Sign up to access the complete lesson and track your progress!
Unlock This CourseIn 1920 Gandhi asked Congress to turn his ideas into a campaign across the whole of India. Remember, non-cooperation meant refusing to help the British run the country. It became his biggest satyagraha campaign so far.
Congress agreed in two steps. A special meeting at Calcutta in September 1920 voted for non-cooperation. The full yearly meeting at Nagpur in December 1920 confirmed it. Nagpur also changed what Congress stood for:
The Khilafat leaders, the brothers Muhammad Ali and Shaukat Ali, joined the campaign and toured India with Gandhi. So Hindus and Muslims began it together.
Key terms:
The plan was to pull Indian support away from the Raj, one step at a time.
Indians handed back British titles and medals. Gandhi returned the medals he had been given for his work in South Africa. Congress refused to stand in the elections of November 1920 for the new councils.
Students walked out of government schools and colleges, and 'national' schools and colleges were set up for them. Lawyers stopped working in British courts. Motilal Nehru and C. R. Das, two of the best-paid lawyers in India, gave up their careers.
People boycotted foreign cloth and burned it on public bonfires. Volunteers stood outside shops that sold it. The value of foreign cloth brought into India fell by about half between 1920-21 and 1921-22.
Congress also raised money. The Tilak Swaraj Fund reached its target of ten million rupees in 1921. This paid for volunteers, national schools and spinning wheels.
When the Prince of Wales (the heir to the British throne) landed at Bombay in November 1921, Congress called a hartal. In city after city he was met by empty streets and closed shops.
The British were slow to react at first. They did not want to make Gandhi a hero by arresting him. From late 1921 they hit back. Congress and Khilafat volunteer groups were banned. By January 1922 about 30,000 people were in prison, including Motilal Nehru and his son Jawaharlal. For many, going to prison became something to be proud of.
But non-violence was hard to control in a movement of millions.
The year also ran out. By the end of 1921 there was no swaraj. Gandhi planned to go a step further, with civil disobedience in Bardoli, a small area of Gujarat. The peasants there would refuse to pay their taxes.
On 4 February 1922, at Chauri Chaura, a small town in the United Provinces in northern India, police fired on a crowd of protesters. The angry crowd chased the police into their station and set it on fire. Twenty-two policemen were killed.
Gandhi was horrified. On 12 February, at Bardoli, he persuaded the Working Committee to call off the whole campaign. His reasons were clear:
Many nationalists were shocked and angry. Motilal Nehru, C. R. Das and the young Subhas Chandra Bose could not see why the whole country should stop because of one town, just when the movement seemed strong.
With the campaign over and his supporters divided, the British now felt safe to act. Gandhi was arrested on 10 March 1922 and charged with sedition for three articles in his newspaper, Young India. At his trial in Ahmedabad on 18 March he pleaded guilty and asked the judge for 'the highest penalty'. He was sentenced to six years in prison.
He served about two. In February 1924 he was let out early after an operation for appendicitis.
Congress was now a mass party with members, money and branches across India. Millions of ordinary people had taken part in politics for the first time. Many had lost their fear of the Raj. The British had been shown that they could not rule easily without Indian help.
Swaraj had not come. British rule was still firmly in place, and the Raj had learned that arrests could contain a campaign. With Gandhi in prison, Congress had no clear plan and membership fell.
Nationalists also split over what to do next. In 1923 Motilal Nehru and C. R. Das set up the Swaraj Party. It stood in the council elections so that it could oppose the British from inside. Gandhi's closest followers stayed out and worked in the villages instead, spreading spinning and khadi.
Hindu-Muslim unity faded too. Turkey itself abolished the caliphate in 1924, so the Khilafat movement had nothing left to fight for. You will see what followed in Congress, the Muslims, the Untouchables and Jinnah.
Explain two effects of the Non-Cooperation movement (1920-22) on the Indian nationalist movement. [8 marks]
One effect was that Indian nationalism became a mass movement. The campaign asked for actions that anyone could take, such as boycotting foreign cloth, leaving government schools and giving up titles. This drew in millions of ordinary people, and by January 1922 about 30,000 had gone to prison. To run the campaign, Congress was reorganised at Nagpur in December 1920 with a Working Committee and village branches. As a result, Congress came out of the campaign as a party with mass support across India, not a small group of educated men.
A second effect was that the nationalist movement became divided once the campaign ended. Because Gandhi called it off after 22 policemen were killed at Chauri Chaura in February 1922, swaraj was not won, and leaders such as Motilal Nehru and C. R. Das were angry. With Gandhi then in prison, they disagreed with his followers about the next step. This led them to set up the Swaraj Party in 1923 to fight council elections, while others kept to village work. So nationalists were no longer following one plan.
What lifts it to the top level: each paragraph names one effect, backs it with precise facts and uses linking words ('this drew in', 'because', 'this led them') to show how the campaign caused it.
This question is about effects, so do not tell the story of the boycotts or of Chauri Chaura. Pick two different results, such as mass support and division, and give each its own paragraph. One effect alone, however well explained, cannot score more than 4 marks out of 8.