Underground Activity During The Quit India Movement

The government's sudden attack elicited an immediate response from the public. As soon as word of the arrests reached Bombay, thousands of people flocked to Gowalia Tank, where a mass meeting had been planned, and sparking clashes with police. On the 9th of August, there were similar riots in Ahmedabad and Poona. On the 10th, many towns in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, including Kanpur, Allahabad, Varanasi, and Patna, defied the law with hartals, public demonstrations, and processions. The government retaliated by placing a gag order on the media. 

 

•    The National Herald and Harijan stopped publishing for the duration of the struggle, while others did so for a shorter time. Meanwhile, provincial and local leaders who had managed to elude arrest returned home via devious means and began organising resistance. 

 

•    As word of the protest spread throughout the countryside, villagers joined the townspeople in recording their outrage. There was a tremendous' mass upsurge all over the country for the first six or seven weeks after 9 August. People came up with a variety of ways to express their rage. 

 

•    Huge crowds attacked police stations, post offices, kutcheries (courts), railway stations, and other government symbols in some places. In defiance of the police, national flags were forcibly hoisted on public buildings. In other places, Satyagrahis threatened to arrest people at tehsil or district headquarters.

 

•    Railway tracks were physically removed by crowds of villagers numbering in the hundreds or even thousands. Small groups of people blew up bridges, removed tracks, and cut telephone and telegraph wires in other places. 

 

•    Students went on strike in schools and colleges across the country, occupying themselves with processions, writing and disseminating illegal newssheets: hundreds of these patrikas appeared across the country. 

 

•    They were also used as couriers for the burgeoning underground networks.' Workers were also stuck at work: mills in Ahmedabad were closed for three and a half months, workers in Bombay went on strike for more than a week after the 9 August arrests, workers in Jamshedpur went on strike for thirteen days, and workers in Ahmednagar and Poona were active for several months.

 

•    The outrage over the arrests was greatest in Bihar and Eastern Uttar Pradesh, where the movement grew to the point of rebellion. The news began to reach rural areas around the middle of August, thanks to students and other political activists who fanned out from the cities. 

 

•    Banaras Hindu University students decided to go to the villages to spread the Quit India message. They chanted "Thana jalao" (burn the police station), "Station phoonk do" (burn the railway stations), and "Angrez Bhag Gaya" (Englishmen have fled). 

 

•    Trains were hijacked and draped in national flags. Large crowds of peasants descending on the nearest tehsil or district town and attacking all symbols of government authority was the pattern in rural areas. The government retaliated with firings and repression, but the rebellion grew stronger. 

 

•    Tirhut division in Bihar was cut off from the rest of the country for two weeks, and no government authority existed. After firing at the Secretariat, control of Patna was lost for two days. In ten districts of North and Central Bihar, 80% of police stations were captured or temporarily evacuated. Europeans were also physically attacked. Two R.A.F. officers were killed by a crowd at the railway station in Fatwa, near Patna, and their bodies were paraded through the town. Villagers in Monghyr killed the crews of two R.A.F. planes that crashed at Pasraha on August 18 and Rulhar on August 30. In this phase, Azamgarh, Ballia, and Gorakhpur in East U.P., and Gaya, Bhagalpur, Saran, Purnea, Shahabad, Muzaffarpur, and Champaran in Bihar, were particularly important centres of resistance.

 

•    According to official estimates, 250 railway stations were damaged or destroyed in the first week after the leaders' arrests, as well as over 500 post offices and 150 police stations. Train service in Bihar and Eastern Uttar Pradesh was disrupted for several weeks. There were 1600 incidents of telegraph line cutting in Karnataka alone, with twenty-six railway stations and thirty-two post offices targeted. On 538 occasions, unarmed crowds were fired upon by police and military personnel, and they were also machine-gunned by low-flying aircraft.

 

•    Taking hostages from villages, imposing collective fines of up to Rs 90 lakhs (which were often realised on the spot by looting the people's belongings), whipping suspects, and burning entire villages whose inhabitants had run away and could not be caught were all examples of repression. Over 60,000 people had been arrested by the end of 1942. 

 

•    Under the Defence of India Rules, 26,000 people were convicted and 18,000 were detained. Although martial law had not been declared, the army often did what it wanted without consulting the direct officers, despite working under the orders of the civilian authorities. Under martial law, the repression was as harsh as it could have been.

 

•    Within six or seven weeks, the brutal and all-out repression had succeeded in putting an end to the mass phase of the struggle. Meanwhile, underground networks with prominent members such as Achyut Patwardhan, Aruna Asaf Ali, Ram Manohar Lohia, Sucheta Kripalani, Chootubhai Puranik, Biju Patnaik, R.P. Goenka, and later, after his escape from prison, Jayaprakash Narayan began to emerge. 

 

•    The underground movement's role, according to this leadership, is to maintain popular morale by serving as a line of command and a source of guidance and leadership to activists across the country. 

 

•    They also gathered and distributed cash as well as weapons, such as bombs, arms, and dynamite, to underground groups across the country. They did see their role as directing the precise pattern of activities at the local level, however. 

 

•    Local groups took the initiative in this case. Bombay, Poona, Satara, Baroda, and other parts of Gujarat, Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Delhi were among the places where local underground organisations were active. Congress Socialists were in the lead, but Gandhian ashramites, Forward Bloc members, revolutionary terrorists, and other Congressmen were also involved.

 

•    Although the number of people involved in the underground activity was small, they received a lot of help from a wide range of people. Businessmen generously donated. Sumati Morarjee, who went on to become India's most powerful woman industrialist, for example, assisted Achyut Patwardhan in avoiding detection by loaning him a different car every day from her unsuspecting wealthy friends. Others provided safe havens for underground activists and leaders. 

 

•    Students served as messengers. By refusing to provide information to the police, ordinary villagers assisted. Bombs and other materials were delivered across the country by pilots and train drivers.

 

•    Important information about impending arrests was passed on by government officials, including police officers. One of the three-man high-level official committees formed to track down the Congress underground, according to Achyut Patwardhan, regularly informed him of the committee's activities.

 

•    The underground movement's general pattern of activity was to organise communications disruption by blowing up bridges, cutting telegraph and telephone wires, and derailing trains. A few attacks on government and police officials, as well as police informers, were also reported. 

 

•    Their success in actually disrupting communications may have been limited to being annoying, but they did succeed in keeping the people's spirits up in a situation where open mass activity was impossible due to the state's superior armed might. 

 

•    The Congress Radio, which operated clandestinely from various locations in Bombay city and whose broadcast could be heard as far as Madras, was a very important part of the activity, and considerable success was achieved on this score. This radio was used by Ram Manohar Lohia on a regular basis until November 1942, when it was discovered and confiscated by the police.