But one can never accuse Gandhi of being a reckless gambler. Though he had been declaring that it was an "open rebellion", that there was "no room left for negotiations", "no question of last chance", he did not throw caution to the four winds. Instead, on 15 July, the day after the Working Committee adopted a `Quit India' resolution at his instance, he sent his disciple Mira Behn (daughter of a former British Admiral) to see the Viceroy, the Commander-in-Chief and General Harley.(124) The Viceroy refused to see Mira Behn since, as his private secretary Laithwaite told her, Gandhi was talking of an open rebellion. Gandhi's emissary assured Laithwaite that Gandhi "would do all he could to guide the movement on non-violent lines". She hinted that Gandhi would invite his death, that is, fast unto death, if he was not "left free to guide it". But she was given clearly to understand that there would be no change in the British Government's attitude and the Congress claim would not be entertained.(125)
On receiving Mira Behn's report, Gandhi's secretary Desai issued a most significant statement. It said "that there appeared to be some misunderstanding about Gandhi's intentions" and that "it was not correct to say that Gandhiji had decided to launch an open non-violent rebellion against the British".(126)
Immediately after Mira Behn had seen Laithwaite, G.D. Birla, often an unofficial emissary of Gandhi, wrote to the Viceroy stressing the need for "personal contact" and saw Laithwaite.(127) In his letter of 4 August to Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, Gandhi assured him that he was "doing all I can to avert the crisis, if by milder measures I can possibly reach the same result".(128) Gandhi told the Associated Press on 6 August that there would be "an interval between the passing of the Congress resolution and the starting of the struggle". "A letter will certainly go to the Viceroy, not as an ultimatum but as an earnest pleading for avoidance of a conflict. If there is a favourable response, then my letter can be the basis for negotiation."(129) It is hard to reconcile this craving for negotiations with his earlier pronouncements that there was no scope for negotiations, that there could be no compromise on the issue of immediate political withdrawal of the British. He had categorically said that "it must be irrevocable and complete political withdrawal".(130) On 8 August also, after urging "the whole of India to launch upon a non-violent struggle on the widest scale" and giving them the mantra `Do or Die', he warned them against precipitate action and asked them to wait until he had written to the Viceroy. During these months he had been threatening to take the plunge but stepped back from the brink.
The leaders were fully aware that arrests would immediately follow the passage of the `Quit India' resolution in Bombay.(131) There was no dearth of warnings from reliable sources. On 28 July Azad wrote to Gandhi that the Government would take immediate action after the AICC meeting. But Gandhi told Azad that "a way out would be found" and believed that "the Government would take no drastic action".(132) Gandhi told some CSP leaders who had come to warn him on the evening of 7 August that Linlithgow would not be so foolish as to arrest him. He expected to remain busy for at least one month in negotiating with the Viceroy.(133) At four in the morning of 9 August, before the police came, he told Mahadev: "After my last night's speech, they will never arrest me."(134) Till the last moment Gandhi felt confident that the raj would be too afraid to "take any precipitate action" when the Japanese stood at the door.
Gandhi decided to ignore all warnings and to do nothing except making brave statements, until perhaps the end of the monsoon to see whether the Japanese would really come and then to make up his mind whether to take the final leap or to retreat along the escape route that the negotiations with the Viceroy, which he proposed, would open up.
It appears that Linlithgow had anticipated Gandhi's plan. On 11 July when the Working Committee was drafting its resolution, the Viceroy wrote to the Secretary of State that
"the old man will play for time and (as so often happened in the past) produce a threatening resolution drafted so as to attract as much attention as possible here, at home and in the United States but also worded so carefully as to leave ample opportunity for Congress to get out without too much loss of face if things look like going badly for it later on."(135)
On the same day Linlithgow wrote to Punjab Governor Glancy that he found it "difficult to believe that they will take an out-and-out campaign against us". He thought "it much more likely that Gandhi will continue to frame resolutions designed to make our blood curdle and to keep public nerves on the stretch, but to avoid any major battle, and to have ready as many avenues of escape as he can, if he finds his new nostrum is not going as it should".(136)
Though Gandhi preferred to play for time, the Viceroy and his Council refused to wait. As early as 16 July, after the Working Committee's meeting at Wardha, the Council decided unanimously to deal "swiftly and sternly with Congress if they force the issue". With its "unanimous support"(137) on 8 August "to immediate action", Gandhi, almost all members of the Working Committee and other prominent Congressmen were put under arrest in the early hours of 9 August. Among the members of the Viceroy's Council were friends and former Congressmen -- M.S. Aney, once an acting Congress president and Nalini Sarkar, who flitted in and out of the Congress and enjoyed the never-failing trust of Gandhi and Birla.
Immediately after arrest Gandhi became a sadder and wiser man. That morning Azad found him "looking very depressed". Azad observed: "I have never seen him looking so dejected.... Now that his calculations had proved wrong, he was uncertain as to what he should do."(138)
But, as a B.B.C. official who spent some months in India during the `Quit India' movement said: "The arrest of the leaders had the usual effect of enshrining them once again as national heroes..."
The `Quit India' struggle was described by Linlithgow in a cable to Prime Minister Winston Churchill as "by far the most serious rebellion since that of 1857, the gravity and extent of which we have so far concealed from the world for reasons of military security".(139) It was a rebellion of the people, mainly a peasant revolt, in which the leaders had no role to play for some time except that they had popularized a slogan -- `Quit India' -- coined by an American journalist. After some time they played a negative role; they did whatever they could to liquidate it.
When the Congress leaders took refuge in the Aga Khan Palace or prisons and other prominent Congressmen were arrested and the Congress organization was banned, students went on strike, people observed hartals, held meetings and demonstrations and took out processions defying government orders almost all over India. They tried to hoist Congress flags atop government buildings and there were clashes everywhere between the demonstrators and the police. There was a spate of arrests throughout India, and lathi-charges and shootings by the police causing many deaths and severe injuries of the people were common occurrences. Strict censorship of news was enforced and ruthless suppression of all signs of militancy on the part of the people was the official line from the beginning.
The most common forms of struggle that developed were attacks on centres of British power like police stations and treasuries and on means of transport and communications like railway stations and post offices and cutting of telegraph and telephone wires -- all intended to paralyse the government. There were pitched battles in many places between the armed police and the army on the one hand and the people equipped with primitive weapons on the other. The railways most affected were East Indian, Bengal and North-Western, and Madras and Southern Mahratta. There was hardly any no-rent or no-revenue movement. The leadership was provided mainly by persons thrown up by the struggles and mostly unknown before. Students played an important role in many areas. Forward Bloc, CSP activists and Kisan Sabha workers in some places played a prominent role.
The AICC members, Congress Socialists, Gandhians and others, who had escaped arrest, formed a central organizing body and tried to function in the name of Congress. It drew up a programme of action which endorsed violent attacks on symbols of government authority, sabotage and capture of power. It tried to circulate its programme and its appeals and circulars from time to time, but its links with the different areas of struggle were tenuous or non-existent.(140) When, early in 1943, Gandhi condemned violence and sabotage activities, there was a split in this body. Sucheta Kripalani and other Gandhians withdrew from it.
Of the many battles that took place in urban areas, Patna's reached a great intensity. When a big procession of students on 11 August was fired upon by the police and seven students were killed and many wounded, there was a revolt of the people. Next day there was no trace of British rule in Bihar's capital. Urban proletarians replaced students as leaders of the revolt. As Rahul Sankrityayana said, "The power of the people of Patna had destroyed the established government", but they knew not what to build in its place and how to defend that. As there was no revolutionary party to lead them and as army units were rushed into the city, the heroic revolt came to an end.(141) Many students left the city for rural areas.
At Chimur, a small town in the Central Provinces, a veritable reign of terror was imposed by the government when angry demonstrators, who had been lathi-charged and brutally fired upon, retaliated. The military which took over the town perpetrated unbelievable crimes.(142) At the initial stage large demonstrations were fired upon and many atrocities were committed by the minions of law and order in many cities and towns -- Bombay, Pune, Ahmedabad, Calcutta, Balurghat (in north Bengal) and so on. In Ballia town (in eastern U.P.) `order' was restored when the army marched in.
The working class under the influence of the CPI in cities like Bombay, Calcutta, Madras and Kanpur hardly participated in the struggle. Wherever industrial strikes took place, whether in Ahmedabad, Jamshedpur or some other place, these were engineered by factory-owners themselves. More of this later.
The struggle became intense in a number of rural areas. In an area comprising twenty-five villages in the Balasore district of Orissa, the people revolted: they braved police firing to wipe out the authority of the government for some time. In the Jeypore estate (now Koraput in Orissa) and Talcher, also in Orissa, firings and even machine-gunning from the air were resorted to to put down the revolts.(143) In the Madras Presidency several police stations were destroyed or damaged and many government buildings came under attack. Troops were employed between August and October to suppress the revolt. Rajagopalachari, the former Congress Prime Minister of Madras, and several associates of his condemned it as "hooliganism".(144) In some districts of Gujarat hartals, demonstrations and clashes with the police took place on 9 August and subsequent days. In Surat, Broach and East Khandesh guerrilla-type attacks on government property, means of communications and loyalists were a feature. In Broach, Surat and Navsari the entire peasantry supported the movement but in districts like Kheda and Mehsana (Baroda) the poor peasants belonging to the lower castes were hostile. A parallel government led by the Congress socialists functioned for some months in Ahmedabad, drawing its support from the Hindu middle classes of the city. In this city, retail, wholesale and share markets were closed by the mahajans or unions of businessmen. The movement received its support chiefly from the middle classes and the upper strata of the peasantry. An important organizer in Gujarat was B.K. Mazmudar, who had been secretary to the big industrialist Kasturbhai Lalbhai, with whom he maintained contact during his underground life. Hindu-Muslim relations were strained and in February 1943 there was a serious clash between the two communities in Ahmedabad.(145)
In the NWFP, demonstrations in protest against government repression were held. There was firing by the police and large numbers of people courted arrest. Nothing more remarkable happened.
In almost the whole of North and Central Bihar and six districts of Eastern U.P., a contiguous region about the size of England and Wales, the struggle assumed the character of a peasant insurrection. In most villages of this large area the British raj collapsed. "For two weeks or more", writes H.V. Hodson, then Reforms Commissioner of the Government of India, "the writ of the Government did not run in most of Bihar and some districts of the United Provinces."(146) The British raj could be set up again in this region after about a fortnight by "nearly a full army corps, supported by aircraft and armour". As Max Harcourt observes, "the forestalling arrests of provincial Congress leaders [and all-India leaders] far from dampening down the movement actually abetted the process whereby it developed into an insurrection".(147) To crush this peasant rebellion more than 57 army battalions were employed and machine-gunning from the air was resorted to. By May 1943, "105 battalions were given the task of keeping India quiet..."(148)
The struggle in Bihar and U.P. was directed against the raj but not against the zamindars, not even against the biggest of them -- the Darbhanga raj.(149) Sporadic guerrilla warfare started in North Bihar after the open revolt was put down by fire and sword. Guerrilla bands were organized mostly by CSP leaders but these leaders were thoroughly incompetent and guerrilla war fizzled out.
Medinipur (Midnapur) in South-West Bengal with its long tradition of militant anti-imperialist struggles of the peasants and of the national revolutionaries was one of the few places in India where the fire of revolt burnt the longest and where the people suffered the cruellest oppression by the government as well as the ravages of Nature.
With the threatened invasion of India by the Japanese the government declared the coastal areas as emergency areas and removed the different means of transport -- boats, cycles, motor vehicles -- causing much hardship to the people. Another problem was that of food. The government started procurement of rice and paddy for the Allied forces as well as for export elsewhere. Even before the `Quit India' call, the people of Medinipur (especially of the Tamluk and Kanthi sub-divisions) launched struggles against the government's `denial policy', procurement and removal of rice and paddy from the district. On 8 September the police killed three villagers when they fired on unarmed people trying to prevent export of rice.
The Congress committees in Kanthi and Tamluk were reorganized, ridding themselves of those who strictly adhered to non-violence, and set up War Councils with Forward Bloc and other Congress representatives. Training camps for volunteers whose number swelled to several thousands, were set up in Tamluk sub-division and a Mukti Bahini (Liberation Army) and a Bhagini Sena (Army of Sisters) were organized. Important roads were dug up at places, culverts were blown off, telegraph and telephone lines were cut off for miles and poles uprooted on the night of 28 September by thousands of villagers according to plan in the Tamluk sub-division, but the enemy had no knowledge of all this. Next day began mass attacks on police stations for the capture of the entire area. While leading a large contingent of thousands for the capture of the Tamluk sub-divisional headquarters and police station, Matangini Hazra, a brave lady of 73, fell along with nine others to the bullets of the enemy.(150) Several police stations in Tamluk and Kanthi were captured after considerable losses. British and Indian troops were rushed in. They were assisted by aeroplanes ready to drop bombs on the people.(151) But undeterred by shootings and other savageries committed by these, the people fought on. As the District Magistrate of Medinipur reported in mid-October, the combined civil and military offensive could not dampen the morale of the people and was only partly effective.
It was a real people's war in the Tamluk and Kanthi sub-divisions and some contiguous areas in the sadar sub-division. Except most Muslims and a few communists, the entire people including Krishak Samiti activists supported the struggle. Parallel administrations were set up. An official publication stated:
"In Midnapur in Bengal, the operation of the rebels indicated considerable care and planning, an effective warning system had been devised, elementary tactical principles were observed, for instance, encirclement and flanking movements, clearly on pre-arranged signals. The forces of disorder were accompanied by doctors and nursing orderlies to attend to casualties and the intelligence system was efficient."(152)
Upcountry Muslim officers were brought in to administer the district. The army and the police set new records in savagery: it was a tale of mass arrests, killing, destruction of homes, raping, even gang-raping, of women; as well as of heroic resistance.
A fierce cyclone swept over Kanthi and Tamluk sub-divisions on the night of 16-17 October leaving a trail of devastation. In the wake of the cyclone a huge tidal wave rushed several miles inland and when it receded, entire villages with men, their homes and cattle were washed away into the sea. Tens of thousands perished; there was neither food nor drinking water for the survivors; and epidemics followed.
The news of the terrible happenings was censored and not allowed to reach the outside world. No relief to the survivors was provided as a policy -- to punish the people. As news filtered through, non-official relief organizations tried to offer whatever help they could. But even they were prevented from doing so for some weeks until the pressure of public opinion was too much for the alien government. And when the people suffered from the ravages of the cyclone, the raids by the combined forces of the army and the police continued.(153) There was a set-back in Kanthi after December 1942.
The Tamralipta Jatiya Sarkar (National Government of Tamluk) was set up on 17 December to resist the marauders including dacoits, arrange for relief and rehabilitation of cyclone-affected people, preserve law and order and administer justice. Biplabi, a journal they had been bringing out, became the organ of the Jatiya Sarkar. Vidyut Bahini, the national militia, had been formed earlier.
The Jatiya Sarkar decided to eliminate local informers after careful and systematic investigation. It had to fight the alien government as well as local landlords, rich landowners and unscrupulous merchants whom they had to force to unearth their hoarded stocks of food and whose profiteering at the cost of the lives of people they had to curb. The requisitioned stocks were distributed among the people and the consumption per capita was rationed. Their actions came to be openly condemned by `votaries of non-violence'. To quote Hitesranjan Sanyal,
"As a matter of fact, the Quit India Movement of Tamluk and Kanthi had outgrown the Congress and for that matter all other political parties. The veterans of the past satyagrahas had submitted to the newly emerging forces which represented the mood and aspirations of the common people."(154)
The Jatiya Sarkar functioned successfully until the end of August 1944. On 14 August 1944, Richard Casey, Governor of Bengal, reported to the Viceroy that the government's position in Tamluk was "still difficult", that there had been further "deterioration" and the situation was "clearly intolerable".(155)
But the rebellion that the forces of the alien raj could not defeat, was killed by Gandhi's injunctions about non-violence and his denunciations of secrecy and "sabotage activities". He personally toured the area and at the end of August 1944, the leaders of the struggle decided to call it off from 1 September, disband the Jatiya Sarkar and the militia and suspend the publication of Biplabi.
In the Rampurhat sub-division of the Birbhum district in Bengal also, the people rose up in a death-defying struggle in 1942, which led to the collapse of the British administration for some time.
A long-drawn guerrilla struggle heroically resisted the forces of British imperialism in Satara in Western Maharashtra. Guerrilla bands were formed and became active in several districts -- Satara, East Khandesh, Pune, Kolaba, Broach, Belgaum and Surat. It was in Satara which comprised present-day Satara and a major part of present-day Sangli district, the guerrilla struggle continued the longest. In Satara Prati Sarkar, a parallel government, was set up. The struggle was anti-imperialist as well as anti-feudal and anti-caste. The leader thrown up in this struggle was Nana Patil, who had been an activist in social reform movements and in the civil disobedience movement of 1932. They had hardly any links with the Congress or with any other parties like the CSP or the CPI.
The movement started with disrupting communication lines by cutting telegraph wires, burning government buildings, stealing rifles from the armed police and mass marches to capture centres of British power. After mass confrontations which led to the deaths of several people and arrests of about two thousand persons by the end of 1942, the people gradually took to guerrilla warfare. Attacks were launched against enemy agents and informers and `police' and `revenue' departments were set up before the end of 1942. The Prati Sarkar was formally inaugurated in June 1943. By this time nyayadan mandals had begun to function and became real people's courts. Besides the central core of underground activists, there were elected committees of villagers and bands of volunteers -- the Rashtra Seva Dal, the Tufan Dal, etc.
They formed some link with the underground CSP leaders in Bombay but they acted independently. One of the three groups into which the activists divided themselves waged struggle in the eastern part of Satara as well as of Khandesh; another group in the western part and Sholapur; and the third group in Pune district. At Gandhi's call for surrender, about sixty activists were permitted to surrender in 1944. But the large majority ignored Gandhi's injunctions as well as the later instruction of the Working Committee to lay down arms. The activities of the rebels, which harmed the interests of the Brahman landlords and usurers and of the Marwari merchants, were denounced by the Congress Working Committee member, Shankar Rao Deo, as criminal. The guerrilla struggle and the Prati Sarkar survived all the offensives of the British raj as well as the admonitions of Congress leaders until the beginning of 1946 when the Congress and other parties waged the election battle all over India. "It was the elections", observes Gail Omvedt, "which effectively ended the prati sarkar, not British military force".(156)
The Quit India revolt, mainly a peasant rebellion in widely scattered places, revealed the revolutionary potentialities of the Indian people. It showed that the main force of an anti-imperialist, democratic revolution in a country like India is the peasantry. What ensured its defeat was the lack of a revolutionary theory and a well-knit organization.