Quit India Movement

On August 8, 1942, at Gowalia Tank Maidan in Bombay, the All-India Congress Committee passed the Quit India resolution, demanding an immediate end to British rule. Mohandas Gandhi told the crowd to do or die. Before dawn on August 9 the British arrested Gandhi and the entire Congress leadership, and the party was banned.¹

Japan had taken Singapore and Burma in early 1942, and a Japanese invasion of India seemed possible. The Cripps Mission of March and April 1942 had offered only dominion status after the war and failed. Congress leaders, who had not been consulted about India's entry into the war in 1939 and had resigned from provincial ministries, feared that Britain could not defend India and that the people had to be mobilised. With the leaders in prison, the movement became spontaneous and leaderless. Crowds attacked police stations, post offices and railways, and telegraph lines were cut.¹

In places such as Ballia in Uttar Pradesh, Tamluk in Bengal and Satara in Maharashtra, local people set up parallel governments for a time. Younger leaders such as Aruna Asaf Ali and Jayaprakash Narayan worked underground. The British answered with force, including, by some accounts, strafing from the air, and with mass arrests of over 100,000 people. By 1944 the rebellion was largely crushed. The Muslim League stayed away, the communists opposed it after the Soviet Union joined the war, and the Bengal famine of 1943 added to the misery.¹³