was out.

India had been taken into the war in 1939 by the Viceroy’s word alone, and the Congress ministries in the provinces had resigned in protest.

On 22 March 1942, with American pressure behind it, the War Cabinet sent Sir Stafford Cripps to Delhi. He was a Labour man known to be friendly to Indian freedom. His offer: full dominion status after the war, with the right to leave the Commonwealth; a constitution-making body; and the right of any province to stay out of the new union. Defence would stay in British hands while the fighting lasted.

The Congress wanted real power now, not a promise for later, and it read the opt-out clause as a road to Pakistan. The talks broke down in April. Cripps’s own account blamed the Congress; many historians say Linlithgow and Churchill made sure the offer could not grow into more. The line people remember is Gandhi’s: a post-dated cheque.

Gandhi came away convinced that the British could not defend India. If the Japanese came, he argued, they would come for the British, not for India. Through May and June he wrote it in his weekly Harijan: the British must go, now.

Jawaharlal Nehru feared anything that might help Japan or fascism, and argued hard at Wardha. In the end the Working Committee passed its resolution there on 14 July 1942, and called the All India Congress Committee to Bombay.

One leader walked out instead. C. Rajagopalachari of Madras, Gandhi’s old comrade, wanted the Congress to settle with the Muslim League and help defend the country against invasion. In 1942 he left the Congress rather than follow its line.

The Bombay resolution of 8 August demanded an immediate end to British rule. A free India, it said, would fight the Axis alongside the Allies and allow their armies to stay. If Britain refused, the Congress would launch a mass struggle ‘on the widest possible scale’, on non-violent lines, under Gandhi’s lead.

Gandhi’s speech added an instruction in case the leaders were taken: every Indian who wanted freedom should be his or her own guide. He said he would first write to the Viceroy. He never got the chance.

The government had its plan ready weeks before. In the small hours of Sunday, 9 August, police officers called at Birla House, where Gandhi was staying, and at the homes of the Working Committee members across Bombay. By morning they were on a special train out of the city.

Gandhi, with Mahadev Desai, Sarojini Naidu and Mirabehn, was taken to the Aga Khan Palace outside Poona, a mansion behind high walls that became his prison. Nehru, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and the rest of the Working Committee were sent to Ahmednagar Fort. Nehru would write The Discovery of India there.

That day Kasturba Gandhi said she would address the public meeting her husband was to have spoken at. She was arrested too, and joined him in Poona. The Congress was declared an unlawful body. Its offices were sealed and its funds seized.

At Gowalia Tank that morning a crowd had gathered anyway. Aruna Asaf Ali, 33, the wife of a senior Congressman, walked up and raised the tricolour. The police fired tear gas into the crowd. She slipped away, and did not come back into the open for four years.

Six days later, on 15 August, Mahadev Desai collapsed with a heart attack inside the Aga Khan Palace and died. He was 50.

With the leaders gone, the people made their own plan. The first days brought strikes, marches and hartals in Bombay, Delhi, Ahmedabad and Poona, and police firing in all of them. Students walked out of colleges in Bombay, Benares, Allahabad, Lucknow, Patna, Amritsar and Lahore.

On 11 August, in Patna, a crowd of students marched on the Bihar Secretariat to raise the national flag on its dome. The police opened fire. Seven young men fell, school and college boys. In the account told in Patna ever since, each one took the flag from the boy who fell before him.

Then the revolt turned on the machinery of the Raj. In Bihar, eastern United Provinces and parts of Bengal, Orissa and Bombay Presidency, crowds tore up railway lines, burned stations, cut telegraph wires and attacked police posts, courts and post offices. For days, north Bihar was cut off from the rest of India. Historian John F. Riddick, using official figures for 9 August to 21 September, counts 550 post offices and 250 railway stations attacked, 70 police stations destroyed and about 2,500 cases of telegraph wires cut.

This was not the satyagraha of Dandi, where marchers took blows and did not strike back (read the full story of the Salt March). Crowds killed policemen and some officials. On 31 August the Viceroy cabled Churchill.

by far the most serious rebellion since that of 1857Lord Linlithgow, Viceroy, telegram to Winston Churchill, 31 August 1942

The British put 57 battalions of troops into the field. In Bihar and Bengal, nationalist histories record, aircraft fired on crowds at the railway lines. By the end of September the open revolt was largely beaten. What came next went underground.

Ballia, eastern United Provinces, 19 August 1942. A crowd thousands strong surrounded the district headquarters. Chittu Pandey, a local Congressman, declared a ‘national government’. The district officials gave way and released the Congress prisoners from the jail. For a few days Ballia was free. Then troops arrived, the leaders fled, and the reprisals began. Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose would both call Pandey the Tiger of Ballia.

Tamluk, Midnapore, Bengal, 29 September 1942. A procession of thousands, many of them women, marched on the police station. At its head walked Matangini Hazra, a widow in her seventies who carried the tricolour. When the police opened fire she stepped forward and asked them not to shoot at the crowd. She was shot several times and died still holding the flag.

Weeks later a cyclone smashed into the Midnapore coast, and the government was slow with relief. On 17 December 1942 the rebels set up the Tamralipta Jatiya Sarkar, the national government of Tamluk, under Satish Chandra Samanta. It ran its own courts and relief, and had an armed volunteer corps, the Vidyut Vahini. It lasted until 1944, when Gandhi asked its leaders to dissolve it.

Satara, in the Deccan, held out longest. From 1943 a Prati Sarkar, a ‘parallel government’ led by Nana Patil, ran its own people’s courts in a belt of villages put at 150 by researchers and at more than 600 by its veterans. It went after moneylenders and landlords who sided with the Raj. Its armed wing, the Toofan Sena or Whirlwind Army, held up a train on the Pune–Miraj line near Shenoli on 7 June 1943 and took the pay meant for government officials.

In 2016 the journalist P. Sainath found the Toofan Sena’s commander, Ramchandra Sripati Lad, ‘Captain Bhau’, still alive at 94. He insisted the money went to the Prati Sarkar and the poor, not to anyone’s pocket.

We were the government here.Captain Bhau (Ramchandra Sripati Lad), to P. Sainath, People’s Archive of Rural India, 2016

Bombay, 27 August 1942. On a short-wave set in a borrowed room, a young woman’s voice came on the air. Usha Mehta was 22, a student who had dropped out of her studies to fight. With a handful of friends and equipment from a radio dealer, she had built a transmitter.

This is the Congress Radio calling on 42.34 metres from somewhere in India.Opening words of the secret Congress Radio, Bombay, 1942

For almost three months the station kept moving from flat to flat, broadcasting news the censored newspapers could not print: firings, arrests, speeches. The socialist Ram Manohar Lohia helped run it. On 12 November police traced the signal and raided the station; Usha Mehta was caught and sent to prison for four years.

Aruna Asaf Ali, meanwhile, was the most wanted woman in India. The government seized and sold her property and offered 5,000 rupees for her capture. She edited an underground monthly, Inquilab, with Lohia. Gandhi later sent her a handwritten note telling her to come out and give herself up, and to let the reward money go to the Harijan cause. She stayed hidden until the warrant was withdrawn in 1946.

In Hazaribagh Central Jail in Bihar sat Jayaprakash Narayan, the socialist leader. On Diwali night in November 1942, while the guards were busy with the festival, he and five comrades knotted dhotis into a rope, about 56 of them by the usual account, and went over the 17-foot wall. JP went on to organise guerrilla squads from the Nepal border.

The Raj answered with everything it had. Police and troops fired on crowds. Whole villages paid collective fines. Men were publicly flogged. Thousands were held without trial under the Defence of India Rules.

No full count was ever made.

The British had a case, and they made it. India was the base for the war against Japan. Railways in Bihar and Bengal carried troops and supplies to the eastern front. A rising that cut those lines, officials said, was a stab in the back of an army defending India itself. In 1943 the government published Congress Responsibility for the Disturbances, 1942–43, which argued that the violence had been planned, and laid it at Gandhi’s door.

Gandhi denied it. The violence, he said, had been provoked by the government arresting the leaders before any campaign had begun, and he would not condemn people driven to fury. Churchill, for his part, left no doubt where he stood. On 10 November 1942, at the Lord Mayor’s luncheon in London, he said he had not become Prime Minister for one purpose:

to preside over the liquidation of the British EmpireWinston Churchill, Mansion House, London, 10 November 1942 (end of a longer sentence)

In Lahore that August, the Punjab was ruled by the Unionist Party, a coalition of Muslim, Hindu and Sikh landlords and farmers under the Premier, Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan. The Unionists backed the war to the hilt. The Punjab was the Army’s biggest recruiting ground, and its villages lived on soldiers’ pay and pensions. The Unionist government opposed the Quit India movement.

Two months before the Bombay meeting, on 15 June 1942, Sikandar announced a pact with the Sikh leader Baldev Singh: jhatka meat in government kitchens, a fair share of jobs for Sikhs, a say for each community over laws on its religion, and Punjabi in Gurmukhi as the province’s second language. Baldev Singh joined the cabinet. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism records that he went in his personal capacity, and that an Akali conference at Gujranwala on 18 July 1942 disapproved of the pact.

The Akalis were divided over Quit India. One section wanted a token campaign of civil disobedience; the group around Master Tara Singh wanted to keep the Sikhs’ place in the Army and cooperate with the war. Sikh soldiers were fighting for the Empire in North Africa and Burma; in Malaya in the same year a Sikh officer, Captain Mohan Singh, was raising the first Indian National Army against it.

There were student strikes in Lahore and Amritsar, and some Congress workers went to jail. But the Punjab saw nothing like the railway war in Bihar, and historians of the province have long asked why its response was so thin: a weak and divided Punjab Congress, an Army-dependent countryside, and a provincial government that stood with the British. Sikandar died in Lahore on 26 December 1942, and Khizar Hayat Tiwana carried on his policy. Within five years the Punjab would be cut in two (read the full story of Partition).

Quit India was not India’s unanimous voice, and those who stayed out had their reasons.

The Muslim League. Since its Lahore Resolution of March 1940 the League had demanded separate Muslim homelands. Muhammad Ali Jinnah saw Quit India as an attempt to force the British to hand power to a Congress-run India before the Muslim question was settled. The League told Muslims to keep away from it, and in most Muslim-majority areas they did. During the war years League ministries took office in Sind, Bengal and the North-West Frontier.

The Communist Party of India. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Communists stopped calling the war imperialist and began calling it a ‘People’s War’. The British lifted the ban on the party in July 1942. Under P.C. Joshi it opposed Quit India and urged support for the war. The stand isolated it from the national movement for years, and many Communists later said it was a mistake.

The Hindu Mahasabha. Its president, V.D. Savarkar, told members who held office in municipalities, legislatures or the services to ‘stick to their posts’. The Mahasabha’s Syama Prasad Mookerjee, Finance Minister of Bengal, wrote to the Governor on 26 July 1942 that anyone stirring up mass feeling during the war ‘must be resisted’. His defenders point out that he resigned from the Bengal ministry on 20 November 1942, protesting against the government’s repression.

B.R. Ambedkar. On 20 July 1942 Ambedkar joined the Viceroy’s Executive Council as Labour Member. He called the Quit India move ‘both irresponsible and insane’. His wider case, set out in his 1945 book What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, was that freedom on Congress terms would leave the Scheduled Castes at the mercy of caste Hindus unless they had guarantees first.

C. Rajagopalachari. He had already left the Congress over the war and over Pakistan. He argued that India should negotiate with the British and with the League, not fight both while Japan stood at the gate. In 1944 his ‘C.R. formula’ became the basis for Gandhi’s talks with Jinnah.

Inside the Aga Khan Palace, Gandhi wrote letter after letter to Linlithgow, rejecting the charge that he had planned the violence. The Viceroy would not withdraw it. So on 10 February 1943, aged 73, Gandhi began a fast of 21 days, an appeal, he said, to the highest tribunal.

Three Indian members of the Viceroy’s Council resigned in protest. At one point the doctors feared he would not live. Linlithgow did not give way. On 3 March Gandhi broke the fast. He had won nothing on paper, and the world had watched.

Kasturba was 74 and her health was failing. She suffered heart attacks in January 1944, and bronchitis turned into pneumonia. Her son Devdas brought penicillin, then rare in India, but her doctors judged it too late to help. At 7.35 on the evening of 22 February 1944 she died in the palace, with her husband beside her. They had been married for more than 60 years.

She was cremated in the palace grounds, next to Mahadev Desai. Weeks later Gandhi fell ill with malaria. On 6 May 1944, fearing he might die in their custody, the British let him go. Nehru and the Working Committee were held until June 1945.

While Gandhi fasted by choice, Bengal starved without one. In 1943 rice prices in Bengal went through the roof. The rice imports from Burma had stopped when Japan took it; the cyclone of October 1942 had wrecked the crop in Midnapore, the same district as Tamluk; the government bought grain for the war and the cities; officials removed boats and stocks from coastal districts for fear of a Japanese landing; and traders hoarded.

Villagers walked into Calcutta and died on its pavements. The Famine Inquiry Commission later put the toll at about 1.5 million; other estimates run as high as 3 million or more. Critics such as Madhusree Mukerjee blame Churchill’s War Cabinet for refusing to send food; others stress wartime shipping losses. Amartya Sen showed that the food supply had fallen only a little. People died because they could no longer afford to buy it.

In Tamluk, the rebel government ran relief for cyclone and famine victims. For millions in Bengal, 1943 was not the year of the revolt. It was the year of the famine.

On the face of it, the revolt failed. The open rising was crushed within weeks. The leaders spent the rest of the war in prison. India got its freedom five years later, after a world war, a new British government, the trials of the Indian National Army and the naval mutiny of 1946.

Historians read the same facts two ways. Bipan Chandra and the Indian national school argue that 1942 showed how deep the demand for freedom ran. After it, they say, the British could hold India only by force, and a Britain broke after the war did not have the force to spare. Benjamin Zachariah writes that the British came out of 1942 knowing India was ungovernable in the long run; the question after the war was how to leave, not whether.

After Quit India there could be no retreat.Bipan Chandra, historian

Others put more weight elsewhere: on the cost of the war, on the Labour Party’s election victory in 1945, on the INA trials and the mutinies that shook British faith in the Indian Army. Some argue the Congress came out of jail in 1945 to find the Muslim League stronger than ever, after three years with the field to itself. On that reading, 1942 brought freedom nearer and made Partition more likely too.

Gandhi himself lived to see freedom only briefly. Five and a half years after Gowalia Tank he was shot dead in Delhi (read the full story of his assassination).

1942 is a year of hard choices made under a war sky. An empire fighting for its life in Asia jailed a whole national leadership overnight, shot its way through the villages of Bihar and Bengal, and let Bengal starve. A movement sworn to non-violence lost its leaders on the first night, and the people who carried on did not always keep the vow.

Some Indians stood aside, for reasons that ranged from principle to self-interest. But remember the names most textbooks give only a line to: seven boys at the Patna Secretariat, a widow with a flag at Tamluk, a student at a microphone in Bombay, a farmer’s army in Satara, and an old woman who died in a palace prison beside the man she had married at 13. That is the August revolt. Tell all of it.