Quit India Movement of 1942

Gowalia Tank Maidan (now also known as August Kranti Maidan) is a park in central Mumbai where Mahatma Gandhi issued the Quit India speech on 8 August 1942 decreeing that the British must leave India immediately or else mass agitations would take place. Gandhi's call for the nation was of "Do or Die". The call mobilised the citizens to a huge Civil Disobedience movement as the British refused to grant independence till the War was over.

Very aptly the stamp on the FDC has been postmarked at the Gowalia Tank. The stamp depicts The Martyr's Memorial also known as Shaheed Smarak which is a life-size statue of seven brave young men who sacrificed their lives in the Quit India movement (August 1942), to hoist the national flag on the Secretariat building. The foundation stone of Martyr's Memorial was laid on August 15, 1947, by the thengovernor of Bihar, Mr. Jairam Das Daulatram. The sculptor Mr. Deviprasad Roychoudhry built the bronze statue of the seven students with the national flag. These statues were cast in Italy and later placed here.

The Quit India Movement, or the India August Movement (August Kranti), was a civil disobedience movement launched in India in August 1942 in response to Gandhi’s call for satyagraha. The Congress Party proclaimed a mass protest demanding what Gandhiji called "an orderly British withdrawal" from India. It was for the determined, which appears in his call to Do or Die, issued on 8 August at the Gowalia Tank Maidan   in Mumbai in 1942.

The British were prepared to act. Almost the entire Congress leadership, and not just at the national level, was imprisoned without trial within hours after Gandhi’s speech  Most spent the rest of the war in prison and out of contact with the masses. The British had the support of the Viceroy’s Council (which had a majority of Indians), of the Muslims, the Communist Party, the princely states, the Imperial and State Police,the Indian Army  , and the Indian Civil Service. Many Indian businessmen were profiting from heavy wartime spending and did not support Quit India. Many students paid more attention to Subhas Chandra Bose  , who was in exile and supporting the Axis. The only outside support came from the Americans, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt  pressured Prime Minister Winston Churchill   to give in to Indian demands. The Quit India campaign was effectively crushed.

The British refused to grant immediate independence, saying it could happen only after the war ended. Sporadic small-scale violence took place around the country but the British arrested tens of thousands of leaders, keeping them imprisoned until 1945. In terms of immediate objectives Quit India failed because of heavy-handed suppression, weak coordination and the lack of a clear-cut programme of action. However, the British government realized that India was ungovernable in the long run, and the question for postwar became how to exit gracefully and peacefully.