Quit India Movement

Importance

The Quit India Movement (Hindi: भारत छोड़ो आन्दोलन Bharat Chhoṛo Andolan), or the August Movement (August Kranti) was a civil disobedience movement launched in India in August 1942 in response to Mohandas Gandhi's call for immediate independence. Gandhi hoped to bring the British government to the negotiating table. Almost the entire Indian National Congress leadership, and not just at the national level, was put into confinement less than twenty-four hours after Gandhi's speech, and the greater number of the Congress leaders were to spend the rest of World War II in jail.

Description

The 'Quit India' movement was followed, nonetheless, by large-scale violence directed at railway stations, telegraph offices, government buildings, and other emblems and institutions of colonial rule. There were widespread acts of sabotage, and the government held Gandhi responsible for these acts of violence, suggesting that they were a deliberate act of Congress policy. Gandhi resolutely denied these charges, but the deadlock was not to be resolved. It has been suggested by other scholars that though Gandhi himself did not authorize violence, he had grown skeptical of the efficacy of non-violence, and that he had arrived at the point in his life where he was determined to see India attain independence during his lifetime. However attractive this line of reasoning might appear, it has little support in Gandhi's voluminous writings. Others have suggested that the 'Quit India' movement was a failure in that it invited the government to unleash repression, and therefore led to the incarceration of the Congress leadership. Consequently, it has been argued, the Muslim League, which declared its support to the British, was to grow in strength during the war, while the Congress languished. Though the Muslim League failed to secure support even among Muslim voters before the war, elections in 1946 suggested that it had the loyalty of the majority of Muslims in many Muslim-dominant areas. On these lines, then, it is suggested that the 'Pakistan movement' developed when there were no countervailing forces to check it, and that Gandhi played into the hands of both Muslim communalists and British imperialists. The 'Quit India' movement remains, in any event, among the most controversial episodes in Gandhi's life and modern Indian history.