ON 8 August, 1942, at Gandhi's behest the Congress Working Committee adopted the famous Quit India resolution calling for “mass struggle on non-violent lines on the widest possible scale”. Anticipating immediate arrest of the Congress leadership, the resolution even asked “every Indian who desires freedom and strives for it ... (to) be his own guide”. Gandhi delivered his celebrated “Do or die” speech and for once even went to the extent of saying “if a general strike becomes a dire necessity, I shall not flinch”, Nehru told the session that “It is Gandhiji's feeling that Japan and Germany will win. Tints feeling unconsciously governs his decision”.

All Congress leaders were arrested and removed by the early morning of August 9. With the British unleashing wholesale repression, almost the entire country exploded in violent protests.

What eventually came to be known as the great Quit India rebellion was thus a largely spontaneous outburst, led in pockets by socialist leaders working underground and local-level Congress activists. Bombay and Calcutta were rocked by continuous strikes. Striking workers clashed with the police in Delhi, and in Patna, control over the city was virtually lost for two days following a major confrontation in front of the Secretariat on 11 August. The Tata steel plant was completely closed down for 13 days from 20 August with the TISCO workers refusing to resume work till a national government was formed. Ahmedabad textile workers were also on strike for no less than three and a half months. As many as 11 B & C Mills workers died in police firing in Madras.

In the second phase of the Quit India Movement the focus shifted to the countryside with students in large numbers fanning out into village India. Communication lines were destroyed on a massive scale and riding on the crest of a powerful peasant upsurge there came into being a number of local “National Governments”, most notably at Tamluk in Midnapur district of Bengal, Satara in Maharashtra and Talcher in Orissa.

The scale and intensity of the upsurge can be assessed from the following official figures. By the end of 1943, 91,836 people had been arrested, 1060 had been killed by police or army firing white 63 policemen died combating the upsurge and 216 defected, almost all of them in Bihar. 208 police outposts, 332 railway stations and 945 post offices had been destroyed or severely damaged and 664 bomb explosions reported, primarily from Bombay.

It must be admitted here that while Gandhi correctly sensed and reflected the restless mood of the masses, the Communist Party found itself completely out of tune. The ban on the party was lifted in July 1942 and in May 1943 the party held its First Congress. But the specific backdrop of the war situation hung so heavily on the party that the First Congress could do little to prepare the party for a really effective intervention. On the working class front, the communists opposed all strikes during this period and Comrade B T Randive presented a “Report on Production” to the First Congress. The report almost mistook colonial India for the socialist USSR and went to the absurd length of making the following paralysing formulation about the role of the working class: “Their (the workers') patriotism and our propaganda must teach them that production is the sacred trust given by the nation, and only by executing that trust in spite of all obstacles that they are able to appeal to the nation for improvement in labour conditions and legitimately demand better standards of pay, fair wages, etc., and that only thus do they become one with the nation”.