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Indian Freedom Struggle (1707–1947 A.D.)

Notes • The Government’s failure to arrest Gandhiji for breaking the salt law was by the local level
leaders to impress upon the people that ‘the Government is afraid of persons like ourselves,’
and that since the starting of the, salt Satyagraha the Government ‘has disappeared and
hidden itself somewhere and that Gandhi Government has already been established.’
• There was a massive wave of protest at Gandhiji’s arrest. In Bombay, the crowd that spilled
out into the streets was so large that the police just withdrew. Its ranks were swelled by
thousands of textile and railway workers. Cloth-merchants went on a six-day hartal. There
were clashes and firing in Calcutta and Delhi. But it was in Sholapur, in Maharashtra, that
the response was the fiercest.
• On May 21, with Sarojini Naidu, the first Indian woman to become President of the Congress,
and Imam Saheb, Gandhiji’s comrade of the South African struggle, at the helm, and Gandhiji’s
son, Manilal, in front ranks, a band of 2000 marched towards the police cordon that had
sealed off the Dharasana salt works. As they came close, the police rushed forward with their
steel-tipped lathis and set upon the non-resisting Satyagrahis till they fell down.
• Eastern India became the scene of a new kind of no-tax campaign — refusal to pay the
chowkidara tax. Chowkidars, paid out of the tax levied specially on the villages, were guards
who supplemented the small police force in the rural areas in this region.
• The police did not even spare Vallabhbhai Patel’s eighty-year-old mother, who sat cooking
in her village house in Karamsad; her cooking utensils were kicked about and filled with
kerosene and stone. Vallabhbhai, on his brief sojourns out of jail throughout 1930, continued
to provide encouragement and solace to the hard-pressed peasants of his native land.
• Defiance of forest laws assumed a mass character in Maharashtra, Karnataka and the Central
Provinces, especially in areas with large tribal populations who had been the most seriously
affected by the colonial Government’s restrictions on the use of the forest.
• U.P. was the setting of another kind of movement — a no-revenue, no-rent campaign. The
no-revenue part was a call to the zamindars to refuse to pay revenue to the Government, the
no-rent a call to the tenants not to pay rent to the zamindars.
• The fortnight-long discussions culminated on 5 March 1931 in the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, which
was variously described as a ‘truce’ and a ‘provisional settlement.’
• The Pact was signed by Gandhiji on behalf of the Congress and by Lord Irwin on behalf of
the Government, a procedure that was hardly popular with officialdom as it placed the
Congress on an equal footing with the Government.
• Cripps Mission in April 1942 made it clear that Britain was unwilling to offer an honourable
settlement and a real constitutional advance during the War, and that she was determined to
continue India’s unwilling partnership in the War effort. The empty gesture of the ‘Cripps
offer’ convinced even those Congressmen like Nehru and Gandhiji, who did not want to do
anything to hamper the anti-fascist War effort (and who had played a major role in keeping in
check those who had been spoiling for a fight since 1939), that any further silence would be
tantamount to accepting the right of the British Government to decide India’s fate without any
reference to the wishes of her people. Gandhiji had been as clear as Nehru that he did not want
to hamper the anti-fascist struggle, especially that of the Russian and Chinese people. But by
the spring of 1942 he was becoming increasingly convinced of the inevitability of a struggle.
• In February 1943, a striking new development provided a new burst of political activity. Gandhiji
commenced a fast on 10 February in jail. He declared the fast would last for twenty-one days.
This was his answer to the Government which had been constantly exhorting him to condemn
the violence of the people in the Quit India Movement. Gandhiji not only refused to condemn the
people’s resort to violence but unequivocally held the Government responsible for it.
• The contradictory nature of the reality of 15 August 1947 continues to intrigue historians and
torment people on both sides of the border to this day. A hard-earned, prized freedom was
won after long, glorious years of struggle but a bloody, tragic Partition rent asunder the
fabric of the emerging free nation.

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