India — methods of struggle and the key leaders (History (2028+) HL)

By the 1920s, the Indian National Congress needed a strategy that could turn millions of ordinary people into political actors — not just lawyers and elites.

Mohandas Gandhi supplied it. He called it satyagraha — a method of resisting injustice without violence, built on mass civil disobedience and the moral pressure it created.

Satyagraha in plain terms: Gandhi argued that British rule survived only because millions of Indians cooperated with it — paying taxes, buying British cloth, serving in British courts and schools. If Indians simply withdrew that cooperation, the Raj would have nothing left to rule.

The Non-Cooperation Movement (1920–22) was the first time Congress tried this on a national scale. Gandhi launched it after the horror of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, when British troops killed hundreds of unarmed civilians in Amritsar.

Indians resigned government jobs, returned British honours, boycotted foreign cloth and courts, and boycotted the 1921 visit of the Prince of Wales. Millions joined for the first time — Congress became a genuine mass movement rather than an elite debating society.

Why Gandhi called it off: In February 1922, a mob at Chauri Chaura killed 22 policemen and set fire to a police station. Gandhi was horrified — this broke his rule of strict nonviolence — and he suspended the whole movement, even though it was gathering huge momentum. Congress leaders were stunned; some, like Nehru, felt the moment had been thrown away.

This single decision shows the tension at the heart of Gandhi's method: discipline and moral purity mattered to him as much as short-term political gain, and that made his leadership both powerful and, to some, frustratingly cautious.

Gandhi's most famous act of civil disobedience came in 1930: the Salt March. Under British law, Indians could not make or sell their own salt — they had to buy it taxed from the government, even though salt was freely available from the sea.

Gandhi walked 240 miles from Ahmedabad to the coastal village of Dandi over 24 days, gathering huge crowds and press attention along the way. On 6 April 1930, he picked up a lump of natural salt from the beach — breaking the law in front of the world's cameras.

Why salt worked so well: Gandhi chose salt deliberately. Everyone needed it, rich and poor alike, so the tax touched every Indian household. It let peasants who had never read a Congress pamphlet take direct, understandable action — this is what made the campaign genuinely mass-based rather than just symbolic.

A decade later, the context had transformed. Back in 1939 Britain had declared India at war too — without consulting any Indian leader — which made Congress ministries resign in protest. By 1942, with the failed Cripps Mission offering too little too late, Congress lost patience.

Congress responded with the Quit India Movement in August 1942, demanding immediate British withdrawal under the slogan "Do or Die." This time the British reaction was ferocious: Gandhi, Nehru and the entire Congress leadership were arrested within hours, and the movement exploded into scattered violence, strikes and sabotage that the leaderless masses carried on alone.

A debate to hold in mind: Did Quit India actually weaken British resolve to leave, or did it simply prove Britain could crush any uprising by force? Historians disagree — some see it as the final psychological blow to imperial confidence, others see the INA (next section) as the more direct military shock. This is exactly the kind of "to what extent" argument Paper 3 rewards.

Independence was never won by one man or one method. Four leaders pulled Congress and India in different directions, and their disagreements shaped how — and when — independence actually arrived.

Within Congress, Gandhi was the moral centre — mobilising the masses through satyagraha — while Jawaharlal Nehru was the modernising, socialist-leaning voice who wanted full and immediate independence (Purna Swaraj), industrial planning and a secular, unified India. Nehru admired Gandhi's methods but pushed him toward bolder, more explicitly political goals.

Outside Congress, Muhammad Ali Jinnah led the Muslim League. Jinnah had once worked within Congress for Hindu–Muslim unity, but grew convinced that an independent India dominated by Congress would leave Muslims as a permanent, unprotected minority.

The Two-Nation idea takes shape: By the 1940s Jinnah championed the idea that Hindus and Muslims were two distinct nations who needed separate homelands — the foundation of the demand for Pakistan. His strategy was constitutional and political: negotiation, elections and pressure within the British system, not mass civil disobedience.

The most dramatic break from Gandhi's path came from Subhas Chandra Bose. Once a rising Congress leader (even its president in 1938–39), Bose rejected nonviolence entirely, believing armed struggle was the only realistic way to force Britain out.

After escaping British house arrest in 1941, Bose reached Germany and then Japanese-occupied Asia, where he took command of the Indian National Army (INA) — formed largely from Indian prisoners of war and expatriates in Southeast Asia — and fought alongside Japan against the British in Burma in 1944–45.

Why the INA trials mattered more than the INA's battles: Militarily, the INA failed — Imphal and Kohima were British victories. But when captured INA officers were court-martialled at the Red Fort in Delhi in 1945–46, huge protests and mutinies (including in the Royal Indian Navy) broke out in sympathy across India. Many historians argue this shock — proof that even the British Indian Army's loyalty could not be guaranteed — did more to convince Britain independence was inevitable than any single Congress campaign.