Chauri Chaura Incident

A small sleepy village named Chauri-Chaura (Gorakhpur district in United Provinces) has found a place in history books due to an incident of violence on February 5, 1922 which was to prompt Gandhi to withdraw the movement. The police here had beaten up the leader of a group of volunteers campaigning against liquor sale and high food prices, and then opened fire on the crowd which had come to protest before the police station. The agitated crowd torched the police station with policemen inside who had taken shelter there; those who tried to flee were hacked to death and thrown back into the fire. Twenty-two policemen were killed in the violence. Gandhi, not happy with the increasingly violent trend of the movement, immediately announced the withdrawal of the movement.

The Congress Working Committee met at Bardoli in February 1922 and resolved to stop all activity that led to

Views

To sound the order of retreat just when public enthusiasm was reaching the boiling point was nothing short of a national calamity. The principal lieutenants of the Mahatma, Deshbandhu Das, Pandit Motilal Nehru and Lala Lajpat Rai, who were all in prison, shared the popular resentment.

—Subhas Chandra Bose

A mass wave of revolutionary unrest in India in 1919 (evident from the labour unrest and strike wave of 1919-20 and peasant protests in UP and Bihar) worked as a kind of popular ground-

swell virtually forcing the leadership to a radical posture. Gandhi

and the Congress bigwigs sensed that a revolutionary mass movement was in the offing. They decided to take over the leadership to keep the movement a ‘controlled’ affair and ‘within safe channels’. The movement was called off just when the masses seemed to be taking the initiative.

—Marxist Interpretation

I would suffer every humiliation, every torture, absolute ostracism and death itself to prevent the movement from becoming violent.

—M.K. Gandhi, in Young India, February 16, 1922

breaking of the law and to get down to constructive work, instead, which was to include popularisation of khadi, national schools, and campaigning for temperance, for Hindu-Muslim unity and against untouchability.

Most of the nationalist leaders including C.R. Das, Motilal Nehru, Subhash Bose, Jawaharlal Nehru, however, expressed their bewilderment at Gandhi’s decision to withdraw the movement.

In March 1922, Gandhi was arrested and sentenced to six years in jail. He made the occasion memorable by a magnificent court speech: “I am here, therefore, to invite and submit cheerfully to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me for what in law is deliberate crime, and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen.”