Hello friends! in today's blog, we will discuss in detail about very important topic of Modern History called The Chauri Chaura incident, this incident is the reason behind the Gandhiji's withrawn of Non-Cooperation Movement.
Chauri Chaura Incident:
The importance of the Chauri Chaura incident in Indian history is because it was the reason because of which Gandhiji had to stop the Non-Cooperation Movement suddenly. The Chauri Chaura incident happened in the United Provinces of British India, United provinces was basically the area where Uttar Pradesh is in today's date. Chauri Chaura is a small town near Gorakhpur, what happened was that, in August 1920 Gandhiji had launched the Non-Cooperation Movement and the whole country was supporting the movement meanwhile in Chauri Chaura on 2nd February 1922 a retired army officer Bhagwan Ahir along with some of his colleagues started a protest against the increased prices of essential commodities and the sale of liquor in the market. The local police lathi charged these protesters. At first these leaders were severely beaten and then the leaders were arrested and they were put in the lock-up of Chauri Chaura police station. When this matter reached the people the general public was angry that, while lathi charge was done on peaceful protesters. So on 4th February i.e, two days after the last incident. The general public took out a protest against the police, only a few people had gathered so the people ignored this but on the very next day that is on 5th February more people gathered and started marching towards the Chauri Chaura market. According to an estimate around 2500 people gathered there and one after the other all the liquour shops were forced to be closed. Now, there, the police had to interfere simply in the name of peaceful protest, you cannot close the shops so the police took action and again did a fierce charge and caught the leaders and took them to the police station. So the people of Chauri Chaura were very angry with this attitude of the police and surrounded the Chauri Chaura police station and started raising slogans against the police, administration, and the government and at the same time they were also demanding that our leaders should be released. So the police thought that this is general public if we fired two to four shots in air they would run away so in order to control the situation the police started firing in the air but the public was already angry so hearing the sound of the gunshots they became uncontrollable and started pelting stones at the police. Seeing the situation, getting worse the police also started open fire on the public they thought that if one or two people die then maybe the rest of the crowd will run away.
Three to four people died in this open fire and don't know how many were injured and now the crowd was in a mood to give a befitting reply to the police firing. The crowd went ahead and set the police station on fire and those policemen who were trying to escape from the police station, people started picking them up and throwing them in the burning police station and in this whole incident 22-23 policemen were killed. Now the British Authority imposed martial law in Chauri Chaura to control the situation, military was called and Gandhiji was very disappointed due to this Chauri Chaura incident and fasted for five days this five days fast which he did was an atonement because Gandhiji also considered himself guilty of this Chauri Chaura violence and along with this on 12 February 1922, Gandhiji also withdrawn the Non-Cooperation Movement because Gandhiji believed that the movement can be successful only when people participate in the movement without violence and the Chauri Chaura movement had proved that people are not yet ready for mass movement. This is why Gandhiji decided to withdraw the Non- Cooperation movement.
