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Unit 10: National Movements and Indian Independence

people’s resort to violence but unequivocally held the Government responsible for it. It was the Notes
‘leonine violence’ of the state which had provoked the people, he said. And it was against this
violence of the state, which included the unwarranted detention of thousands of Congressmen,
that Gandhiji vowed to register his protest, in the only way open to him when in jail, by fasting.
The popular response to the news of the fast was immediate and overwhelming. All over the
country, there were hartals, demonstrations and strikes. Calcutta and Ahmedabad were particularly
active. Prisoners in jails and those outside went on sympathetic fasts. Groups of people secretly
reached Poona to offer satyagraha outside the Aga Khan Palace where Gandhiji was being held in
detention. Public meetings demanded his release and the Government was bombarded with
thousands of letters and telegrams from people from all walks of life — students and youth, men
of trade and commerce, lawyers, ordinary citizens, and labour organizations.

From across the seas, the demand for his release was made by newspapers such as
the Manchester Guardian, New Statesmen, Nation, News Chronicle, Chicago Sun, as well
as by the British Communist Party, the citizens of London and Manchester, the
Women’s International League, the Australian Council of Trade Unions and the
Ceylon State Council. The U.S. Government, too, brought pressure to bear.

A Leaders’ Conference was held in Delhi on 19-20 February and was attended by prominent men,
politicians and public figures. They all demanded Gandhiji’s release. Many of those otherwise
unsympathetic to the Congress felt that the Government was going too far in its obduracy. The
severest blow to the prestige of the Government was the resignation of the three Indian members
of the Viceroy’s Executive Council, M.S. Aney, N.R. Sarkar and H.P. Mody, who had supported
the Government in its suppression of the 1942 movement, but were in no mood to be a party to
Gandhiji’s death.
But the Viceroy and his officials remained unmoved. Guided by Winston Churchill’s statement to
his Cabinet that ‘this our hour of triumph everywhere in the world was not the time to crawl
before a miserable old man who had always been our enemy,’ they arrogantly refused to show
any concern for Indian feeling. The Viceroy contemptuously dismissed the consequences of
Gandhiji’s possible death: ‘Six months unpleasantness, steadily declining in volume, little or nothing
at the end of it.’ He even made it sound as if he welcomed the possibility: ‘India would be far more
reliable as a base for operations. Moreover, the prospect of a settlement will be greatly enhanced
by the disappearance of Gandhi, who had for years torpedoed every attempt at a settlement.’
While an anxious nation appealed for his life, the Government went ahead with finalizing
arrangements for his funeral. Military troops were asked to stand by for any emergency. ‘Generous’
provision was made for a plane to carry his ashes and for a public funeral and a half-day holiday
in offices. But Gandhiji, as always, got the better of his opponents, and refused to oblige by dying.
The fast had done exactly what it had been intented to do. The public morale was raised, the anti-
British feeling heightened, and an opportunity for political activity provided. A symbolic gesture
of resistance had sparked off widespread resistance and exposed the Government’s high-handedness
to the whole world. The moral justification that the Government had been trying to provide for its
brutal suppression of 1942 was denied to it and it was placed clearly in the wrong.
Parallel Government
A significant feature of the Quit India Movement was the emergence of what came to be known as
parallel governments in some parts of the country. The first one was proclaimed in Ballia, in East
U.P., in August 1942 under the leadership of Chittu Pande, who called himself a Gandhian.
Though it succeeded in getting the Collector to hand over power and release all the arrested
Congress leaders, it could not survive for long and when the soldiers marched in, a week after the
parallel government was formed, they found that the leaders had fled.

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