1942

On 9 August 1942 the entire Congress leadership was jailed before dawn. What followed was a leaderless rising in the districts: a seventy-one-year-old woman holding a flag in Tamluk, a seventeen-year-old in Gohpur, a secret radio in Bombay, and a parallel government that lasted two years.

Lessons in this chapter

• Do or Die — The resolution of 8 August 1942, the arrests before dawn on the 9th, and how a rebellion with no leaders left spread through Bengal, Assam, Odisha and Bombay
• The Flag Did Not Fall — Matangini Hazra walked into police fire at Tamluk on 29 September 1942, at seventy-one, and the flag in her hands stayed up.
• Gohpur, Seventeen — A girl of seventeen with three years of schooling walked at the head of an unarmed procession to put a flag on a police station, and did not turn back when the officer raised his hand
• Sarupathar — The Santi Sena man who argued against cutting the railway, and was hanged in June 1943 for the derailment he had not carried out
• Mathili, August 1942 — A thousand tribal cultivators marched on the Mathili police station on 21 August 1942, five were shot, and Lakshman Naik was hanged for a killing the police almost certainly committed.
• This Is the Congress Radio — The secret Congress Radio, 42.34 metres, from somewhere in India: eleven weeks in 1942 and the four years they cost
• The Tamluk National Government — The parallel government that ran courts, cyclone relief and an army in Midnapore for twenty-one months, and then shut itself down when Gandhi asked
• Sukkur, 21 January 1943 — The night on the track outside Sukkur, the sentence a military administrator changed, and the four names a nineteen-year-old took to the gallows
• The Prati Sarkar of Satara — The parallel government that ran village courts, grain and an army across some six hundred villages of Satara, from 1943 until it wound itself down in 1946

Back to Kranti Veer: From Chittagong to the Navy (1930-1947)