1) The economic impact of the war was manifest in rising prices, shortage of food- grains and closure of war time industries causing retrenchment and employment.
2) This merged with the anti-British sentiments evident in the mass scale of the protests revolving around the INA trials.
3) B.C. Dutt, a rating in the HMIS Talwar was arrested for scribbling 'Quit India' on the panel of the ship.
4) This provoked a strike by the 1,100 ratings on the ship. The ratings resented the racist behaviour of the English commanders, the poor quality of the food and abuses that were the norm.
5) Dutt's arrest served as the trigger for the revolt on February 18, 1946.
6) The day after, the revolt was joined by the ratings in the Fort Barracks and the Castle and a large number of them went into the Bombay cities in commandeered trucks waving Congress flags and shouting anti-British slogans.
7) Soon, the workers in the textile mills, The trade unions in Bombay and Calcutta called for strike and the two cities turned into war zones. Shopkeepers downed shutters, Trains were stopped.
8) As the news of the Bombay Revolt reaches Karachi, ratings in the HMIS Hindustan and other naval establishments in Karachi went on a lightning strike on February 19.
9) The strike wave spread to almost all the naval establishments across India and at least 20,000 ratings from 78 ships and 20 shore .establishments ended up revolting in the days after February 18, 1946.
10)  There were strikes, expressing support to the ratings in the Royal Indian Air Force in Bombay and Calcutta units & the sepoys in the army cantonment station at Jabalpur too went on strike.
11) The ratings, in many places, hoisted the Congress, the Communist, and the Muslim League flags together on the ship masts during the revolt.
12) The colonial government's response was brutal repression.
13) The strikes in Bombay and Calcutta and Madras were strong expressions against British rule in India, these did not last for long and the ratings were forced to surrender soon.
14) Sardar Vallabhai Patel, then in Bombay, took the initiative to bring the revolt to an end.
15) The RIN mutiny, however, was indeed a glorious chapter in the Indian National Movement and perhaps the last act of rebellion in the long story of such acts of valour in the cause of independence.

In April 1944, when the Congress leaders were in jail, C.Rajagopalachari put out a proposal to resolve the issue. It contained the following:
1)  A post-war commission to be formed to demarcate the contiguous districts where the Muslims were in absolute majority and a plebiscite of the adult population there to ascertain whether they would prefer Pakistan;
2) In case of a partition there would be a mutual agreement to run certain essential services, like defence or communication;
3) The border districts could choose to join either of the two sovereign states;
4) The implementation of the scheme would wait till after full transfer of power. After his release from prison, Gandhi, in July 1944, proposed talks with Jinnah based on what came to be the 'Rajaji formula'. The talks did not go anywhere.
Wavell Plan:
1) In June 1945 Lord Wavell moved to negotiate and called for the Simla conference.
2) The rest of the Congress leaders, including Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel and the Congress president, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad were released from jail for this.
3) Wavell convinced Churchill for a Congress-Muslim League coalition government as a way to deal with the post-war political crisis.
4) The Viceroy's proposal before the leaders of all political formations and most prominently the Congress and the Muslim League was setting up of an Executive Council, exclusively with Indians along with himself and the commander-in-chief; equal number of representatives in the council for the caste Hindus and the Muslims and separate representation for the Scheduled Castes; and start of discussions for a new constitution.
5) The proposal displeased everyone. The Simla Conference held between June 25 and July 14-1945 ended without resolution.
6) The talks broke down on the right of the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League to nominate members to the Viceroy's Council.
7) The Muslim League insisted on its exclusive right to nominate Muslim members to the Council.
8) Its demand was that the Congress nominees shall only be caste Hindus and that the Indian National Congress should not nominate a Muslim or a member from the Scheduled Caste.
9) This was seen as a means to further the divide on communal lines and deny the Congress the status of representing the Indian people.
10) Lord Wavell found a council without Muslim League representation as unworkable and thus abandoned the Simla talks.
11) The years between the Lahore resolution of 1940 and the Simla Conference in 1945 marked the consolidation of a Muslim national identity and the emergence of Jinnah as its sole spokesperson.
12) It was at a convention of Muslim League Legislators in Delhi in April 1946, that Pakistan was defined as a 'sovereign independent state.
13) For the first time the League also declared its composition in geographical terms as 'the region consisting of the Muslim majority provinces of Bengal and Assam in the Northeast and the Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sind and Baluchistan in the Northwest.
14) The Congress president Maulana Abul Kalam Azad rejected this idea and held that the Congress stood for a united India with complete independence.
15) All these were developments after the Simla conference of June-July 1945 and after Churchill was voted out and replaced by a Labour Party government headed by Clement Attlee.
16) Times had changed in a substantial sense. British Prime Minister, Attlee had declared the certainty of independence to India with only the terms left to be decided.

1) A considerably large contingent of the Indian Army was posted on the South East Asian countries that were part of the British Empire.
2)  Mohan Singh, an officer of the British Indian Army in Malaya, approached the Japanese for help and they found in this an opportunity.
3) Indians in the region saw the INA as saviours against Japanese expansionism as much as the commander and other officers held out that the army would march into India but only on invitation from the Indian National Congress.
4) Bose at Singapore, set up the Provisional Government of Free India on October 21, 1943.
5) This Provisional Government declared war against Britain and the other allied nations. The Axis powers recognised Bose's Provisional Government as its ally.
INA with Axis Powers in War
1) A battalion of the INA commanded by Shah Nawaz accompanied the Japanese army, in its march on Imphal.
2) The Axis powers, including the Japanese forces, did not succeed and the Japanese retreated.
3) Shah Nawaz and his soldiers of the INA were taken prisoners and charged with treason.
INA Trial
1) The INA trials were held at the Red Fort in New Delhi.
2) The INC fielded its best lawyers Nehru, in defence of the INA soldiers.
3) Even though the INA did not achieve much militarily, the trials made a huge impact in inspiring the masses.
4) The colonial government's arrogance once again set the stage for another mass mobilisation.
5)  The Indian National Congress, after the debacle at the Simla Conference plunged into reaching out to the masses by way of public meetings across the country.
6) The INA figured more prominently as an issue in all these meetings than even the Congress's pitch for votes in the elections that were expected soon
7) It was in this context that the colonial rulers sent up three prominent officers of the INA - Shah Nawaz Khan, P.K. Sehgal and G.S. Dhillon - to trial.
8) The press in India reported the trials with all empathy and editorials sought the soldiers freed immediately.
9) The INA week was marked by processions, hartals and even general strikes across the nation demanding release of the soldiers.
10) The choice of the three men to be sent up for trial ended up rallying all political opinion behind the campaign.
11) The Muslim League, the Shiromani Akali Dal and the Hindu Maha Sabha, all those who had stayed clear of the Quit India campaign, joined the protests and raised funds for their defence.
12) Although the trial court found Sehgal, Dhillon and Shah Nawaz Khan guilty of treason, the commander in chief remitted the sentences and set them free on January 6, 1946.
13) The INA trials, indeed, set the stage for yet another important stage in the history of the Indian National Movement in February 1946.
14) The ratings of the Royal Indian Navy (RIN) raised the banner of revolt.

1) The outbreak of Second World War and Britain's decision to involve India in the War without consulting Congress ministries in provinces, provoked the leaders of Indian National Congress and Gandhi.
2) The Congress ministers resigned in protest.
3) Gandhi launched the individual Satyagraha in October 1940 to keep up the morale of the Congress.
4) The election of Subash Chandra Bose as Congress President upset Gandhi this led to Bose's resignation.
5) The Cripps Mission's proposal of March 1942 bore no fruit.
6) Gandhi decided to embark on the Quit India Movement in August 1942.
Congress Meet at Wardha
1) The Working Committee of the Indian National Congress met at Wardha on July 14, 1942 to launch a mass civil disobedience movement.
2) C.Rajagopalachari and Bhulabhai Desai had reservations against launching a movement
3) Nehru, though not want a movement then bound himself with the majority's decision in the Working Committee.
'Do or Die':
1) The Cripps mission had turned both Gandhi and Nehru sour with the British than any time in the past.
2) Gandhi in a press interview said: 'Leave India to God. If that is too much, then leave her anarchy.
3) The Mahatma called upon the people to 'Do or Die' and called the movement he launched from there as a 'fight to the finish'.
Quit India
1) All the leaders of the Indian National Congress, including Gandhi, were arrested early in the morning on August 9, 1942 by the colonial government.
2) The immediate response by Indian people against the arrest was hartals, in which people from almost all the towns where clashed, often violently, with the police.
3) Industrial workers such as Tata Steel Plant, textile workers in Ahmedabad and across India went on strike.
Brutal Repression:
1) The colonial government responded with brutal repression.
2) police resorted to firing, The army was called in to suppress the protest. Totally 57 battalions were called in as a whole. Aircrafts were used.
3) It spread in its second phase into the villages.
4) A sixty-point increase in prices of food-grains recorded between April and August 1942 had laid the seeds of resentment. . ,
5) The leaders of the Congress, who had managed to escape arrest on August 9 organised the youth into guerrilla actions.
Outbreak of Violence:
1) Beginning late September 1942, 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.
2) This spread across the country and was most intense in Eastern United Provinces, Bihar, Maharashtra and in Bengal.
3)The rebels even set up ·'national governments' in pockets they liberated from the colonial administration.
4) Gandhi's 21 day fast in jail, beginning February 10, 1943, marked a turning point and gave the movement (and even the violence in a limited sense) a great push. Spread and Intensity of the Movement
5) By the end of 1943, the number of persons arrested across India stood at 91,836.
6) The police shot dead 1060 persons during the same period.
7) 208 police outposts, 332 railway stations and 945 post offices were destroyed or damaged very badly.
8) At least 205 policemen defected and joined the rebels.
9) Collective fines were imposed on all the people in a village where public property was destroyed.
Clandestine Radio:
1) Yet another prominent feature of the Quit India movement was the use of Radio by the rebels.
2) The press being censored, the rebels set up a clandestine radio broadcast system from Bombay.
3) The transmitter was shifted from one place to 'another in and around the city. Usha Mehta was the force behind the clandestine radio operations and its broadcast was heard as far away as Madras.
4) The Quit India movement was the most powerful onslaught against the colonial state hitherto.
5) The movement included the Congress, the Socialists, and the Forward Bloc.
6) The movement witnessed unprecedented unity of the people and sent a message that the colonial rulers could not ignore.
Release of Gandhi
1) Gandhi's release from prison, on In health grounds, on May 6, 1944 led to the revival of the Constructive Programme.
2) 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.
3) The colonial state, meanwhile, put forward a plan for negotiation.
4) Lord Archibald Wavell, who had replaced Linlithgow as Viceroy in October 1943, had begun to work towards another round of negotiation.
The message was clear: The British had no option but to negotiate!