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Mahatma Gandhi may not have realised, as he made the announcement for the biggest civil disobedience movement yet in 1942, that the British would be gone from in India in half a decade. He would probably be even more surprised that more than seven decades later, Indians can still get righteously indignant at the treatment the United Kingdom meted out to India and the hold that anti-colonial sentiments still has on the Indian public, enough to unite factions that would otherwise be at each others throats.

Such was the case 73 years ago, as Gandhi made the call in Bombay for the British to leave. With massive numbers of Indians being used in British armies fighting World War II, Gandhi and other Indian nationalists insisted that the Raj had to end with full independence for India.

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"I believe that in the history of the world, there has not been a more genuinely democratic struggle for freedom than ours," Gandhi said at what is known at the Do or Die speech, on 8 August 1942 in Bombay. "In the democracy which I have envisaged, a democracy established by non-violence, there will be equal freedom for all. Everybody will be his own master. It is to join a struggle for such democracy that I invite you today. Once you realize this you will forget the differences between the Hindus and Muslims, and think of yourselves as Indians only, engaged in the common struggle for independence."

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The movement would paralyze cities like Bombay for a little while, as these newsreels from Fox Movietone show, and the British would immediately imprison almost the entire leadership of the Indian National Congress, eventually helping them stay united, despite reservations from many about the Quit India call.

Although the movement itself never ended up achieving much in direct gains, it was the very scale of the response that helped convinced the British that it would only become harder to govern India from there on.