In Mahatma Gandhi’s “Quit India” Speech, delivered to the All India Congress Committee (AICC) on the evening of August 8, 1942, the father of modern India made a historic appeal for a mass civil-disobedience movement in support of the greatest cause of his life: the struggle for India’s freedom from the yoke of British imperialism. Gandhi finished delivering his address shortly before midnight at Gowalia Tank Maidan, a park in Bombay (now Mumbai). Earlier that day the AICC—the main organizational wing of the Indian National Congress—had endorsed the Quit India Resolution, which demanded an immediate end to British rule in India; this endorsement provided the occasion for Gandhi’s speech. Three weeks earlier, on July 14, the Working Committee of the AICC had passed the Quit India Resolution. To this day, the AICC is made up of delegates from the Indian National Congress. The Congress, as it is simply called, is India’s largest and oldest democratic organization (having been founded in 1885), which Gandhi had reorganized as its spiritual and political leader beginning in 1918.