Our school history books and popular historians insist on the role played by the Quit India movement (initiated on 8th August, 1942) and Gandhi in giving India its independence. RC Mazumdar, in his seminal book (The History and Culture of the Indian People: Volume 11: Struggle for Freedom), places the movement in its correct perspective. This greatly diverges from the history taught to us and popularised across the world too.
Mazumdar writes that there were two great misconceptions regarding the outbreak of 1942: 1) it was predominantly non-violent, and 2) Gandhi carried this great revolution single-handedly, giving us our independence. The details that the historian provides leave no doubt about the violence involved during the movement. Gandhi himself, Nehru, Azad, Patel, and the official history of the Congress all admitted this patent fact. Patel said that “one had to face the reality, and India switched over from non-violent to violent attempts to regain independence.” To call the movement of 1942 non-violent in any sense is nothing but a perversion of truth, writes Mazumdar.
Similarly, the credit given to Gandhi for a glorious revolution leading to freedom is based on assumptions as opposed to actual facts. It is well known, and the Congress was the first to admit it, that the movement collapsed in two months’ time, and India had to wait for five more years before it achieved freedom under very different circumstances. Far from claiming any credit for the achievements of 1942, both Gandhi and the Congress offered an apology and explanation for the “madness” that seized the people participating in it. Jayaprakash Narayan most emphatically claimed that fastening the programme on Gandhiji is a lie. Even the correspondence between Gandhi and the Government of India is conclusive on this point.
How far was the Congress itself responsible for the violent outbreak of 1942? Some argue that the Congress leaders were not responsible for the violence because they were all in jail. But the public speeches of the Congress leaders just before the movement, including Gandhi, Nehru, and Patel, indicated the nature of the coming struggle. It laid special emphasis on two points. Firstly, that it was a “do or die” movement and would “kindle a fire all over the country, which would only be extinguished after either achieving it or wiping out the Congress organisation altogether”. Secondly, there was the insistence by all speakers that “every man should be prepared and willing to act on his own initiative.” The utterances of Congress leaders negate the view that the outbreak was a spontaneous popular reaction to the arrest of Gandhi and other leaders and not a premeditated course of rebellion. The Government had valid reasons to say that the Congress leaders had to take responsibility for the outbreak of 1942.
The Congress, Nehru, and one foreign journalist claimed that the violent items of the campaign would not have come into operation but for the terrorism of the Government. They argued that the popular reaction to the arrest of Gandhi and other leaders was very mild on the 9th and 10th and assumed a violent character only on the 11th, after the Government had broken up peaceful processions by lathi charge and firing.
However, it was clear that the disorders had begun simultaneously in widely separated, vital strategic areas. The expert technical knowledge displayed was evidence of design and preparation. There were elaborate plans and preparations for violent acts like disruption of communications and sabotage of industrial work. Andhra Provincial Congress Committee carried a secret document headed with Gandhi’s slogan, Do or die, outlining a plan of campaign in successive stages. The fifth stage included the cutting of telephone and telegraph wires, the removal of rails, and the demolition of bridges. Other items were ‘to impede the war efforts’ and ‘to run parallel Governments”. All these were the characteristic features of the 1942 movement throughout the country.
The Bihar Congress Committee initially planned a non-violent approach after the arrest of Mahatma Gandhi. However, when police killed seven students on August 11 for attempting to hoist a national flag on the Patna Secretariat building, the very next day Congress resolved to destroy all communications and take control of Police Stations, Courts, jails, and other Government institutions. Mazumdar writes, “The word ‘spontaneously’ obviously means ‘without any direct and definite instructions from the Congress’. But it is difficult to understand how on that very evening “telegraph and telephone wires were cut at many places and telephone posts were uprooted”, without some previous direction (like the Andhra document), organisation, training, and equipment. Jayaprakash Narayan justified some of the more radical activities as “dislocation,” an infallible weapon for people under slavery. Thus, cutting wires, removing railway lines, blowing up bridges, stoppage of factory work, setting fire to oil tanks as well as to thanas, and destruction of Government papers and files come under dislocation, and it is perfectly right for people to carry these out.
The explanation of the violent acts in the 1942 movement cannot be insensate and mad acts of fury on the part of the people provoked by ruthless acts of the Government. “They were really due to the fact that whatever might have been its original character, the movement of 1942 shortly merged itself into the revolutionary or terrorist movement, which was always an active political force running on a parallel line with the non-violent policy of Gandhi.”
The revolutionary feeling, rejecting Gandhian non-violence, was strong in a powerful section of the Congress too, led by Jayprakash Narayan. They sought to fight Britain with arms and violence in accordance with the Congress resolution of Bombay, though not with Gandhi’s principles. Anyway, as Mazumdar writes, the resentment at the arrest of Congress leaders, the absence of a restraining hand on the violent reactions of amorphous groups who had no specific instructions to follow, and the lack of eager support from the revolutionary wing of the Congress made for a lukewarm response to the Quit India movement amongst the general public.
The professed revolutionaries must have taken full advantage of the situation. They had their own organisations and a ready technique of violence through different stages according to circumstances. Many of these revolutionaries had infiltrated into the Congress camp and were trying to establish “bomb factories.” Jayaprakash was the most prominent among these underground organisations. A coordinated network of organisations issued and widely circulated leaflets carrying specific instructions.
There was a secret meeting in Bombay that initiated underground work in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh. Their programme was to procure arms and ammunition from non-British ports, set up factories for preparing bombs and dynamite, procure rifles and guns, and so on. This movement gained momentum across the country with more coordination after the escape of Jayaprakash Narayan from Hazaribagh jail in October 1942.
In a significant document entitled “The Freedom Struggle Front”, the socialist leaders unfolded their strategy. The first circular justified the use of arms to fight the British in terms of the Bombay resolution. The Central Action Committee, consisting of Jayaprakash, some other leaders, and a batch of students from Banaras Hindu University, chalked out a programme of action for the whole of India. Among the many programmes, there were even technical instructions to help saboteurs destroy planes, tanks, locomotives, etc. with easily obtained substances and methods. There was a separate set of instructions for guerillas and details about the training and equipment.
Sardar Nityanand Singh of Bihar was the chief instructor, while Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia took over the charge of the radio and Publicity departments. Among the revolutionary groups working in different parts of the country, Siaram Dal and Parasuram Dal in Bihar, Hindustan Socialist Republican Army in Uttar Pradesh, and Anusilan Samiti and Jugantar Group in Bengal were the most important ones. This gigantic revolutionary movement, which spread over almost all the provinces, however, soon lost its tempo, and by February 1943, it was over.
The 1942 movement in the open, practically crushed in less than a month, finally collapsed within two months. But it would be a mistake to call it a dismal failure. The violent mass upsurge of 1942 left no doubt that freedom’s battle in India had begun in earnest. Mazumdar writes, “For the movement of 1942, the last rising of the people against the British Government, was not non-violent, and was neither planned nor led by Gandhi. To give him credit for it, after he had publicly disowned his responsibility for the whole movement, would be an indirect imputation of untruth and insincerity on his part—a charge which his worst critics would be the foremost to repudiate.”
1942–3 marks the end of India’s struggle for freedom. The revolutionary movement that had begun early in this century, as well as the non-violent Satyagraha that Gandhi had launched in 1920, both ended almost simultaneously without achieving freedom. “Curiously enough, the last battle for India’s freedom (Subhash Bose and the Indian National Army) began almost immediately after, far beyond her frontier, and this also proved a failure, in this respect. But it was out of these failures that success came in less than five years.”
The Quit India movement collapsed in 1942, and our independence had a lot more reasons equally important, if not more, apart from non-violence. Historians ignore the period from 1942 to 1947, a great blank in our textbooks, which perhaps played a greater and more important role in gaining her independence. Violence was its strong base: The second world war, Subhash Bose, the Indian National Army of Bose, the wars on the eastern front like Singapore, Burma, and Kohima, the Red Fort public trials, the Naval mutinies of Bombay, the economic collapse of the British after World War 2, a sympathetic Labor Government in England, and so on. But non-violence makes for a feel-good story.
RANDOM MUSINGS 