Quit India Movement

The Quit India Movement began when the All India Congress Committee adopted a resolution at Gowalia Tank Maidan, Bombay (later renamed August Kranti Maidan), on 8 August 1942, following the failure of the Cripps Mission earlier that year. Mahatma Gandhi's call to 'Do or Die' (Karo ya Maro) asked every Indian to act as a free citizen from that moment, demanding an immediate and unconditional end to British rule. The British responded within hours: in a pre-dawn operation termed Operation Zero Hour, the entire senior Congress leadership, including Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel, was arrested on 9 August 1942 and the Congress itself was declared unlawful. Rather than ending the movement, this leadership vacuum transformed it into a decentralised, largely underground uprising. Second-tier leaders such as Aruna Asaf Ali (who hoisted the flag at Gowalia Tank Maidan immediately after the arrests), Jayaprakash Narayan (who organised the underground Azad Dasta network after escaping Hazaribagh jail), and Usha Mehta (who ran the clandestine Congress Radio from 27 August 1942 until her arrest that November) kept the movement alive. In several districts this energy produced short-lived parallel governments: Chittu Pandey's National Government in Ballia (August 1942) and, more durably, Krantisinha Nana Patil's Prati Sarkar in Satara, which survived until May 1946. In Bihar, police firing on unarmed students marching to hoist the flag at the Patna Secretariat on 11 August 1942 killed seven students, commemorated today at Patna's Shaheed Smarak.

• 1 Resolution adopted 8 August 1942, Gowalia Tank Maidan (August Kranti Maidan), Bombay
• 2 Slogan: 'Do or Die' (Karo ya Maro)
• 3 Preceded by the failure of the Cripps Mission (March-April 1942)
• 4 Congress leadership arrested 9 August 1942 under 'Operation Zero Hour'
• 5 Key underground leaders: Aruna Asaf Ali, Jayaprakash Narayan, Ram Manohar Lohia, Usha Mehta (Congress Radio)
• 6 Parallel governments: Ballia (Chittu Pandey, Aug 1942) and Satara's Prati Sarkar (Nana Patil, 1943-1946)
• 7 Patna Secretariat firing, 11 August 1942, killed 7 students
• 8 Historian Francis Hutchins' 'Spontaneous Revolution' (1971) argues the movement's post-arrest phase was genuinely decentralised

The 84th anniversary of the movement in 2026 renewed attention to Bihar's role, since Jayaprakash Narayan's underground student mobilisation drew heavily on the networks activated by the Patna Secretariat firing.