The Quit India Movement of 1942: Do or Die and the Final Mass Upsurge

Causes of the Quit India Movement

Failure of the Cripps Mission in 1942

The failure of the Cripps Mission was the immediate cause of the Quit India Movement. In the spring of 1942 the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was persuaded to send Sir Stafford Cripps, one of his ministers, to India to forge a compromise with Gandhi and the Congress. Cripps landed in Delhi on 22 March 1942. His draft declaration offered dominion status, a constituent assembly and the right of the provinces to make separate constitutions, all to take effect only after the war.

The talks broke down when the Congress insisted that, if it was to help Britain defend India from the Axis powers, the Viceroy must first appoint an Indian as the Defence Member of his Executive Council. To the Congress the offer was only a promise for the future, and Gandhi called it "a post-dated cheque on a crashing bank". Cripps went home leaving behind a frustrated and embittered people, who felt that the time had come for a final assault on imperialism.

War, the Japanese Advance and Wartime Distress

The war itself brought the crisis to India's door. Japan had overrun almost the whole of South-East Asia, Singapore fell on 15 February 1942, and in March 1942 Japan reached Rangoon. The threat of an invasion of India was real, and confidence in Britain was low.

Wartime hardship turned this anxiety into anger. The main pressures were these:

• Prices and shortages: The general level of prices doubled, and rice and salt ran short.
• Seizure of boats: Boats were commandeered in Bengal and Odisha.
• Fear of a scorched-earth policy: People feared that Britain would follow a scorched-earth policy in Assam, Bengal and Odisha against a possible Japanese advance.
• Loss of faith in British rule: People withdrew their deposits from banks and post offices, expecting a British collapse.
• Racism in the retreat: During the evacuation from South-East Asia, a "White Road" was kept for European refugees and a "Black Road" for Indian refugees, and the rout by an Asian power shattered white prestige.

Gandhi's Change of Stance and the Demand for British Withdrawal

Gandhi's own position changed between 1939 and 1942. When the war began he had not supported the Congress offer of conditional help, because he could not reconcile himself to endorsing a war, and through 1940 and 1941 the Congress protested through a series of individual satyagrahas. After Cripps left, Gandhi framed a resolution calling for British withdrawal and for non-violent non-cooperation against any Japanese invasion. He now asked for what he called "an orderly British withdrawal" from India.

The leadership had a further aim. It wanted to prepare the people for a possible Japanese invasion, which Britain no longer seemed able to resist. The phrase "Quit India" itself was coined by the socialist leader Yusuf Meherally, and Gandhi approved it.

The Quit India Resolution: Wardha and Gowalia Tank

The Wardha Resolution of 14 July 1942

The Congress Working Committee, meeting at Wardha on 14 July 1942, passed the Quit India resolution, demanding the immediate transfer of power to Indians. It proposed massive civil disobedience if the British did not accept the demand. The resolution then went to the All India Congress Committee (AICC) at Bombay for its approval.

The decision divided the leadership. Jawaharlal Nehru and Maulana Azad were apprehensive about the call, but they backed it and stayed with Gandhi to the end, while Vallabhbhai Patel and Rajendra Prasad supported it openly and enthusiastically. C. Rajagopalachari and Bhulabhai Desai, who favoured recognising the right of the Muslim-majority provinces to secede through plebiscites after independence, resigned from the AICC in July 1942.

The AICC Session at Gowalia Tank, 8 August 1942

The AICC met at the Gowalia Tank Maidan in Bombay, now officially August Kranti Maidan, on 7 August 1942 under the presidentship of Maulana Azad, and its session continued past midnight into the next day. Nehru moved the Quit India resolution, and on 8 August 1942 the AICC endorsed it. The resolution sanctioned "a mass struggle on non-violent lines on the widest possible scale". The meeting resolved to:

• Demand an immediate end to British rule in India.
• Declare the commitment of a free India to defend itself against all types of Fascism and imperialism.
• Form a provisional government of India after the British withdrawal.
• Sanction a civil disobedience movement against British rule.
• Name Gandhi the leader of the struggle.

Gandhi's Instructions and the Mantra of Do or Die

At the Gowalia Tank meeting Gandhi spelt out instructions for each section of society; his arrest the next morning meant they were never formally issued as a programme. They show how far he expected the struggle to reach, and how carefully he limited what each group was asked to do.

Gandhi then gave the struggle its watchword. "Here is a mantra, a short one, that I give you," he said. "You may imprint it on your hearts and let every breath of yours give expression to it. The mantra is 'Do or Die'. We shall either free India or die in the attempt; we shall not live to see the perpetuation of our slavery." In Hindi the call was karo ya maro.

The Arrests of 9 August 1942 and a Leaderless Revolt

The Pre-Dawn Arrests and the Ban on the Congress

The government did not wait for the movement to begin. In the early hours of 9 August 1942, in a single sweep, it arrested all the top leaders of the Congress and took them to unknown destinations. The members of the Congress Working Committee were imprisoned, and the Congress was later banned. Gandhi, Kasturba Gandhi and his secretary Mahadev Desai were interned in the Aga Khan Palace at Pune, where Sarojini Naidu was also held.

The arrests decided the character of the revolt. With the established leaders removed, the younger and more militant workers were left to act on their own initiative, and the element of spontaneity was higher than in any earlier movement. On 9 August Aruna Asaf Ali, until then relatively unknown, presided over the remainder of the AICC session and hoisted the Congress flag at the Gowalia Tank Maidan, and the police fired on the gathering.

The press was silenced as well. Under the Defence of India Act, reports on war-related topics could be censored, and all reports about the Quit India Movement came under it. In August 1942 about 90 newspapers were suppressed.

Spread of the Movement: Strikes, Sabotage and the Underground

Hartals and Strikes in the Towns

In the towns the movement took the form of hartals, strikes and processions, which marched with national songs and slogans. Students went on strike in schools and colleges, joined processions, wrote and distributed illegal news sheets (patrikas) and acted as couriers for the underground. The movement especially energised the young, who in very large numbers left their colleges to go to jail.

Workers struck as well. There were strikes in Ahmedabad, Bombay, Jamshedpur, Ahmednagar and Pune, and in Bangalore the Congress trade union leader K. T. Bhashyam organised strikes by about 30,000 workers.

Attacks on Railways, Telegraphs and Police Stations

In the countryside the revolt struck at the symbols of authority. Crowds hoisted national flags on public buildings, blew up bridges, removed railway tracks and cut telegraph lines. This activity was most intense in the eastern United Provinces and Bihar, and Bihar saw the greatest violence of all.

The damage in the first six weeks was enormous. Between 9 August and 21 September 1942, crowds attacked 550 post offices and 250 railway stations, damaged many rail lines, destroyed 70 police stations and burned or damaged 85 other government buildings. There were about 2,500 instances of telegraph wires being cut. The government deployed 57 battalions of British troops to restore order, troops it needed for the war, and the construction of airfields was delayed by four to six weeks.

In rural west Bengal the revolt drew on the peasants' resentment of the new war taxes and the forced export of rice. Open resistance went on there from 1942 until the great famine of 1943 weakened it, though the Tamluk government survived until 1944.

The Underground Network

Once its leaders were in jail, the movement was kept going by an underground network. It was run by Socialists, Forward Bloc members, Gandhian ashram workers, revolutionaries and local groups in Bombay, Pune, Satara, Baroda and other parts of Gujarat, Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra, the United Provinces, Bihar and Delhi. Its purpose was to keep up popular morale by continuing to provide a line of command and guidance, and to distribute arms and ammunition.

The network depended on quiet help from many quarters. Businessmen gave donations, shelter and material help; students acted as couriers; villagers refused information to the authorities; pilots and train drivers delivered bombs and other material; and government officials, police among them, passed secret information to the activists.

Leaders of the Underground and the Secret Congress Radio

Jayaprakash Narayan, Ram Manohar Lohia and the Socialist Underground

Socialist members of the Congress were particularly active in the underground resistance. Jayaprakash Narayan, the founder general secretary of the Congress Socialist Party, became a hero of the 1942 movement. He and six companions, among them Yogendra Shukla and Suraj Narayan Singh, scaled the wall of the Hazaribagh Central Jail to start an underground movement. Narayan was ill, and Yogendra Shukla carried him on his shoulders to Gaya, a distance of about 124 km. Narayan went on to assemble a guerrilla force.

Ram Manohar Lohia became an important leader after the arrest of Gandhi and Nehru. He helped the Secret Congress Radio that Usha Mehta ran in Bombay and backed a similar station in Calcutta, to carry information to the people and sustain a leaderless movement. With Aruna Asaf Ali he also edited Inquilab, a monthly magazine of the Congress Party. Lohia was captured in 1944 and imprisoned in the Lahore Fort, and he was released only on 11 April 1946.

Usha Mehta and the Secret Congress Radio

Usha Mehta, a Gandhian who had given up her law studies to join the movement, was 22 in 1942. On 14 August that year she and some close associates began the Secret Congress Radio, a clandestine station in Bombay. The first words it broadcast, in her voice, were "This is the Congress radio calling on 42.34 meters from somewhere in India."

The radio carried uncensored news and recorded messages from Gandhi and other leaders, and it kept the leaders of the movement in touch with the public. Her associates included Vithalbhai Jhaveri, Chandrakant Jhaveri, Babubhai Thakkar and Nanka Motwani, owner of Chicago Radio, who supplied equipment and technicians; Lohia, Achyut Patwardhan and Purushottam Trikamdas also helped. To elude the police the station moved almost daily, but on 12 November 1942 the police found it, after an Indian technician betrayed the group. The radio had worked for only three months, and Usha Mehta was sentenced to four years' imprisonment.

Aruna Asaf Ali and the Other Organisers of the Underground

Aruna Asaf Ali played an important role in the underground. After hoisting the flag at Gowalia Tank she went underground for nearly four years, edited underground bulletins and helped coordinate secret resistance, although she was declared a dangerous outlaw. Her property was seized and sold, and the government announced a reward of ₹5,000 for her capture. She came out of hiding only in 1946, after the warrant against her was withdrawn, and she was dubbed the Queen of the 1942 movement.

Many other organisers worked in the same network, often in their own regions.

Parallel Governments During the Quit India Movement

Ballia and Tamluk: Liberated Districts in the East

In a few places the revolt replaced British rule, for a time, with a government of its own. These parallel governments took over the administration of their areas, and they showed how thin British control of the countryside had become.

Ballia, in the eastern United Provinces, was freed for the shortest time. Chittu Pandey, who called himself a Gandhian and was known as the Sher-e-Ballia (Lion of Ballia), became the first head of a popular government when the people declared independence for Ballia on 20 August 1942. The crowd had forced the release of the Congress leaders held in Ballia jail, and seven of the district's ten police stations were in the hands of the freedom fighters, but within a week soldiers marched in and the leaders had to flee.

The Tamralipta Jatiya Sarkar (Tamluk National Government) lasted far longer. Satish Chandra Samanta founded it on 17 December 1942 in the Tamluk and Contai subdivisions of Medinipur (Midnapore) in Bengal, and Sushil Kumar Dhara and Ajoy Mukherjee were among its leaders. Its armed militia, the Bidyut Bahini, was commanded by Dhara. The Jatiya Sarkar set up its own police stations, courts and revenue collection, undertook cyclone relief, sanctioned grants to schools and supplied paddy from the rich to the poor. It existed for almost two years and was disbanded in 1944 at Gandhi's request.

The Satara Prati Sarkar in the West

The longest-lasting parallel government grew up in Satara district in Maharashtra. In 1943 some of the younger leaders there set up a parallel government, the Prati Sarkar, with volunteer corps (seba dals) and village units (tufan dals). Its leader was Nana Patil, known as Krantisinha, and Y. B. Chavan was among its organisers.

The Satara government ran people's courts and organised constructive work. It set up village libraries, campaigned for prohibition and organised "Gandhi marriages". Dominated by kunbi peasants and supported by dalits, it functioned until the elections of 1946, despite government repression and, in its later stages, the disapproval of the Congress.

Mass Participation, Women and the Martyrs of 1942

Peasants, Officials and Communities in the Movement

Peasants of all strata were at the heart of the Quit India Movement. Even some zamindars took part. The peasants concentrated their attacks on the symbols of authority, and there was almost no violence against zamindars.

Support came from people who had once been loyal to the Raj. Officials in the lower levels of the police and the administration took part. Muslims gave shelter to underground activists, and there were no communal clashes during the movement. Even some Communists, despite their party's opposition to the movement, felt its irresistible pull. The princely states, by contrast, showed a low-key response, and the upper classes and the bureaucracy remained largely loyal.

Women took an active part, especially school and college girls. Aruna Asaf Ali, Sucheta Kripalani and Usha Mehta led in the underground, while Matangini Hazra in Bengal, Kanaklata Barua in Assam and Rama Devi in Odisha were among the many women who joined the movement in their own regions.

Martyrs of 1942: Matangini Hazra, Kanaklata Barua and Others

Matangini Hazra, an elderly peasant widow and a staunch Gandhian fondly called Gandhi buri (old lady Gandhi), became the first Quit India martyr in Medinipur. On 29 September 1942 she led a procession of volunteers to capture the police station at Tamluk. The police fired on the procession and shot her repeatedly, but she kept the national flag aloft and went on chanting "Vande Mataram" until she died.

Assam and Odisha had their martyrs too:

• Kanaklata Barua: At just 17 years old, she was shot dead by the police at Gohpur in Assam on 20 September 1942 while leading a procession to hoist the national flag at the local police station; she is honoured as Birangana, the heroic woman.
• Lakshman Nayak: He led a large tribal population from Koraput in Odisha against the Jeypore zamindari and attacked police stations; he was hanged in Berhampur Jail on 29 March 1943 for allegedly murdering a forest guard.

British Repression of the 1942 Revolt

Firing, Collective Fines, Flogging and Mass Arrests

The British met the movement with the full force of a wartime state. Martial law was not applied, but crowds were lathi-charged, tear-gassed and fired upon. The military took over many cities, the police and the secret service reigned supreme, rebellious villages were fined heavily, and mass flogging was carried out in many villages.

More people were jailed in Quit India than in any earlier Gandhian campaign. During the Quit India Movement of 1942 to 1945, over one lakh freedom fighters were imprisoned and nearly 10,000 were killed. In the earlier campaigns some 40,000 had been jailed in the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920 to 1922, over 60,000 in the Salt Satyagraha of 1930, which opened the Civil Disobedience Movement, and another 40,000 in that movement's later phase, from 1931 to 1934.

Linlithgow's Verdict: The Most Serious Rebellion Since 1857

The Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, knew how close the government had come to losing control. In a telegram to Churchill on 31 August 1942 he wrote: "I am engaged here in meeting 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." He added that mob violence remained rampant over large tracts of the countryside.

The words carried weight because the Viceroy himself wrote them. Linlithgow had declared India at war with Germany in September 1939 without consulting Indian politicians, and three years later he was admitting, in private, that his government had kept the scale of the revolt hidden.

Positions of Other Parties and Groups in 1942

The Muslim League, the Hindu Mahasabha, the Communists and the Princes

Several political groups opposed the Quit India Movement or stayed out of it.

The Muslim League gained most from the Congress's years in jail. The Cripps offer had conceded that provinces could opt out of a future union, which strengthened Jinnah's hand. The League supported the war effort, and by staying in the provincial ministries and legislatures it let the British go on administering India with its cooperation.

While the Congress leaders languished in jail, Jinnah and his colleagues worked patiently at expanding their influence. It was in these years that the League began to make a mark in the Punjab and Sind, provinces where it had previously had scarcely any presence, and it observed Pakistan Day on 23 March 1943. Its growing strength gave the demand for Pakistan new weight in the years that followed.

Gandhi in Jail: The Fast of 1943 and the Release of 1944

Mahadev Desai's Death and the 21-Day Fast of 1943

Gandhi's imprisonment in the Aga Khan Palace began with a personal loss. His secretary Mahadev Desai, who had kept a diary of his life with Gandhi since 1917, died of a heart attack in the palace on the morning of 15 August 1942.

In February 1943 Gandhi began a 21-day fast. It was a protest against the government's actions against Indians involved in the movement. The popular response at home and abroad was immediate and overwhelming. Hartals, demonstrations and strikes were organised, and three members of the Viceroy's Executive Council resigned. The fast raised public morale, heightened anti-British feeling and gave the people an opportunity for political activity.

The fast also exposed the government's high-handedness, and Gandhi got the better of his opponents by surviving it.

Kasturba's Death, Gandhi's Release and the C. R. Formula

Kasturba Gandhi, imprisoned with her husband, suffered two heart attacks in January 1944. She died in the Aga Khan Palace on 22 February 1944, at the age of 74, and she and Mahadev Desai have their samadhis in the palace grounds.

Gandhi was released because of his failing health, with the end of the war in sight. NCERT places his release in June 1944, while other accounts give 6 May 1944. The other Congress leaders remained in jail until June 1945.

After his release Gandhi tried to break the deadlock with the Muslim League. In March 1944 C. Rajagopalachari had proposed a formula: The League would support independence and cooperate in an interim government, and after the war the Muslim-majority areas would decide by plebiscite whether to form a separate state, with a common centre for defence, commerce and communications in case of partition. Gandhi offered the C. R. formula as his proposal in talks with Jinnah in September 1944. Jinnah rejected it because he wanted the Congress to accept the two-nation theory, and the talks failed after two weeks of negotiations.

Significance and Assessment of the Quit India Movement

Results: What the Movement Achieved

The Quit India Movement did not end British rule at once, but it changed what the national movement would accept. Its main results were these:

• Independence on the immediate agenda: The movement placed the demand for independence on the immediate agenda of the national movement; after Quit India there could be no retreat.
• A Raj that could not last: The British came to realise that India was ungovernable in the long run, and the question for the post-war years became how to leave.
• Loyalty eroded: The Raj could no longer count on its own lower officials and police.
• Nationalism in the villages: The main storm centres, the eastern United Provinces, Bihar, Medinipur, Maharashtra and Karnataka, showed how deep nationalism had reached into rural India.
• A united Congress: One of the movement's important achievements was that the Congress stayed united through the years of repression that followed.

The common people displayed unparalleled heroism and militancy in this struggle, though the repression they faced was the most brutal ever used against the national movement, and they resisted in the most adverse conditions it had known. Quit India stayed in popular memory as perhaps the most widespread popular movement against the British Raj.

Subhas Chandra Bose remarked that a "new chapter in Indian freedom struggle began with the Quit India Movement", and the outbreak of the movement strengthened the Indian National Army, whose first division was formed in September 1942 with 16,300 men.

Limits and Criticism of the Movement

The movement also had clear limits. It failed in its immediate aim, for the British did not withdraw during the war, and it was suppressed, though only after more than a year. At the national level the lack of leadership limited its ability to galvanise rebellion, so the revolt remained strong in some regions and weak in others.

Much of the revolt also departed from Gandhi's method. The resolution had called for a non-violent mass struggle, but sabotage, attacks on police stations and the armed militia of Tamluk went far beyond it. The rebels of Medinipur were inspired less by Gandhi's ahimsa than by his precept "Do or Die", which their underground literature took as its motto. In a 1944 issue of Inquilab, Aruna Asaf Ali urged the youth to forget futile discussions about violence and non-violence and join the revolution.

The years in jail also cost the Congress ground. The Muslim League used them to build its strength, and when Gandhi came out in 1944 his talks with Jinnah broke down.

Sources

• NCERT: Themes in Indian History Book 3, Class 12, Chapter 11, Mahatma Gandhi and the Nationalist Movement (current edition, reprint 2026‑27)
• NCERT: Themes in Indian History Book 3, Class 12, Chapter 15, Framing the Constitution (current edition, reprint 2026‑27)
• NCERT: Exploring Society: India and Beyond Book 2, Class 8, Chapter 2, India's Long Road to Independence (current edition)
• NCERT: India and the Contemporary World II, Class 10, Chapter 2, Nationalism in India (current edition, reprint 2026‑27)
• NCERT: India and the Contemporary World II, Class 10, Chapter 5, Print Culture and the Modern World (current edition, reprint 2026‑27)
• NCERT: Politics in India since Independence, Class 12, Chapter 6, The Crisis of Democratic Order (current edition, reprint 2026‑27)
• Wikipedia: Quit India Movement
• Wikipedia: Cripps Mission
• Wikipedia: Gowalia Tank
• Wikipedia: Mahatma Gandhi
• Wikipedia: Aga Khan Palace
• Wikipedia: Kasturba Gandhi
• Wikipedia: Mahadev Desai
• Wikipedia: Aruna Asaf Ali
• Wikipedia: Usha Mehta
• Wikipedia: Jayaprakash Narayan
• Wikipedia: Ram Manohar Lohia
• Wikipedia: Biju Patnaik
• Wikipedia: Achyut Patwardhan
• Wikipedia: Sucheta Kripalani
• Wikipedia: Yusuf Meherally
• Wikipedia: Chittu Pandey
• Wikipedia: Tamralipta Jatiya Sarkar
• Wikipedia: Matangini Hazra
• Wikipedia: Laxman Nayak
• Wikipedia: Kanaklata Barua
• Wikipedia: C. R. formula
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• Government of Maharashtra (Mumbai City district): History
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