Phase 6 — Civil Disobedience to Independence (1930–1947)

12 March – 6 April 1930 — the Dandi (Salt) March. Gandhi, with 78 chosen followers, walked roughly 240 miles over 24 days from his Sabarmati Ashram to the coastal village of Dandi, Gujarat, to break the government salt monopoly by illegally making salt from seawater — a deliberately symbolic act (salt being a necessity taxed even for the poorest) that launched the Civil Disobedience Movement: mass law-breaking, boycott of foreign cloth and liquor, non-payment of taxes, and — for the first time on this scale — significant participation by women.

• 1930 — First Round Table Conference, London: Congress, its leadership largely imprisoned, did not attend; the conference achieved little without it.
• March 1931 — the Gandhi-Irwin Pact: Gandhi, released from jail, negotiated directly with Viceroy Lord Irwin; Congress agreed to suspend Civil Disobedience and attend the Second Round Table Conference, while the government agreed to release political prisoners (not those convicted of violence) and permit salt-making for personal use in coastal areas — a pact some nationalists (notably younger radicals, distressed that it did not save Bhagat Singh from execution weeks later) considered too conciliatory.
• 1931 — the Second Round Table Conference: Gandhi attended as Congress's sole official representative; talks collapsed principally over the question of minority (and especially depressed-class) representation.
• 1932 — the Communal Award: British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald granted separate electorates to the "Depressed Classes" (alongside existing separate electorates for Muslims, Sikhs and others); Gandhi, viewing this as a permanent fracture of Hindu society, began a fast unto death in Yerwada Jail in protest.
• 1932 — the Poona Pact: after intense negotiation, Gandhi and B.R. Ambedkar — Ambedkar representing the Depressed Classes and initially firmly in favour of separate electorates as the only real safeguard against caste oppression — agreed instead on substantially increased reserved seats for the Depressed Classes within the general (joint) electorate, ending Gandhi's fast. The episode also marks the beginning of the long, complicated political relationship between Gandhi and Ambedkar.
• 1932 — the Third Round Table Conference: poorly attended, with Congress again absent; the whole Round Table process petered out into the eventual Government of India Act, 1935.

Memory hook — the three Round Table Conferences, "Away-Arrive-Away": 1st RTC (1930) — Congress away (jailed, absent); 2nd RTC (1931) — Gandhi arrives in person, alone; 3rd RTC (1932) — Congress away again. The pattern (absent–present–absent) is the whole exam-relevant fact, and it reads like a chant: Away, Arrive, Away.

Memory hook — three Government of India Acts, "Crown-Divide-Provinces": 1858 (Crown takes direct control from the Company) → 1919 (Divide into reserved/transferred subjects — dyarchy) → 1935 (Provinces get full autonomy). Picture a crown, a knife cutting a pie in two, and a set of provincial flags — Crown, Divide, Provinces.

Practice Recall: For each Round Table Conference (1st, 2nd, 3rd), was Congress present or absent, and who represented it when it did attend? Answer before reading on.

• 1935 — the Government of India Act, 1935: introduced full provincial autonomy (ministries responsible to elected provincial legislatures), proposed an all-India federation including princely states (never actually implemented, as princely accession fell short), and expanded the franchise substantially. It remains the single most detailed pre-independence constitutional Act and the direct structural template later drawn upon for the Constitution of India.
• 1937 — provincial elections under the 1935 Act: Congress won outright majorities or formed ministries in most provinces (Madras, Bombay, the United Provinces, the Central Provinces, Bihar, Orissa), demonstrating for the first time its capacity for actual administration; the Muslim League fared comparatively poorly, a result some historians see as sharpening Jinnah's later insistence on parity and eventually a separate state, since Congress ministries afterwards were seen by League opinion as marginalising Muslim political voice in several provinces.
• 1939 — Congress ministries resign en masse, in protest at Viceroy Lord Linlithgow's unilateral declaration of India as a belligerent in World War II without any consultation of elected Indian opinion — a decision the League, by contrast, welcomed as an opportunity, observing a "Day of Deliverance" from what it called Congress domination.
• 1939 — Subhas Chandra Bose, having won a contested re-election as Congress president against Gandhi's preferred candidate but finding himself unable to work with an unsupportive Working Committee, resigned the presidency and founded the All India Forward Bloc, a left-wing platform advocating a more militant, uncompromising path to full independence.
• August 1940 — the "August Offer": a vague British promise of eventual Dominion Status after the war, with minority consent required for any future constitutional change — rejected by Congress as inadequate and correctly read by the League as an effective veto in its favour.
• 1940–41 — Individual Satyagraha: a deliberately limited, symbolic protest against India's forced participation in the war, led first by Vinoba Bhave (chosen by Gandhi as the first individual satyagrahi) and then by Jawaharlal Nehru, intended to register protest without provoking mass repression before Congress was ready for a larger movement.
• March–April 1942 — the Cripps Mission: with Japan's rapid advance through Southeast Asia making Allied anxiety about Indian cooperation acute, Sir Stafford Cripps arrived offering Dominion Status after the war's end, a new constitution-making body, and — controversially — the right of any province (or princely state) to opt out of the future Indian union, effectively conceding the principle behind Pakistan in advance. Congress rejected the offer, Gandhi famously dismissing it as "a post-dated cheque on a crashing bank." The Muslim League also rejected it, for want of an explicit, unconditional commitment to Pakistan.
• 8 August 1942 — the Quit India Movement. The All India Congress Committee, meeting at Gowalia Tank Maidan in Bombay, passed the "Quit India" resolution demanding immediate British withdrawal; Gandhi's address that evening — remembered for the exhortation "Do or Die" (Karo ya Maro) — called on every Indian to act as their own leader in a final, decisive struggle. Within hours the entire top Congress leadership (Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Azad and others) was arrested, leaving the movement leaderless at the top but not below: it erupted into a genuinely spontaneous, often violent nationwide uprising — railway lines cut, government buildings attacked, police stations burnt. Underground leaders kept the movement alive from hiding: Jayaprakash Narayan and Ram Manohar Lohia ran an underground radio and organising network; Aruna Asaf Ali hoisted the Congress flag at Gowalia Tank on the movement's first day and then went underground for years, evading capture. Parallel, short-lived "independent" local governments sprang up where British authority briefly collapsed — most famously at Ballia (UP), where Chittu Pandey headed an administration for about a week, and at Satara (Maharashtra), where the "Prati Sarkar" (parallel government) under Y.B. Chavan, Nana Patil and others functioned with real durability for an extended period, running its own courts (nyayadan mandals) and even a volunteer police force. The movement was eventually suppressed with heavy force, but it demonstrated conclusively that British authority in India could no longer be sustained by consent.
• 1943 — the Azad Hind Government. Subhas Chandra Bose, who had earlier escaped house arrest in Calcutta (January 1941) and travelled overland via Afghanistan to Germany, sought Axis support for Indian independence before travelling by submarine to Japanese-held Southeast Asia in 1943. There he took over leadership of the Indian National Army (Azad Hind Fauj) — originally raised from Indian prisoners of war under Captain Mohan Singh — and proclaimed the Azad Hind (Provisional Government of Free India), with its own currency, postage stamps, and a war cabinet, allied with Japan. The INA included the all-women Rani of Jhansi Regiment, commanded by Captain Lakshmi Sahgal, named for the 1857 heroine. The INA fought alongside Japanese forces into Manipur and Nagaland in the failed Imphal-Kohima campaign (1944), briefly raising the tricolour on Indian soil at Moirang before being forced back by Allied counter-attack and monsoon conditions. Bose died in a plane crash in Taiwan on 18 August 1945, a death whose circumstances remain, to this day, the subject of persistent conspiracy theories and periodic government inquiry commissions.
• 1945 — the INA (Red Fort) Trials, Delhi. Captured INA officers — including Shah Nawaz Khan, Prem Sahgal, and Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon, one Hindu, one Muslim, one Sikh, deliberately chosen by the prosecution to demonstrate impartiality but read by the public as a symbol of the INA's cross-communal unity — were tried for treason at the Red Fort. The trials generated an extraordinary wave of public sympathy across every political faction, uniting Congress, League and other opinion in common cause for perhaps the last time before Partition; all three officers, though convicted, were ultimately released amid the public outcry.
• February 1946 — the Royal Indian Navy (RIN) Mutiny, Bombay. Naval ratings aboard HMIS Talwar and other vessels, protesting racial discrimination, poor food and conditions, mutinied and were joined by sympathetic strikes ashore; the mutiny spread to other ports before being negotiated down, but it signalled — like the INA trials — that British reliance on the loyalty of India's own armed forces could no longer be taken for granted, weighing heavily on British calculations about how much longer colonial rule could be sustained by force.
• 1946 — the Cabinet Mission Plan: sent by the new Labour government under Clement Attlee, the mission proposed a loose three-tier federation — a weak Union government handling only defence, foreign affairs and communications, with provinces grouped into sections that could frame their own constitutions — an attempt to hold India together without full Partition. Congress and the League initially gave qualified, differing acceptances before the plan collapsed over interpretation, particularly the League's insistence that grouping was compulsory and amounted to a virtual Pakistan-in-embryo.
• 16 August 1946 — Direct Action Day. The Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, called for direct action to press the demand for Pakistan after the Cabinet Mission's collapse; in Calcutta the day exploded into the Great Calcutta Killings, days of horrific communal violence that killed thousands and triggered a chain of retaliatory massacres across Bengal, Bihar, and eventually Punjab — violence that hardened the sense, on all sides, that Partition had become unavoidable.
• 1946–47 — the interim government was formed with Nehru as vice-president of the Viceroy's Executive Council; the League joined later, but cooperation between Congress and League ministers within the same government proved almost unworkable amid the escalating communal violence.
• 3 June 1947 — the Mountbatten Plan. The last Viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, announced the plan for Partition of British India into the two dominions of India and Pakistan, with princely states left to accede to either; the Indian Independence Act, 1947, passed by the British Parliament, gave it legal effect, and — in a controversial acceleration by Mountbatten from an original mid-1948 target — advanced the transfer of power to 15 August 1947.
• The Radcliffe Line. The actual boundary between India and Pakistan (in both Punjab and Bengal) was drawn by a British barrister, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who had never previously visited India and was given barely five weeks to complete the task, working from imperfect maps and census data amid intense pressure. The line's announcement was delayed until after Independence Day itself, meaning millions of people learned only after 15 August which country their homes now lay in — a decision blamed for worsening the chaos of Partition's mass migration.
• 15 August 1947 — Independence, achieved simultaneously with Partition into the Dominions of India and Pakistan — accompanied by one of the largest and most violent mass migrations in human history, with roughly ten to twelve million people crossing the new borders and estimates of Partition-related deaths ranging from several hundred thousand into the low millions.

Practice Recall: Chart the last stretch, 1939–1947, as a chain of single words — one per year that had a defining event (e.g., 1939: resignation; 1940: offer; 1942: Quit India...) — before checking your memory against the bullets above.