Forward Bloc. The movement witnessed unprecedented unity of the people and sent a message that the colonial rulers could not ignore. Release of Gandhi Gandhi’s release from prison, on health grounds, on May , led to the revival of the Constructive Programme. Congress committees began activities in its garb and the ban on the Congress imposed in the wake of the Quit India movement was thus overcome.
The the repression can be made out from the fact that as many as battalions were called in as a whole. Aircrafts were used to strafe protesters. The momentum and its intensity was such that Linlithgow, wrote to Churchill, describing the protests as ‘by far the most serious rebellion since , the gravity and extent of which we have so far concealed from the world for reasons of military security.’ Though this phase of the protest, predominantly urban, involving the industrial workers and the students was put down by use of brutal force, the upsurge did not end. It spread in its second phase into the villages.
A sixty-point increase in prices of food-grains recorded between April and August had laid the seeds of resentment. In addition, those leaders of the Congress, particularly the Socialists within, who had managed to escape arrest on August fanned into the countryside where they organised the youth into guerrilla actions. Outbreak of Violence Beginning late September , the movement took the shape of attacks and destruction of communication facilities such as telegraph lines, railway stations and tracks and setting fire to government offices. This spread across the country and was most intense in Eastern United Provinces, Bihar, Maharashtra and in Bengal.
The rebels even set up ‘national governments’ in pockets they liberated from the colonial administration. An instance of this was the ‘Tamluk Jatiya Sarkar’ in the Midnapore district in Bengal that lasted until September . There was a parallel government in Satara. Socialists like Jayaprakash Narayan, Achyut Patwardhan, Asaf Ali, Yusuf Mehraly and Ram Manohar Lohia provided leadership.
Gandhi’s day fast in jail, beginning February , , marked a turning point