The Quit India Movement as well as the revolutionary movement of colonial India continue to remain embroiled in debates, and, in more recent years, in controversy as well. While in the past, the revolutionary movement was relegated to the margins of the ‘Independence’ movement and seen more as a heroic yet failed enterprise, in the last decade or so, it has become an integral part of a hardened, performative, nationalist repertoire. The word ‘revolutionary’ continues to inspire a strong emotional connection.

Yet this emotional connection is itself varied, diverse and sometimes very complexly interwoven with one another. On the one hand, there is a kind of emotional connection between revolutionaries, their contribution to the anti-colonial movement and the civil society of India today that we get to witness when we visit the world of heritage, especially museums. In this context, I would like to take the reader through a brief journey that I took on a recent visit to two such important museums in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), in West Bengal. The first is the Alipore Central Jail, which has now almost entirely been converted into a museum. The second is the Special Branch Archives in north Kolkata, which used to also be the home of the Kolkata Police Museum.

President Roosevelt to Former Naval Person, 11 March 19421

I have given much thought to the problem of India, and I am grateful that you have kept me in touch with it. As you can well realise, I have felt much diffidence in making any suggestions, and it is a subject which of course all of you good people know far more about than I do. I have tried to approach the problem from the point of view of history and with the hope that the injection of a new thought to be used in India might be of assistance to you. That is why I go back to the inception of the Government of the United States. During the Revolution, from 1775 to 1783, the British Colonies set themselves up as thirteen States, each one under a different form of government, although each one assumed individual sovereignty. While the war lasted there was great confusion between these separate sovereignties, and the only two connecting links were the Continental Congress (a body of ill-defined powers and large inefficiencies), and second the Continental Army, which was rather badly maintained by the thirteen States. In 1783, at the end of the war, it was clear that the new responsibilities of the thirteen sovereignties could not be welded into a Federal Union because the experiment was still in the making and any effort to arrive at a final framework would have come to naught. Therefore the thirteen sovereignties joined in the Articles of Confederation, an obvious stopgap Government, to remain in effect only until such time as experience and trial and error could bring about a permanent union.

These opening lines from a lesser-known novel by Baren Basu, a soldier-turned-novelist, capture the textures of feelings and experiences that wrapped around most Bengalis during the Second World War. Translated from Bengali, they reveal the layered, complex yet varied emotional response to Russia's defeat and a possible German invasion of India.

In the previous chapter we looked at the role of rumours in dislodging the image of the colonial state and the activities of various revolutionary parties in attempting to politicise the countryside in preparation for a revolutionary struggle. Let us now pan out of Bengal in this chapter to analyse the responses of the Government of India (GOI), as well as Gandhi, to the movement. In the following pages, I undertake an analysis of the different ideas and meanings of ‘responsibility’ for the movement, passed around between the GOI and Gandhi. Both tried to completely deny any sort of responsibility for the movement or the violence that ensued, but for different reasons. This then will give us an insight into the desperate situation that Britain found itself in the global context of the War as well as Gandhi's position at this critical juncture of anti-colonial politics. But before that, and since in the previous chapter we have studied the preparations made by the revolutionary parties, let us first take a look at how prepared exactly the GOI was in meeting any threat of civil disobedience from Gandhi and the Congress. This will also reveal subtle tensions between routes envisaged by the GOI and the British government, an aspect that continued to find echoes even in the post-war political scenario (see Conclusion).

This chapter focuses on the co-production of commercial social credit ratings by citizens and e-payment platforms, and on the financial transaction and financial network data provided by citizens when participating in Alibaba and Tencent’s commercial credit-rating systems. It starts by laying out the regional variation in voluntary subscription to commercial credit ratings. It finds that, surprisingly, less developed provinces are taking the lead in this development. The chapter then investigates who engages in data production, focusing on the role of privacy concerns and motivation. Despite strong evidence for privacy concerns, these play a minor role in decisions about joining commercial social credit-rating systems. Instead, citizens predominantly join for financial motivations. Financial rewards help overcome privacy concerns, thus drawing citizens into volunteering their data for the construction of the SCS. Data production is therefore skewed toward those who see SCS as a financial rather than political tool. These users volunteer financial transaction and network data to the firm, which can be leveraged by Alibaba and Tencent as informational and organizational resources in the state–company relationship around developing the SCS.

Through investigating how exactly bribery take place, this chapter examines why guanxi is a necessary conduit of corruption in China. I argue that guanxi-practice embodies an alternative contracting mechanism of corruption with three functions. First, it allows corruption practitioners to communicate their intent to exchange without explicitly expressing it. Second, it minimizes the otherwise prohibitively high transactional costs and reduces the moral and cognitive barriers of corruption. Third, it contains a self-enforcing mechanism that allows the terms of corruption to be negotiated and enforced. Performed with tactics and etiquettes, guanxi-practice seamlessly grafts a corrupt and immoral agreement upon a social setting, in which venality is neutralized and rationalized. In this redefined social reality of corruption, an instrumental relationship is perceived or at least presentable as a reciprocal relationship based on social commitment. Lastly, I draw attention to the emergence of professional guanxi-brokers that has marketized guanxi and extended the otherwise highly restricted opportunity to engage in parochial corruption to a much-broadened user base.

This chapter begins Part II of the book – on the SCS as participatory space. It explores the relationship between government and companies in developing commercial social credit ratings targeting citizens. It starts by explaining the overall structure of the SCS, followed by background information on the two most important company players – Alibaba and Tencent. Drawing on procurement notices and process tracing of the evolution of SCS over time based on expert interviews, Chinese academic publications, news articles, and policy documents, it outlines the nature of the state–company partnership and the dynamic changes in the partnership over time. It argues and demonstrates that the user base and architecture built by companies preceding the 2014 plan for the SCS created a certain degree of dependency on platforms for the state. This in-depth analysis of the role of companies during the evolution of social credit rating of individual citizens highlights that commercial credit rating was not established under a command-and-control system where the state dominates the design of the system and corporate players merely follow the state’s vision, instructions, and directives. Instead, Alibaba and Tencent significantly influenced the design and implementation of the central government’s vision.

Moving the focus back from the global to the regional, let us now take a look at the nature of the movement as it developed in Bengal between 1942 and 1944. Almost a century after the Revolt of 1857, the Quit India Movement emerged as one of the biggest moments of a direct confrontation between the colonial state and the masses. Just like in other parts of the country, in Bengal too, the movement first started in the urban areas, but as the violence and disturbances in these areas started subsiding, it sprang up with renewed vigour in the countryside. This chapter is divided into two main sections. The first section looks at the main centres of the movement in the urban areas in parts of north Bengal, Birbhum, Howrah and Calcutta. Midnapore, which was the main storm centre in the countryside, has been discussed in a separate section, as the formation of the Tamralipta Jatiya Sarkar deserves a separate analysis. More or less, the movement followed a similar pattern throughout the province.

In north Bengal, students played a key role in popularising and leading the movement. Here, student politics was heavily influenced by revolutionary groups, especially the resurgent Anushilan Party and Jugantar, whose main areas of influence were Dinajpur, Pabna, Rajshahi, Japlpaiguri and Rangpur. In Pabna, Siliguri and Rajshahi, a large number of students left schools and colleges and led hartals, processions and distribution of anti-British pamphlets.

Why did the movement come to an end? Despite arguments of Gandhian legitimacies, the seemingly ‘sudden’ end of a ‘popular’ movement that survived for two years is baffling, to say the least. Upon his release from prison in May 1944, Gandhi unilaterally gave a call for surrender for all those who were ‘underground’, distancing himself and the Congress High Command from the violent ‘underground’ revolutionaries. But while most of the remaining underground revolutionaries, including those of Midnapore, surrendered, those of the Satara Prati Sarkar did not; rather, some revolutionaries of the Prati Sarkar argued that the question of surrender did not even arise.1 In Satara, police repression made little difference to the movement; Gandhi's original call of ‘Do or Die’ took precedence over his current demands of surrender, and the activities of the Prati Sarkar – local nyayadan mandal (justice board or law board) work, punishment of criminals, sporadic bank and post office robberies – intensified from mid-1944.2 Given the intense struggle that the revolutionaries of Tamralipta Jatiya Sarkar had waged for nearly two years, why did they not follow the Satara example, then? Attempts to answer this question must, at least in part, find context in the famine of 1943, which impacted Bengal in unprecedented ways, in terms of not only hunger but also communal politics around famine relief and rehabilitation.3

The famine of 1943 impacted Midnapore as severely as it did the rest of Bengal. Famine conditions appeared in Midnapore earlier than they did in other parts of the province, and deaths by starvation started to occur as early as June 1943.