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The Presidents. Nearly 200 party leaders were rounded up and jailed. White-capped Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi's leading disciple and right-hand man, who is also a well-proven friend of the United Nations, was sent to Yeravda, six miles from Poona. Into the same jail went white-bearded Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, President of the Congress party. A few minutes before his arrest Azad smuggled out a message: if party leaders were seized, "every Congress member becomes Congress President."
This message, coming before Gandhi's set off the first riots. It was read by a woman in the canvas tentlike Pandal, where 250 party leaders of the day before had voted (with 13 opposing) authorization for Gandhi to lead his last great civil disobedience campaign. Scattered by police who threw tear-gas bombs and whacked heads with lathis (five-foot bamboo staves), Gandhi's followers quickly reassembled in the streets. Hundreds threw stones and vegetables at police who rushed the Bombay provincial party headquarters and seized all administrative documents. Before nightfall, when reserves of British officers and yellow-turbaned native police were held in readiness for blackout riots, at least eight persons were killed in Bombay alone. In 48 hours police and troops fired "about ten times" into unruly mobs. The list of bullet-wounded soon passed the hundred mark. Bands of men and women lay down on streetcar tracks or piled rubble on the rails. Others hauled passengers out of automobiles and forced cyclists to dismount with the admonition that they must walk "because this is a democracy." Growing nastier mobs began stoning foreigners. A.P. Correspondent Preston Grover's car was shot at, bombarded with bottles, rocks, chamber pots.
Spreading from Bombay, the riots took on increasingly serious proportions. At Poona 14 were injured when goondas (Hindu for hoodlums) threw bottles into windows. At Lucknow, police fired on student demonstrators. Demonstrators stoned trains, cut wires, smashed police lamps. In Ahmadabad police killed one person when they fired directly into a mob trying to burn the police post. In New Delhi a small crowd fought its way past a barricade at the foot of the hill leading to the Viceroy's palace, but later was turned back. Whites in New Delhi said: "It's here," kept close together for mutual protection. In Calcutta there were demonstrations, but no immediate strike call for war workers in strategic factories. The British feared that communal riots between Hindus and Moslems might break out. The stoning of Moslem shops by Hindus in Bombay was one portent of even greater trouble.