Quit India Movement

In August 1942, in the middle of the Second World War, the Indian National Congress demanded that Britain leave India at once and threatened mass civil disobedience if it did not. Mahatma Gandhi launched the campaign in Bombay on 8 August with the call "Do or Die". The British arrested the Congress leadership within hours and suppressed the unrest that followed by force, but the upheaval, which the Viceroy called the most serious rebellion since 1857, left a lasting mark on the road to independence.

When war broke out in 1939, the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, declared India a belligerent without consulting Indian leaders. The Congress said India could not take part in a war it had not been consulted on, and its ministers in eight provinces resigned. The Muslim League, under Muhammad Ali Jinnah, backed the war effort and welcomed the resignations, and in March 1940 it called for a separate Muslim homeland at its Lahore session. In 1940–41 Gandhi led a campaign of individual civil disobedience against the war in which some fourteen thousand people were arrested.

With Japanese forces advancing through Southeast Asia, the British government sent Sir Stafford Cripps to India in March 1942. He offered dominion status and a constituent assembly, but only after the war. The Congress found the offer inadequate because it set no timetable for real self-government; Gandhi is said to have likened it to a post-dated cheque. The failure of the talks, and fear that Britain could not defend India against Japan, pushed Congress towards confrontation.

The Congress Working Committee, meeting at Wardha on 14 July 1942, demanded complete independence, and the All India Congress Committee endorsed the call in Bombay on 8 August. Not everyone agreed: C. Rajagopalachari left the Congress over it, and Jawaharlal Nehru and Maulana Azad had misgivings but stayed loyal to Gandhi. The movement was opposed by the Muslim League, by the Hindu Mahasabha, by the Communists, who backed the war effort, and by some princely rulers.

The government struck the next morning, detaining Gandhi and the entire Working Committee. With the leaders in prison, protest became leaderless and often violent. Crowds attacked post offices, railway stations and police stations and cut telegraph lines; according to one historian, around 550 post offices and 250 stations were attacked in the first six weeks, with the worst violence in Bihar. Local parallel governments appeared in places such as Satara, Ballia and the Tamluk area of Midnapore, and underground leaders including Aruna Asaf Ali kept up resistance through pamphlets and clandestine radio.

The British deployed 57 battalions, imposed collective fines and made more than 100,000 arrests. Estimates of the dead vary widely: British figures put them at about 1,028, while Congress estimates ranged from 4,000 to 10,000. Viceroy Linlithgow privately told Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the end of August that he faced the gravest rebellion since 1857.

The Congress leaders spent most of the rest of the war cut off in jail. Gandhi's wife Kasturba and his secretary Mahadev Desai died during his detention, and he undertook a 21-day fast before being released on health grounds in 1944. The other prisoners were freed in 1945, after the war in Europe, as a Labour government that had promised Indian independence took office in Britain.

The movement failed in its immediate aim, but it kept the Congress united and deepened popular hostility to British rule. Many historians argue that it helped convince Britain that India could not be governed indefinitely, shifting the question after the war to how to leave. Subhas Chandra Bose, then fighting the British with Axis support, described it as a new chapter in the freedom struggle. Independence, and the partition of India, followed in 1947.

Our 1938 and 1945 maps show the British Raj, with its provinces and princely states, during the years of the campaign.