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Unit 10: National Movements and Indian Independence

the Quit India resolution, instructions for arrests and suppression had gone out to the provinces. Notes
The sudden attack by the Government produced an instantaneous reaction among the people. In
Bombay, as soon as the news of arrests spread, lakhs of people flocked to Gowalia Tank where a
mass meeting had been scheduled and there were clashes with the authorities. There were similar
disturbances on 9 August in Ahmedabad and Poona. On the 10th, Delhi and many towns in U.P.
and Bihar, including Kanpur, Allahabad, Varanasi and Patna followed suit with hartals, public
demonstrations and processions in defiance of the law. The Government responded by gagging
the press. The National Herald and Harijan ceased publication for the entire duration of the struggle,
others for shorter periods.
Meanwhile, many provincial and local level leaders who had evaded arrest returned to their
homes through devious routes and set about organizing resistance. As the news spread further in
the rural areas, the villagers joined the townsmen in recording their protest. For the first six or
seven weeks after 9 August, there was a tremendous mass upsurge all over the country. People
devised a variety of ways of expressing their anger. In some places, huge crowds attacked police
stations, post offices, kutcheries (courts), railway stations and other symbols of Government authority.
National flags were forcibly hoisted on public buildings in defiance of the police. At other places,
groups of satyagrahis offered arrest in tehsil or district headquarters. Crowds of villagers, often
numbering a few hundreds or even a couple of thousand, physically removed railway tracks.
Elsewhere, small groups of individuals blew up bridges and removed tracks, and cut telephone
and telegraph wires. Students went on strike in schools and colleges all over the country and
busied themselves taking out processions, writing and distributing illegal news-sheets: hundreds
of these ‘patrikas’ came out all over the country. They also became couriers for the emerging
underground networks. Workers too struck work: in Ahmedabad, the mills were closed for three
and a half months, workers in Bombay stayed away from work for over a week following the 9
August arrests, in Jamshedpur there was a strike for thirteen days and workers in Ahmednagar
and Poona were active for several months.
Atmosphere of Revolution: The reaction to the arrests was most intense in Bihar and Eastern U.P.,
where the movement attained the proportions of a rebellion. From about the middle of August,
the news reached the rural areas through students and other political activists who fanned out
from the towns. Students of the Banaras Hindu University decided to go to the villages to spread
the message of Quit India. They raised slogans of ‘Thana jalao’ (Burn the police station), ‘Station
phoonk do’ (Burn the railway stations) ‘Angrez bhag gaya’ (Englishmen have fled). They hijacked
trains and draped them in national flags. In rural areas, the pattern was of large crowds of
peasants descending on the nearest tehsil or district town and attacking all symbols of government
authority. There was government firing and repression, but the rebellion only gathered in
momentum. For two weeks, Tirhut division in Bihar was totally cut off from the rest of the country
and no Government authority existed. Control was lost over Patna for two days after firing at the
Secretariat. Eighty percent of the police stations were captured or temporarily evacuated in ten
districts of North and Central Bihar. There were also physical attacks on Europeans. At Fatwa,
near Patna, two R.A.F. officers were killed by a crowd at the railway station and their bodies
paraded through the town. In Monghyr, the crews of two R.A.F. planes that crashed at Pasraha on
18 August and Ruihar on 30 August were killed by villagers. Particularly important centres of
resistance in this phase were Azamgarh, Ballia and Gorakhpur in East U.P. and Gaya, Bhagalpur,
Saran, Purnea, Shahabad, Muzaffarpur and Champaran in Bihar.
According to official estimates, in the first week after the arrests of the leaders, 250 railway
stations were damaged or destroyed, and over 500 post offices and 150 police stations were
attacked. The movement of trains in Bihar and Eastern U.P., was disrupted for many weeks. In
Karnataka alone, there were 1600 incidents of cutting of telegraph lines, and twenty-six railway
stations and thirty-two post offices were attacked. Unarmed crowds faced police and military
firing on 538 occasions and they were also machine-gunned by low-flying aircraft. Repression also
took the form of taking hostages from the villages, imposing collective fines running to a total of
Rs 90 lakhs (which were often realized on the spot by looting the people’s belongings), whipping
of suspects and burning of entire villages whose inhabitants had run away and could not be

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