fascists, and was against an anti-British move that might in the end lead
to a fascist victory. But short of arguing that British imperialism was
better than Japanese imperialism, Nehru could no longer insist that some
sort of agreement with the government should be the goal. After the
failure of the Cripps Mission this position was not tenable. Cripps’ reliance
on Nehru for the success of his mission had irritated Nehru and placed
him in a false position. ‘I made it perfectly plain to him [Cripps],’ Nehru
was to write later, ‘that there were limits beyond which I could not carry
the Congress and there were limits beyond which the Congress could
not carry the people.’^18 Perhaps Nehru’s closeness to Cripps and to the
Labour Party had led him to believe that Indian independence under a
Labour government would be a reality, but for this to happen Britain had
to end the war on the winning side, and India had to remain British. At
any rate, Nehru’s side lost the argument; the Congress decided to launch
the Quit India Movement, and in the spirit of democratic centralism,
Nehru moved the Quit India resolution himself. The country was waiting
for a signal, it was now argued, and three years of dithering, manoeuvring
and searching for direction in the hope of some sort of British gesture had
come to nothing. On August 8, 1942, the Congress announced that the
British were being told to quit India immediately.
Through July and early August 1942 the internal debates of the
Congress had been followed with great anxiety and interest by the British.
The moment the call to Quit India had been announced, the govern-
ment acted swiftly. The entire top-level leadership of the Congress was
arrested. But if this was intended to retard a potential anti-government
movement, it did not work. The government seems to have had more faith
in the Congress’s ability to command and control the masses than did the
Congress itself: the Congress leadership had fully expected to be arrested,
and to be reduced to following events through the limited information
that would be available to them in prison. Uncharacteristically, Gandhi’s
call for popular action did not make the usual appeal to non-violence: the
movement, once begun, must not be stopped, and could not be stopped;
people would have to make judgements for themselves; this was a time to
‘do or die’.^19
The resultant upsurge of popular anger took the British by surprise.
From August to September 1942, different local initiatives and circums-
tances and divergent goals merged and coalesced into popular violence and
unrest. Much of this was unorganised activity – there was a large-scale116 THE END OF THE RAJ