Gandhi Told the Congress Committee 'Do or Die' on 8 August 1942, the Leaders Were Arrested Before Dawn, and the Viceroy Wired Churchill That He Faced the Most Serious Rebellion Since 1857

The Quit India movement began on 8 August 1942, when the All-India Congress Committee met at Gowalia Tank in Bombay and asked Britain to withdraw from India. Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Azad and the rest of the Working Committee were arrested in the early hours of 9 August, and the rising that followed had no central direction.

Counts of the dead and the arrested differ from one official to the next, so each figure below comes with the name of whoever stated it. The sources are the Viceroy’s cables, Hansard, Gandhi’s Collected Works and the parties’ own resolutions.

Cripps left on 12 April and Wardha answered on 14 July

Sir Stafford Cripps, a member of the British War Cabinet, reached India on 22 March 1942 with a draft declaration, published on 30 March as Command Paper 6350. It promised an Indian Union with Dominion status after the war, an elected body to write the constitution, and a right for any province to stay out. Until then, it said, the British government “must inevitably bear the responsibility for and retain control and direction of the defence of India.”

The Congress Working Committee refused it in a resolution issued on 11 April. Taking defence out of Indian hands, it said, would “reduce that responsibility to a farce and nullity.” The Muslim League’s Working Committee also called the proposals unacceptable that day, while noting with gratification that the possibility of Pakistan was “recognised by implication.” Cripps left on 12 April.

Bipan Chandra and his co-authors write that Gandhi drafted a withdrawal resolution about a fortnight later. At the Working Committee session of 27 April to 1 May, Sumit Sarkar writes, Patel, Rajendra Prasad, Kripalani and the Socialists backed Gandhi, while Nehru sided with Rajagopalachari and Bhulabhai Desai. On 14 July, meeting at Wardha, the Committee resolved that British rule in India “must end immediately.” It accepted Allied troops on Indian soil, said it would otherwise use “all the non-violent strength it might have gathered since 1920” under Gandhi, and sent the decision to the All-India Congress Committee, to meet in Bombay on 7 August.

Gowalia Tank on 7 and 8 August: the resolution and the speech

The Committee’s resolution repeated “the demand for the withdrawal of the British power from India.” It promised a provisional government of the main parties once India was declared independent, and sanctioned “a mass struggle on non-violent lines on the widest possible scale” under Gandhi. One passage allowed for his arrest: where instructions could not reach people, “every Indian who desires freedom and strives for it must be his own guide.”

Thirteen members voted against the resolution, and three pressed amendments to a vote. Gandhi congratulated them on their courage. Sarkar says the amendments came from the Communists K. M. Ashraf and S. G. Sardesai, who wanted a joint front with the League.

Gandhi spoke first in Hindustani and then in English, and his Collected Works prints both. The Hindustani speech, in translation, has the passage that gave the movement its slogan. “Here is a mantra, a short one, that I give you,” he said. “The mantra is: ‘Do or Die.’” He went on: “We shall either free India or die in the attempt; we shall not live to see the perpetuation of our slavery.”

He also said the struggle had not yet begun: “the actual struggle does not commence this moment.” He would first wait on the Viceroy, a process “likely to take two or three weeks.” Soldiers should stay at their posts but “refuse to fire on our own people,” and nothing should be secret: “This is an open rebellion. In this struggle secrecy is a sin.”

The arrests of 9 August and the Aga Khan Palace

Mani Bhavan, the Gandhi museum in Bombay, says Gandhi, Nehru, Patel and Azad were arrested in the early hours of 9 August and the Congress was declared unlawful. Gandhi’s Collected Works chronology adds that he was taken to the Aga Khan Palace at Poona. Churchill told the Commons on 10 September that the leaders “have been interned under conditions of the highest comfort and consideration.”

Mani Bhavan’s account says that despite a ban on meetings a large crowd came to Gowalia Tank, Aruna Asaf Ali hoisted the national flag, and the police used lathis and tear gas. She then went underground. Chandra’s group list her among the organisers with Achyut Patwardhan, Ram Manohar Lohia and Sucheta Kripalani.

Mahadev Desai, Gandhi’s secretary, died at the palace on 15 August 1942. On 16 December 1943 Leo Amery, the Secretary of State for India, told the Commons that Kasturba Gandhi had suffered two severe heart attacks and that the Government of India thought her safest where she was. GandhiServe’s chronology records her death at 7.35 pm on 22 February 1944, and the Gandhi Research Foundation says she and Desai both died during their internment. Gandhi was released on 6 May 1944.

The dead, the arrested and the Viceroy’s cable to Churchill

For six or seven weeks, Chandra’s group write, crowds attacked police stations, post offices, courts and railway stations, pulled up track and cut telegraph wires. Tirhut division in Bihar was cut off for two weeks, and control of Patna was lost for two days. Amery told the Commons that after a Blenheim crashed in Bihar one crew member died in the crash and two were murdered.

On 31 August Linlithgow cabled Churchill that he was meeting “by far the most serious rebellion since that of 1857,” whose “gravity and extent” had been “concealed from the world for reasons of military security.” On 21 September he told Amery: “I think we can be pretty well content with the general situation in the country.”

The official counts rose as reports came in. The Home Department’s telegram of 5 September put casualties from police firing at 340 killed and 630 wounded or more, in reports it called “exceedingly incomplete” and without Bihar, and said the “equivalent of 57 battalions” had been employed at the height. Churchill told the Commons five days later: “Less than 500 persons have been killed.” Only “a few brigades of British troops” had needed to move, he said. On 8 October Amery gave 846 killed and 2,024 wounded. On 18 February 1943 he gave 1,028 killed and 3,215 injured between 9 August and 30 November, and 958 sentences of caning in British India outside the United Provinces.

Sarkar quotes a Home Political file for the end of 1943: 91,836 arrested and 1,060 killed by police or army firing, a number he calls “almost certainly a gross underestimate.” Chandra’s group give over 60,000 arrested by the end of 1942, with 26,000 convicted and 18,000 held under the Defence of India Rules.

The Congress side gave its own figures. The Government of India’s 1943 pamphlet Congress Responsibility for the Disturbances reprints underground Congress leaflets. One says 500 people had been shot dead in the week after Gandhi’s arrest. A bulletin headed War of Independence claims 700 killed, about 7,000 wounded and 4,500 arrested. Sarkar cites Govind Sahai’s 1947 history, written from the Congress side, for deaths of 533 in Hazaribagh, 517 in Saran and 447 in Bhagalpur, out of a figure of 1,761.

Machine-gunning from the air: what is on record

On 15 August Linlithgow cabled Amery that floods and broken communications had made it impossible to get troops to the Patna area in time. “I have authorised machine-gunning from air of saboteurs,” he wrote, adding that any reference to it should, where practicable, be “kept out of statements to Press.”

In the Commons on 1 October Amery said “mobs were five times machine-gunned from the air.” On 8 October he gave the dates: 15, 16, 21 and 22 August and 6 September. Casualty information was “not available,” he said, but believed slight, and probably nil on two of the five occasions. When Shinwell objected that this was not in conformity with British practice, Amery answered: “There are conditions of violence and danger to life when that may be the only method.”

The Home Department’s telegram of 5 September counted two occasions in Bihar of firing at rail saboteurs from the air, and added that there had been “no bombing or cannon fire.” Sarkar names aircraft also at Bhagalpur and Monghyr in Bihar, Nadia and Tamluk in Bengal, and Talcher in Orissa. Amery’s answers gave no figure for the dead from the air.

Parallel governments at Ballia, Tamluk and Satara

In Ballia, in eastern Uttar Pradesh, Chittu Pandey led the first parallel government in August 1942. Chandra’s group say it made the Collector hand over power and release the arrested Congress men, and that it fell about a week later when soldiers marched in and found the leaders gone.

The Tamluk Jatiya Sarkar, in Midnapore, was set up on 17 December 1942 and lasted until September 1944. Sarkar draws on its own leaders’ accounts. It ran an armed Vidyut Vahini, arbitration courts that claim 1,681 cases, school grants, relief work worth Rs 79,000, and a scheme to distribute surplus paddy. On 29 September 1942, 44 people were killed in a single day of attacks on police stations in Tamluk and nearby areas, among them Matangini Hazra, a 73-year-old widow who kept the flag raised after being shot.

A cyclone struck Midnapore on 16 October 1942 and, by Sarkar’s count, killed about 4,000 in Tamluk subdivision. Chandra’s group and Sarkar both record the earlier order to seize country boats in Bengal, and the anger it caused, and Sarkar says Congress in Midnapore had campaigned since mid-1942 against that policy and against grain exports from the district. Our account of the Bengal famine of 1943 covers what followed. Sarkar puts the deaths in Bengal at between one and a half and three million, in what he calls a basically man-made famine.

Satara, in Maharashtra, had the Prati Sarkar under Nana Patil. It took shape in mid-1943, ran people’s courts and enforced prohibition, and lasted until 1945 by Chandra’s group’s count and into 1945 or 1946 by Sarkar’s. Gyanendra Pandey calls it perhaps the most powerful and long-lasting of the parallel governments.

The Muslim League, the Communists and the Mahasabha, in their own words

The Muslim League’s Working Committee met in Bombay on 20 August. Its resolution deplored the Congress decision to launch what it put in quotation marks as an “open rebellion,” and said the movement aimed at “Hindu domination.” It called “Quit India” “mere camouflage” for the Congress seizing control of government, said the Cripps talks had broken down over Britain’s refusal to hand the Muslims over to the Congress, and asked Britain to pledge Pakistan by a plebiscite of Muslims. Chandra’s group add that Muslim participation was low but there were no communal clashes.

The Communist Party, legalised in July 1942, had adopted the “People’s War” line in December 1941. People’s Democracy, the weekly of the CPI(M), says the party opposed Quit India for fear of disrupting the effort against Japan, while demanding the release of the leaders, Congress and League unity, and a national government. After independence, it says, the party concluded: “It was therefore wrong on the part of the Party to oppose the Quit India movement.” Chandra’s group note that hundreds of Communists at local level joined in anyway.

V. D. Savarkar, the Hindu Mahasabha’s president, said on 14 August that the sympathies of Mahasabha members went with the arrested leaders, and told Hindus not to support the resolution actively or to take a hostile attitude until the Mahasabha’s Working Committee met. On 3 September he told members of local bodies, legislatures and the armed forces to “stick to them and continue to perform their regular duties.” Syama Prasad Mookerjee, a Mahasabha leader and Bengal’s Finance Minister, wrote to Governor Herbert on 26 July asking how to combat the movement in Bengal so that it “will fail to take root in the province.” His diary records that the Mahasabha Working Committee condemned the repression, and that Savarkar declined to join openly because the Congress leaders were jailed before giving direction. He left the ministry in November 1942.

How historians weigh it

Chandra and his co-authors argue that the movement put independence on the immediate agenda: after it, “there could be no retreat,” and later talks could only concern the transfer of power. They say Gandhi would not condemn the violence, which he blamed on the state. He wrote to Linlithgow on 23 September 1942 that “the Government, not the Congress, are responsible for the destruction that has taken place.”

The Home Department’s pamphlet blamed Gandhi and the Congress High Command, and Churchill said the Congress might have been “aided by Japanese fifth-column work.” Sarkar rejects both. He writes that the British failed to prove the Congress had planned violent rebellion before 9 August, calls the fifth-column charge a smear, and says “the element of British provocation is, therefore, absolutely clear.” He also calls the struggle “perhaps untimely and doomed to failure” given British military strength, and says it gave new standing to the Congress Right and weakened the Left.

Pandey describes a popular upsurge in Gandhi’s name that went well beyond what he had envisaged, and calls Gandhi “the undisputed leader of a movement over which he had little command.” In May 1942, Sarkar notes, Gandhi was reported as saying that “Subhas Bose will have to be resisted by us,” more than a year before Bose reached Singapore to take over the Indian National Army.

More on this site: Gandhi’s whole career, whether non-violence alone ended British rule, and the naval revolt of 1946, where ratings scrawled “Quit India” on the saluting base of HMIS Talwar. The Congress leaders were released to take part in the Simla Conference of June 1945.