# Congress at Calcutta adopts Non-Cooperation with Gandhi as the programme’s author-leader

Date: 1920

## The fact

In September 1920 the [Indian National Congress](/organizations/indian-national-congress), in a special Calcutta session, adopted Non-Cooperation — boycott of councils, schools, law courts, and foreign cloth — as Gandhi had designed it after the Punjab and Khilafat shocks. Chauri Chaura is the later halt.

## Context

Boycott is a political technology. It can build parallel authority and can wreck livelihoods of clerks and mill-hands. The improving path here is mass withdrawal of consent from the Raj’s civic machinery.

[Mahatma Gandhi](/people/mahatma-gandhi) is not the sole author of every later object, law, or museum label that uses the name. Shared work with courts, excavators, printers, spouses, officials, and later states does not erase a documented role, and it does not make an ancient person the signer of a twentieth-century statute.

## Evidence and sources

Official archival, ashram, or government pages and an independent publisher independently describe this instrument.

Official or archival record: Gandhi Heritage Portal (https://www.gandhiheritageportal.org/; Sabarmati Ashram Preservation and Memorial Trust).

## Significance

A Congress resolution is not independence. 1947 is another row.

A Congress resolution is not independence. 1947 is another row.

## What is established and what is not

Established as a dated public record of this instrument.

What would change the picture: a contradictory original with a different date or name, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions.

The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit.
Later competitions, monuments, translations, UNESCO listings, and museums are not converted into extra lifetime acts. The attached driver is [democratic-resilience](/drivers/democratic-resilience). The welfare reading used in this dossier is improving. That reading is an impact-path choice, not a property stored on the Fact itself. Confidence is stated on the impact path. A later English edition is not a recovered autograph. If a number is not in the two records named above, it is not supplied here.

## People

- Mahatma Gandhi: https://factrail.ai/people/mahatma-gandhi

## Drivers

- Democratic Resilience: https://factrail.ai/drivers/democratic-resilience

## Sources

- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mahatma-Gandhi
- https://www.gandhiheritageportal.org/

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/ga-non-cooperation-1920