Gandhian Mass Movements, the INA and the Road to Partition

Subhas Chandra Bose, after resigning the Congress presidency amid disagreement with Gandhi's leadership and methods, escaped India and organised the Indian National Army (INA/Azad Hind Fauj) from Indian prisoners-of-war and expatriates with Japanese support during the Second World War, leading it (alongside his Azad Hind provisional government) in the failed 1944 Imphal-Kohima campaign against British forces from Japanese-occupied Burma — a militant, externally-allied strand of the freedom struggle running genuinely parallel to, rather than a mere footnote within, Gandhian non-violent mass politics; Left Wing Politics (the Communist Party of India, founded 1925, and the Congress Socialist Party, founded 1934 as an organised left faction within Congress itself under leaders like Jayaprakash Narayan) pushed the movement's economic-programme debate toward land reform, labour rights and, for the CPI specifically, an internationalist Marxist framework often in tension with Congress's own broader nationalist coalition; and the Depressed Class Movement, led chiefly by B.R. Ambedkar, organised independently of (and at points in direct conflict with) mainstream Congress politics around the specific demand for separate political representation and social emancipation for the groups Gandhi himself termed Harijans — the Poona Pact (1932) resolving the Communal Award controversy between Gandhi and Ambedkar over separate electorates for the Depressed Classes is this strand's single most consequential episode.

Communal politics moved from the structural foundation of separate electorates (met in this unit's previous chapter) through a series of hardening steps: the failure of united Hindu-Muslim politics after the mid-1920s (the collapse of the Khilafat-linked unity of Non-Cooperation, and a rising cycle of communal riots); Muhammad Ali Jinnah's political trajectory from an early Congress-League unity advocate (the very architect of the 1916 Lucknow Pact) to the demand for a separate Muslim nation, formalised in the Lahore Resolution (1940, the Muslim League's first explicit call for separate Muslim-majority states); the Second World War's political stalemate (the failed Cripps Mission, the Congress's Quit India imprisonment leaving the League relatively free to organise and consolidate support during the war years); and Direct Action Day (16 August 1946, called by Jinnah after Cabinet Mission plan negotiations broke down, triggering large-scale communal violence in Calcutta and beyond) as the final, decisive slide toward an outcome that had, by 1946-47, become effectively unavoidable — Partition itself and independence arriving together on 15 August 1947, with Pakistan's creation the day before.

The syllabus's own explicit naming of 'Role of Middle Class in National Movement' as a distinct sub-item (alongside Gandhian mass movements, Bose and women's participation) signals that this is not incidental background but an examinable claim in its own right: the same educated, English-speaking, professionally-employed middle class this platform's Unit VIII already traced as an Indian Renaissance product supplied the movement's characteristic leadership profile (lawyers, teachers, journalists disproportionate among Congress leadership at every level) even as the movement itself, especially under Gandhi from the 1920s onward, deliberately worked to broaden its base far beyond this class into the peasantry, labour and, more unevenly, women and the Depressed Classes — a tension between middle-class leadership and genuinely mass social composition that runs through the whole freedom struggle rather than resolving neatly in either direction.