“We shall either free India or die in the attempt …” who said it?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, Mahatma Gandhi. The line comes from his Quit India speech at Gowalia Tank Maidan, Bombay, on 8 August 1942, the day the All India Congress Committee adopted the Quit India Resolution. The sentence the paper has clipped runs in full: 'The mantra is Do or Die. We shall either free India or die in the attempt; we shall not live to see the perpetuation of our slavery.' So the phrase in the stem is not a separate saying at all — it is the second clause of the sentence that gave the freedom struggle its most famous two words, and any student who knows 'Do or Die' already knows this answer. The occasion matters as much as the words. The Cripps Mission had collapsed in April 1942, the Japanese had reached the Burma frontier, and Gandhi abandoned bargaining for a demand that the British leave immediately. He was asking for a vow, not a tactic: the movement was to be non-violent, and 'die in the attempt' meant accept death, not inflict it. Within hours the Raj answered. Early on 9 August Gandhi and the entire Congress Working Committee were arrested, the Congress was banned, and tens of thousands of leaders were held until 1945; a then little-known Aruna Asaf Ali presided over the AICC gathering on 9 August and hoisted the flag. Decapitated, the movement turned spontaneous and violent. Between 9 August and 21 September 1942 crowds attacked some 550 post offices and 250 railway stations, destroyed about 70 police stations, burnt or damaged 85 other government buildings and cut telegraph wires in roughly 2,500 places; the Government of India moved 57 battalions of British troops to restore order and made over 100,000 arrests. Viceroy Linlithgow called it the most serious rebellion since 1857. And the historians' judgement on where it burned hottest points straight at this exam's home State: the greatest level of violence occurred in Bihar.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) He was in the room and went to jail for it, but the words are not his. Nehru was among those apprehensive about the Quit India call — he and Maulana Azad were critical of its timing yet backed Gandhi and stayed with him — and he was arrested with the rest of the Congress Working Committee on 9 August 1942. His own famous sentences belong to other moments, above all the 'tryst with destiny' address to the Constituent Assembly on the midnight of 14-15 August 1947. Presence at an event is not authorship of its slogan.  (c) The most defensible wrong answer, and worth understanding rather than merely eliminating. Azad was Congress President at that moment — elected at the Ramgarh session in March 1940 and continuing until 1946 — so he presided over the very Bombay session that passed the Quit India Resolution on 8 August 1942, and he was arrested the next morning with everyone else. But like Nehru he had doubts about the call, and the mantra-and-vow language of the speech is Gandhi's. Chairing the meeting is not the same as speaking the sentence.  (d) The exact opposite position, which makes this the cleanest elimination on the paper. As president of the Hindu Mahasabha during the Second World War, Savarkar advanced the slogan 'Hinduise all Politics and Militarise Hindudom' and supported the British war effort, with the Mahasabha running Hindu Militarisation Boards that recruited for the armed forces. The Mahasabha openly opposed the Quit India Movement and boycotted it officially, and Savarkar wrote a letter titled 'Stick to your Posts' telling members who sat in municipalities, local bodies and legislatures or served the government to remain where they were. A man instructing his followers to stay at their posts did not tell India to die in the attempt.

Concept: Quit India was the moment the national movement stopped asking for terms. Every earlier campaign had a negotiable demand attached — Non-Cooperation had Khilafat and Punjab wrongs, Civil Disobedience had the salt tax and then the Gandhi-Irwin Pact. In August 1942 the demand was simply that British rule end at once, and the method was a mass struggle to be conducted, in Gandhi's formula, by every Indian who considered himself free. The trigger was the failure of the Cripps Mission: Sir Stafford Cripps had landed in Delhi on 22 March 1942 offering Dominion status only after the war, a constituent assembly, and the right of any province to opt out, and the talks broke down in April. With Japanese forces on the Burma border, Gandhi judged that an India held down by an unwilling ruler could neither be defended nor be free. The Congress itself was divided about it. Rajagopalachari left the party over the decision; Nehru and Azad were uneasy; Vallabhbhai Patel, Rajendra Prasad and Anugrah Narayan Sinha backed it openly. What actually happened bore little resemblance to the plan, because the plan assumed leaders. With the entire leadership in jail by dawn on 9 August, the movement improvised — underground networks, Usha Mehta's secret Congress Radio, and short-lived parallel governments at Tamluk in Midnapore, at Satara in Maharashtra and at Talcher in Odisha. It was crushed within months, and it still worked: the British came out of 1942 convinced that India could not be governed by force indefinitely.

State PCS 2025 Q78 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q78 — History PYQ with Answer