In September 1934, Gandhi resigned form the Congress Party. What provoked him into this extreme step was the differences of opinion and approaches between him and the Party.

Early that year, there was a terrific earth quake in the province of Bihar, in which thousands of people died, millions of people were thrown out of their homes, buildings leveled, in about a thousand square kilometers of area, life was thrown out of all gears, and the miseries of the survivors presented a heart-rending spectacles. The quake was, in its intensity and aftermath, more severe than the one that struck Japan in recent memory. 

Gandhi was in jail, but the quake made the government release him to initiate some relief activities. Gandhi toured through the quake-affected areas accompanied by Rajendra Prasad, a lawyer and a leader of the farmers in the poor province. Those areas lay devastated, but the victims lined the roadsides to have a glance of the great man and as they saw him, they called aloud ‘Mahatma Gandhi Ki Jai’ which meant ‘Hail Gandhi, the Great Soul’. 

It was a moving sight, the poor, famished, people in their hundreds raising the words of respect to the Great leader wherever he went, either in a vehicle or walking along with them. People of even in the remote villages thronged in their thousands to see him and to listen to his speech and that was something I never saw anywhere else in my life, wrote a British Social worker who accompanied Gandhi in his journeys.