Eight Days After a Crowd Burned the Chauri Chaura Police Station on 4 February 1922, Gandhi Called Off Non-Cooperation. A Court Sentenced 172 Men to Death and the High Court Upheld 19.

On the afternoon of Saturday 4 February 1922, a crowd that the Allahabad High Court later put at 3,000 to 4,000 people burned down the police station at Chauri Chaura, in Gorakhpur district, and killed the policemen and village watchmen inside. Eight days later, on 12 February, the Congress Working Committee meeting at Bardoli, in Gujarat, suspended the mass civil disobedience that Gandhi had been about to begin. Bipan Chandra and his four co-authors date the end of the Non-Cooperation Movement to that day.

The sources disagree on how many died, on who fired first, on why Gandhi stopped and on what the trial proved.

Three accounts of the shooting

Gandhi’s account came from an informant. In Young India on 16 February he wrote that once the procession had passed, constables abused some stragglers, that the crowd turned back, and that the constables fired until their small stock of ammunition ran out and then withdrew into the building. The crowd set fire to it, he wrote, and the men who came out were hacked down and thrown into the flames. He had heard that the constables gave “much provocation”, and he wrote that nothing could justify “the brutal murder of men who had been rendered defenceless.”

The Indian Annual Register, a yearly chronicle of public affairs, told it much the same way for 1922. Police roughly handled stragglers, the crowd came back throwing brickbats, and the armed police fired a volley into the air and then at the crowd. The Register added that Gupteshwar Singh, the sub-inspector, was alleged to have beaten volunteers who were picketing a bazaar on 1 February.

The High Court’s judgment of 1923, by Chief Justice Sir Grimwood Mears and Justice Piggott, is harder on the crowd. The court posted a Hindi translation of it in February 2025, and this account follows that text. The judges wrote that the police were a sub-inspector, eight armed constables and some village watchmen, carrying old rifles and weak cartridges. The crowd, they found, had walked about two miles with a set purpose and moved on whistle signals. Gupteshwar Singh’s order to fire into the air they called a fatal mistake. Hit by bricks and lumps of limestone torn from the railway line, the police shut themselves into the building and killed two attackers. The crowd then burned it with oil looted from nearby shops, and only one policeman got away. The judges add that people from the crowd went home afterwards boasting and saying that Mahatma Gandhi’s raj had come.

Twenty-one, twenty-two or twenty-three

The toll depends on the source. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi give twenty-one policemen and watchmen in the chronology of volume 22 and twenty-two constables in a footnote to volume 23. The Register, Chandra and his co-authors, and Colonel Sir Charles Yate in a House of Commons question of 14 March 1922 all say twenty-two. The minister who answered Yate said he was aware of the fact and that standing orders strictly prohibited firing in the air.

The High Court judgment counts twenty-three policemen and watchmen. So do the Gorakhpur district administration’s tourism page, which adds three civilians dead, and the University of California Press in its description of Shahid Amin’s book. The court’s own 2025 booklet lists twenty-two names: two officers, fifteen constables and five watchmen. Chandra’s book and the volume 23 footnote also put the attack on 5 February, where the court and the district administration say the 4th.

Eight days to Bardoli

On 1 February Gandhi had written to the Viceroy that Bardoli, a sub-district of Surat, would begin mass civil disobedience unless the Government freed the press and the non-violent prisoners. On 10 February he told the Bardoli workers that most of them had failed to understand non-violence and that he must stop the movement for civil disobedience at once. The editors of the Collected Works write that the workers, young and old, had told him a retreat would disgrace the country before the world.

The Working Committee met on 11 and 12 February. Its first resolution deplored “the inhuman conduct of the mob” and sent sympathy to the constables’ families. The rest suspended mass civil disobedience, told cultivators to pay land revenue and taxes, stopped activity meant to court arrest, ended picketing except to warn visitors to liquor shops against drink, and told tenants not to withhold rent from their landlords. The new programme began with enrolling one crore (ten million) members. Gandhi started a five-day fast that Sunday evening.

His reasons ran in Young India of 16 February under the heading “The Crime of Chauri Chaura.” He named three warnings: the riots of 1919, the year of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre; the Bombay riots of 17 November 1921; and now Gorakhpur. A grain of arsenic spoils a pot of milk, he wrote, and Chauri Chaura would spoil Bardoli the same way. He urged anyone who felt guilty to give himself up. The reversal, he conceded, “may be politically unsound and unwise, but there is no doubt that it is religiously sound.” Gandhi’s wider story is in a longer profile.

The leaders who read it in jail

Jawaharlal Nehru, writing in 1936, remembered learning of the suspension in prison “to our amazement and consternation.” He said almost all the prominent Congress leaders other than Gandhi resented it, that his father Motilal Nehru was much upset, and that they asked whether “a remote village and a mob of excited peasants in an out-of-the-way place” could end a national struggle.

Subhas Bose, in a book published in London in 1935, wrote that he was with C. R. Das at the time and that Das was “beside himself with anger and sorrow.” Ordering a retreat “just when public enthusiasm was reaching the boiling-point was nothing short of a national calamity,” Bose wrote. At the All-India Congress Committee in Delhi on 24 and 25 February, Gandhi wrote afterwards, he was “totally unprepared for the hurricane of opposition.” The committee still adopted the resolutions without material change, in the words of the Collected Works editors.

Gandhi was arrested on 10 March. On 18 March Judge R. S. Broomfield sentenced him to six years.

Five readings of why he stopped

Gandhi wrote in Young India on 2 March: “I assure the reader that Bardoli’s unpreparedness had nothing to do with the decision.” In a letter of 4 March he called Gorakhpur typical, said the infection might have spread, and held that the procession and its route past the station were both avoidable.

Bose reported another explanation circulating in what he called semi-official circles. By that story the Government had secretly prepared to make the Bardoli campaign fail, and Gandhi used Chauri Chaura as his pretext. Bose added that those who knew Gandhi well would not accept it. The Register’s account for 1922 names a different pressure. It says Gandhi went to Bombay on 9 February, met Madan Mohan Malaviya and other Independents who wanted a Round Table Conference, and that Malaviya and the Independents prevailed. A Lahore correspondent whose letter Gandhi printed wrote that the decision seemed to come either under Malaviya’s influence or from far-fetched notions of non-violence.

R. Palme Dutt, in The Communist on 25 February 1922, said Gandhi had retreated out of alarm at where a movement of workers and peasants would lead, and compared him to Kerensky. Dutt’s article does not mention Chauri Chaura. Chandra and his co-authors say later commentators followed Dutt’s India Today in reading the decision as fear of radical masses, and point to the order to pay taxes and rents. They answer that the crowd at Chauri Chaura showed no intention of attacking landlords, and that Gandhi had said repeatedly he did not want other districts to start while Bardoli did. They suggest he may have judged Bardoli’s chances had receded, so that Chauri Chaura “presented an opportunity to retreat with honour.” They write that “Withdrawal is not tantamount to betrayal.” Nehru noted that before the campaign of 1930, which opened with the Salt March, Gandhi said sporadic violence should not end a movement. Whether non-violence alone won independence is argued from other papers in a separate piece.

A trial of 225 men

Reprisals started within weeks. Young India of 9 March printed a letter from Jang Bahadur Singh, one of six workers the Gorakhpur Congress committee sent to Hata tehsil. He wrote that police were taking money from villagers under threat of naming them in the Chauri Chaura case, and that he had seen the cuts left by lashes on one villager. Gandhi’s comment was: “Whatever the guilt of the crowd at Chauri Chaura, the police outrages reported by numerous correspondents are wholly unjustified.”

The High Court’s translation gives the course of the case. The committing magistrate, M. B. Dikshit, sent 225 men to the Gorakhpur sessions court on 18 June 1922. The trial before Judge H. E. Holmes opened on 21 June, and the judgment came on 9 January 1923. Three accused had died during the trial and the prosecution had dropped its case against one. Holmes acquitted 47, gave two men light sentences, and sentenced the other 172 to death for murder, applying the law on a shared unlawful purpose to each of them. The Register’s chronicle records the same figure for 9 January. Two of the 172 died in jail, which left 170 sentences for the High Court to confirm.

On 30 April 1923 Mears and Piggott confirmed 19 death sentences. Nazar Ali and Lal Muhammad were among them. The judges acquitted 38, gave three men two years for rioting alone, and changed 110 death sentences to transportation for life. For 96 of those 110 they recommended shorter terms, and the Register records the United Provinces Government accepting its clemency recommendations on 4 May. The court’s booklet tabulates the outcome as 14 life terms, 19 of eight years, 57 of five years, 20 of three years and three of two. ThePrint’s centenary report and other accounts give 110 as the number of life sentences. The judgment shows 110 as the number first changed to life terms, before the reductions. The booklet adds that the 19 were hanged between 2 and 11 July 1923.

The judges wrote that most of the appellants were uneducated peasants drawn in by misreading of facts and empty promises of swaraj (self-rule), and that some believed Gandhi could work miracles. They then said they could not leave the case without the uneasy feeling that men who had never been tried were at large, with moral responsibility at least as great as that of Nazar Ali and Lal Muhammad, who had acted openly in daylight as leaders. The translated passage names no one.

Madan Mohan Malaviya, who had retired from practice, argued the appeal for the defence, according to the High Court’s history of its bar. In the translated judgment the judges call him a very able lawyer when they take up his argument that the charges had been wrongly joined, and they do not accept it. They also read the volunteers’ pledge differently from his argument that it bound them to non-violence. By their reading it bound volunteers to obey their officers without question, and the non-violence vow held only while non-violence stayed the nation’s policy.

What the villagers made of Gandhi

Shahid Amin’s essay on Gorakhpur in 1921 and 1922, reprinted in Selected Subaltern Studies in 1988, starts from the fact that Gandhi spent less than a day in the district, on 8 February 1921, addressing a meeting variously put at 1 lakh to 2.5 lakh people (100,000 to 250,000). He draws on the trial evidence. Sarju Kahar, the murdered station officer’s servant, testified that days before the attack he had heard that Gandhi Mahatma’s swaraj had been established and the thana (police station) would be abolished. Amin notes that the High Court judges found it remarkable how the word swaraj was tied to Gandhi’s name in the peasants’ minds. His conclusion is that the peasants’ ideas about Gandhi’s orders and powers clashed with Gandhism itself: “The violence at Chauri Chaura was rooted in this paradox.”

Chandra and his co-authors describe a crowd angered by overbearing policemen. The High Court describes an organised advance. Amin’s reading is of volunteers whose devotion to Gandhi had taken a militant turn.

His book of 1995 asks how the event was remembered. The publisher says the British denied the riot reflected Indian resistance and tried the rioters as common criminals. Amit Chaudhuri, reviewing it in the London Review of Books, quotes Amin that “Chauri Chaura was just a railway station,” and reports local accounts of bullets turned into water by Gandhi’s blessings. Mahesh Rangarajan writes that Amin traced the volunteers, called otiyars, who reinterpreted Gandhi’s message, and the approver (an accused who turns witness) Mir Shikari, whose testimony let the Government clinch its case. Amin faults the Congress, post-independence governments and historians for silence. In April 1938 Dwarka Gosain, one of those indicted, wrote from jail to the Congress chief minister, Govind Ballabh Pant, who noted on the file that his release “may follow later.”

The centenary

On 4 February 2021 the Prime Minister’s Office reported that Narendra Modi inaugurated the centenary at Chauri Chaura by video link and released a postal stamp. It says he described the sacrifice as giving a new direction to the freedom struggle and regretted how little the martyrs were discussed. It records him urging people to remember Baba Raghav Das and Madan Mohan Malaviya, through whom “around 150 freedom fighters were saved from hanging.” The state’s programmes ran in all 75 districts of Uttar Pradesh from 4 February 2021 to 4 February 2022.