Gandhian mass movements in depth (NCM, CDM, QIM)
An in-depth comparative study of the three Gandhian mass movements—Non-Cooperation, Civil Disobedience and Quit India—their triggers, programmes and outcomes.
The Non-Cooperation Movement (1920-22)
The Non-Cooperation Movement (NCM) was the first all-India mass agitation under Gandhi's leadership, formally adopted by the Indian National Congress at the Nagpur Session of December 1920. Its immediate triggers were threefold: the Rowlatt Act (1919), the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 13 April 1919 and the publication of the Hunter Committee Report, and the wrong done to the Ottoman Caliph after the First World War, which animated the Khilafat Movement led by the Ali Brothers (Shaukat and Muhammad Ali). Gandhi fused the Khilafat and Swaraj questions to forge Hindu-Muslim unity, a high point of communal cooperation rarely matched again.
The constructive and negative programme
The NCM had a twin character. The negative programme called for the surrender of titles and honours, boycott of legislatures, courts, schools, foreign cloth and the proposed visit of the Prince of Wales (boycotted on 17 November 1921). The constructive programme promoted national schools (Jamia Millia Islamia, Kashi Vidyapith and Gujarat Vidyapith were founded), khadi and the charkha, panchayats and Hindu-Muslim unity and the removal of untouchability. Motilal Nehru, C.R. Das and others gave up lucrative legal practice. The Tilak Swaraj Fund crossed one crore rupees.
Chauri Chaura and withdrawal
Gandhi had promised Swaraj within a year. As the movement radicalised, an agitated crowd at Chauri Chaura (Gorakhpur district, United Provinces) burned a police station killing 22 policemen on 5 February 1922. Gandhi, holding non-violence inviolable, persuaded the Congress Working Committee at Bardoli (12 February 1922) to suspend the movement. He was arrested in March 1922, tried for sedition under Section 124A IPC and sentenced to six years (the famous 'Great Trial' before Judge Broomfield). The abrupt withdrawal disillusioned younger leaders like Subhas Chandra Bose and Jawaharlal Nehru, and the collapse of Khilafat after Mustafa Kemal abolished the Caliphate in 1924 ended the unique Hindu-Muslim front. The Swaraj Party (Das and Motilal Nehru, 1923) emerged to contest councils in the vacuum left by withdrawal.