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M AHATMA GANDHI AND THE N ATIONALISTM OVEMENT 303 4. Quit India After the failure of the Cripps Mission, Mahatma Satara, 1943 Gandhi decided to launch his third major movement From the late nineteenth against British rule. This was the “Quit India” century, a non-Brahman campaign, which began in August 1942. Although movement,whichopposed the Gandhiji was jailed at once, younger activists caste system and landlordism, organised strikes and acts of sabotage all over the haddeveloped inMaharashtra. country. Particularly active in the underground This movement established resistance were socialist members of the Congress, links with the national such as Jayaprakash Narayan. In several districts, movement by the 1930s. such as Satara in the west and Medinipur in the In 1943, some of the east, “independent” governments were proclaimed. younger leaders in the Satara district of Maharashtra set up The British responded with much force, yet it took more than a year to suppress the rebellion. a parallel government (prati “Quit India” was genuinely a mass movement, sarkar), with volunteer corps bringing into its ambit hundreds of thousands of (seba dals) and village ordinary Indians. It especially energised the young units (tufan dals ). They ran people’s courts and organised who, in very large numbers, left their colleges to go constructive work. Dominated to jail. However, while the Congress leaders languished in jail, Jinnah and his colleagues in the by kunbi peasants and Muslim League worked patiently at expanding their supported by dalits, the Satara prati sarkar functioned till influence. It was in these years that the League began the elections of 1946, despite to make a mark in the Punjab and Sind, provinces government repression and, where it had previously had scarcely any presence. in the later stages, Congress In June 1944, with the end of the war in sight, Gandhiji was released from prison. Later that year disapproval. Fig. 11.12 Women’s procession in Bombay during the Quit India Movement Reprint 2026-27