In 1920 Mahatma Gandhi asked Indians to stop lending their labour, custom and loyalty to British rule, in the hope that mass, peaceful withdrawal of support would force the colonial government to concede self-rule, or swaraj. Taken up by the Indian National Congress in September of that year, the non-cooperation movement was Gandhi's first nationwide campaign of satyagraha. It drew millions into politics before he abruptly suspended it in February 1922 after protesters killed policemen at Chauri Chaura.
Origins
Two events of 1919 turned Gandhi, until then willing to work with the British, into an opponent. The Rowlatt Act of March 1919 allowed political suspects to be dealt with without the usual safeguards in sedition cases, and protests against it were widespread. Then, on 13 April 1919, troops under Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer fired on a crowd at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, killing and wounding a great many people. The Jallianwala Bagh massacre shocked Gandhi, who now said that cooperating with such a government would be a sin. Nationalists also pointed to economic grievances: the ruin of Indian handicrafts by imported factory goods, and wartime recruiting during the First World War.
The programme
Gandhi promised swaraj within a year if the plan were fully carried out. Indians were urged to boycott British cloth and other imports, to spin and wear homespun khadi, to picket liquor shops, and to withdraw from government schools, courts, councils and services. Many gave back titles and honours or resigned their posts. The campaign also called for an end to untouchability.
Older leaders such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Annie Besant and Muhammad Ali Jinnah opposed the idea, as did the All India Muslim League, but younger nationalists rallied to Gandhi, and the Congress endorsed his plan in September 1920 before launching it that December.
Alliance with the Khilafat movement
Gandhi linked the campaign to the Khilafat movement, through which many Indian Muslims protested against the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and the threat to the caliph's position after the First World War. This brought leaders such as Maulana Azad and the brothers Shaukat Ali and Mohammad Ali Jauhar to his side and produced a rare period of joint Hindu–Muslim political action.
Mass protest
Strikes, or hartals, and public meetings spread across the country, and many new Indian schools and colleges were founded. The authorities responded with arrests; on 6 December 1921 they detained Jawaharlal Nehru and his father Motilal Nehru, the first arrest for each of them. Not all protest stayed peaceful: in 1921 there were riots linked to the visit of the Prince of Wales, and the Moplah rebellion abandoned non-violent methods.
Chauri Chaura and suspension
On 4 February 1922, at Chauri Chaura in the Gorakhpur district of the United Provinces, police fired on a large crowd of demonstrators, killing three. The crowd then set fire to the police station, and 22 policemen inside died. Gandhi concluded that the public was not yet ready for disciplined non-violence. He fasted and, on 12 February 1922, called off the campaign. He was then arrested, and on 18 March 1922 he was sentenced to six years' imprisonment for publishing seditious material.
Many in the Congress, including Nehru and others then in jail, thought the decision hasty. Motilal Nehru and Chittaranjan Das set up the Swaraj Party, and the Ali brothers also broke away.
Legacy
Although it did not deliver swaraj, the movement is widely seen as the moment Indian nationalism became a mass movement rather than a middle-class one. Its methods of boycott, khadi and non-violent defiance shaped later campaigns, notably the Salt March of 1930 and the Quit India Movement of 1942.
On our maps
Our 1920 map shows the British Raj at the time of the campaign, alongside the shrinking Ottoman lands whose fate fuelled the Khilafat movement.