Non-Cooperation Movement

Background

Post-war grievances converged to produce the movement. The Rowlatt Act of 1919 extended wartime emergency powers allowing detention without trial, provoking widespread protest across northern India, organised in part by Gandhi under an early, more localised satyagraha campaign; the response to that protest culminated in the Jallianwala Bagh massacre at Amritsar in April 1919, in which troops under Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer fired without warning on an unarmed crowd gathered for a public meeting, killing a large number of people, commonly estimated in the hundreds though figures are disputed, an event that discredited claims of British trusteeship for many Indians and was condemned even by some British officials once the Hunter Committee investigated it. Simultaneously, the Khilafat Movement mobilised Indian Muslims in defence of the Ottoman Caliphate, whose territorial and religious authority was threatened by the post-war peace settlement, giving Gandhi an opening to weld Hindu and Muslim political energy into a single campaign under Congress leadership on the understanding that Congress would support Khilafat demands in exchange for Muslim participation in the broader nationalist struggle. The Montagu-Chelmsford reforms of 1919, which introduced limited provincial self-government (dyarchy) while keeping key departments under British control, were widely judged inadequate to nationalist demands and did little to offset the anger generated by the Rowlatt Act and Amritsar.

Programme and launch

Gandhi launched Non-Cooperation on 1 August 1920, the day Tilak died. Its programme called for the surrender of British titles and honours, boycott of government schools, colleges, courts and legislative councils, boycott of foreign cloth in favour of hand-spun khadi, and eventual non-payment of taxes, all conducted under a discipline of strict nonviolence, or satyagraha, which Gandhi regarded as inseparable from the campaign's legitimacy. The Indian National Congress formally endorsed the programme at a special session in Calcutta in September 1920 and confirmed it, alongside a revised constitution aimed at converting Congress into a mass organisation with provincial linguistic committees, at its regular session in Nagpur that December, where the goal of swaraj (self-rule) by legitimate and peaceful means was adopted.

Course of the movement

Participation spread rapidly and drew in groups previously outside organised nationalist politics: students left government-affiliated institutions, lawyers including C. R. Das and Motilal Nehru gave up practice, and foreign cloth was burned in public bonfires. Jawaharlal Nehru, then a younger Congress figure, was among those who threw themselves into the campaign and were jailed for it. The Ali brothers, Mohammad Ali and Shaukat Ali, led parallel Khilafat agitation, producing a period of unusually close Hindu-Muslim political cooperation. The movement was the first Congress campaign to draw substantial peasant and artisan participation, though local outbreaks of unrest sometimes exceeded the discipline Gandhi demanded.

Chauri Chaura and suspension

On 4 February 1922, a demonstration at Chauri Chaura in the United Provinces turned violent when a crowd set fire to a police station, killing a number of policemen trapped inside, commonly cited as around twenty-two. Gandhi, holding nonviolence as a non-negotiable precondition for the campaign, suspended Non-Cooperation days later, over the objections of colleagues who considered a national movement's momentum too valuable to abandon over a local incident. Gandhi was arrested in March 1922, tried for sedition, and sentenced to six years' imprisonment, of which he served roughly two.

Consequences

The abrupt suspension produced disillusionment among younger and more militant nationalists, some of whom, in the following years, turned toward the revolutionary and armed-resistance strand of the independence movement associated with groups such as the Hindustan Republican Association. It also contributed to a period of drift within Congress and to the fraying, over the following years, of the Khilafat alliance, as the movement's original grievance lost force once the Ottoman Caliphate was abolished by the new Turkish republic in 1924. Motilal Nehru and C. R. Das subsequently formed the Swaraj Party to contest and obstruct legislative councils from within, a tactical departure from strict boycott that split Congress opinion between "no-changers," who wished to continue constructive, grassroots work outside the councils, and "pro-changers" who favoured council entry. Historians differ on whether Gandhi's decision was principled discipline that preserved the moral authority of the freedom movement and avoided a slide into indiscriminate violence, or a premature retreat that squandered genuine revolutionary momentum at a moment when British authority in parts of the country was visibly strained; both readings persist in assessments of the movement, which nonetheless is generally credited with transforming Congress from an elite, urban debating body into a mass political organisation for the first time.