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Unit 10: National Movements and Indian Independence

• The Tilak Swaraj Fund was oversubscribed, exceeding the target of rupees one crore. Charkhas Notes
were popularized on a wide scale and khadi became the uniform of the national movement.
There was a complaint at a students meeting Gandhiji addressed in Madurai that khadi was
too costly. Gandhiji retorted that the answer lay in wearing less clothes and, from that day,
discarded his dhoti and kurta in favour of a langot. For the rest of his life, he remained a ‘half-
naked fakir.’
• The next dramatic event was the visit of the Prince of Wales which began on 17 November,
1921. The day the Prince landed in Bombay was observed as a day of hartal all over the
country.
• The Prince of Wales was greeted with empty streets and downed shutters wherever he went.
Emboldened by their successful defiance of the Government, non-cooperators became more
and more aggressive. The Congress Volunteer Corps emerged as a powerful parallel police,
and the sight of its members marching in formation and dressed in uniform was hardly one
that warmed the Government’s heart.
• In May 1921, it had tried, through the Gandhi-Reading talks, to persuade Gandhiji to ask the
Ali brothers to withdraw from their speeches those passages that contained suggestions of
violence; this was an attempt to drive a wedge between the Khilafat leaders and Gandhiji,
but it failed.
• Its fate was decided by the action of members of a Congress and Khilafat procession in
Chauri Chaura in Gorakhpur district of U.P. on 5 February 1922. Irritated by the behaviour
of some policemen, a section of the crowd attacked them. The police opened fire. At this, the
entire procession attacked the police and when the latter hid inside the police station, set fire
to the building. Policemen who tried to escape were hacked to pieces and thrown into the
fire. In all twenty-two policemen were done to death. On hearing of the incident, Gandhiji
decided to withdraw the movement. He also persuaded the Congress Working Committee to
ratify his decision and thus, on 12 February 1922, the Non-Cooperation Movement came to
an end.
• The Lahore Congress of 1929 had authorized the Working Committee to launch a programme
of civil disobedience including non-payment of taxes. It had also called upon all members of
legislatures to resign their seats.
• Gandhiji, along with a band of seventy-eight members of the Sabarmati Ashram, among
whom were men belonging to almost every region and religion of India, was to march from
his headquarters in Ahmedabad through the villages of Gujarat for 240 miles. On reaching
the coast at Dandi, he would break the salt laws by collecting salt from the beach. The
deceptively innocuous move was to prove devastatingly effective.
• Gandhiji began his march, staff in hand, at the head of his dedicated band, there was something
in the image that deeply stirred the imagination of the people. News of his progress, of his
speeches, of the teeming crowds that greeted and followed the marchers, of the long road.
• 300 village officials in Gujarat who resigned their posts in answer to his appeal, was ‘carried
day after day by newspapers to readers across the country and broadcast live by thousands
of Congress workers to eager listeners. By the time Gandhiji reached Dandi, he had a whole
nation, aroused and expectant, waiting restlessly for the final signal. On 6 April 1930, by
picking up a handful of salt, Gandhiji inaugurated the Civil Disobedience Movement, a
movement that was to remain unsurpassed in the history of the Indian national movement
for the country-wide mass participation it unleashed.
• Once the way was cleared by Gandhiji’s ritual beginning at Dandi, the defiance of salt laws
started all over the country. In Tamil Nadu, C. Rajagopalachari, led a salt march from
Trichinopoly to Vedaranniyam on the Tanjore coast. By the time he was arrested on 30 April
he had collected enough volunteers to keep the campaign going for quite some time. In
Malabar, K. Kelappan, the hero of the Vaikom Satvagraha, walked from Calicut to Payannur
to break the salt law. A band of Satyagrahis walked all the way from Sylhet in Assam to
Noakhali on the Bengal Coast to make salt.

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