Gandhi Civil Disobedience
Author: Lorraine Boissoneault
Smithsonian Magazine
The movement, Gandhi decided, would be called “Quit India” to reflect his main demand: that the United Kingdom leave India voluntarily. In a speech at a meeting of the Congress in Bombay at the beginning of August 1942, Gandhi instructed his fellow leaders that this was the moment to seize power:
“Here is a mantra, a short one, that I give to you. 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. Every true Congressman or woman will join the struggle with inflexible determination not to remain alive to see the country in bondage and slavery.”
...The thought of an unauthorized shift to independence is what so terrified the British. “The intelligence reports the government was getting were equally alarming. The British had at one point even mulled over the possibility of deporting Gandhi to Aden.”
On August 10, India’s Secretary of State Leo Amery, working with the War Cabinet and other British leaders, announced the reason for the arrests of Gandhi and the Congress to the press. Amery said the Indian leaders planned to incite “strikes, not only in industry and commerce, but in the administration and law courts, schools and colleges, the interruption of traffic and public utility services, the cutting of telegraph and telephone wires, the picketing of troops and recruiting stations… The success of the proposed campaign would paralyze not only the ordinary civil administration of India, but her whole war effort.” In short, the movement would have led to dire calamity if the British government had not detained its leaders.
...As historian Paul Greenough writes, “The chief irony of 1942 in India was that the awesome power of the press to inspire united action was unleashed by the British government; the radicalizing text was the composition of Leopold Amery, not Mahatma Gandhi… [the] self-consciously rebellious underground press was never able to duplicate the impact or achieve the degree of mass coordination which Amery’s speech had provoked.” In essence, Amery had provided the blueprints for how to rebel. Civilians attacked railway stations and post offices, fought against police officers and held riots. The police and the British Army in India led a violent crackdown on the rioters, arresting over 100,000 people. Viceroy Lord Linlithgow compared the uprising to the failed Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, when nearly one million Indians and thousands of Europeans were killed. The total civilian deaths after the Quit India protests, however, were closer to 1,000.
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