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India’s Struggle for Independence by Bipan Chandra Chapter 29 Indian Capitalists and The National Movement

Among the various groups that participated in the national movement were several individual capitalists who joined the Congress. They fully identified with the movement, went to jails and accepted the hardships that were the lot of Congressmen in the colonial period. The names of Jamnalal Bajaj, Vadilal Lallubhai Mehta, Samuel Aaron, Lala Shankar Lal, and others are well known in this regard. There were other individual capitalists who did not join the Congress but readily gave financial and other help to the movement. People like G.D. Birla, Ambalal Sarabhai, and Watch and Hirachand, fall into this category. There were also a large number of smaller traders and merchants who at various points came out in active support of the national movement. On the other hand, there were several individual capitalists or sections of the class who either remained neutral towards the Congress and the national movement or even actively opposed it.

In this chapter, we shall examine the overall strategy of the Indian capitalist class, as a class, towards the national movement, rather than highlight the role of various individuals or sections within the class who did not necessarily represent the class as a whole or even its dominant section.

At the outset, it must be said that the economic development of the Indian capitalist class in the colonial period was substantial and in many ways, the nature of its growth was quite different from the usual experience in other colonial countries. This had important implications regarding the class’s position vis-a-vis imperialism. First, the Indian capitalist class grew from about the mid 19th century with largely an independent capital base and not as junior partners of foreign capital or as compradors. Second, the capitalist class, on the whole, was not tied up in a subservient position with pro-imperialist feudal interests either economically or politically. In fact, a wide cross-section of the leaders of the capitalist class actually argued, m 1944-45, in their famous Bombay plan (the signatories to which were Purshottamdas Thakurdas, J.R.D. Tata, G.D. Birla, Ardeshir Dalal, Sri Ram, Kasturbhai Lalbhai, A.D. Shroff and John Mathai) for comprehensive land reform, including Cooperativization of production, finance and marketing.’

Third, in the period 1914-1947, the capitalist class grew rapidly, increasing its strength and self-confidence. This was achieved primarily through import substitution; by edging out or encroaching upon areas of European domination, and by establishing almost exclusive control over new areas thus accounting for the bulk of the new investments made since the 1920s. Close to independence, indigenous enterprise had already cornered seventy-two to seventy-three percent of the domestic market and over eighty percent of the deposits in the organized banking sector.

However, this growth, unusual for a colonial capitalist class, did not occur, as is often argued, as a result, or by-product of colonialism or because of a policy of decolonization. On the contrary, it was achieved in spite of and in opposition to colonialism — by waging a constant struggle against colonialism and colonial interests, i.e., by wrenching space from colonialism itself.

There was, thus, nothing in the class position or the economic interest of the Indian capitalists which, contrary to what is so often argued,4 inhibited its opposition to imperialism. In fact, by the mid-1920s, Indian capitalists began to correctly perceive their long-term class interest and felt strong enough to take a consistent and openly anti-imperialist position. The hesitation that the class demonstrated was not in its opposition to imperialism but in the choice of the specific path to fight imperialism. It was apprehensive that the path chosen should not be one which, while opposing imperialism, would threaten its own existence, i.e., undermine capitalism itself.

Before we go on to discuss the capitalist class’s position vis­a-vis imperialism and vis-a-vis the course of the anti-imperialist movement, we should look at the emergence of the class as a political entity — a ‘class for itself. ’

Since the early 1920s, efforts were being made by various capitalists like G.D. Birla and Purshottamdas Thakurdas to establish a national level organization of Indian commercial, industrial and financial interests (as opposed to the already relatively more organized European interests in India) to be able to effectively lobby with the colonial government. This effort culminated in the formation of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) in 1927, with a large and rapidly increasing representation from all parts of India. The FICCI was soon recognized by the British government as well as the Indian public in general, as representing the dominant opinion as well as the overall consensus within the Indian capitalist class.

The leaders of the capitalist class also clearly saw the role of the FICCI as being that of ‘national guardians of trade, commerce and industry,’ performing in the economic sphere in colonial India the functions of a national government.5 In the process, Indian capitalists, with some of the most astute minds of the period in their ranks, developed a fairly comprehensive economic critique of imperialism in all its manifestations, whether it be direct appropriation through-home charges or exploitation through trade, finance, currency manipulation or foreign investments, including in their sweep the now fashionable concept of unequal exchange occurring in trade between countries with widely divergent productivity levels. (G.D. Birla and S.P. Jam were talking of unequal exchange as early as the 1930s).6 The Congress leaders quite often saw their assistance as invaluable and treated their opinions and expertise on many national economic issues with respect.

The FICCI was, however, not to remain merely a sort of trade union organization of the capitalist class fighting for its own economic demands and those of the nation. The leaders of the capitalist class now clearly saw the necessity of and felt strong enough for, the class to effectively intervene in politics. As Sir Purshottamdas, President of FICCI, declared at its second annual session in 1928: We can no more separate our politics from our economies.’ Further involvement of the class in politics meant doing so on the side of Indian nationalism. ‘Indian commerce and industry are intimately associated with and are, indeed, an integral part of the national movement — growing with its growth and strengthening with its strength.’ Similarly, G.D. Birla was to declare a little later in 1930: ‘It is impossible in the present political condition of our country to convert the government to our views the only solution lies in every Indian businessman strengthening the hands of those who are fighting for the freedom of our country.’

However, as mentioned earlier, the Indian capitalist class had its own notions of how the anti-imperialist struggle ought to be waged. It was always in favour of not completely abandoning the constitutional path and the negotiating table and generally preferred to put its weight behind constitutional forms of struggle as opposed to mass civil disobedience. This was due to several reasons.

First, there was the fear that mass civil disobedience, especially if it was prolonged, would unleash forces which could turn the movement revolutionary in a social sense (i.e., threaten capitalism itself). As Laiji Naranji wrote to Purshottamdas in March 1930, ‘private property,’ itself could be threatened and the ‘disregard for authority’ created could have ‘disastrous after effects’ even for the ‘future government of Swaraj.’ Whenever the movement was seen to be getting too dangerous in this sense, the capitalists tried their best to bring the movement back to a phase of constitutional opposition.

Second, the capitalists were unwilling to support a prolonged all-out hostility to the government of the day as it prevented the continuing of day-to-day business and threatened the very existence of the class.

Further, the Indian capitalists’ support to constitutional participation, whether it be in assemblies, conferences or even joining the Viceroy’s Executive Council, is not to be understood simply as their getting co-opted into the imperial system or surrendering to it. They saw all this as a forum for maintaining an effective opposition fearing that boycotting these forums completely would help ‘black legs’ and elements who did not represent the nation to, without any opposition, easily pass measures which could severely affect the Indian economy and the capitalist class. However, there was no question of unconditionally accepting reforms or participating in conferences or assemblies. The capitalists were to ‘participate on (their) own terms,’ with ‘no compromise on fundamentals,’ firmly rejecting offers of cooperation which fell below their own and the minimum national demands.’ It was on this ground that the FICCI in 1934 rejected the ‘Report of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Constitutional Reforms for India’ as ‘even more reactionary than the proposals contained in the White paper.”

Further, however keen the capitalists may have been to keep constitutional avenues open, they clearly recognized the futility of entering councils, etc., ‘unless,’ as N.R. Sarkar, the President of FICCI, noted in 1934, ‘the nation also decides to enter tliem.” They also generally refused to negotiate with the British Government, and certainly to make any final commitments, on constitutional as well as economic issues, behind the back of the Congress, i.e., without its participation or at least approval. In 1930, the FICCI (in sharp contrast to the Liberals) advised its members to boycott the Round Table Conference (RTC) stating that ‘. . . no conference . . . convened for the purpose of discussing the problem of Indian constitutional advance can come to a solution . . . unless such a conference is attended by Mahatma Gandhi, as a free man, or has at least his aproval.”3 This was partially because the capitalists did not want India to present a divided front at the RTC and because they knew only the Congress could actually deliver the goods. As Ambalal Sarabhai put it in November 1929, ‘Minus the support of the Congress, the government will not listen to you.”

Finally, it must be noted that for the capitalist class constitutionalism was not an end in itself, neither did it subscribe to what has often been called ‘gradualism,’ in which case it would have joined hands with the Liberals and not supported the Congress which repeatedly went in for non­constitutional struggle including mass civil disobedience. The capitalist class itself did not rule out other forms of struggle, seeing constitutional participation as only a step towards the goal, to achieve which other steps could be necessary. For example, GD. Birla, who had worked hard for a compromise leading to the Congress accepting office in 1937, warned Lord Halifax and Lord Lothian that the ‘Congress was not coming in just to work the constitution, but to advance towards their goal,’ and if the ‘Governors and the Services’ did not play ‘the game’ or ‘in case there was no (constitutional) advance after two or three years, then India would be compelled to take direct action,’ by which he meant ‘non-violent mass civil disobedience.”

This brings us to the Indian capitalists’ attitude towards mass civil disobedience, which was very complex. While, on the one hand, they were afraid of protracted mass civil disobedience, on the other hand, they clearly saw the utility, even necessity of civil disobedience in getting crucial concessions for their class and the nation. In January 1931, commenting on the existing Civil Disobedience Movement, G.D. Birla wrote to Purshottamdas, ‘There could be no doubt that what we are being offered at present is entirely due to Gandhiji. . . if we are to achieve what we desire, the present movement should not be allowed to slacken.”

When, after the mass movement had gone on for considerable time, the capitalists, for reasons discussed above, sought the withdrawal of the movement and a compromise (often mediating between the Government and Congress to secure peace), they were quite clear that this was to be only after extracting definite concessions, using the movement, or a threat to re-launch it, to bargain. In their ‘anxiety for peace,’ they were not to surrender or ‘reduce (their) demands.” The dual objective of achieving conciliation without weakening the national movement, which after all secured the concessions, was aptly described by G.D. Birla in January 1931: We should . . . have two objects in view: one is that we should jump in at the most opportune time to try for a conciliation and the other is that we should not do anything which might weaken the hands of those through whose efforts we have arrived at this stage.”

Further, however, opposed the capitalist class may have been at a point of time to mass civil disobedience, it never supported the colonial Government in repressing it. In fact, the capitalists throughout pressurized the Government to stop repression, remove the ban on the Congress and the press, release political prisoners and stop arbitrary rule with ordinances as a first step to any settlement, even when the Congress was at the pitch of its non-constitutional mass phase. The fear of Congress militancy or radicalization did not push the capitalists (especially after the late 1920s) to either supporting imperialism in repressing it or even openly condemning or dissociating themselves from the Congress.

The Indian capitalists’ attitude had undergone significant changes on this issue over time. During the Swadeshi Movement (1905-08), the capitalists remained opposed to the boycott agitation. Even during the Non-Cooperation Movement of the early ‘20s, a small section of the capitalists, including Purshottamdas, openly declared themselves enemies of the Non­Cooperation Movement. However, during the I 930s’ Civil Disobedience Movement, the capitalists largely supported the movement and refused to respond to the Viceroy’s exhortations (in September 1930) to publicly repudiate the Congress stand and his offer of full guarantee of government protection against any harassment for doing so.’9 In September 1940, Purshottamdas felt that, given the political stance of the British, the Congress was ‘left with no other alternative than to launch non-cooperation.’20 On 5 August 1942, four days before the launching of the Quit India Movement, Purshottamdas, J.R.D. Tata and G.D. Birla wrote to the Viceroy that the only solution to the present crisis, the successful execution of the war and the prevention of another civil disobedience movement was ‘granting political freedom to the country. . . even during the midst of war.’

It must be emphasized at this stage that though, by the late 1920s, the dominant section of the Indian capitalist class began to support the Congress, the Indian national movement was not created, led or in any decisive way influenced by this class, nor was it in any sense crucially dependent on its support. In fact, it was the capitalist class which reacted to the existing autonomous national movement by constantly trying to evolve a strategy towards it. Further, while the capitalist class, on the whole, stayed within the nationalist camp (as opposed to lining up with the loyalists), it did so on the most conservative end of the nationalist spectrum, which certainly did not call the shots of the national movement at any stage.

However, the relative autonomy of the Indian national movement has been repeatedly not recognized, and it has been argued that the capitalists, mainly by using the funds at their command, were able to pressurize the Congress into making demands such as a lower Rupee-Sterling ratio, tariff protection, reduction in military expenditure, etc., which allegedly suited only their class? Further, it is argued that the capitalists were able to exercise a decisive influence over the political course followed by the Congress, even to the extent of deciding whether a movement was to be launched, continued or withdrawn. The examples quoted are of the withdrawal of civil disobedience in 1931 with the Gandhi-Irwin Pact and the non-launching of another movement between 1945-47.

These formulations do not reflect the reality and this for several reasons. First, a programme of economic nationalism vis­a-vis imperialism, with demands for protection, fiscal and monetary autonomy, and the like, did not represent the interest of the capitalist class alone, it represented the demands of the entire nation which was subject to imperialist exploitation. Even the leftists — Nehru, Socialists, and Communists — in their struggle against imperialism had to and did fight for these demands.

Second, the detailed working out of the doctrine of economic nationalism was done by the early nationalism nearly haifa century before the Indian capitalists got constituted as a class and entered the political arena and began fighting for these demands. So there was no question of the Congress being bought, manipulated or pressurized into these positions by the capitalist class.

Third, while it is true that the Congress needed and accepted funds from the business community, especially during constitutional (election) phases. there is no evidence to suggest that through these funds the businessmen were able to, in any basic way, influence the party’s policy and ideology along lines which were not acceptable to it independently. Even the Congress dependence on funds (in the days when it was a popular movement) has been grossly exaggerated. The Director of the Intelligence Bureau, in reply to a query from the Viceroy, noted in March 1939, ‘Congress has also very important substitutes for regular finance. The “appeal to patriotism” saves a lot of cash expenditures. . . Both for normal Congress activities and for election purposes, the moneybags (capitalists) are less important than the Gandhian superstition . . . local Congress organizations can command so much support from the public that they are in a position to fight elections without needing much money. ‘In non-election phases, an overwhelming majority of Congress cadres maintained themselves on their own and carried on day-to-day agitations with funds raised through membership fees and small donations.

Gandhiji’s position on capitalist support is very revealing in this context. As early as 1922, while welcoming and even appealing for support from merchants and mill owners; he simultaneously maintained that ‘whether they do so or not, the country’s march to freedom cannot be made to depend on any corporation or groups of men. This is a mass manifestation. The masses are moving rapidly towards deliverance and they must move whether with the aid of the organized capital or without. This must, therefore, be a movement independent of capital and yet not antagonistic to it. Only if capital came to the aid of the masses, it would redound to the credit of the capitalists and hasten the advent of the happy day.’2S (Gandhiji’s attitude towards the capitalists was to harden further over time, especially during World War II when a large number of them were busy profiteering while the national movement was facing untold repression and the people shortages and famines).

Lastly, as for the capitalists’ determining the course of the Congress-led movements (many of them in specific areas led or supported by socialists and Communists), again there is little evidence to support this view. The Congress launched or withdrew movements based on its own strategic perceptions arising out of its understanding of the nature of the colonial state and its current postures, the organizational, political and ideological preparedness of the people, the staying power of the masses, especially when faced with repression, and so on. It did not do so at the behest, and not even on behalf of the capitalist class. In fact, almost every time the Congress launched mass movements, e.g., in 1905-08, 1920-22, 1930, 1932 and 1942, it did so without the approval of either the capitalist class as a whole or a significant section of it. However, once the movements were launched, the capitalist class reacted to it in a complex and progressively changing fashion, as discussed above.

Quite significantly, the Indian capitalists never saw the Congress as their class party or even as a party susceptible only to their influence. On the contrary, they saw the Congress as an open-ended organization, heading a popular movement, and in the words of J.K. Mehta, Secretary, Indian Merchants’ Chamber, with ‘room in it for men of all shades of political opinion and economic views,’ and therefore, open to be transformed in either the Left or the Right Direction.

In fact, it was precisely the increasing radicalization of the Congress in the Left direction in the 1930s, with the growing influence of Nehru, and the Socialists and Communists within the Congress, which spurred the capitalists into becoming more active in the political field. The fear of radicalization of the national movement, however, did not push the capitalists into the ‘lap of imperialism,’ as predicted by contemporary radicals and as actually happened in some other colonial and semi-colonial countries. Instead, the Indian capitalists evolved a subtle, many­sided strategy to contain the Left, no part of which involved a sell-out to imperialism or imperial interests.

For example, when in 1929 certain capitalists, to meet the high pitch of Communist activity among the trade unions, attempted to form a class party, where European and Indian capitalists would combine, the leaders of the capitalist class firmly quashed such a move. As G.D. Birla put it, The salvation of the capitalists does not lie in joining hands with reactionary elements’ (i.e., pro-imperialist European interests in India) but in ‘cooperating with those who through constitutional means want to change the government for a national one’ (i.e. conservative nationalists). Similarly, in 1928, the capitalists refused to support the Government in introducing the Public Safety Bill, which was intended to contain the Communists, on the ground that such a provision would be used to attack the national movement.

Further, the capitalists were not to attempt to ‘kill Bolshevism and Communism with such frail weapons’ as frontally attacking the Left with their class organizations which would carry no weight with ‘the masses’ or even the ‘middle classes.’ As Birla explained, ‘I have not the least doubt in my mind that a purely capitalist organization is the last body to put up an effective fight against communism.’ A much superior method, he argued later (in 1936), when Nehru’s leftist attitude was seen as posing a danger, was to ‘let those who have given up property say what you want to say.’ The strategy was to ‘strengthen the hands’ of those nationalists who, in their’ ideology, did not transcend the parameters of capitalism or, preferably, even opposed socialism.

The capitalists also realized, as G.L. Mehta, the president of FICCI, argued in 1943, that ‘A consistent program of reforms’ was the most effective remedy against social upheavals.’ It was with this reform perspective that the ‘Post War Economic Development Committee,’ set up by the capitalists in 1942, which eventually drafted the Bombay Plan, was to function. Its attempt was to incorporate ‘whatever is sound and feasible in the socialist movement’ and see ‘how far socialist demands could be accommodated without capitalism surrendering any of its essential features.’ The Bombay Plan, therefore, seriously took up the question of rapid economic growth and equitable distribution, even arguing for the necessity of partial nationalization, the public sector, land reform and a series of workers’ welfare schemes. One may add that the basic assumption made by the Bombay planners was that the plan could be implemented only by an independent national Government.

Clearly the Indian capitalist class was anti-socialist and bourgeois but it was not pro-imperialist The maturity of the Indian capitalist class in identifying its long term interests, correctly understanding the nature of the Congress and its relationship with the different Classes in Indian society, its refusal to abandon the side of Indian nationalism even when threatened by the Left or tempted by imperialism, its ability to project its own class interests as societal interests, are some of the reasons (apart from the failure of the Left in several of the above directions) which explains why, on the whole, the Indian national movement remained, till independence under bourgeois ideological hegemony, despite strong contending trends within it.

India’s Struggle for Independence by Bipan Chandra Chapter 28 The Freedom Struggle in Princely India

The variegated pattern of the British conquest of India, and the different stratagems through which the various parts of the country were brought under colonial rule, had resulted in two- fifths of the sub-continent being ruled by Indian princes. The areas ruled by the Princes included Indian States like Hyderabad, Mysore, and Kashmir that were equal in size to many European countries, and numerous small States who counted their population in the thousands. The common feature was that all of them, big and small, recognized the paramountcy of the British Government.

In return, the British guaranteed the Princes against any threat to their autocratic power, internal or external. Most of the princely States were run as unmitigated autocracies, with absolute power concentrated in the hands of the ruler or his favorites. The burden of the land tax was usually heavier than in British India and there was usually much less of the rule of law and civil liberties. The rulers had unrestrained power over the state revenues for personal use, and this often led to ostentatious living and waste Some of the more enlightened rulers and their ministers did make attempts, from time to time, to introduce reforms in the administration, the system of taxation and even granted powers to the people to participate in government But the vast majority of the States were bastions of economic, social, political and educational backwardness, for reasons not totally of their own making.

Ultimately, it was the British Government that was responsible for the situation in which the Indian States found themselves in the twentieth century. As the national movement grew in strength, the Princes were increasingly called upon to play the role of ‘bulwarks of reaction.’ Any sympathy with nationalism, such as that expressed by the Maharaja of Baroda, was looked upon with extreme disfavor. Many a potential reformer among the rulers was gradually drained of initiative by the constant surveillance and interference exercised by the British residents. There were honorable exceptions, however, and some States, like Baroda and Mysore, succeeded in promoting industrial and agricultural development, administrative and political reforms, and education to a considerable degree.

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The advance of the national movement in British India, and the accompanying increase in political consciousness about democracy, responsible government, and civil liberties had an inevitable impact on the people of the States. In the first and second decade of the twentieth century, runaway terrorists from British India seeking shelter in the States became agents of politicization. A much more powerful influence was exercised by the Non-Cooperation and Khilafat Movement launched in 1920; around this time and under its impact, numerous local organizations of the States’ people came into existence. Some of the States in which Praja mandals or States’ People’s Conferences were organized were Mysore, Hyderabad, Baroda, the Kathiawad States, the Deccan States, Jamnagar, Indore, and Nawanagar. This process came to a head in December 1927 with the convening of the All India States’ People’s Conference (AISPC) which was attended by 700 political workers from the States. The men chiefly responsible for this initiative were Baiwantrai Mehta, Manikial Kothari, and G.R. Abhayankar.

The policy of the Indian National Congress towards the Indian states had been first enunciated in 1920 at Nagpur when a resolution calling upon the Princes to grant full responsible government in their States had been passed. Simultaneously, however, the Congress, while allowing residents of the States to become members of the Congress, made it clear that they could not initiate political activity in the States in the name of Congress but only in their individual capacity or as members of the local political organizations. Given the great differences in the political conditions between British India and the States, and between the different States themselves, the general lack of civil liberties including freedom of association, the comparative political backwardness of the people, and the fact that the Indian States were legally independent entities, these were understandable restraints imposed in the interest of the movements in the States as well as the movement in British India. The main emphasis was that people of the States should build up their own strength and demonstrate their capacity to struggle for their demands. Informal links between the Congress and the various organizations of the people of the States, including the AISPC, always continued to be close. In 1927, the Congress reiterated as resolution of 1920, and in 1929. Jawaharlal Nehru, in his presidential address to the famous Lahore Congress, declared that ‘the Indian states cannot live apart from the rest of India. . . the only people who have a right to determine the future of the states must be the people of those states’) In later years, the Congress demanded that the Princes guarantee fundamental rights to their people.

In the mid-thirties, two associated developments brought about a distinct change in the situation in the Indian States. First, the Government of India Act of 1935 projected a scheme of federation in which the Indian States were to be brought into a direct constitutional relationship with British India and the States were to send representatives to the Federal Legislature. The catch was that these representatives would be nominees of the Princes and not democratically elected representatives of the people. They would number one-third of the total numbers of the Federal legislature and act as a solid conservative block that could be trusted to thwart nationalist pressures. The Indian National Congress and the AISPC and other organizations of the States’ people clearly saw through this imperialist manoeuvre and demanded that the States be represented not by the Princes’ nominees but by elected representatives of the people. This lent a great sense of urgency to the demand for responsible democratic government in the States.

The second development was the assumption of office by Congress Ministries in the majority of the provinces in British India in 1937. The fact that the Congress was in power created a new sense of confidence and expectation in the people of the Indian States and acted as a spur to greater political activity. The Princes too had to reckon with a new political reality — the Congress was no longer just a party in opposition but a party in power with a capacity to influence developments in contiguous Indian States.

The years 1938-39, in fact, stand out as years of a new awakening in the Indian States and were witness to a large number of movements demanding responsible government and other reforms. Praja mandals mushroomed in many States that had earlier no such organizations. Major struggles broke out in Jaipur, Kashmir, Rajkot, Patiala, Hyderabad, Mysore, Travancore, and the Orissa States.

These new developments brought about a significant change in Congress policy as well. Whereas, even in the Haripura session in 1938, the Congress had reiterated its policy that movements in the States should not be launched in the name of the Congress but should rely on their own independent strength and fight through local organizations, a few months later, on seeing the new spirit that was abroad among the people and their capacity to struggle. Gandhiji and Congress changed their attitude on this question. The radicals and socialists in the Congress, as well as political workers in the States, had in any case been pressing for this change for quite some time.

Explaining the shift in policy in an interview to the Times of India on 24 January 1939, Gandhiji said: ‘The policy of non­intervention by the Congress was, in my opinion, a perfect piece of statesmanship when the people of the States were not awakened. That policy would be cowardice when there is all­round awakening among the people of the States and a determination to go through a long course of suffering for the vindication of their just rights . . . The moment they became ready, the legal, constitutional and artificial boundary was destroyed.’

Following upon this, the Congress at Tripuri in March 1939 passed a resolution enunciating its new policy: ‘The great awakening that is taking place among the people of the States may lead to a relaxation, or to a complete removal of the restraint which the Congress imposed upon itself, thus resulting in an ever-increasing identification of the Congress with the States’ peoples’.3 Also in 1939, the AISPC elected Jawaharlal Nehru as its President for the Ludhiana session, thus setting the seal on the fusion of the movements in Princely India and British India.

The outbreak of the Second World War brought about a distinct change in the political atmosphere. Congress Ministries resigned, the Government armed itself with the Defence of India Rules, and in the States as well there was less tolerance of political activity. Things came to a head again in 1942 with the launching of the Quit India Movement. This time the Congress made no distinction between British India and the Indian States and the call for struggle was extended to the people of the States. The people of the States thus formally joined the struggle for Indian independence, and in addition to their demand for responsible government, they asked the British to quit India and demanded that the States become integral parts of the Indian nation.

The negotiations for transfer of power that ensued after the end of the War brought the problem of the States to the center of the stage. It was, indeed, to the credit of the national leadership, especially Sardar Patel, that the extremely complex situation created by the lapse of British paramountcy which rendered the States legally independent — was handled in a manner that defused the situation to a great degree. Most of the States succumbed to a combination of diplomatic pressure, arm­twisting, popular movements and their own realization that independence was not a realistic alternative, and signed the Instruments of Accession. But some of the States like Travancore, Junagadh, Kashmir, and Hyderabad held out till the last minute. Finally, only Hyderabad held out and made a really serious bid for Independence.

To illustrate the pattern of political activity in the Indian States, it is instructive to look more closely at the course of the movements in two representative States, Rajkot and Hyderabad — one among the smallest and the other the largest, one made famous by Gandhiji’s personal intervention and the other by its refusal to accede to the Indian Union in 1947, necessitating the use of armed forces to bring about its integration.

Rajkot, a small state with a population of roughly 75,000, situated in the Kathiawad peninsula, had an importance out of all proportion to its size and rank among the States of Western India because Rajkot city was the seat of the Western India State Agency from where the British Political Agent maintained his supervision of the numerous States of the area.

Rajkot had enjoyed the good fortune of being ruled for twenty years till 1930 — by Lakhajiraj, who had taken great care to promote the industrial, educational and political development of his state. Lakhajiraj encouraged popular participation in government by inaugurating in 1923 the Rajkot Praja Pratinidhi Sabha. This representative assembly consisted of ninety representatives elected on the basis of universal adult franchise, something quite unusual in those times. Though the Thakore Sahib, as the ruler was called, had full power to veto any suggestion, yet under Lakhajiraj this was the exception rather than the rule and popular participation was greatly legitimized under his aegis.

Lakhajiraj had also encouraged nationalist political activity by giving permission to Mansukhlal Mehta and Amritlal Sheth to hold the first Kathiawad Political Conference in Rajkot in 1921 which was presided over by Vithalbhai Patel. He himself attended the Rajkot and Bhavnagar (1925) sessions of the Conference, donated land in Rajkot for the starting of a national school that became the center of political activity’ and, in defiance of the British Political Agent or Resident, wore khadi as a symbol of the national movement. He was extremely proud of Gandhiji and his achievements and often invited ‘the son of Rajkot’ to the Durbar and would then make Gandhiji sit on the throne while he himself sat in the Durbar. He gave a public reception to Jawaharlal Nehru during his visit to the State.

Lakhajiraj died in 1939 and his son Dharmendra Singhji, a complete contrast to the father, soon took charge of the State. The new Thakore was interested only in pleasure, and effective power fell into the hands of Dewan Virawala, who did nothing to stop the Thakore from frittering away the State’s wealth, and finances reached such a pass that the State began to sell monopolies for the sale of matches, sugar, rice, and cinema licenses to individual merchants. This immediately resulted in a rise in prices and enhanced the discontent that had already emerged over the Thakore’s easy-going lifestyle and his disregard for popular participation in government as reflected in the lapse of the Pratinidhi Sabha as well as the increase in taxes. The ground for struggle had been prepared over several years of political work by political groups in Rajkot and Kathiawad. The first group had been led by Mansukhlal Mehta and Amritlal Sheth and later by Balwantrai Mehta. another by Phulchand Shah, a third by Vrajlal Shukia, and a fourth group consisted of Gandhian constructive workers who, after 1936, under the leadership of U.N. Dhebar, emerged as the leading group in the Rajkot struggle.

The first struggle emerged under the leadership of Jethalal Joshi, a Gandhian worker, who organized the 800 labourers of the state-owned cotton mill into a labour union and led a twenty- one day strike in 1936 to secure better working conditions. The Durbar had been forced to concede the union’s demands. This victory encouraged Joshi and Dhebar to convene, in March 1937, the first meeting of the Kathiawad Rajakiya Parishad to be held in eight years. The conference, attended by 15,000 people, demanded responsible government, reduction in taxes and state expenditure.

There was no response from the Durbar and, on 15 August 1938, the Panshad workers organized a protest against gambling (the monopoly for which had been sold to a disreputable outfit called Carnival) at the Gokulashtmi Fair. According, to a pre­arranged plan, the protesters were severely beaten with lathis first by the Agency police and then by the State police. This resulted in a complete hanal in Rajkot city, and a session of the Parishad was held on 5 September and presided over by Sardar Patel. In a meeting with Dewan Virawala, Patel, on behalf of the Parishad, demanded a committee to frame proposals for responsible government, a ne’ election to the Pratinidhi Sabha, reduction of land revenue by fifteen percent, cancellation of all monopolies or /ijaras, and a limit on the ruler’s claim on the State treasury. The Durbar, instead of conceding the demands, asked the Resident to appoint a British officer as Dewan to deal effectively with the situation, and Cadell took over on 12 September. Meanwhile, Virawala himself became Private Adviser to the Thakore, so that he could continue to operate from behind the scenes.

The Satyagraha now assumed major proportions and included withhold of land revenue, defiance of monopoly rights, boycott of all goods produced by the State, including electricity and cloth. There was a run on the State Bank and strikes in the state cotton mill and by students. All sources of income of the state, including excise and custom duties, were sought to be blocked.

Sardar Patel, though most of the tune not physically present in Rajkot, kept in regular touch with the Rajkot leaders by telephone every evening. Volunteers began to arrive from other parts of Kathiawad, from British Gujarat and Bombay. The movement demonstrated a remarkable degree of organization: a secret chain of command ensured that on the arrest of one leader another took charge and code numbers published in newspapers informed each Satyagrahi of his arrival date and arrangements in Rajkot.

By the end of November, the British were clearly worried about the implications of a possible Congress victory in Rajkot. The Viceroy, Linlithgow, wired to the Secretary of State: ‘I have little doubt that if Congress were to win in the Rajkot case the movement would go right through Kathiawad, and that they would then extend their activities in other directions.

But the Durbar decided to ignore the Political Department’s advice and go ahead with a settlement with Sardar Patel. The agreement that was reached on 26 December 1938, provided for a limit on the Thakore’s Privy Purse and the appointment of a committee of ten State subjects or officials to draw up a scheme of reforms designed to give the widest possible powers to the people. A separate letter to the Sardar by the Thakore contained the informal understanding that ‘seven members of the Committee are to be recommended by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and they are to be nominated by us’. All prisoners were released and the Satyagraha was withdrawn.

But such open defiance by the Thakore could hardly be welcomed by the British government. Consultations involving the Resident, the Political Department, the Viceroy and the Secretary of State were immediately held and the Thakore was instructed not to accept the Sardar’s list of members of the Committee, but to select another set with the help of the Resident. Accordingly, the list of names sent by Patel was rejected, the excuse being that it contained the names of only Brahmins and Banias, and did not give any representation to Rajputs, Muslims, and the depressed classes.

The breach of agreement by the State led to a resumption of the Satyagraha on 26 January 1939. Virawala answered with severe repression. As before, this soon led to growing concern and sense of outrage among nationalists outside Rajkot. Kasturba, Gandhiji’s wife, who had been brought up in Rajkot, was so moved by the state of affairs that she decided, in spite of her poor health and against everybody’s advice, to go to Rajkot. On arrival, she and her companion Maniben Patel, the Sardar’s daughter, were arrested and detained in a village sixteen miles from Rajkot.

But Rajkot was destined for even more dramatic events. The Mahatma decided that he, too, must go to Rajkot. He had already made it clear that he considered the breach of a solemn agreement by the Thakore Sahib a serious affair and one that was the duty of every Satyagrahi to resist. He also felt that he had strong claims on Rajkot because of his family’s close association with the State and the Thakore’s family and that this justified and prompted his personal intervention. In accordance with his wishes, mass Satyagraha was suspended to prepare the way for negotiations. But a number of discussions with the Resident, the Thakore and Dewan Virawala yielded no results and resulted in an ultimatum by Gandhiji that if, by 3 March, the Durbar did not agree to honour its agreement with the Sardar, he would go on a fast unto death. The Thakore, or rather Virawala, who was the real power behind the throne, stuck to his original position and left Gandhiji with no choice but to begin his fast.

The fast was the signal for a nation-wide protest. Gandhiji’s health was already poor and any prolonged fast was likely to be dangerous. There were hartals, an adjournment of the legislature and finally a threat that the Congress Ministries might resign. The Viceroy was bombarded with telegrams asking for his intervention. Gandhiji himself urged the Paramount Power to fulfill its responsibility to the people of the State by persuading the Thakore to honour his promise. On 7 March, the Viceroy suggested arbitration by the Chief Justice of India, Sir Maurice Gwyer, to decide whether, in fact, the Thakore had violated the agreement. This seemed a reasonable enough proposition, and Gandhiji broke his fast.

The Chief Justice’s award announced on 3 April 1939, vindicated the Sardar’s position that the Durbar had agreed to accept seven of his nominees. The ball was now back in the Thakore’s court. But there had been no change of heart in Rajkot.   Virawala continued with his policy of propping up Rajput, Muslim and depressed classes’ claims to representation and refused to accept any of the proposals made by Gandhiji to accommodate their representatives while maintaining a majority of the Sardar’s and the Parishad’s nominees.

The situation soon began to take an ugly turn, with hostile demonstrations by Rajputs and Muslims during Gandhiji’s prayer meetings, and Mohammed Au Jinnah’s and Ambedkar’s demand that the Muslims and depressed classes be given separate representation. The Durbar used all this to continue to refuse to honour the agreement in either its letter or spirit. The Paramount Power, too, would not intervene because it had nothing to gain and everything to lose from securing an outright Congress victory. Nor did it see its role as one of promoting responsible government in the States.

At this point, Gandhiji, analyzing the reasons for his failure to achieve a ‘change of heart’ in his opponents, came to the conclusion that the cause lay in his attempt to use the authority of the Paramount Power to coerce the Thakore into an agreement. This, for him, smacked of violence; non-violence should have meant that he should have directed his fast only at the Thakore and Virawala, arid relied only on the strength of his suffering to effect a ‘change of heart’. Therefore, he released the Thakore from the agreement, apologized to the Viceroy and the Chief Justice for wasting their time, and to his opponents, the Muslims and the Rajputs, and left Rajkot to return to British India.

The Rajkot Satyagraha brought into clear focus the paradoxical situation that existed in the States and which made the task of resistance a very complex one. The rulers of the States were protected by the might of the British Government against any movements that aimed at reform and popular pressure on the British Government to induce reform could always be resisted by pleading the legal position of the autonomy of the States. This legal independence, however, was usually forgotten by the British when the States desired to follow a course that was unpalatable to the Paramount Power. It was, after all, the British Government that urged the Thakore to refuse to honour his agreement with the Sardar. But the legal separation of power and responsibility between the States and the British Government did provide a convenient excuse for resisting pressure, an excuse that did not exist in British India. This meant that movements of resistance in the States operated in conditions that were very different from those that provided the context for movements in British India. Perhaps, then, the Congress had not been far wrong when for years it had urged that the movements in Princely India and British India could not be merged. Its hesitation to take on the Indian States was based on a comprehension of the genuine difficulties in the situation, difficulties which were clearly shown up by the example of Rajkot.

Despite the apparent failure of the Rajkot Satyagraha, it exercised a powerful politicizing influence on the people of the States, especially in Western India. It also demonstrated to the Princes that they survived only because the British were there to prop them up, and thus, the struggle of Rajkot, along with others of its time, facilitated the process of the integration of the States at the time of independence. Many a Prince who had seen for himself that the people were capable of resisting would hesitate in 1947 to resist the pressure for integration when it came. In the absence of these struggles, the whole process of integration would inevitably have been arduous and protracted. It is hardly a matter of surprise that the man who was responsible more than any other for effecting the integration in 1947-48 was the same Sardar who was a veteran of many struggles against the Princes.

Bu there was one State that refused to see the writing on the wall — Hyderabad. Hyderabad was the largest princely State in India both by virtue of its size and its population. The Nizam’s dominions included three distinct linguistic areas: Marathi­speaking (twenty-eight percent), Kannada peaking (twenty-two) and Telugu-speaking (fifty percent). Osman Ali Khan, who became Nizam in 1911 and continued till 1948, ruled the State as a personalized autocracy. The staff khas, the Nizam’s own estate, which accounted for ten percent of the total area of the State, went directly to meet the royal expenses. Another thirty percent of the States’ area was held as jagirs by various categories of the rural population and was heavily burdened by a whole gamut of illegal levies and exactions and forced labour or vethi.

Particularly galling to the overwhelmingly Hindu population of the State was the cultural and religious suppression practiced by the Nizam. Urdu was made the court language and all efforts were made to promote it, including the setting up of the Osmania University. Other languages of the State — Telugu, Marathi, and Kannada — were neglected and even private efforts to promote education in these languages were obstructed. Muslims were given a disproportionately large share of the jobs in the administration, especially in its upper echelons. The Arya Samaj Movement that grew rapidly in the 1920s was actively suppressed and official permission had to be sought to set up a havan kund for Arya Samaj religious observances. The Nizam’s administration increasingly tried to project Hyderabad as a Muslim state, and this process was accelerated after 1927 with the emergence of the Ittehad ul Muslimin, an organization that based itself on the notion of the Nizam as the ‘Royal Embodiment of Muslim Sovereignty in the Deccan.’

It is in this context of political, economic, cultural and religious oppression that the growth of political consciousness and the course of the State’s People’s Movement in Hyderabad has to be understood.

As in other parts of India, it was the Non-Cooperation and Khilafat Movement of 1920-22 that created the first stirrings of political activity. From various parts of the State, there were reports of charkhas being popularized national schools being set up, of propaganda against drink and untouchability, of badges containing pictures of Gandhiji and the All brothers being sold. Public meetings were not much in evidence, except in connection with the Khilafat Movement, which could take on a more open form because the Nizam hesitated to come out openly against it. Public demonstration of Hindu-Muslim unity was very popular in the’ years.

This new awakening found expression in the subsequent years in the holding of a series of Hyderabad political conferences at different venues outside the State. The main discussion at these conferences centered around the need for a system of responsible government and for elementary civil liberties that were lacking in the State. Oppressive practices like vethi or veth begar and exorbitant taxation, as well as the religious and cultural suppression of the people, were also condemned.

Simultaneously, there began a process of regional cultural awakening, the lead being taken by the Telangana area. A cohesion to this effort was provided by the founding of the Andhra Jana Sangham which later grew into the Andhra Mahasabha. The emphasis initially was on the promotion of Telugu language and literature by setting up library associations, schools, journals, and newspapers and promoting a research society. Even these activities came under attack from the State authorities, and schools, libraries, and newspapers would be regularly shut down. The Mahasabha refrained from any direct political activity or stance till the 1940s.

The Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930-32, in which many people from the State participated by going to the British areas, carried the process of politicization further. Hyderabad nationalists, especially many of the younger ones, spent time in jail with nationalists from British India and became part of the political trends that were sweeping the rest of the nation. A new impatience was imparted to their politics, and the pressure for a more vigorous politics became stronger.

In 1937, the other two regions of the State also set up their own organizations — the Maharashtra Parishad and the Kannada Parishad. And, in 1938, activists from all three regions came together and decided to found the Hyderabad State Congress as a state-wide body of the people of Hyderabad. This was not a branch of the Indian National Congress, despite its name, and despite the fact that its members had close contacts with the Congress. But even before the organization could be formally founded, the Nizam’s government issued orders banning it, the ostensible ground being that it was a communal body of Hindus and that Muslims were not sufficiently represented in it. Negotiations with the Government bore no fruit, and the decision was taken to launch a Satyagraha.

The leader of this Satyagraha was Swami Ramanand Tirtha, a Marathi-speaking nationalist who had given up his studies during the Non-Cooperation Movement, attended a national school and college, worked as a trade unionist in Bombay and Sholapur and finally moved to Mominabad in Hyderabad State where he ran a school on nationalist lines. A Gandhian in his life­style and a Nehruite in his ideology, Swamiji emerged in 1938 as the leader of the movement since the older and more established leaders were unwilling or unable to venture into this new type of politics of confrontation with the State.

The Satyagraha started in October 1938 and the pattern adopted was that a group of five Satyagrahis headed by a popular leader and consisting of representatives of all the regions would defy the ban by proclaiming themselves as members of the State Congress. This was repeated thrice a week for two months and all the Satyagrahis were sent to jail. Huge crowds would collect to witness the Satyagraha and express solidarity with the movement. The two centers of the Satyagraha were Hyderabad city and Aurangabad city in the Marathwada area.

Gandhiji himself took a keen personal interest in the developments and regularly wrote to Sir Akbar Hydari, the Prime Minister, pressing him for better treatment of the Satyagrahis and for a change in the State’s attitude. And it was at his instance that, after two months, in December j 1938, the Satyagraha was withdrawn.

The reasons for this decision were to be primarily found in an accompanying development — the Satyagraha launched by the Arya Samaj and the Hindu Civil Liberties Union at the same time as the State Congress Satyagraha. The Arya Samaj Satyagraha, which was attracting Satyagrahis from all over the country, was launched as a protest against the religious persecution of the Arya Samaj, and it had clearly religious objectives. It also tended to take on communal overtones. The State Congress and Gandhiji increasingly felt that in the popular mind their clearly secular Satyagraha with distinct political objectives were being confused with the religious-communal Satyagraha of the Arya Samaj and that it was, therefore, best to demarcate themselves from it by withdrawing their own Satyagraha. The authorities were, in any case, lumping the two together and seeking to project the State Congress as a Hindu communal organization.

Simultaneously, there was the emergence of what came to be known as the Vande Mataram Movement. Students of colleges in Hyderabad city org arnz.cd a protest strike against the authorities’ refusal to let them sing Vande Mataram in their hostel prayer rooms. This strike rapidly spread to other parts of the State and many of the students who were expelled from the Hyderabad colleges left the State and continued their studies in Nagpur University in the Congress-ruled Central Provinces where they were given shelter by a hospitable Vice-Chancellor This movement was extremely significant because it created a young and militant cadre that provided the activists as well as the leadership of the movement in later years.

The State Congress, however, continued to be banned, and the regional cultural organizations remained the main forums of activity. The Andhra Mahasabha was particularly active in this phase, and the majority of the younger newly-politicized cadre flocked to it. A significant development that occurred around the year 1940 was that Ravi Narayan Reddy, who had emerged as a major leader of the radicals in the Andhra Mahasabha and had participated in the State Congress Satyagraha along with B. Yella Reddy, was drawn towards the Communist Party. As a result, several of the younger cadres also came under Left and Communist influence, and these radical elements gradually increased in strength and pushed the Andhra Mahasabha towards more radical politics. The Mahasabha began to take an active interest in the problems of the peasants.

The outbreak of the War provided an excuse to the government for avoiding any moves towards political and constitutional reforms. A symbolic protest against the continuing ban was again registered by Swami Ramanand Tirtha and six others personally selected by Gandhiji. They were arrested in September 1940 and kept in detention till December 1941. A resumption of the struggle was ruled out by Gandhiji since an All-India struggle was in the offing and now all struggles would be part of that.

The Quit India Movement was launched in August 1942 and it was made clear that now there was no distinction to be made between the people of British India and the States: every Indian was to participate. The meeting of the AISPC was convened along with the AICC session at Bombay that announced the commencement of struggle. Gandhiji and Jawaharlal Nehru both addressed the AISPC Standing Committee, and Gandhiji himself explained the implications of the Quit India Movement and told the Committee that henceforth there would be one movement. The movement in the States was now to be not only for responsible government but for the independence of India and the integration of the States with British India.

The Quit India Movement got a considerable response from Hyderabad, especially the youth. Though arrests of the main leaders, including Swamiji, prevented an organized movement from emerging, many people all over the State offered Satyagraha and many others were arrested. On 2 October 1942, a batch of women offered Satyagraha in Hyderabad city, and Sarojini Naidu was arrested earlier in the day. Slogans such as ‘Gandhi Ka Charkha Chalana Padega, Goron ko London Jana Padega’ (Gandhiji’s wheel will have to be spun, while the Whites will have to return to London) became popular. In a state where, till a few years ago even well-established leaders had to send their speeches to the Collector in advance and accept deletions made by him, the new atmosphere was hardly short of revolutionary.

But the Quit India Movement also sealed the rift that had developed between the Communist and non-Communist radical nationalists after the Communist Party had adopted the slogan of People’s War in December 1941. Communists were opposed to the Quit India Movement as it militated against their understanding that Britain must be supported in its anti-Fascist War. The young nationalists in Telangana coalesced around Jamalpuram Keshavrao but a large section went with Ravi Narayan Reddy to the Communists. The Communists were also facilitated by the removal of the ban on the CPI by the Nizam, in keeping with the policy of the Government of India that had removed the ban because of the CPI’s pro-war stance. Therefore, while most of the nationalists were clamped in jail because of their support to the Quit India Movement, the Communists remained free to extend and consolidate their base among the people. This process reached a head in 1944 when a split occurred in the Andhra Mahasabha session at Bhongir, and the pro-nationalist as well as the liberal elements walked out and set up a separate organization. The Andhra Mahasabha now was completely led by the Communists and they soon launched a program of mobilization and organization of the peasantry. The end of the War in 1945 brought about a change in the Peoples’ War line, and the restraint on organizing struggles was removed.

The years 1945-46, and especially the latter half of 1946, saw the growth of a powerful peasant struggle in various pockets in Nalgonda district, and to some extent in Warangal and Khammam. The main targets of attack were the forced grain levy, the practice of veth begar, illegal exactions and illegal seizures of land. Clashes took place initially between the landlords’ goondas and the peasants led by the Sangham (as the Andhra Mahasabha was popularly known), and later between the armed forces of the State police and peasants armed with sticks and stones. The resistance was strong, but so was the repression, and by the end of 1946, the severity of the repression succeeded in pushing the movement into quietude. Thousands were arrested and beaten, many died, and the leaders languished in jails. Yet, the movement had succeeded in instilling into the oppressed and downtrodden peasants of Telangana new confidence in their ability to resist.

On 4 June 1947, the Viceroy, Mountbatten, announced at a press conference that the British would soon leave India for good on 15 August. On 12 June, the Nizam announced that on the lapse of British paramountcy he would become a sovereign monarch. The intention was clear: he would not accede to the Indian Union. The first open session of the Hyderabad State Congress which demanded accession to the Indian Union and grant of responsible government was held from 16 to 18 June. The State Congress, with the full support of the Indian National Congress, had also thwarted an attempt by the Nizam. a few months earlier, to foist an undemocratic constitution on the people. The boycott of the elections launched by them had received tremendous support. With this new confidence, they began to take a bold stand against the Nizam’s moves.

The decision to launch the final struggle was taken by the leaders of the State Congress in consultation with the national leaders in Delhi. As recorded by Swami Ramanand Tirtha in his Memoirs of Hyderabad Freedom Struggle: ‘That (the) final phase of the freedom struggle in Hyderabad would have to be a clash of arms with the Indian Union, was what we were more than ever convinced of. It would have to be preceded by a Satyagraha movement on a mass scale’.

After the preliminary tasks of setting up the Committee of Action under the Chairmanship of D.G. Bindu (which would operate from outside the State to avoid arrest), the establishment of offices in Sholapur, Vijayawada, Gadag and a central office at Bombay, mobilization ‘f funds in which Jayaprakash Narayan played a critical role, the struggle was formally launched on 7 August which was to be celebrated as ‘Join Indian Union Day’. The response was terrific, and meetings to defy the bans were held in towns and villages all over the State. Workers and students went on strike, including 12,000 Hyderabadi workers in Bombay. Beatings and arrests were common. On 13 August, the Nizam banned the ceremonial hoisting of the national flag. Swamiji gave the call: ‘This order is a challenge to the people of Hyderabad and I hope they will accept it’. Swamiji and his colleagues were arrested in the early hours of 15 August 1947, soon after the dawn of Indian Independence. But, despite tight security arrangements, 100 students rushed out of the Hyderabad Students’ union office and hoisted the flag in Sultan Bazaar as scheduled. in subsequent days, the hoisting of the Indian national flag became the major form of defiance and ingenious methods were evolved. Trains decorated with national flags would steam into Hyderabad territory from neighboring Indian territory. Students continued to play a leading role in the movement and were soon joined by women in large numbers, prominent among them being Brij Rani and Yashoda Ben.

As the movement gathered force and gained momentum, the Nizam and his administration cracked down on it. But the most ominous development was the encouragement given to the stormtroopers of the Ittihad ul Muslimin, the Razakars, by the State to act as a paramilitary force to attack the peoples’ struggle. Razakars were issued arms and let loose on protesting crowds; they set up camps near rebellious villages and carried out armed raids.

On 29 November 1947, the Nizam signed a Standstill Agreement with the Indian Government, but simultaneously the repression was intensified, and the Razakar menace became even more acute. Many thousands of people who could afford to do so fled the State and were housed in camps in neighboring Indian territory. The people increasingly took to self-defense and protected themselves with whatever was available. In organizing the defense against the Razakars and attacks on Razakar camps, the Communists played a very important role, especially in the areas of Nalgonda, Warangal, and Khammam that were their strongholds. Peasants were organized into dreams, given training in arms, and mobilized for the anti-Nizam struggle. In these areas, the movement also took an anti-landlord stance and many cruel landlords were attacked, some even killed, and illegally occupied land was returned to the original owners. Virtually all the big landlords had run away, and their land was distributed to and cultivated by those with small holdings or no land.

The State Congress, too, organized armed resistance from camps on the State’s borders. Raids were made on customs’ outposts, police Stations and Razaicar camps. Outside the Communist strongh% olds in the Telangana areas, it was the State Congress that was the main vehicle for organizing popular resistance. Over 20,000 Satyagrahis were in jail and many more were participating in the movement outside.

By September 1948, it became clear that all negotiations to make the Nizam accede to the Union had failed. On 13 September 1948, the Indian Army moved in and on 18 September the Nizam surrendered. The process of the integration of the Indian Union was finally complete. The people welcomed the Indian Army as an army of liberation, an army that ended the oppression of the Nizam and the Razakars. Scenes of jubilation were evident all over, and the national flag was hoisted. The celebration was, however, marred by the decision of the Communists to refuse to lay down arms and continue the struggle against the Indian Union, but that is another long story that falls outside the scope of our present concerns.

The cases of Hyderabad, and that of Rajkot are good examples of how methods of struggle evolved to suit the conditions in British India, such as non-violent mass civil disobedience or Satyagraha, did not have the same viability or effectiveness in the India States. The lack of civil liberties, and of representative institutions, meant that the political space for hegemonic politics was very small, even when compared to the conditions prevailing under the semi-hegemonic and semi- repressive colonial state in British India. The ultimate protection provided by the British enabled the rulers of the States to withstand popular pressure to a considerable degree, as happened in Rajkot. As a result, there was a much greater tendency in these States for the movements to resort to violent methods of agitation — this happened not only in Hyderabad, but also in Travancore, Patiala, and the Orissa States among others. In Hyderabad, for example, even the State Congress ultimately resorted to violent methods of attack, and, in the final count, the Nizam could only be brought into line by the Indian Army.

This also meant that those such as the Communists and other Left groups, who had less hesitation than the Congress in resorting to violent forms of struggle, were placed in a more favorable situation in these States and were able to grow as a political force in these areas. Here, too, the examples of Hyderabad, Travancore, Patiala and the Orissa States were quite striking.

The differences between the political conditions in the States and British India also go a long way in explaining the hesitation of Congress to merge the movements in the States with those in British India. The movement in British India adopted forms of struggle and a strategy that was specifically suited to the political context. Also, political sagacity dictated that the Princes should not be unnecessarily pushed into taking hard positions against Indian nationalism, at least till such time as this could be counter-balanced by the political weight of the people of the state.

India’s Struggle for Independence by Bipan Chandra Chapter 27 Peasant Movements In the 1930s and ’40s

The 1930s bore witness to a new and nation-wide awakening of Indian peasants to their own strength and capacity to organize for the betterment of their living conditions. This awakening was largely a result of the combination of particular economic and political developments: the Great Depression that began to hit India from 1929-30 and the new phase of mass struggle launched by the Indian National Congress in 1930.

The Depression which brought agricultural prices crashing down to half or less of their normal levels dealt a severe blow to the already impoverished peasants burdened with high taxes and rents. The Government was obdurate in refusing to scale down its own rates of taxation or in asking zamindars to bring down their rents. The prices of manufactured goods, too, didn’t register comparable decreases. All told, the peasants were placed in a situation where they had to continue to pay taxes, rents, and debts at pre-Depression rates while their incomes continued to spiral steadily downward.

The Civil Disobedience Movement was launched in this atmosphere of discontent in 1930, and in many parts of the country it soon took on the form of a no-tax and no-rent campaign. Peasants, emboldened by the recent success of the Bardoli Satyagraha (1928), joined the protest in large numbers. In Andhra, for example, the political movement was soon enmeshed with the campaign against re-settlement that threatened an increase in land revenue. In U.P., no-revenue soon turned into no-rent 3rd the movement continued even during the period of truce following the Gandhi-Irwin Pact. Gandhiji himself issued a manifesto to the U.P. Kisan asking them to pay only fifty per cent of the legal rent and get receipts for payment of the full amount. Peasants in Gujarat, especially in Surat and Kheda, refused to pay their taxes and went hijrat to neighbouring Baroda territory to escape government repression. Their lands and movable property were confiscated. In Bihar and Bengal, powerful movements were launched against the hated chowkidar tax by which villagers were made to pay for the upkeep of their own oppressors. In Punjab, a no-revenue campaign was accompanied by the emergence of Kisan Sabhas that demanded a reduction in land revenue and water-rates and the scaling down of debts. Forest satyagrahas by which peasants, including tribals, defied the forest laws that prohibited them from use of the forests were popular in Maharashtra, Bihar and the Central Provinces. Anti-zamindari struggles emerged in Andhra, and the first target was the Venkatagiri zamindari, in Nellore district.

The Civil Disobedience Movement contributed to the emerging peasant movement in another very important way; a whole new generation of young militant, political cadres was born from its womb. This new generation of political workers, which first received its baptism of fire in the Civil Disobedience Movement, was increasingly brought under the influence of the Left ideology that was being propagated by Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Bose. the Communists and other Marxist and Left individuals and groups. With the decline of the Civil Disobedience Movement, these men and women began to search for an outlet of their political energies and many of them found the answer in organizing the peasants.

Also, in 1934, with the formation of the Congress Socialist Party (CSP). the process of the consolidation of the Left forces received a significant push forward. The Communists, too, got the opportunity, by becoming members of the CSP to work in an open and legal fashion. This consolidation of the Left acted as a spur to the formation of an all-India body to coordinate the Kisan movement, a process that was already underway through the efforts of N.G. Ranga and other Kisan leaders. The culmination was the establishment of the All-India Kisan Congress in Lucknow in April 1936 which later changed its name to the All- India Kisan Sabha. Swami Sahajanand, the militant founder of the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha (1929), was elected the President, and N.G. Ranga, the pioneer of the Kisan movement in Andhra and a renowned scholar of the agrarian problem, the General Secretary. The first session was greeted in person by Jawaharlal Nehru. Other participants included Ram Manohar Lohia, Sohan Singh Josh, Indulal Yagnik, Jayaprakash Narayan, Mohanlal Gautam, Kamal Sarkar, Sudhin Pramanik and Ahmed Din. The Conference resolved to bring out a Kisan Manifesto and a periodic bulletin edited by Indulal Yagnik.

A Kisan Manifesto was finalized at the All-India Kisan Committee session in Bombay and formally presented to the Congress Working Committee to be incorporated into its forthcoming manifesto for the 1937 elections. The Kisan Manifesto considerably influenced the agrarian programme adopted by the Congress at its Faizpur session, which included demands for fifty per cent reduction in land revenue and rent, a moratorium on debts, the abolition of feudal levies, security of tenure for tenants, a living wage for agricultural labourers, and the recognition of peasant unions.

At Faizpur, in Maharashtra, along with the Congress session, was held the second session of the All India Kisan Congress presided over by N.G. Ranga. Five hundred Kisan marched for over 200 miles from Manmad to Faizpur educating the people along the way about the objects of the Kisan Congress. They were welcomed at Faizpur by Jawaharlal Nehru, Shankar Rao Deo, M.N. Roy, Narendra Dev, S.A. Dange, M.R. Masani, Yusuf Meherally, Bankim Mukherji and many other Kisan and Congress leaders. Ranga, in his Presidential Address, declared: We are organizing ourselves in order to prepare ourselves for the final inauguration of a Socialist state and society.’

The formation of Congress Ministries in a majority of the provinces in early 1937 marked the beginning of a new phase in the growth of the peasant movement. The political atmosphere in the country underwent a marked change: increased civil liberties, a new sense of freedom born of the feeling that ‘our own people are in power’, a heightened sense of expectation that the ministries would bring in pro-people measures — all combined to make the years 1937-39 the high-water mark of the peasant movement. The different Ministries also introduced varying kinds of agrarian legislation — for debt relief, restoration of lands lost during the Depression, for security of tenure to tenants and this provided an impetus for the mobilization of the peasantry either in support of proposed legislation or for asking for changes in its content.

The chief form of mobilization was through the holding of Kisan conferences or meetings at the thana, Taluka. district and provincial levels at winch peasants’ demands would be aired and resolutions passed. These conferences would be addressed by local, provincial and all-India leaders. These would also usually be preceded by a campaign of mobilization at the village level when Kisan workers would tour the villages, hold meetings, enrol Congress and Kisan Sabha members, collect subscriptions in money and kind and exhort the peasants to attend the conferences in large numbers. Cultural shows would be organized at these conferences to carry the message of the movement to the peasants in an appealing manner. The effect on the surrounding areas was powerful indeed, and peasants returned from these gatherings with a new sense of their own strength and a greater understanding of their own conditions.

In Malabar, in Kerala, for example, a powerful peasant movement developed as the result of the efforts mainly of CSP activists, who had been working among the peasants since 1934, touring villages and setting up Karshaka Sanghams (peasant associations). The main demands, around which the movement covered, were for the abolition of feudal levies or akramapirivukal, renewal fees or the practice of policceluthu, advance rent, and the stopping of eviction of tenants by landlords on the ground of personal cultivation. Peasants also demanded a reduction in the tax, rent, and debt burden, and the use of proper measures by landlords when measuring the grain rent, and an end to the corrupt practices of the landlords’ managers. The main forms of mobilization and agitation were the formation of village units of the Karshaka Sanghams, conferences and meetings. But a form that became very popular and effective was the marching of jat has or large groups of peasants to the houses of big jenmies or landlords, placing the demands before them and securing immediate redressal. The main demand of these jathas was for the abolition of feudal levies such as vasi, Nuri, etc.

The Karshaka Sanghams also organized a powerful campaign around the demand for amending the Malabar Tenancy Act of 1929. The 6th of November, 1938 was observed as the Malabar Tenancy Act Amendment Day and meetings all over the district passed a uniform resolution pressing the demand. A committee headed by R. Ramachandra Nedumgadi was appointed by the All Malabar Karshaka Sangham to enquire into the tenurial problem and its recommendations were endorsed by the Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee on 20 November 1938. In December, two jathas of five hundred each started from Karivallur in north Malabar and Kanjikode in the south and, after being received and hosted by local Congress Committees en route converged at Chevayur near Calicut where the All Malabar Karshaka Sangham was holding its conference. A public meeting was held the same evening at Calicut beach presided over by P. Krishna Pillai, the CSP and later Communist leader, and resolutions demanding amendments in the Tenancy Act were passed. In response to popular pressure, T. Prakasam, the Andhra Congress leader who was the Revenue Minister in the Congress Ministry in Madras Presidency, toured Malabar in December 1938 to acquaint himself with the tenant problem. A Tenancy Committee was set up which included three left-wing members. The Karshaka Sangham units and Congress committees held a series of meetings to mobilize peasants to present evidence and to submit memoranda to the Committee. But, by the time the Committee submitted its report in 1940, the Congress Ministries had already resigned and no immediate progress was possible. But the campaign had successfully mobilized the peasantry on the tenancy question and created an awareness that ensured that in later years these demands would inevitably have to be accepted. Meanwhile, the Madras Congress Ministry had passed legislation for debt relief, and this was welcomed by the Karshaka Sangham.

In coastal Andhra, too, the mobilization of peasants proceeded on an unprecedented scale. The Andhra Provincial Ryots Association and the Andhra Zamin Ryots Association already had a long history of successful struggle against the Government and zamindars. In addition, N.G. Ranga had, since 1933, been running the Indian Peasants’ Institute in his home village of Nidobrolu in Guntur district which trained peasants to become active workers of the peasant movement. After 1936, left­wing Congressmen, members of the CSP, many of whom were to later join the CPI also joined in the effort to organize the peasants, and the name of P. Sundarayya was the foremost among them.

The defeat of many zamindars and pro-zamindar candidates in the 1937 elections by Congress candidates dealt a blow to the zamindars prestige and gave confidence to the zamindari ryots. Struggles were launched against the Bobbili and Mungala zamindaris, and a major struggle erupted against the Kalipatnam zamindari over cultivation and fishing rights.

In coastal Andhra, the weapon of peasant marches had already been used effectively since 1933. Peasant marchers would converge on the district or taluka headquarters and present a list of demands to the authorities. But, in 1938, the Provincial Kisan Conference organized, for the first time, a march on a massive scale — a true long march in which over 2.000 Kisan marched a distance of over 1,500 miles, starting from Itchapur in the north, covering nine districts and walking for a total of 130 days En route, they held hundreds of meetings attended by lakhs of peasants and collected over 1,100 petitions; these were then presented to the provincial legislature in Madras on 27 March 1938. One of their main demands was for debt relief, and this was incorporated in the legislation passed by the Congress Ministry and was widely appreciated in Andhra. In response to the peasants’ demands, the Ministry had appointed a Zamindari Enquiry Committee, but the legislation based on its recommendations could not be passed before the Congress Ministries resigned.

Another notable feature of the movement in Andhra was the organization of Summer Schools of Economics and Politics for peasant activists. These training camps, held at Kothapatnam, Mantenavaripalarn and other places were addressed by many of the major Left Communist leaders of the time including P.C. Joshi, Ajoy Ghosh and R.D. Bhardwaj. Lectures were delivered on Indian history, the history of the national struggle on Marxism, on the Indian economy and numerous associated subjects. Money and provisions for running these training camps were collected from the peasants of Andhra. The celebration of various Kisan and other ‘days,’ as well as the popularization of peasant songs, was another form of mobilization.

Bihar was another major area of peasant mobilization in this period. Swami Sahajanand., the founder of the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha and a major leader 3f the All India Kisan Sabha, was joined by many other left-wing leaders like Karyanand Sharma, Rahul Sankritayan, Panchanan Sharma and Yadunandan Sharma in spreading the Kisan Sabha organization to the village of Bihar.

The Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha effectively used meetings, conferences, rallies, and mass demonstrations, including a demonstration of one lakh peasants at Patna in 1938, to popularize the kisan Sabha programme. The slogan of zamindari abolition, adopted by the Sabha in 1935, was popularized among the peasants through resolutions passed at these gatherings. Other demands included the stopping of illegal levies, the prevention of eviction of tenants and the return of Bakasht lands.

The Congress Ministry had initiated legislation for the reduction of rent and the restoration of Bakasht lands. Bakasht lands were those which the occupancy tenants had lost to zamindars, mostly during the Depression years, by virtue of non­payment of rent, and which they often continued to cultivate as share-croppers. But the formula that was finally incorporated in the legislation on the basis of an agreement with the zamindars did not satisfy the radical leaders of the Kisan Sabha. The legislation gave a certain proportion of the lands back to the tenants on condition that they pay half the auction price of the land. Besides, certain categories of land had been exempted from the operation of the law.

The Bakasht lands issue became a major ground of contention between the Kisan Sabha and the Congress Ministry. Struggles, such as the one already in progress in Barahiya tall in Monghyr district under the leadership of Karyanand Shanna, were continued and new ones emerged. At Reora, in Gaya district, with Yadunandan Sharma at their head, the peasants won a major victory when the District Magistrate gave an award restoring 850 out of the disputed 1,000 bighas to the tenants. This gave a major fillip to the movement elsewhere. In Darbhanga, movements emerged in Padri, Raghopore, Dekuli and Pandora. Jamuna Karjee led the movement in Saran district and Rahul Sankritayan in Annawari. The movements adopted the methods of Saiyagraha and forcible sowing and harvesting of crops. The zamindars retaliated by using lathials to break up meetings and terrorize the peasants. Clashes with the zamindars’ men became the order of the day and the police often intervened to arrest the leaders and activists. In some places, the government and other Congress leaders intervened to bring a compromise. The movement on the Bakasht issue reached its peak in late 1938 and 1939, but by August 1939 a combination of concessions, legislation and the arrest of about 600 activists succeeded in quietening the peasants. The movement was resumed in certain pockets in 1945 and continued in one form or another till zamindari was abolished.

Punjab was another centre of Kisan activity. Here, too, the Kisan Sabhas that had emerged in the early 1930s, through the efforts of Naujawan Bharat Sabha, Kirti Kisan. Congress and Akali activists were given a new sense of direction and cohesion by the Punjab Kisan Committee formed in 1937. The pattern of mobilization was the familiar one — Kisan workers toured villages enrolling Kisan Sabha and Congress members, organizing meetings, mobilizing people for the tehsils, district and provincial level conferences (which were held with increasing frequency and attended by an array of national stars). The main demands related to the reduction of taxes and a moratorium on debts. The target of attack was the Unionist Ministry, dominated by the big landlords of Western Punjab.

The two issues that came up for an immediate struggle were the resettlement of land revenue of Amritsar and Lahore districts and the increase in the canal tax or water-rate. Jathas marched to the district headquarters and huge demonstrations were held. The culmination was the Lahore Kisan Morcha in 1939 in which hundreds of Kisan from many districts of the province courted arrest. A different kind of struggle broke out in the Multan and Montgomery canal colony areas. Here large private companies that had leased this recently-colonized land from the government and some big landlords insisted on recovering a whole range of feudal levies from the share-croppers who tilled the land. The Kisan leaders organized the tenants to resist these exactions which had recently been declared illegal by a government notification and there were strikes by cultivators in some areas in which they refused to pick cotton and harvest the crops. Many concessions were won as a result. The tenants’ struggle, I suspended as a result of the War, was resumed in 1946-47.

The peasant movement in Punjab was mainly located in the Central districts, the most active being the districts of Jullundur, Amritsar, Hoshiarpur, Lyalipur and Sheikhupura. These districts were the home of the largely self-cultivating Sikh peasantry that had already been mobilized into the national struggle via the Gurdwara Reform Movement of the early 1920s and the Civil Disobedience Movement in 1930-32. The Muslim tenants-at-will of Western Punjab, the most backward part of the province, as well as the Hindu peasants of South-eastern Punjab (the present- day Haryana) largely remained outside the ambit of the Kisan Movement. The tenants of Montgomery and Multan districts mobilized by the Kisan leaders were also mostly emigrants from Central Punjab, Baba Sohan Singh. Teja Singh Swatantar, Baba Rur Singh, Master Han Singh, Bhagat Singh Bilga, and Wadhawa Ram were some of the important peasant leaders.’

The princely states in Punjab also witnessed a major outbreak of peasant discontent. The most powerful movement emerged in Patiala and bas based on the demand for restoration of lands illegally seized by a landlord-official combine through various forms of deceit and intimidation. The muzaras (tenants) refused to pay the batai (share rent) to their biswedars (landlords) and in this they were led by Left leaders like Bhagwan Singh Longowalia and Jagir Singh Joga and in later years by Teja Singh Swatantar. This struggle continued intermittently till 1953 when legislation enabling the tenants to become owners of their land was passed.

In other parts of the country as well, the mobilization of peasants around the demands for security of tenure, abolition of feudal levies, reduction of taxes and debt relief, made major headway. In Bengal, under the leadership of Bankim Mukherji, the peasants of Burdwan agitated against the enhancement of the canal tax on the Damodar canal and secured major concessions. Kisans of the 24-Parganas pressed their demands by a march to Calcutta in April 1938. In Surma Valley, in Assam, a no-rent struggle continued for six months against zamindari oppression and Karuna Sindhu Roy conducted a major campaign for amendment of the tenancy law. In Orissa, the Utkal Provincial

Kisan Sabha, organized by Malati Chowdhury and others in 1935, succeeded in getting the kisan manifesto accepted by the PCC as part of its election manifesto, and the Ministry that followed introduced significant agrarian legislation. In the Orissa States, a powerful movement in which tribals also participated was led on the question of forced labour, rights in forests, and the reduction of rent. Major clashes occurred in Dhenkanal and thousands fled the state to escape repression. The kisans of Ghalla Dhir state in the North-West Frontier Province protested against evictions and feudal exactions by their Nawab. In Gujarat the main demand was for the abolition of the system of hail (bonded labour) and a significant success was registered. The Central Provinces Kisan Sabha led a march to Nagpur demanding the abolition of the malguzari system, reduction of taxes and moratorium on debts.

The rising tide of peasant awakening was checked by the outbreak of World War II which brought about the resignation of the Congress Ministries and the launching of severe repression against left-wing and kisan Sabha leaders and workers because of their strong anti-War stance. The adoption by the CM of the Peoples’ War line in December 1941 following Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union created dissensions between the Communist and non-Communist members of the kisan Sabha. These dissensions came to a head with the Quit India Movement, in which Congress Socialist members played a leading role. The CPI because of its pro-War People’s War line asked its cadres to stay away, and though mans local level workers did join the Quit India Movement, the party line sealed the rift in the kisan sabha ranks, resulting in a split in 1943. In these year’ three major leaders of the All India Kisan Sabha, N.G. Ranga, Swam, Sahajanand Saraswati and Indulal Yagnik, left the organization. Nevertheless, during the War years the kisan Sabha continued to play and important role in various kinds of relief work, as for example in the Bengal Famine of 1943 and helped to lessen the rigour of shortages of essential goods, rationing and the like. It also continued its organizational work, despite being severely handicapped by its taking the unpopular pro- War stance which alienated it from various sections of the peasantry.

The end of the War, followed by the negotiations for the transfer of power and the anticipation of freedom, marked a qualitatively new stage in the development of the peasant movement. A new spirit was evident and the certainty of approaching freedom with the promise of a new social order encouraged peasants, among other social groups, to assert their rights and claims with a new vigour.

Many struggles that had been left off in 1939 were renewed. The demand for zamindari abolition was pressed with a greater sense of urgency. The organization of agricultural workers in Andhra which had begun a few years earlier took on the form of a struggle for higher wages and use of standard measures for payment of wages in kind.

The peasants of Punnapra-Vayalar in Travancore fought bloody battles with the administration. In Telangana, the peasants organized themselves to resist the landlords’ oppression and played an important role in the anti-Nizam struggle. Similar events took place in other parts of the country. But in British India, it was the tebhaga struggle in Bengal that held the limelight. in late 1946, the share-croppers of Bengal began to assert that they would no longer pay a half share of their crop to the jotedars but only one-third and that before division the crop would be stored in their khamars (godowns) and not that of the jotedars. They were no doubt encouraged by the fact that the Bengal Land Revenue Commission, popularly known as the Flood Commission, had already made this recommendation in its report to the government. The Hajong tribals were simultaneously demanding commutation of their kind rents into cash rents. The tebhaga movement, led by the Bengal Provincial Kisan Sabha, soon developed into a clash between jotedars and bargadars with the bargadars insisting on storing the crop in their own khamars.

The movement received a great boost in late January 1947 when the Muslim League Ministry led by Suhrawardy published the Bengal Bargadars Temporary Regulation Bill in the Calcutta Gazette on 22 January 1947. Encouraged by the fact that the demand for tebhaga could no longer be called illegal, peasants in hitherto untouched villages and areas joined the struggle. In many places, peasants tried to remove the paddy already stored in the jotedars’ khamars to their own, and this resulted in innumerable clashes.

The jotedars appealed to the Government, and the police came in to suppress the peasants. Major clashes ensued at a few places, the most important being the one at Khanpur in which twenty peasants were killed. Repression continued and by the end of February, the movement was virtually dead. A few incidents occurred in March as well, but these were only the death pangs of a dying struggle.

The Muslim League Ministry failed to pursue the bill in the Assembly and it was only in 1950 that the Congress Ministry passed a Bargadars Bill which incorporated, in substance, the demands of the movement.

The main centres of the movement were Dinajpur, Rangpur, Jalpaiguri, Mymensingh, Midnapore, and to a lesser extent 24- Parganas and Khulna. Initially, the base was among the Rajbansi Kshatriya peasants, but it soon spread to Muslims, Hajongs, Santhals and Oraons. Among the important leaders of this movement were Krishnobinode Ray, Abani Lahiri, Sunil Sen, Bhowani Sen, Moni Singh, Ananta Singh, Bhibuti Guha, Ajit Ray, Sushil Sen, Samar Ganguli, and Gurudas Talukdar.

To draw up a balance sheet of such a diverse and varied struggle is no easy task, but it can be asserted that perhaps the most important contribution of the peasant movements that covered large areas of the subcontinent in the 30s and 40s was that even when they did not register immediate successes, they created the climate which necessitated the post-Independence agrarian reforms. Zamindari abolition, for example, did not come about as a direct culmination of any particular struggle, but the popularization of the demand by the Kisan Sabha certainly contributed to its achievement.

The immediate demands on which struggles were fought in the pre-Independence days were the reduction of taxes, the abolition of illegal cesses or feudal levies and begar or vethi, the ending of oppression by landlords and their agents, the reduction of debts, the restoration of illegally or illegitimately seized lands, and security of tenure for tenants. Except in a few pockets like Andhra and Gujarat, the demands of agricultural labourers did not really become part of the movement. These demands were based on the existing consciousness of the peasantry of their just or legitimate rights, which was itself a product of tradition, custom, usage, and legal rights. When landlords or the Government demanded what was seen by peasants as illegitimate — high taxes, exorbitant rents, illegal cesses, forced labour or rights over land which peasants felt was theirs — they were willing to resist if they could muster the necessary organizational and other resources. But they were also willing to continue to respect what they considered legitimate demands. The struggles based on these demands were clearly not aimed at the overthrow of the existing agrarian structure but towards alleviating its most oppressive aspects. Nevertheless, they corroded the power of the landed classes in many ways and thus prepared the ground for the transformation of the structure itself. The Kisan movement was faced with the task of transforming the peasants’ consciousness and building movements based on a transformed consciousness.

It is also important to note that, by and large, the forms of struggle and mobilization adopted by the peasant movements in diverse areas were similar in nature as were their demands. The main focus was on mobilization through meetings, conferences, rallies, demonstrations, enrolment of members, formation of Kisan Sabhas or ryotu and karshaka sanghams. Direct action usually involved Satyagraha or civil disobedience, and non­payment of rent and taxes. All these forms had become the stock-in-trade of the national movement for the past several years. As in the national movement, violent clashes were the exception and not the norm. They were rarely sanctioned by the leadership and were usually popular responses to extreme repression.

The relationship of the peasant movement with the national movement continued to be one of a vital and integral nature. For one, areas, where the peasant movement was active, were usually the ones that had been drawn into the earlier national struggles. This was true at least of Punjab, Kerala, Andhra, U.P. and Bihar. This was hardly surprising since it was the spread of the national movement that had created the initial conditions required for the emergence of peasant struggles — a politicized and conscious peasantry and a band of active political workers capable of and willing to perform the task of organization and leadership.

In its ideology as well, the Kisan movement accepted and based itself on the ideology of nationalism. Its cadres and leaders carried the message not only of organization of the peasantry on class lines but also of national freedom. As we have shown earlier, in most areas Kisan activists simultaneously enrolled Kisan Sabha and Congress members.

True, in some regions, like Bihar, serious differences emerged between sections of Congressmen and the Kisan Sabha and at times the Kisan movement seemed set on a path of confrontation with the Congress, but this tended to happen only when both left-wing activists and right-wing or conservative Congressmen took extreme positions and showed an unwillingness to accommodate each other. Before 1942 these differences were usually contained and the Kisan movement and the national movement occupied largely common ground. With the experience of the split of 1942, the Kisan movement found that if it diverged too far and too clearly from the path of the national movement, it tended to lose its mass base, as well as create a split within the ranks of its leadership. The growth and development of the peasant movement was thus indissolubly linked with the national struggle for freedom.

India’s Struggle for Independence by Bipan Chandra Chapter 26 Twenty-eight Months of Congress Rule

After a few months’ tussles with the Government, the Congress Working Committee decided to accept office under the Act of 1935. During July, it formed Ministries in six provinces: Madras, Bombay, Central Provinces, Orissa, Bihar, and U.P. Later, Congress Ministries were also formed in the North-West Frontier Province and Assam. To guide and coordinate their activities and to ensure that the British hopes of the provincialization of the Congress did not materialize, a central control board known as the Parliamentary Sub-Committee was formed, with Sardar Patel, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Rajendra Prasad as members. Thus began a novel experiment — a party which was committed to liquidating British rule took charge of administration under a constitution which was framed by the British and which yielded only partial state power to the Indians; this power could moreover be taken away from the Indians whenever the imperial power so desired. The Congress was now to function both as a government in the provinces and as the opposition vis-a-vis the Central Government where effective state power lay. It was to bring about social reforms through the legislature and administration in the provinces and at the same time carry on the struggle for independence and prepare the people for the next phase of mass struggle. Thus the Congress had to implement its strategy of Struggle-Truce-Struggle (S-T-S’) in a historically unique situation.’

As Gandhiji wrote on the meaning of office acceptance in Harijan on 7 August 1937: ‘These offices have to be held lightly, not tightly. They are or should be crowns of thorns, never of renown. Offices have been taken in order to see if they enable us to quicken the pace at which we are moving towards our goal.’ Earlier he had advised Congressmen to use the Act of 1935 ‘in a manner not expected by them (the British) and by refraining from using it in the way intended by them.’

The formation of the Ministries by Congress changed the entire psychological atmosphere in the country. People felt as if they were breathing the very air of victory and people’s power, for was it not a great achievement that khadi clad men and women who had been in prison until just the other day were now ruling in the secretariat and the officials who were used to putting Congressmen in jail would now be taking orders from them? The exhilarating atmosphere of the times is, perhaps, best brought out by the following passage from Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India: ‘There was a sense of immense relief as of the lifting of a weight which had been oppressing the people; there was a release of long- suppressed mass energy which was evident everywhere. At the headquarters of the Provincial Governments, in the very citadels of the old bureaucracy, many a symbolic scene was witnessed. . . Now, suddenly, hordes of people, from the city and the village, entered these sacred precincts and roamed about almost at will. They were interested in anything; they went into the Assembly Chamber, where the sessions used to be held; they even peeped into the Ministers’ rooms. It was difficult to stop them for they no longer felt as outsiders; they had a sense of ownership in all this . . . The policemen and the orderlies with shining daggers were paralyzed; the old standards had fallen; European dress, symbol of position and authority, no longer counted. It was difficult to distinguish between members of the Legislatures and the peasants and townsmen who came in such large numbers.’

There was an immense increase in the prestige of the Congress as an alternative power that would look after the interests of the masses, especially of the peasants. At the same time, the Congress had got an opportunity to demonstrate that it could not only lead the people in mass struggles but also use state power for their benefit.

The responsibility was, of course, tremendous. However, there were limitations on the Congress Ministries’ power and financial resources. They could obviously not change the basically imperialist character of the administration; they could not introduce a radical era. But, within the narrow limits of their powers, and the time available to them (their tenure lasted only two years and four months), they did try to introduce some reforms, take some ameliorative measures, and make some improvement in the condition of the people — to give the people a glimpse of the future Swaraj.

The Congress Ministers set an example in plain living. They reduced their own salaries drastically from Rs. 2000 to Rs. 500 per month. They were easily accessible to the common people. And in a very short time, they did pass a very large amount of ameliorative legislation, trying to fulfil many of the promises made in the Congress election manifesto.

The commitment of the Congress to the defence and extension of civil liberties was as old as the Congress itself, and it is hardly surprising, therefore, that the Congress Ministries registered major achievements in this sphere. All emergency powers acquired by the provincial governments during 1932, through Public Safety Acts and the like, were repealed; bans on illegal political organizations such as the Hindustan Seva Dal and Youth Leagues and on political books and journals were lifted. Though the ban on the Communist Party remained, since it was imposed by the Central Government and could only be lifted on its orders, the Communists could in effect now function freely and openly in the Congress provinces. All restrictions on the press were removed. Securities taken from newspapers and presses were refunded and pending prosecutions were withdrawn. The blacklisting of newspapers for purposes of government advertising was given up. Confiscated arms were returned and forfeited arms licenses were restored.

Of all the British functionaries, the ones the people were most afraid of, as also hated, were the police. On 21 August 1937, after the formation of the Ministries, Gandhiji wrote, ‘Indeed, the triumph of the Congress will be measured by the success it achieves in rendering the police and military practically idle. . . The best and the only effective way to wreck the existing Constitution is for the Congress to prove conclusively that it can rule without the aid of military and with the least possible assistance of the police. In the Congress provinces, police powers were curbed and the reporting of public speeches and the shadowing of political workers by CID (Central Investigation Department) agents stopped.

One of the first acts of the Congress Government was to release thousands of political prisoners and detenus and to cancel internment and deportation orders on political workers. Many of the revolutionaries involved in the Kakori and other conspiracy cases were released. But problems remained in U.P. and Bihar where several revolutionaries convicted of crimes involving violence remained in jails. Most of these prisoners had earlier been sent to Kala Pani (Cellular Jail in Andamans) from where they had been transferred to their respective provinces after they had gone on a prolonged hunger strike during July 1937. In February 1938, there were fifteen such prisoners in U.P. and twenty-three in Bihar. Their release required consent by the Governors which was refused. But the Congress Ministries were determined to release them. The Ministries of U.P. and Bihar resigned on this issue on 15 February. The problem was finally resolved through negotiations. All the prisoners in both provinces were released by the end of March.

The difference between the Congress provinces and the non­Congress provinces of Bengal and Punjab was most apparent in this realm. In the latter, especially in Bengal, civil liberties continued to be curbed and revolutionary prisoners and detenus, kept for years in prison without trial, were not released despite repeated hunger strikes by the prisoners and popular movements demanding their release.

In Bombay, the Government also took steps to restore to the original owners’ lands which had been confiscated by the Government as a result of the no-tax campaign during the Civil Disobedience Movement in 1930. It, too, had to threaten resignation before it could persuade the Governor to agree. The pensions of officials dismissed during 1930 and 1932 for sympathizing with the movement were also restored. There were, however, certain blemishes on the Congress ministerial record in this respect. In July 1937, Yusuf Meherally, a Socialist leader, was prosecuted by the Madras Government for making an inflammatory speech in Malabar, though he was soon let off. In

October 1937, the Madras Government prosecuted S.S. Batliwala, another Congress Social leader, for making a seditious speech and sentenced him to six months’ imprisonment. There was a furor in the Congress ranks led by Jawaharlal Nehru, for this action went against the well-known Congress position that nobody should be prosecuted for making a speech and least of all for a speech against colonial rule. During the discussion on the subject in the Congress Working Committee, Nehru, reportedly, asked C. Rajagopalachari, the Premier of Madras (the head of the Provincial ministry was then known as Premier and not Chief Minister as now is the case): ‘Do you mean to say that if I come to Madras and make a similar speech you would arrest me?’ ‘I would,’ the latter is said to have replied. In the end, Batliwala was released and went around Madras Presidency making similar speeches. The affair proved to be an exception, but it bred a certain suspicion regarding the future attitude of the Congress Right wing.

Much worse was the mentality of a few of the right-wing Congress ministers. For instance, K.M. Munshi, the Home Minister of Bombay, and a light-weight within the Congress leadership used the C1D to watch the Communists and other left-wing Congressmen, earning a rebuke from Jawaharlal Nehru: ‘You have already become a police officer.’7 The Madras Government, too, used the police to shadow radical Congressmen. These blemishes have, however, to be seen in the larger context of the vast expansion of civil liberties even in Bombay and Madras. Moreover, the mass of Congressmen were vigilant on this question. Led by the left-wing, they exerted intense pressure on the right-wing Congress ministers to avoid tampering with civil liberties.

The Congress Ministries tried to give economic relief to the peasants and the workers as quickly as possible. The Congress had succeeded, in the past, in acquiring massive support among them by exposing the roots of their poverty in colonial structure and policy, appealing to their nationalism, leading them in anti­imperialist struggles, and organizing and supporting their struggles around their economic demands. Now that the Congress had acquired some elements of state and administrative power, it was necessary to use these powers to improve their economic condition, and, thus, consolidate Congress support.

The strategy of Congress agrarian legislation was worked out within certain broad parameters. First, the Congress was committed by its election manifesto and the election campaign to a policy of agrarian reform through reform of the system of land tenures and the reduction of rent, land revenue and the burden of debt. The Congress had asked rural voters to vote for its candidates by making large promises in this respect. The voters had taken them seriously; for example, according to government reports from Pratapgarh in U.P., on election day ‘a very large number of voters had brought with them pieces of dried cow dung to the various polling stations where these were lighted and, according to the tenants, “bedakhlis”, i.e., ejectment orders, were burnt once for all.

Congress could not attempt a complete overhaul of the agrarian structure by completely eliminating the zamindari system. This, for two reasons, According to the constitutional structure of the 1935 Act, the provincial Ministries did not have enough powers to do so. They also suffered from an extreme lack of financial resources, for the lion’s share of India’s revenues was appropriated by the Government of India. The Congress Ministries could also not touch the existing administrative structure, whose sanctity was guarded by the Viceroy’s and Governor’s powers. What is more important, the strategy of class adjustment also forbade it. A multi-class movement could develop only by balancing or adjusting various, mutually clashing class interests. To unite all the Indian people in their struggle against colonialism, the main enemy of the time, it was necessary to make such an adjustment. The policy had to be that of winning over or at least neutralizing as large a part of the landlord classes as possible so as to isolate the enemy and deprive him of all social support within India. This was even more necessary because, in large parts of the country, the smaller landlords were active participants in the national movement. This was recognized by most of the leaders of the time. Swami Sahajanand, the militant peasant leader of Bihar, for example, wrote in his memoirs: ‘As a national organization, the Congress is the forum of all classes. All the classes are a part of the Congress. It represents all sections and classes. This is the claim of the Congress and this is desirable also . . . The major function of Congress is to maintain harmony between different classes and to further its struggle while doing so.

There was also the constraint of time. The Congress leadership knew that their Ministries would not last long and would have to quit soon as the logic of their politics was to confront imperialism and not cooperate with it. As Nehru put it later in his Discovery of India, a ‘sense of impending crisis was always present; it was inherent in the situation.’ Even when Congress had accepted office, the usual figure given for longevity of the policy was two years. The time constraint became even more apparent as war clouds gathered in Europe from 1938 onwards. The Congress Ministries had, therefore, to act rapidly and achieve as much as possible in the short time available to them.

Further, nearly all the Congress-run states (that is, U.P., Bihar, Bombay, Madras, and Assam) had reactionary second chambers in the form of legislative councils, which were elected on a very narrow franchise — while the number of voters for the assemblies in these states was over 17.5 million, it was less than 70 thousand for the second chambers. These were, therefore, dominated by landlords, capitalists, and moneylenders, with the Congress forming a small minority. As a majority in the lower house was not enough, in order to get any legislation passed through the second chamber, the Congress had to simultaneously pressure their upper-class elements and conciliate them. Thus the Bihar Government negotiated a compromise with the zamindars on its tenancy bills while the U.P. Government conciliated the moneylender and merchant members of its upper house by going slow on debt legislation so that their support could be secured for tenancy legislation.

Finally, the agrarian structure of various parts of India had developed over the centuries and was extremely complex and complicated. There was not even enough information about its various components — land rights, for instance. The problem of debt and money lending was also integrated with peasant production and livelihood in too complex a manner to be tackled by an easy one-shot solution. Consequently, any effort at structural reform was bound to be an extremely formidable and time-consuming operation, as was to be revealed later after independence when the Congress and the Communists attempted to transform the agrarian structure in different states of the Indian union.

Within these constraints, the agrarian policy of the Congress Ministries went a long way towards promoting the interests of the peasantry. Agrarian legislation by these Ministries differed from province to province depending on differing agrarian relations, the mass base of the Congress, the class composition and the outlook of the provincial Congress organization and leadership and the nature and extent of peasant mobilization. In general, it dealt with questions of tenancy rights, security of tenure and rents of the tenants and the problem of rural indebtedness.

To enumerate the achievements of the Ministries, in this regard, briefly: In U.P. a tenancy act was passed in October 1939 which gave all statutory tenants both in Agra and Oudh full hereditary rights in their holdings while taking away the landlord’s right to prevent the growth of occupancy. The rents of hereditary tenants could be changed only after ten years, while restrictions were placed on the rights of landlords to enhance rents even after this period. A tenant could no longer be arrested or imprisoned for non-payment of rent. All illegal exactions such as nazrana (forced gifts) and begar (forced unpaid labour) were abolished. In Bihar, the new tenancy legislation was passed mainly in 1937 and 1938, that is, more quickly than in U.P. More radical than that of U.P. in most respects, its main provisions were: All increases in rent made since 1911 were abolished; this was estimated to mean a reduction of about twenty-five percent in rent. The rent was also reduced if the prices had fallen, during the currency of the existing rent, the deterioration of soil and the neglect of irrigation by the landlord. Occupancy ryots were given the absolute right to transfer their holding on the payment of a nominal amount of two percent of rent to the landlord. A point of radical departure was the grant to under-ryots of occupancy rights if they had cultivated the land for twelve years. Existing arrears of rent were substantially reduced and the rate of interest on arrears was reduced from 12.5 to 6.25 percent. The landlord’s share in case of share-cropping was not to exceed 9/20 of the produce. Lands which had been sold in the execution of decrees for the payment of arrears between 1929 and 1937 (bakasht land) were to be restored to previous tenants on payment of half the amount of arrears. The landlord’s power to realize rent was greatly reduced — the tenant could no longer be arrested or imprisoned on this account, nor could his immovable property be sold without his consent. Landlords were forbidden from charging illegal dues; any violation would lead to six months imprisonment. Occupancy tenants could no longer be ejected from their holdings for non-payment of rent. In fact, the only right that the landlord retained was the right to get his rent which was reduced significantly.

In Orissa, a tenancy bill was passed in May 1938 granting the right of free transfer of occupancy holdings, reducing the interest on arrears of rent from 12.5 to 6 percent and abolishing all illegal levies on tenants. Another bill passed in February 1938 reduced all rents in the zamindari areas, transferred in the recent past from Madras presidency to Orissa, to the rate of land revenue payable for similar lands in the nearest ryotwari areas plus 12.5 percent as compensation to the zamindars. The Governor refused to give assent to the bill as it would have reduced the zamindars’ incomes by fifty to sixty percent. In Madras, a committee under the chairmanship of T. Prakasam (1872-1957), the Revenue Minister, recommended that in the areas under Permanent Zamindari Settlement the ryot and not the zamindar was the owner of the soil and that therefore the level of rents prevailing when the Settlement was made in 1802 should be restored. This would have reduced the rents by about two-thirds and would have meant virtual liquidation of the zamindari system. The Premier, C. Rajagopalachari, gave full support to the report. He also rejected the idea of compensating the zamindars. The Legislative Assembly passed, in January 1939, a resolution accepting the recommendations, but before a bill could be drafted, the Ministry resigned.

Measures of tenancy reform, usually extending security of tenure to tenants in landlord areas, were also carried in the legislatures of Bombay, the Central Provinces, and the North-West Frontier Province. The agrarian legislation of the Congress Ministries thus improved and secured the status of millions of tenants in zamindari areas. The basic system of landlordism was, of course, not affected. Furthermore, it was, in the main, statutory and occupancy tenants who benefited. The interests of the sub-tenants of the occupancy tenants were overlooked. Agricultural labourers were also not affected. This was partly because these two sections had not yet been mobilized by the Kisan Sabhas, nor had they become voters because of the restricted franchise under the Act of 1935. Consequently, they could not exert pressure on the Ministries through either elections or the peasant movement.

Except for U.P. and Assam, the Congress Government passed a series of stringent debtors’ relief acts which provided for the regulation of the moneylenders’ business — provisions of the acts included measures such as the cancellation or drastic reduction of accumulated interest ranging from 6.25 percent in Madras to 9 percent in Bombay and Bihar. These Governments also undertook various rather modest rural reconstruction programs. In Bombay, 40,000 dublas or tied serfs were liberated. Grazing fees in the forests were abolished in Bombay and reduced in Madras. While the tenancy bills were strongly opposed by the landlords, the debtors’ relief bills were opposed not only by the moneylenders but also by lawyers, otherwise, supporters of the Congress, because they derived a large part of their income from debt litigation.

The Congress Ministries adopted, in general. a pro-labor stance. Their basic approach was to advance workers’ interests while promoting industrial peace, reducing the resort to strikes as far as possible, establishing conciliation machinery, advocating compulsory arbitration before resorting to strikes, and creating goodwill between labour and capital with the Congress and its ministers assuming the role of intermediaries, while, at the same time, striving to improve the conditions of the workers and secure wage increases. This attitude alarmed the Indian capitalist class which now felt the need to organize itself to press the ‘provincial governments to hasten slowly’ on such matters.’

Immediately after assuming office, the Bombay Ministry appointed a Textile Enquiry Committee which recommended, among other improvements, the increase of wages amounting to a crore of rupees. Despite mill owners protesting against the recommendations, they were implemented. In November 1938, the Governments passed the Industrial Disputes Act which was based on the philosophy of ‘class collaboration and not class conflict,’ as the Premier B.G. Kher put it. The emphasis in the Act was on conciliation, arbitration and negotiations in place of direct action. The Act was also designed to prevent lightning strikes and lockouts. The Act empowered the Government to refer an industrial dispute to the Court of Industrial Arbitration. No strike or lockout could occur for an interim period of four months during which the Court would give its award. The Act was strongly opposed by Left Congressmen, including Communists and Congress Socialists, for restricting the freedom to strike and for laying down a new complicated procedure for registration of trade unions, which, they said, would encourage unions promoted by employers in Madras, too, the Government promoted the policy of ‘internal settlement’ of labour disputes through government sponsored conciliation and arbitration proceedings. In U.P., Kanpur was the seat of serious labour unrest as the workers expected active support from the popularly elected Government. A major strike occurred in May 1938. The Government set up a Labour Enquiry Committee, headed by Rajendra Prasad. The Committee’s recommendations included an increase in workers’ wages with a minimum wage of Rs. 15 per month, formation of an arbitration board, recruitment of labour for all mills by an independent board, maternity benefits to women workers, and recognition of the Left- dominated Mazdur Sabha by the employers. But the employers, who had refused to cooperate with the Committee, rejected the report. They did, however, in the end, because of a great deal of pressure from the Government, adopt its principal recommendations. A similar Bihar Labour Enquiry Committee headed by Rajendra Prasad was set up in 1938. It too recommended the strengthening of trade union rights, an improvement in labour conditions, and compulsory conciliation and arbitration to be tried before a strike was declared.

The Congress Governments undertook certain other measures of social reform and welfare. Prohibition was introduced in selected areas in different states. Measures for the advancement of untouchables or Harijans (children of God), as Gandhiji called them, including the passing of laws enabled Harijans to enter temples. and to get free access to public office, public sources of water such as wells and ponds, roads, means of transport, hospitals, educational and other similar institutions maintained out of public funds, and restaurants and hotels. Moreover, no court or public authority was to recognize any custom or usage which imposed any civil disability on Harijans. The number of scholarships and freeships for Harijan students was increased. Efforts were made to increase the number of Harijans in police and other government services.

The Congress Ministries paid a lot of attention to primary, technical and higher education and public health and sanitation. Education for girls and Harijans was expanded. In particular, the Ministries introduced basic education with an emphasis on manual and productive work. Mass literacy campaigns among adults were organized. Support and subsidies were given to khadi, spinning and village industries. Schemes of prison reforms were taken up. The Congress Governments removed impediments in the path of indigenous industrial expansion and, in fact, actively attempted to promote several modern industrial ventures such as automobile manufacture.

The Congress Governments also joined the effort to develop planning through the National Planning Committee appointed in 1938 by the Congress President Subhas Bose.

It was a basic aspect of the Congress strategy that in the non-mass struggle phases of the national movement, mass political activity and popular mobilization were to continue, though within the four-walls of legality, in fact, it was a part of the office-acceptance strategy that offices would be used to promote mass political activity. Jawaharlal Nehru, as the president of the Congress, for example, sent a circular to all Congressmen on 10 July, 1937 emphasizing that organizational and other work outside the legislature was to remain the major occupation of the Congress for ‘without it legislative activity would have little value’ and that ‘the two forms of activity must be coordinated together and the masses should be kept in touch with whatever we do and consulted about it. The initiative must come from the masses.”

The question was the forms this mass political activity should take, and how work in administration and legislature was to be coordinated with political work outside and, equally important, what attitude the popularly elected government should adopt towards popular agitations, especially those which stepped outside the bounds of existing legality? There were no historical precedents to learn from or to follow. Different answers were found in different provinces. Unfortunately, the subject has not been studied in any depth by historians, except in a case study of U.P. by Visalakshi Menon.’ According to Menon, the coordination of legislative and administrative activities and extra­parliamentary struggles was quite successful in U.P. There was widespread mass mobilization which took diverse forms, from the organization of Congress committees in villages to the setting up of popular organs of authority in the form of Congress police stations and panchayats dispensing justice under the leadership of local Congress committees, from organizing of mass petitions to officials and Ministers to setting up of Congress grievance committees in the districts to hear local grievances and reporting them to MLAs and Ministers, from mass literacy campaigns to explain to the people the working of the Ministries, and from organization of local, district and provincial camps and conferences to celebration of various days and weeks. Local Congress committees, members of Legislative Assembly, provincial and all-India level leaders and even ministers were involved in many of these extra-parliamentary mass mobilization programs. More detailed research is likely to show that not all Congress Governments were able to coordinate administration with popular mobilization, especially where the right-wing dominated the ‘provincial Congress and the Government. Moreover, even in U.P., mass mobilization was losing steam by 1939.

However, the dilemma also arose in another manner. Political work outside the legislatures would involve organizing popular protest. How far could a movement go in organizing protests and agitations against itself?

Could a party which ran a government be simultaneously the organizer of popular movements and enforcer of law and order? And what if some of the protests took a violent or extra­legal form? Could civil liberties have their excess? How should the governmental wing of the movement then respond, since it is one of the functions of any government — colonial or nationalist, leftist or rightist or centrist — to see that the existing laws are observed, in fact, the issue looks at the very question of the role of the state in modern society, whether capitalist or socialist. Moreover, part of the strategy of increasing Congress influence or rather hegemony among the people was dependent on the demonstration, by the party leading the national movement, of its ability to govern and the capacity to rule. At the same time, existing laws were colonial laws. How far could a regime committed to their over-throw go in enforcing them? Furthermore, it was inevitable that, on the one hand, the long-suppressed masses would try to bring pressure on the Ministries to get their demands fulfilled as early as possible, especially as they looked upon the Congress Ministries with ‘a sense of ownership’ while, on the other, the satisfaction of these demands by the Ministries would be slow because of the constraints inherent in working through constitutional processes. The issue was, perhaps, posed as an easily solvable problem as far as Congressmen committed to non violence were concerned, but there were many other Congressmen for example, Communists, Socialists, Royists and Revolutionary Terrorists — and non­Congressmen who were not so committed, who tell that expanded civil liberties should be used to turn the masses towards more militant or even violent forms of agitation, and who tried to prove through such agitations and inadequacy of non-violence, the Congress strategy of S-TS ’and the policy of the working of reforms. Could governance and tolerance, it’ not promotion, of violent forms of protest coexist?

There was one other problem. While many Congressmen agitated within the perspective of accepting the Congress Ministries as their own and their role as one of strengthening them and the Congress through popular agitations and refrained from creating situations in which punitive action by the Government would become necessary, mans’ others were out to expose the ‘breaches of faith and promises’ by these Ministries and show tip the true’ character of the Congress as the political organ of the upper classes and one which was, perhaps, no different from the imperialist authorities so far as the masses and their agitations were concerned, in their turn, many of the Congressmen looked upon all hostile critics and militants as forces of disorder and all situations in which people expressed their feelings in an angry manner as ‘getting out of hand.’ Moreover, Congressmen like C. Rajagopalachari and K.M. Munshi did not hesitate to use their respective state apparatuses in a politically repressive manner. Unfortunately, the lull dimensions of this dilemma have not been adequately explored by historians so far. Today they can, perhaps, be usefully analyzed in a comparative framework vis-a-vis the functioning of the Communists and other radical parties as ruling parties in several states of the Indian Union after 1947, or as parts of ruling groups as seen in France or Portugal, or as rulers in socialist countries.

The formation of Congress Ministries and the vast extension of civil liberties unleashed popular energies everywhere. Kisan sabhas sprang up in every part of the country and there was an immense growth in trade union activity and membership. Student and youth movements revived and burgeoned. A powerful fillip was given to the state peoples’ movement. Left parties were able to expand manifold. Even though it was under a Central Government ban, the Communist Party was able to bring out its weekly organ, The National Front, from Bombay. The CSP brought out The Congress Socialist and several other journals in Indian languages. Of particular interest is the example of Kirti Lehar which the Kirti Communists of Punjab brought out from Meerut, U.P., because they could not do so in Unionist-ruled Punjab.

Inevitably, many of the popular movements clashed with the Congress Governments. Even though peasant agitations usually took the form of massive demonstrations and spectacular peasant marches, in Bihar, the kisan movement often came in frontal confrontation with the Ministry, especially when the Kisan Sabha asked the peasants not to pay rent or to forcibly occupy landlords’ lands. There were also cases of physical attacks upon landlords, big and small, and the looting of crops. Kisan Sabha workers popularized Sahajanand’s militant slogans: Logan Lenge Kaise, Danda Hamara Zindabad (How will you collect rent, long live our lathis or sticks) and Lathi Men Sathi (Lathi is my companion). Consequently, there was a breach in relations between the Bihar Kisan Sabha and the provincial Congress leadership.

In Bombay, the AITUC, the Communists, and the followers of Dr. BR. Ambedkar organized a strike on 7 November 1938, in seventeen out of seventy-seven textile mills against the passage of the Industrial Disputes Act. There was some ‘disorder’ and large- scale stone throwing at two mills and some policemen were injured. The police opened fire, killing two and injuring over seventy. The Madras Government (as also the Provincial Congress Committee) too adopted a strong policy towards strikes, which sometimes took a violent turn. Kanpur workers struck repeatedly, sometimes acting violently and attacking the police. But they tended to get Congress support.

Congress Ministries did not know how to deal with situations where their own mass base was disaffected. They tried to play a mediatory role which was successful in U.P. and Bihar and to a certain extent in Madras, but not in Bombay. But, in general, they were not able to satisfy the Left-wing critics. Quite often they treated all militant protests, especially trade union struggles, as a law and order problem. They took recourse to Section 144 of the Criminal Code against agitating workers and arrested peasant and trade union leaders, even in Kanpur.

Jawaharlal Nehru was privately unhappy with the Ministries’ response to popular protest but his public stance was different. Then his answer was: We cannot agitate against ourselves.’ He tended ‘to stand up loyally for the ministers in public and protect them from petty and petulant criticism.” To put a check on the growing agitations against Congress Ministries, the All India Congress Committee passed a resolution in September 1938, condemning those, ‘including a few Congressmen,’ who ‘have been found in the name of civil liberty to advocate murder, arson, looting and class war by violent means.’

‘The Congress,’ the resolution went on, ‘will, consistently with its tradition, support measures that may be undertaken by Congress governments for the defense of life and property.”

The Left was highly critical of the Congress Governments’ handling of popular protest; it accused them of trying to suppress peasants’ and workers’ organizations. The Communist critique of the Congress Ministries was later summed up by R. Palme Dutt: ‘The experience of the two years of Congress Ministries demonstrated with growing acuteness the dangers implicit in entanglement in imperialist administration under a leadership already inclined to compromise. The dominant moderate leadership in effective control of the Congress machinery and of the Ministries was in practice developing increasing cooperation with imperialism, was acting more and more openly in the interests of the upper-class landlords and industrialists, and was showing an increasingly marked hostility to all militant expression and forms of mass struggle . . . Hence a new crisis of the national movement began to develop.”

Gandhiji too thought that the policy of ministry formation was leading to a crisis. But his angle of vision was very different from that of the Communists. To start with, he opposed militant agitations because he felt that their overt to covert violent character threatened his basic strategy based on non-violence. At the beginning of office acceptance, as pointed out earlier, he had advised the Congress Ministries to rule without the police and the army. Later he began to argue that ‘violent speech or writing does not come under the protection of civil liberty.” But even while bemoaning the militancy and violence of the popular protest agitations and justifying the use of existing legal machinery against them, Gandhiji objected to the frequent recourse to colonial laws and law and order machinery to deal with popular agitations. He wanted reliance to be placed on the political education of the masses against the use of violence. He questioned, for example, the Madras Government’s resort to the Criminal Law Amendment Act, especially to its ‘obnoxious clauses.’ While criticizing Left-wing incitement to class violence, he constantly sought to curb Right-wing confrontation with the Left. He also defended the right of the Socialists and the Communists to preach and practise their politics in so far as they abided by Congress methods. Gandhiji was able to see the immense harm that the Congress would suffer in terms of erosion of popular support, especially of the workers and peasants, because of the repeated use of law and order machinery to deal with their agitations. This would make it difficult to organize the next wave of extra-legal mass movement against colonial rule. He thus perceived the inherent dilemma in the situation and dealt with it in a large number of articles in Haryana during 1938-39. This was one major reason why he began to question the efficacy of continuing with the policy of office acceptance.’8 He wrote in December 1938 that if the Congress Ministries ‘find that they cannot run the State without the use of the police and the military, it is the clearest possible sign, in terms of non-violence, that the Congress should give up office and again wander in the wilderness in search of the Holy Grail.’

*

The period of the Congress Ministries witnessed the emergence of serious weaknesses in the Congress. There was a great deal of factional strife and bickering both on ideological and personal bases, a good example of which was the factional squabbles within the Congress Ministry and the Assembly party in the Central provinces which led to the resignation of Dr. N.B. Khare as premier. The practice of bogus membership made its appearance and began to grow. There was a scramble for jobs and positions of personal advantage. Indiscipline among Congressmen was on the increase everywhere. Opportunists, self­seekers and careerists, drawn by the lure of associating with a party in power, began to enter the ranks of the Congress at various levels. This was easy because the Congress was an open party which anybody could join. Many Congressmen began to give way to casteism in their search for power.

Gandhiji began to feel that We seem to be weakening from within.’ Full of despondency, Gandhiji repeatedly lashed out in the columns of Haryana against the growing misuse of office and creeping corruption in Congress ranks. ‘I would go to the length of giving the whole Congress organization a decent burial, rather than put up with the corruption that is rampant,’ he told the Gandhi Seva Sangh workers in May 1939.20 Earlier, in November 1938, he had written in Haryana: ‘If the Congress is not purged of illegalities and irregularities, it will cease to be the power it is today and will fail to fulfil expectations when the real struggle faces the country.’ Gandhiji, of course, saw that this slackening of the movement and weakening of the moral fibre of Congressmen was in part inevitable in a phase of non-mass struggle. He, therefore, advised giving up of offices and starting preparations for another phase of Satyagraha.

Jawaharlal too had been feeling for some time that the positive role of the Ministries was getting exhausted. He wrote to Gandhiji on 28 April 1938: ‘1 feel strongly that the Congress ministries are working inefficiently and not doing much that they could do. They are adapting themselves far too much to the old order and trying to justify it. But all this, bad as it is, might be tolerated. What is far worse is that we are losing the high position that we have built up, with so much labour, in the hearts of the people. We are sinking to the level of ordinary politicians who have no principles to stand by and whose work is governed by a day to day opportunism. .. I think there are enough men of goodwill in the Congress. But their minds are full of party conflicts and the desire to crush this individual or that group.’

The Congress Ministries resigned in October 1939 because of the political crisis brought about by World War 11. But Gandhiji welcomed the resignations for another reason — they would help cleanse the Congress of the ‘rampant corruption.’ He wrote to C. Rajagopalachari on 23 October 1939: ‘1 am quite clear in my mind that what has happened is best for the cause. It is a bitter pill I know. But it was needed. It will drive away all the parasites from the body. We have been obliged to do wrong things which we shall be able to avoid.’ The resignations produced another positive effect. They brought the Left and the Right in the Congress closer because of a common policy on the question of participation in the war.

*

In the balance, the legislative and administrative record of the Congress Ministries was certainly positive. As R. Coupland was to remark in 1944: ‘The old contention that Indian self­government was a necessity for any really radical attack on the social backwardness of India was thus confirmed.’’ And Nehru, a stern critic of the Congress Ministries in 1938- 39, wrote in 1944: ‘Looking back, I am surprised at their achievements during a brief period of two years and a quarter, despite the innumerable difficulties that surrounded them.’ Even though the Left was

critical, in the long view even its expectations were fulfilled in a large measure. In 1935, Wang Ming, in his report on the revolutionary movements in colonial countries at the 6 th Congress of the Communist International, said in the section on India: ‘Our Indian comrades in attempting to establish a united anti-imperialist front with the National Congress in December last year put before the latter such demands as “the establishment of an Indian workers’ and peasants’ soviet republic,” “confiscation of all lands belonging to the zamindars without compensation,” “a general strike as the only effective programme of action,” etc. Such demands on the part of our Indian comrades can serve as an example of how not to carry on the tactics of the anti-imperialist united front. . The Indian communists must formulate a programme of popular demands which could serve as a platform for a broad anti-imperialist united front . . . this programme for struggle in the immediate future should include approximately the following demands: 1) against the slavish constitution, 2) for the immediate liberation of all political prisoners, 3) for the abolition of all extraordinary laws etc., 4) against the lowering of wages, the lengthening of working day and discharge of workers, 5) against burdensome taxes, high land rents and against confiscation of peasants’ lands for non­payment of debts and obligations, and 6) for the establishment of democratic rights.’

Certainly, the Congress Ministries fulfilled this agenda more or less in entirety.

One of the great achievements of the Congress Governments was their firm handling of the communal riots. They asked the district magistrates and police officers to take strong action to deal with a communal outbreak.

The Congress leadership foiled the imperialist design of using constitutional reforms to weaken the national movement and, instead demonstrated how the constitutional structure could be used by a movement aiming at capture of state power to further its own aims without getting co-opted. Despite certain weaknesses, the Congress emerged stronger from the period of office acceptance. Nor was the national movement diverted from its main task of fighting for self government because of being engaged in day-to-day administration. Offices were used successfully for enhancing the national consciousness and increasing the area of nationalist influence and thus strengthening the movement’s capacity to wage a mass struggle in the future. The movement’s influence was now extended to the bureaucracy, especially at the lower levels. And the morale of the ICS (Indian Civil Service), one of the pillars of the British Empire, suffered a shattering blow. Many ICS officers came to believe that the British departure from India was only a matter of time. In later years, especially during the Quit India Movement, the fear that the Congress might again assume power in the future, a prospect made real by the fact that Congress Ministries had already been in power once, helped to neutralize many otherwise hostile elements, such as landlords and even bureaucrats, and ensured that many of them at least sat on the fence.

One may quote in this respect Visalakshi Menon’s judgement: ‘From the instance of the United Provinces, it is obvious that there was no popular disillusionment with the Congress during the period of the Ministry. Rather, the people were able to perceive, in more concrete terms, the shape of things to come, if independence were won.’

There was also no growth of provincialism or lessening of the sense of Indian unity, as the framers of the Act of 1935 and of its provision for Provincial Autonomy had hoped. The Ministries succeeded in evolving a common front before the Government of India. Despite factionalism, the Congress organization as a whole remained disciplined. Factionalism, particularly at the top, was kept within bounds with a strong hand by the central leadership. When it came to the crunch, there was also no sticking so office. Acceptance of office thus did prove to be just one phase in the freedom struggle. When an all- India political crisis occurred and the central Congress leadership wanted it, the Ministries promptly resigned. And the opportunists started leaving. As the Congress General Secretary said at the time: ‘The resignations of the ministries demonstrated to all thou who had any doubts that Congress was not out for power and office but for the emancipation of the people of India from the foreign yoke.’

The Congress also avoided a split between its Left and Right wings — a split which the British were trying to actively promote since 1934. Despite strong critiques of each other by the two wings, they not only remained united but tended to come closer to each other, as the crisis at Tripuri showed.

Above all, the Congress gained by influencing all sections of the people. The process of the growth of Congress and nationalist hegemony in Indian society was advanced. If mass struggles destroyed one crucial element of the hegemonic ideology of British colonialism by demonstrating that British power was not invincible then the sight of Indians exercising power shattered another myth by which the British had held Indians in subjection: that Indians were not fit to rule.

India’s Struggle for Independence by Bipan Chandra Chapter 25 The Strategic Debate 1935-37

A major debate on strategy occurred among the nationalists in the period following the withdrawal of the Civil Disobedience Movement. In the first stage of the debate, during 1934-35, the issue was what course the national movement should take in the immediate future, that is, during its phase of non-mass struggle. How was the political paralysis that it had sunk into to be overcome? There were two traditional responses. Gandhiji emphasized constructive work in the villages, especially the revival of village crafts. Constructive work, said Gandhiji, would lead to the consolidation of people’s power, and open the way to the mobilization of millions in the next phase of mass struggle.’

Another section of Congressmen advocated the revival of the constitutional method of struggle and participation in the elections to the Central Legislative Assembly to be held in 1934. Led this time by Dr. M.A. Ansari, Asaf Ali, Satyamurthy, Bhulabhai Desai and B.C. Roy, the new Swarajists argued that in a period of political apathy and depression, when the Congress was no longer in a position to sustain a mass movement, it was necessary to utilize elections and work in the legislative councils to keep up the political interest and morale of the people. This did not amount, they said, to having faith in the capacity of constitutional politics to achieve freedom. It only meant opening up another political front which would help build up the Congress, organizationally extend its influence, and prepare the people for the next mass struggle. C. Rajagopalachari, an erstwhile no-changer, recommended the Swarajist approach to Gandhiji with the additional proviso that the Congress should itself, directly, undertake parliamentary work. A properly organized parliamentary party, he said, would enable the Congress to develop a certain amount of prestige and confidence among the masses even as (happened) during the short period when the Gandhi-Irwin Pact was in force. Since the Government was opposed to a similar pact, a strong Congress presence in the legislatures would serve the movement as ‘its equivalent.’]

But unlike in the 1920s, a third tactical perspective, based on an alternative strategy, made its appearance at this time. The strong Left trend that had developed in the early l930s was critical of both the Council-entry programme and the suspension of civil disobedience and its replacement b the constructive programme. Both of them, the leftists said, would sidetrack direct mass action and political work among the masses and divert attention from the basic issue of struggle against colonial rule. The leftists instead favoured the continuation or resumption of the non- constitutional mass movement since they felt that the situation continued to be revolutionary because of the continuing economic crisis and the readiness of the masses to fight.

It was Jawaharlal Nehru who represented at this time at its most cogent and coherent this New Leftist alternative to the Gandhian anti-imperialist programme and strategy. Accepting the basic analytical framework of Marxism, Nehru put forward the Left paradigm in a series of speeches, letters, articles and books and his Presidential addresses to the Lucknow and Faizpur sessions of the Congress in 1936. The basic goal before the Indian people, as also before the people of the world, he said, had to be the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of socialism. While we’ve already looked at the pragmatic aspect of Nehru’s challenge two of its other aspects have to be understood.

To Nehru, the withdrawal of the Civil Disobedience Movement and Council-entry and the recourse to constructive programmes represented a ‘spiritual defeat’ and a surrender of ideas, a retreat from the revolutionary to the reformist mentality, and a going back to the pre-1919 moderate phase What was worse, it seemed that the Congress was giving up all social radicalism and ‘expressing a tender solicitude for every vested interest.’ Many Congress leaders, he said, ‘preferred to break some people’s hearts rather than touch others’ pockets. Pockets are, indeed, more valuable and more cherished than hearts and brains and bodies and human justice and dignity.” His alienation from Gandhiji also seemed to be complete. He wrote in his jail diary in April 1934: ‘Our objectives are different, our ideas are different, our spiritual outlook is different and our methods are likely to be different.’

The way out, said Nehru, lay in grasping the class basis of society and the role of class struggle and in ‘revising vested interests in favour of the masses.’ This meant taking up or encouraging the day-to-day class, economic demands of the peasants and workers against the landlords and capitalists, organizing the former in their class organizations — Kisan Sabhas and trade unions — and permitting them to affiliate with the Congress and, thus, influence and direct its policies and activities. There could be, said Nehru, no genuine anti-imperialist struggle which did not incorporate the class struggle of the masses.

Throughout these years, Nehru pointed to the inadequacy of the existing nationalist ideology and stressed the need to inculcate a new, socialist or Marxist ideology, which would enable the people to study their social condition scientifically. Several chapters of his Autobiography, published in 1935, were an ideological polemic against Gandhiji even though conducted in a friendly tone.

Jawaharlal also challenged the basic Gandhian strategy of struggle.4 Under the Gandhian strategy. which may be described as Struggle — Truce — Struggle (S-T-S’), phases of a vigorous extra-legal mass movement and confrontation with colonial authority alternate with phases, during which direct confrontation is withdrawn, political concessions or reforms, if any, wrested from the colonial regime, are willy-nilly worked and silent political work carried on among the masses within the existing legal framework, which, in turn, provides scope for such work. Both phases of the movement are to be utilized, each in its own way, to undermine the twin ideological notions on which the colonial regime rested — that British rule benefits Indians and that it is too powerful to be challenged and overthrown and to recruit and train cadres and to build up the people’s capacity to struggle. The entire political process of S-T-S’ was an upward spiralling one, which also assumed that the freedom struggle would pass through several stages, ending with the transfer of power by the colonial regime itself.

Nehru did not subscribe to this strategy and believed that, whatever might have been the case in the past, the Indian national movement had now reached a stage where there should be a permanent confrontation and conflict with imperialism till it was overthrown. He accepted that the struggle had to go through setbacks and phases of upswing and downswing, but these should not lead to a passive phase or a stage of compromise or ‘cooperation’ with the colonial framework towards which permanent hostile and non-cooperation had to be maintained. The Congress, said Nehru, must maintain ‘an aggressive direct action policy.’ This meant that even if the mass movement was at a low ebb or remained at a symbolic plane, it should be continued. There could be no interposition of a constitutional phase when the existing constitutional framework was worked; nor could there be a diversion from political and economic class issues to the constructive programme. Furthermore, said Nehru, every moment sooner or later reached a stage when it endangered the existing order. The struggle then became perpetual and could go forward only through unconstitutional and illegal means. This also happened when the masses entered politics. No compromise or half-way house was then left. This stage had been reached in India with the Lahore Resolution for Poorna Swaraj. There was now no alternative to permanent continuation of the struggle. For this reason, Nehru attacked all moves towards the withdrawal of the Civil Disobedience Movement. This would lead, he warned, to ‘some form of compromise with imperialism’ which ‘would be a betrayal of the cause.’ Hence, ‘the only way out is to struggle for freedom without compromise or going back or faltering.’ Nehru also attacked the notion of winning freedom through stages. Real power could not be won gradually ‘bit by bit’ or by ‘two annas and four annas.’ ‘The Citadel’ — State power — had to be seized, though through a non-violent mass struggle. Thus, to S-T-S’ he counterposed the strategy of S-V (‘V’ standing for victory) or the permanent waging of mass struggle till victory was won.

So sharp were the differences between Nehru and the leftists on the one side and proponents of Council-entry on the other that many — the nationalists with apprehension and the British officials with hope — expected a split sooner or later. But Gandhiji once again moved into the breach and diffused the situation. Though believing that Satyagraha alone was capable of winning freedom, he conciliated the proponents of council- entry by acceding to their basic demand that they should be permitted to enter the legislatures. He also defended them from accusations of being lesser patriots Parliamentary politics, he said, could not lead to freedom but those large number of Congressmen who could not for some reason or the other offer Satyagraha or devote themselves to constructive work should not remain unoccupied. They could give expression to their patriotic energies through council work in a period when there was no mass movement, provided they were not sucked into constitutionalism or self­serving. As he put it in a letter to Sardar Patel on 23 April 1934: ‘Realities cannot be wished away. At the most we can improve them a little. We may exercise control. We can do neither more nor less.’

Consequently, under Gandhiji’s guidance, the AICC meeting at Patna decided in May 1934 to set up a parliamentary board to fight elections under the aegis of the Congress itself. To the Left­wing critics of the resolution, Gandhiji replied: ‘I hope that the majority will always remain untouched by the glamour of council work. . . Swaraj will never come that way. Swaraj can only come through an all-round consciousness of the masses.’

At the same time, he assured Nehru and the leftists that the withdrawal of the civil disobedience was dictated by the reality of the political situation. But this did not mean following a policy of drift or bowing down before political opportunists or compromising with imperialism. Only civil disobedience had been discontinued, the war continued. The new policy, he said, ‘is founded upon one central idea — that of consolidating the power of the people with a view to peaceful action.’ Moreover, he told Nehru in August 1934: ‘1 fancy that I have the knack for knowing the need of the time.’ He also appeased the Left by strongly backing Nehru for the Presidentship of the Lucknow Congress despite contrary pressure from C. Rajagopalachari and other right-wing leaders.

Gandhiji was at the same time convinced that he was out of tune with powerful trends in the Congress. He felt that a large section of the intelligentsia favoured parliamentary politics with which he was in fundamental disagreement. Another section of the intelligentsia felt estranged from the Congress because of his emphasis on the spinning wheel as ‘the second lung of the nation,’ on Harijan work based on a moral and religious approach, and on other items of the constructive programme. Similarly, the socialist group, whose leader was Jawaharlal, was growing in influence and importance but he had fundamental differences with it. Yet the Socialists felt constrained by the weight of his personality. As he put it: ‘But I would not, by reason of the moral pressure I may be able to exert, suppress the spread of the ideas propounded in their literature.’ Thus, vis-a-vis both groups, ‘for me to dominate the Congress in spite of these fundamental differences is almost a species of violence which I must refrain from.’ Hence, in October 1934, he announced his resignation from the Congress ‘only to serve it better in thought, word and deed.

Nehru and the Socialists responded with no less a patriotic spirit. While enemies of Congress hoped that their radicalism would lead to their breaking away from the Congress, they had their priorities clearly worked out. The British must first be expelled before the struggle for socialism could be waged. And in the anti-imperialist struggle, national unity around the Congress, still the only anti-imperialist mass organization, was indispensable. Even from the socialist point of view, argued Nehru and other leftists, it was far better to gradually radicalize the Congress, where millions upon millions of the people were than to get isolated from these millions in the name of political or ideological purity. Nehru, for example, wrote: ‘I do not see why I should walk out of the Congress leaving the field clear to social reactionaries. Therefore, I think it is up to us to remain there and try to force the pace, thereby either converting others or making them depart.” The Right was no less accommodating. C Rajagopalachari wrote: ‘The British, perhaps, hope for a quarrel among Congressmen over this (socialism). But we hope to disappoint them.”

Elections to the Central Legislative Assembly were held in November 1934. Of the seventy-five elected seats for Indians, the Congress captured forty-five. ‘Singularly unfortunate; a great triumph for little Gandhi,’ wailed the Viceroy, Willingdon.’

Even though the Government had successfully suppressed the mass movement during 1932-33, it was aware that suppression could only be a short-term tactic. it could not prevent the resurgence of another powerful movement in the years to come. For that, it was necessary to permanently weaken the movement. This could be achieved if the Congress was internally divided and large segments of it co-opted or integrated into the colonial constitutional and administrative structure. The phase of naked suppression should, therefore, be followed, decided the colonial policymakers, by another phase of constitutional reforms.

In August 1935, the British Parliament passed the Government of India Act of 1935. The Act provided for the establishment of an All-India Federation to be based on the union of the British Indian provinces and Princely States. The representatives of the States to the federal legislature were to be appointed directly by the Princes who were to be used to check and counter the nationalists. The franchise was limited to about one-sixth of the adults. Defence and foreign affairs would remain outside the control of the federal legislature, while the Viceroy would retain special control over other subjects.

The provinces were to be governed under a new system based on provincial autonomy under which elected ministers controlled all provincial departments. Once again, the Governors, appointed by the British Government, retained special powers. They could veto legislative and administrative measures, especially those concerning minorities, the rights of civil servants, law and order and British business interests. The Governor also had the power to take over and indefinitely run the administration of a province. Thus both political and economic power remained concentrated in British hands; colonialism remained intact. As Linlithgow, Chairman of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the Act of 1935 and the Viceroy of India from 1936, stated later, the Act had been framed ‘because we thought that was the best way . . . of maintaining British influence in India. It is no part of our policy, I take it, to expedite in India constitutional changes for their own sake, or gratuitously to hurry the handing over of the controls to Indian hands at any pace faster than that which we regard as best calculated, on a long view, to hold India to the Empire.”

The long-term strategy, followed by the British Government from 1935 to 1939, had several major components. Reforms, it was hoped, would revive the political standing of the Liberals and other moderates who believed in the constitutional path, and who had lost public favour during the Civil Disobedience Movement. Simultaneously, in view of the severe repression of the movement, large sections of Congressmen would be convinced of the ineffectiveness of extra-legal means and the efficacy of constitutionalism. They would be weaned away from mass politics and guided towards constitutional politics. It was also hoped that once the Congressmen in office had tasted power and dispensed patronage they would be most reluctant to go back to the politics of sacrifice.

Another aspect of the colonial strategy was equally complex and masterly. Reforms could be used to promote dissensions and a split within the demoralized Congress ranks on the basis of constitutionalist vs. non-constitutionalist and Right vs. Left. The constitutionalists and the right- wing were to be placated through constitutional and other concessions lured into the parliamentary game, encouraged to gradually give up agitational politics and coalesce with the moderate Liberals and landlords and other loyalists in working the constitution, and enabled to increase their weight in the nationalist ranks. The Left and radical elements, it was hoped, would see all this as a compromise with imperialism and abandonment of mass politics and would, therefore, become even more strident. Then, either the leftists (radicals) would break away from the Congress or their aggressive anti-Right politics and accent on socialism would lead the right­wing to kick them out. Either way, the Congress would be split and weakened. Moreover, isolated from the right-wing and devoid of the protection that a united national movement gave them, the leftist (radical) elements could be crushed through police measures.

It was as a part of this strategy that the Government reversed its policy, followed during 1933-34, of suppressing the anti-constitutionalists in order to weaken the opposition to constitutionalism. Once division between the Left and the Right began to grow within the Congress, the Government refrained from taking strong action against revolutionary agitation by left­wing Congressmen. This happened from 1935 onwards. Above all the Government banked on Nehru’s strong attacks on the constitutionalists and the right-wing and his powerful advocacy of socialism and revolutionary overthrow of colonial rule to produce a fissure in the nationalist ranks. Officials believed that Nehru and his followers had gone so far in their radicalism that they would not retreat when defeated by the right-wing in the AICC and at the Lucknow Congress. It was for this reason that nearly all the senior officials advised the Viceroy during 1935- 36 not to arrest him. Erskine, the Governor of Madras, for example, advised: ‘The more speeches of this type that Nehru makes the better, as his attitude will undoubtedly cause the Congress to split. Indeed, we should keep him in cotton wool and pamper him, for he is unwittingly smashing the Congress organization from inside.”

Provincial autonomy, it was further hoped, would create powerful provincial leaders in the Congress who would wield administrative power in their own right, gradually learn to safeguard their administrative prerogatives, and would, therefore, gradually become autonomous centres of political power. The Congress would, thus, be provincializing; the authority of the central all-India leadership would be weakened if n destroyed. As Linlithgow wrote in 1936, ‘our best hope of avoiding a direct clash is in the potency of Provincial Autonomy to destroy the effectiveness of Congress as an All-India instrument of revolution.”

The Act of 1935 was condemned by nearly all sections of Indian opinion and was unanimously rejected by the Congress. The Congress demanded instead, the convening of a Constituent Assembly elected on the basis of adult franchise to frame a constitution for an independent India.

The second stage of the debate over strategy occurred among Congressmen over the question of office acceptance. ‘The British, after imposing the Act of 1935, decided to immediately/put into practice provincial autonomy and announced the holding of elections to provincial legislatures in early 1937. Their strategy of co-option or absorption into the colonial constitutional framework was underway. The nationalists were faced with a new political reality. All of them agreed that the 1935 Act must be opposed root and branch, but the question was how to do so in a period when a mass movement was not yet possible.

Very sharp differences once again emerged in the ranks of the Congress leaders. There was, of course, full agreement that the Congress should fight the coming elections on the basis of a detailed political and economic programme, thus deepening the anti-imperialist consciousness of the people. But what was to be done after the elections? If Congress got a majority in a province, should it agree to form the Government or not? Basic question of the strategy of the national movement and divergent perceptions of the prevailing political situation were involved. Moreover, the two sides to the debate soon got identified with the emerging ideological divide along Left and Right lines.

Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Bose, the Congress Socialists and the Communists were totally opposed to office acceptance and thereby working the 1935 Act. The Left case was presented effectively and passionately by Nehru, especially in his Presidential Address at Lucknow in early 1936. Firstly, to accept office, was ‘to negate our rejection of it (the 1935 Act) and to stand self-condemned.’ It would mean assuming responsibility without power, since the basic state structure would remain the same. While the Congress would be able to do little for the people, it would be cooperating ‘in some measure with the repressive apparatus of imperialism, and we would become partners in this repression and in the exploitation of our people.’

Secondly, office acceptance would take away the revolutionary character of the movement imbibed since 1919. Behind this issue, said Nehru. lay the question ‘whether we seek revolutionary changes in India or (whether we) are working for petty reforms under the aegis of British imperialism.’ Office acceptance would mean, in practice, ‘a surrender’ before imperialism. Congress would get sucked into parliamentary activity within the colonial framework and would forget the main issues of freedom, economic and social justice, and removal of poverty. It would be co-opted and deradicalized. It would fall into ‘a pit from which it would be difficult for us to come out.”

The counter-strategy that Nehru and the leftists recommended was the older, Swarajist one: enter the assemblies with a view to creating deadlocks and making the working of the Act impossible. As a long term strategy, they put forward the policy of increasing reliance on workers and peasants and their class organizations, integration of these class organizations with the Congress, imparting a socialist direction to the Congress, and preparing for the resumption of a mass movement.

Those who favoured office acceptance said that they were equally committed to combating the 1935 Act. They denied that they were constitutionalists; they also believed that ‘real ‘work lies outside the legislature’ and that work in the legislatures had to be a short-term tactic, for it could not lead to freedom — for that a mass struggle outside the legal framework was needed. But, they said, the objective political situation made it necessary to go through a constitutional phase, for the option of a mass movement was not available at the time. Congress should, therefore, combine mass politics with work in the legislatures and ministries in order to alter an unfavourable political situation. In other words, what was involved was not a choice between principles but a choice between the two alternative strategies of S-T-S’ and S-V. The case of the right-wing was put with disarming simplicity by Rajendra Prasad in a letter to Nehru in December 1935: ‘So far as I can judge, no one wants to accept offices for their own sake. No one wants to work the constitution as the Government would like it to be worked. The questions for us are altogether different. What are we to do with this Constitution? Are we to ignore it altogether and go our way? Is it possible to do so? Are we to capture it and use it as we would like to use it and to the extent it lends itself to be used in that way. . . It is not a question to be answered a priori on the basis of pre­conceived notions of a so-called pro-changer or no-changer, cooperator or obstructionist.’ And he assured Nehru that ‘1 do not believe that anyone has gone back to pre-non-cooperation mentality. I do not think that we have gone back to 1923-28. We are in 1928-29 mentality and I have no doubt that better days will soon come.’ Similarly, speaking at the Lucknow Session of the Congress, J.B. Kriplani said: ‘Even in a revolutionary movement there may be a time of comparative depression and inactivity. At such times, whatever programmes are devised have necessarily an appearance of reformatory activity but they are a necessary part of all revolutionary strategy.”9 Nor was the issue of socialism involved in the debate. As T. Vishwanathan of Andhra put it: ‘To my socialist comrades, I would say, capture or rejection of office is not a matter of socialism. I would ask them to realize that it is a matter of strategy.’

The pro-office acceptance leaders agreed that there were pitfalls involved and that Congressmen in office could give way to wrong tendencies. But the answer, they said, was to fight these wrong tendencies and not abandon offices. Moreover, the administrative field should not be left clear to pro-Government forces. Even if the Congress rejected office, there were other groups and parties who would readily form ministries and use them to weaken nationalism and encourage reactionary and communal policies and politics. Lastly, despite their limited powers, the provincial ministries could be used to promote constructive work especially in respect of village and Harijan uplift, khadi, prohibition, education and reduction of burden of debt, taxes and rent on the peasants.

The basic question that the ministerialists posed was whether office acceptance invariably led to co-option by the colonial state or whether ministries could be used to defeat the colonial strategy. The answer, in the words of Vishwanathan was: ‘There is no office and there is no acceptance. . . Do not look upon ministries as offices, but as centres and fortresses from which British imperialism is radiated. . . The Councils cannot lead us to constitutionalism, for we are not babies; we will lead the Councils and use them for Revolution.’

Though Gandhiji wrote little on the subject, it appears that in the Working Committee discussions he opposed office acceptance and posed the alternative of quiet preparation in the villages for the resumption of civil disobedience. But by the beginning of 1936 he felt that the latter was still not feasible; he was, therefore, willing to give a trial to the formation of Congress ministries, especially as the overwhelming mood of the party favoured this course.

The Congress decided at Lucknow in early 1936 and at Faizpur in late 1936 to fight the elections and postpone the decision on office acceptance to the post-election period. Once again, as in 1922-24 and 1934, both wings of the Congress, having mutual respect and trust in their commitment to the anti­imperialist struggle and aware of the damage to the movement that a split would cause, desisted from dividing the party. Though often out-voted, the Left fought every inch of the way for acceptance of their approach but would not go to breaking point.

The Congress went all out to win the elections to the provincial assemblies held in February 1937. Its election manifesto reaffirmed its total rejection of the 1935 Act. It promised the restoration of civil liberties, the release of political prisoners, the removal of disabilities on grounds of sex and untouchability, the radical transformation of the agrarian system, substantial reduction in rent and revenue, scaling down of the rural debts, provision of cheap credit, the right to form trade unions and the right to strike.

The Congress election campaign received massive response and once again aroused the political consciousness and energy of the people. Nehru’s country-wide election tour was to acquire legendary proportions. He travelled nearly 80,000 kilometres in less than five months and addressed more than ten million people, familiarizing them with the basic political issues of the time. Gandhiji did not address a single election meeting though he was very much present in the minds of the voters.

The Congress won a massive mandate at the polls despite the narrow franchise. It won 716 out of 1,161 seats it contested. It had a majority in most of the provinces. The exceptions were Bengal, Assam, the NWFP, Punjab and Sind; and in the first three, it was the largest single party. The prestige of the Congress as the alternative to the colonial state rose even higher. The election tour and election results heartened Nehru lifted him from the slough of despondency, and made him reconcile to the dominant strategy of S-T-S’.

India’s Struggle for Independence by Bipan Chandra Chapter 24 The Rise of the Left-wing

A powerful left-wing group developed in India in the late 1920s and 1930s contributing to the radicalization of the national movement. The goal of political independence acquired a clearer and sharper social and economic content. The stream of national struggle for independence and the stream of the struggle for social and economic emancipation of the suppressed and the exploited began to come together. Socialist ideas acquired roots in the Indian soil, and socialism became the accepted creed of Indian youth whose urges came to be symbolized by Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose. Gradually there emerged two powerful parties of the Left, the Communist Party of India (CPI) and the Congress Socialist Party (CSP).

Seminal in this respect was the impact of the Russian Revolution. On 7 November 1917, the Bolshevik (Communist) party, led by V.I. Lenin overthrew the despotic Czarist regime and declared the formation of the first socialist state. The new Soviet regime electrified the colonial world by unilaterally renouncing its imperialist rights in China and other parts of Asia. Another lesson was driven home: If the common people — the workers and peasants and the intelligentsia — could unite and overthrow the mighty Czarist empire arid establish a social order where there was no exploitation of one human being by another, then the Indian people battling against British imperialism could also do so. Socialist doctrines, especially Marxism, the guiding theory of the Bolshevik Party, acquired a sudden attraction, especially for the people of Asia. Bipin Chandra Pal, the famous Extremist leader, wrote in 1919: ‘Today after the downfall of German militarism, after the destruction of the autocracy of the Czar, there has grown up all over the world a new power, the power of the people determined to rescue their legitimate rights — the right to live freely and happily without being exploited and victimized by the wealthier and the so-called higher classes.’ Socialist ideas now began to spread rapidly especially because many young persons who had participated actively in the Non­Cooperation Movement were unhappy with its outcome and were dissatisfied with Gandhian policies and ideas as well as the alternative Swarajist program. Several socialist and communist groups came into existence all over the country. In Bombay, S.A. Dange published a pamphlet Gandhi and Lenin and started the first socialist weekly, The Socialist; in Bengal, Muzaffar Ahmed brought out Navayug and later founded the Langal in cooperation with the poet Nazrul Islam; in Punjab, Ghulam Hussain and others published Inquilab; and in Madras, M. Singaravelu founded the Labour-Kisan Gazette.

Student and youth associations were organized all over the country from 1927 onwards. Hundreds of youth conferences were organized all over the country during 1928 and 1929 with speakers advocating radical solutions for the political, economic and social ills from which the country was suffering. Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Bose toured the country attacking imperialism, capitalism, and landlordism and preaching the ideology of socialism. The Revolutionary Terrorists led by Chandrasekhar Azad and Bhagat Singh also turned to socialism. Trade union and peasant movements grew rapidly throughout the 1920s. Socialist ideas became even more popular during the 1930s as the world was engulfed by the great economic depression. Unemployment soared all over the capitalist world. The world depression brought the capitalist system into disrepute and drew attention towards Marxism and socialism. Within the Congress, the left-wing tendency found reflection in the election of Jawaharlal Nehru as president for 1936 and 1937 and of Subhas Bose for 1938 and 1939 and in the formation of the Congress Socialist Party.

It was above all Jawaharlal Nehru who imparted a socialist vision to the national movement and who became the symbol of socialism and socialist ideas in India after 1929. The notion that freedom could not be defined only m political terms but must have a socioeconomic content began increasingly to be associated with his name.

Nehru became the president of the historic Lahore Congress of 1929 at a youthful forty. He was elected to the post again in 1936 and 1937. As president of the Congress and as the most popular leader of the national movement after Gandhiji, Nehru repeatedly toured the country, traveling thousands of miles and addressing millions of people. In his books (Autobiography and Glimpses of World History), articles and speeches, Nehru propagated the ideas of socialism and declared that political freedom would become meaningful only if it led to the economic emancipation of the masses; it had to, therefore, be followed by the establishment of a socialist society, Nehru thus molded a whole generation of young nationalists and helped them accept a socialist orientation.

Nehru developed an interest in economic questions when he came in touch with the peasant movement in eastern U.P. in 1920-21. He then used his enforced leisure in jail, during 1922­23, to read widely on the history of the Russian and other revolutions. In 1927, he attended the international Congress against Colonial Oppression and imperialism, held at Brussels, and came into contact with communists and anti-colonial fighters from all over the world. By now he had begun to accept Marxism in its broad contours. The same year he visited the Soviet Union and was deeply impressed by the new socialist society. On his return, he published a book on the Soviet Union on whose title page he wrote Wordsworth’s famous lines on French Revolution: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.’ Jawaharlal returned to India, in the words of his biographer S. Gopal, ‘a self-conscious revolutionary radical.’

In 1928, Jawaharlal joined hands with Subhas to organize the Independence for India League to fight for complete independence and ‘a socialist revision of the economic structure of society.’ At the Lahore session of the Congress in 1929, Nehru proclaimed: ‘I am a socialist and a republican, and am no believer in kings and princes, or in the order which produces the modem kings of industry, who have a greater power over the lives and fortunes of men than even the kings of old, and whose methods are as predatory as those of the old feudal aristocracy.’ India, he said, would have to adopt a full ‘socialist program’ if she was ‘to end her poverty and inequality.’ It was also not possible for the Congress to hold the balance between capital and labour and landlord and tenant, for the existing balance was ‘terribly weighted’ in favour of the capitalists and landlords.

Nehru’s commitment to socialism found clearer and sharper expression during 1933-36. Answering the question Whither India’ in October 1933, he wrote: ‘Surely to the great human goal of social and economic equality, to the ending of all exploitation of nation by nation and class by class.’ And in December 1933 he wrote: ‘The true civic ideal is the socialist ideal, the communist ideal.’ He put his commitment to socialism in clear, unequivocal and passionate words in his presidential address to the Lucknow Congress in April 1936: ‘I am convinced that the only key to the solution of the world’s problems and of India’s problems lies in socialism, and when I use this world I do so not in a vague humanitarian way but in the scientific, economic sense. . . I see no way of ending the poverty, the vast unemployment, the degradation, and the subjection of the Indian people except through socialism. That involves vast and revolutionary changes in our political and social structure. That means the ending of private property, except in a restricted sense, and the replacement of the present profit system by a higher ideal of cooperative service. During these years, Nehru also emphasized the role of class analysis and class struggle.

Nehru developed a complex relationship with Gandhiji during this period. He criticized Gandhiji for refusing to recognize the conflict of classes, for preaching harmony among the exploiters and the exploited, and for putting forward the theories of trusteeship by, and conversion of, the capitalists and landlords. In fact, Nehru devoted a whole chapter in his Autobiography to gently combating some of the basic aspects of Gandhian ideology. At the same time, he fully appreciated the radical role that Gandhiji had played and was playing in Indian society. Defending Gandhiji against his left-wing critics, Jawaharlal contended in an article written in January 1936 that ‘Gandhi has played a revolutionary role in India of the greatest importance because he knew how to make the most of the objective conditions and could reach the heart of the masses; while groups with a more advanced ideology functioned largely in the air.’ Moreover, Gandhiji’s actions and teachings had ‘inevitably raised mass consciousness tremendously and made social issues vital. And his insistence on the raising of the masses at the cost, wherever necessary, of vested interests, has given a strong orientation to the national movement in favour of the masses.’ Nehru’s advice to other Leftists in 1939 regarding the approach to be adopted towards Gandhiji and the Congress has been well summed up by Mohit Sen: Nehru believed that ‘the overwhelming bulk of the Congress was composed of amorphous centrists, that Gandhiji not only represented them but was also essential for any genuinely widespread mass movement, that on no account should the Left be at loggerheads with him or the centrists, but their strategy should rather be to pull the centre to the left — possibilities for which existed, especially as far as Gandhiji was concerned.’

But Nehru’s commitment to socialism was given within a framework that recognized the primacy of the political, anti­imperialist struggle so long as India was ruled by the foreigner. In fact the task was to bring the two commitments together without undermining the latter. Thus, he told the Socialists in 1936 that the two basic urges that moved him were ‘nationalism and political freedom as represented by the Congress and social freedom as represented by socialism’; and that ‘to continue these two outlooks and make them an organic whole is the problem of the Indian socialist.’

Nehru, therefore, did not favour the creation of an organization independent of or separate from the Congress or making a break with Gandhiji and the right-wing of the Congress. The task was to influence and transform the Congress as a whole in a socialist direction. And this could be best achieved by working under its banner and bringing its workers and peasants to play a greater role in its organization. And in no case, he felt, should the Left become a mere sect apart from the mainstream of the national movement.

Attracted by the Soviet Union and its revolutionary commitment, a large number of Indian revolutionaries and exiles abroad made their way there. The most well-known and the tallest of them was M.N. Roy, who along with Lenin, helped evolve the Communist International’s policy towards the colonies. Seven such Indians, headed by Roy, met at Tashkent in October 1920 and set up a Communist Party of India. Independently of this effort, as we have seen, a number of left-wing and communist groups and organizations had begun to come into existence in India after 1920. Most of these groups came together at Kanpur in December 1925 and founded an all-India organization under the name the Communist Party of India (CPI). After some time, S.V. Ghate emerged as the general secretary of the party. The CPI called upon all its members to enroll themselves as members of the Congress, form a strong left-wing in all its organs, cooperate with all other radical nationalists, and make an effort to transform the Congress into a more radical mass-based organization.

The main form of political work by the early Communists was to organize peasants’ and workers’ parties and work through them. The first such organization was the Labour-Swaraj Party of the Indian National Congress organized by Muzaffar Ahmed, Qazi Nazrul Islam, Hemanta Kumar Sarkar, and others in Bengal in November 1925. In late 1926, a Congress Labour Party was formed in Bombay and a Kirti-Kisan Party in Punjab. A Labour Kisan Party of Hindustan had been functioning in Madras since 1923. By 1928 all of these provincial organizations had been renamed the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party (WPP) and knit into an All India party, whose units were also set up in Rajasthan, UP and Delhi. All Communists were members of this party. The basic objective of the WPPs was to work within the Congress to give it a more radical orientation and make it ‘the party of the people’ and independently organize workers and peasants in class organizations, to enable first the achievement of complete independence and ultimately of socialism. The WPPs grew rapidly and within a short period, the communist influence in Congress began to grow rapidly, especially in Bombay. Moreover, Jawaharlal Nehru and other radical Congressmen welcomed the WPPs’ efforts to radicalize the Congress. Along with Jawaharlal and Subhas Bose, the youth leagues and other Left forces, the WPPs played an important role in creating a strong left-wing within the Congress and in giving the Indian national movement a leftward direction. The WPPs also made rapid progress on the trade union front and played a decisive role in the resurgence of working-class struggles during 1927-29 as also in enabling in Communists to gain a strong position in the working class.

The rapid growth of communist and WPP influence over the national movement was, however, checked and virtually wiped out during 1929 and after by two developments. One was the severe repression to which Communists were subjected by the Government. Already in 1922-24, Communists trying to enter India from the Soviet Union had been tried in a series of conspiracy cases at Peshawar and sentenced to long periods of imprisonment. In 1924, the Government had tried to cripple the nascent communist movement by trying S.A. Dange, Muzaffar Ahmed, Nalini Gupta and Shaukat Usmani in the Kanpur Bolshevik Conspiracy Case. All four were sentenced to four years of imprisonment.

By 1929, the Government was deeply worried about the rapidly growing communist influence in the national and trade union movements. It decided to strike hard. In a sudden swoop, in March 1929, it arrested thirty-two radical political and trade union activists, including three British Communists — Philip Spratt, Ben Bradley, and Lester Hutchinson — who had come to India to help organize the trade union movement. The basic aim of the Government was to behead the trade union movement and to isolate the Communists from the national movement. The thirty-two accused were put up for trial at Meerut. The Meerut Conspiracy Case was soon to become a cause celebre. The defense of the prisoners was to be taken up by many nationalists including Jawaharlal Nehru, M.A. Ansari, and M.C. Chagla. Gandhiji visited the Meerut prisoners in jail to show his solidarity with them and t0 seek their cooperation in the coming struggle. Speeches of defense made in the court by the prisoners were carried by all the nationalist newspapers thus familiarizing lakhs of people for the first time with communist ideas. The Government design to isolate the Communists from the mainstream of the national movement, not only miscarried but had the very opposite consequence. It did, however, succeed in one respect. The growing working-class movement was deprived of its leadership. At this early stage, it was not easy to replace it with new leadership.

As if the Government blow was not enough, the Communists inflicted a more deadly blow on themselves by taking a sudden lurch towards what is described in leftist terminology as sectarian politics or ‘leftist deviation’.

Guided by the resolutions of the Sixth Congress of the Communist International, the Communists broke their connection with the National Congress and declared it to be a class party of the bourgeoisie. Moreover, the Congress and the bourgeoisie it supposedly represented were declared to have become supporters of imperialism. Congress plans to organize a mass movement around the slogan of Poorna Swaraj were seen as sham efforts to gain influence over the masses by bourgeois leaders who were working for a compromise with British imperialism. Congress left leaders, such as Nehru and Bose, were described as ‘agents of the bourgeoisie within the national movement who were out to ‘bamboozle the mass of workers’ and keep the masses under bourgeois influence. The Communists were now out to ‘expose’ all talk of non-violent struggle and advance the slogan of armed struggle against imperialism, in 1931, the Gandhi-Irwin Pact was described as a proof of the Congress betrayal of nationalism.

Finally, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party was also dissolved on the ground that it was unadvisable to form a two-class (workers’ and peasants’) party for it was likely to fall prey to petty bourgeois influences. The Communists were to concentrate, instead, on the formation of an ‘illegal, independent and centralized’ communist party. The result of this sudden shift in the Communists’ political position was their isolation from the national movement at the very moment when it was gearing up for its greatest mass struggle and conditions were ripe for massive growth in the influence of the Left over it. Further, the Communists split into several splinter groups. The Government took further advantage of this situation and, in 1934, declared the CPI illegal.

The Communist movement was, however, saved from disaster because, on the one hand, many of the Communists refused to stand apart from the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) and participated actively in it, and, on the other hand, socialist and communist ideas continued to spread in the country. Consequently, many young persons who participated in the CDM or in Revolutionary Terrorist organizations were attracted by socialism, Marxism and the Soviet Union, and joined the CPI after 1934.

The situation underwent a radical change in 1935 when the Communist Party was reorganized under the leadership of P.C. Joshi. Faced with the threat of fascism the Seventh Congress of the Communist International, meeting at Moscow in August 1935, radically changed its earlier position and advocated the formation of a united front with socialists and other anti-fascists in the capitalist Countries and with bourgeois-led nationalist movements in colonial countries. The Indian Communists were to once again participate in the activities of the mainstream of the national movement led by the National Congress. The theoretical and political basis for the change in communist politics in India was laid in early 1936 by a document popularly known as the Dun-Bradley Thesis. According to this thesis, the National Congress could play ‘a great part and a foremost part in the work of realizing the anti-imperialist people’s front.’

The Communist Party now began to call upon its members to join the Congress and enrol the masses under their influence to the Congress. In 1938, it went further and accepted that the Congress was ‘the central mass political organization of the Indian people ranged against imperialism.” And, in 1939, P.C. Joshi wrote in the party weekly, National Front, that the greatest class struggle today is our national struggle’ of which Congress was the ‘main organ.”2 At the same time, the party remained committed to the objective of bringing the national movement under the hegemony of the working class, that is, the Communist Party. Communists now worked hard inside the Congress. Many occupied official positions inside the Congress district and provincial committees; nearly twenty were members of the All- India Congress Committee. During 1936-42, they built up powerful peasant movements in Kerala, Andhra, Bengal, and Punjab. What is more important, they once again recovered their popular image of being the most militant of anti-imperialists.

The move towards the formation of a socialist party was made in the jails during 1930-31 and 1932-34 by a group of young Congressmen who were disenchanted with Gandhian strategy and leadership and attracted by socialist ideology. Many of them were active in the youth movement of the late 1920s. In the jails, they studied and discussed Marxian and other socialist ideas. Attracted by Marxism, communism and Soviet Union, they did not find themselves in agreement with the prevalent political line of the CPI. Many of them were groping towards an alternative. Ultimately they came together and formed the Congress Socialist Party (CSP) at Bombay in October 1934 under the leadership of Jayaprakash Narayan, Acharya Narendra Dev, and Minoo Masani. From the beginning, all the Congress socialists were agreed upon four basic propositions: that the primary struggle in India was the national struggle for freedom and that nationalism w..s a necessary stage on the way to socialism; that socialists must work inside the National Congress because it was the primary body leading the national struggle and, as Acharya Narendra Dev put it in 1934, It would be a suicidal policy for us to cut ourselves 3ff from the national movement that Congress undoubtedly represents; that they must give the Congress and the national movement a socialist direction; and that to achieve this objective they must organize the workers and peasants in their class organizations, wage struggles for their economic demands and make them the social base of the national struggle.”

The CSP from the beginning assigned itself the task of both transforming the Congress and of strengthening it. The task of transforming Congress was understood in two senses. One was the ideological sense. Congressmen were to be gradually persuaded to adopt a socialist vision of independent India and a more radical pro-labor and pro-peasant stand on current economic issues. This ideological and programmatic transformation was, however, to be seen not as an event but as a process. As Jayaprakash Narayan repeatedly told his followers in 1934: We are placing before the Congress a program and we want the Congress to accept it. If the Congress does not accept it, we do not say we are going out of the Congress. If today we fail, tomorrow we will try and if tomorrow we fail, we will try again.”

The transformation of the Congress was also seen in an organizational sense, that is, in terms of changes in its leadership at the top. Initially, the task was interpreted as the displacement of the existing leadership, which was declared to be incapable of developing the struggle of the masses to a higher level. The CSP was to develop as the nucleus of the alternative socialist leadership of the Congress. As the Meerut Thesis of the CSP put it in 1935, the task was to ‘wean the anti-imperialist elements in the Congress away from its present bourgeois leadership and to bring them under the leadership of revolutionary socialism.”

This perspective was, however, soon found to be unrealistic and was abandoned in favour of a ‘composite’ leadership in which socialists would be taken into the leadership at all levels. The notion of alternate Left leadership of the Congress and the national movement came up for realization twice at Tripuri in 1939 and at Ramgarh in 1940. But when it came to splitting the Congress on a Left-Right basis and giving the Congress an executive left-wing leadership, the CSP (as also the CPI) shied away. Its leadership (as also CPI’s) realized that such an effort would not only weaken the national movement but isolate the Left from the mainstream, that the Indian people could be mobilized into a movement only under Gandhiji’s leadership and that, in fact, there was at the time no alternative to Gandhiji’s leadership. However, unlike Jawaharlal Nehru, the leadership of the CSP, as also of other Left groups and parties, was not able to fully theorize or internalize this understanding and so it went back again and again to the notion of alternative leadership.

The CSP was, however, firmly well grounded in the reality of the Indian situation. Therefore, it never carried its opposition to the existing leadership of the Congress to breaking point. Whenever it came to the crunch, it gave up its theoretical position and adopted a realistic approach close to that of Jawaharlal Nehru’s. This earned it the condemnation of the other left-wing groups and parties — for example, in 1939, they were chastised for their refusal to support Subhas Bose in his confrontation with Gandhiji and the Right wing of the Congress. At such moments, the socialists defended themselves and revealed flashes of an empiricist understanding of Indian reality. Jayaprakash Narayan, for example, said in 1939 after Tripuri: ‘We Socialists do not want to create factions in the Congress nor do we desire to displace the old leadership of the Congress and to establish rival leadership. We are only concerned with the policy and program of the Congress. We only want to influence Congress decisions. Whatever our differences with the old leaders, we do not want to quarrel with them. We all want to march shoulder to shoulder in our common fight against imperialism.”

From the beginning, the CSP leaders were divided into three broad ideological currents: the Marxian, the Fabian and the current influenced by Gandhiji. This would not have been a major weakness — in fact, it might have been a source of strength — for a broad socialist party which was a movement. But the CSP was already a part, and a cadre-based party at that, within a movement that was the National Congress. Moreover, the Marxism of the 1930s was incapable of accepting as legitimate such diversity of political currents on the Left. The result was confusion which plagued the CSP till the very end. The party’s basic ideological differences were papered over for a long time because of the personal bonds of friendship and a sense of comradeship among most of the founding leaders of the party, the acceptance of Acharya Narendra Dev and Jayaprakash Narayan as its senior leaders, and its commitment to nationalism and socialism.

Despite the ideological diversity among the leaders, the CSP as a whole accepted a basic identification of socialism with Marxism. Jayaprakash Narayan, for example, observed in his book Why Socialism? that ‘today more than ever before it is possible to say that there is only one type, one theory of Socialism — Marxism.” Gradually, however as Gandhiji’s politics began to be more positively evaluated, large doses of Gandhian and liberal democratic thought were to become basic elements of the CSP leadership’s thinking.

Several other groups and currents developed on the Left in the I 930s. M.N. Roy came back to India in 1930 and organized a strong group of Royists who underwent several political and ideological transformations over the years. Subhas Bose and his left-wing followers founded the Forward Bloc in 1939 after Bose was compelled to resign from the Presidentship of the Congress. The Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, the Revolutionary Socialist Party, and various Trotskyist groups also functioned during the 193Os. There were also certain prestigious left-wing individuals, such as Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, Professor N.G. Ranga, and Indulal Yagnik, who worked outside the framework of any organized left-wing party.

The CPI, the CSP and Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Bose and other Left groups and leaders all shared a common political program which enabled them, despite ideological and organizational differences, to work together after 1935 and make socialism a strong current in Indian politics. The basic features of this programme were: consistent and militant anti-imperialism, anti-landlordism, the organization of workers and peasants in trade unions and kisan sabhas, the acceptance of a socialist vision of independent India and of the socialist programme of the economic and social transformation of society, and an anti­fascist, anti-colonial and anti-war foreign policy.

Despite the fact that the Left cadres were among the most courageous, militant and sacrificing of freedom fighters, the Left failed in the basic task it had taken upon itself— to establish the hegemony of socialist ideas and parties over the national movement. It also failed to make good the promise it held out in the l930s. This is, in fact, a major enigma for the historian.

Several explanations for this complex phenomenon suggest themselves. The Left invariably fought the dominant Congress leadership on wrong issues and, when it came to the crunch, was either forced to trail behind that leadership or was isolated from the national movement. Unlike the Congress right-wing, the Left failed to show ideological and tactical flexibility. It sought to oppose the right-wing with simplistic formulae and radical rhetoric. It fought the right-wing on slippery and wrong grounds. It chose to tight not on questions of ideology but on methods of struggle and on tactics. For example, its most serious charge against the Congress right-wing was that it wanted to compromise with imperialism, that it was frightened of mass struggle, that its anti-imperialism was not wholehearted because of bourgeois influence over it. The right-wing had little difficulty in disposing of such charges. The people rightly believed it and not the Left. Three important occasions may be cited as examples. In 1936-37, the Left fought the Right within the Congress on the issue of elections and office acceptance which was seen as a compromise with imperialism. In 1939-42, the tight was waged on the issue of the initiation of a mass movement, when Gandhiji’s reluctance was seen as an aspect of his soft attitude towards imperialism and as the missing of a golden opportunity And, in 1945-47, the Left confronted the dominant Congress leadership, including Jawaharlal Nehru and Maulana Azad, on the question of negotiations for the transfer of power, which were seen as British imperialism’s last-ditch effort to prolong their domination and the tired Congress leadership’s hunger for power or even betrayal.

The Left also failed to make a deep study of Indian reality. With the exception of Jawaharlal Nehru, the Left saw the dominant Congress leadership as bourgeois its policy of negotiations as working towards a compromise with imperialism any resort to constitutional work as a step towards the ‘abandonment of the struggle for independence’. It took recourse to a simplistic model of analyzing Indian social classes and their political behavior. It saw all efforts to guide the national movement in a disciplined manner as imposing restrictions on the movement. It constantly counterposed armed struggle to non­violence as a superior form and method of struggle, rather than concentrating on the nature of mass involvement and mobilization and ideology. It was Convinced that the masses were ever ready for struggles in any form if only the leaders were willing to initiate them. It constantly overestimated its support among the people. Above all, the Left failed to grasp the Gandhian strategy of struggle.

A major weakness of the Left was the failure of the different Left parties, groups, and individuals to work unitedly except for short periods. All efforts at forging a united front of left-wing elements ended in frustration. Their doctrinal disputes and differences were too many and too passionately held, and the temperamental differences among the leaders overpowering. Nehru and Bose could not work together for long and bickered publicly in 1939. Nehru and the Socialists could not coordinate their politics. Bose and Socialists drifted apart after 1939. The CSP and the Communists made herculean efforts to work together from 1935 to 1940: The CSP opened its doors to Communists and Royists in 1935 so that the illegal Communist Party could have legal avenues for political work. But the Socialists and Communists soon drifted apart and became sworn enemies. The inevitable result was a long-term schism between the Socialists who suffered from an anti-Communist phobia and Communists who saw every Socialist leader as a potential bourgeois or (after 1947) American agent.

The Left did succeed in making a basic impact on Indian society and politics. The organization of workers and peasants, discussed elsewhere, was one of its greatest achievements. Equally important was its impact on Congress. Organizationally, the Left was able to command influence over nearly one-third of the votes in the All-India Congress Committee on important issues. Nehru and Bose were elected Congress presidents from 1936 to 1939. Nehru was able to nominate three prominent Socialists, Acharya Narendra Dev, Jayaprakash Narayan, and Achyut Patwardhan, to his Working Committee. In 1939, Subhas Bose, as a candidate of the Left, was able to defeat Pattabhi Sitaramayya in the presidential election by a majority of 1580 to 1377.

Politically and ideologically, the Congress as a whole was given a strong Left orientation. As Nehru put it, Indian nationalism had been powerfully pushed ‘towards vital social changes, and today it hovers, somewhat undecided, on the brink of a new social ideology.” The Congress, including its right-wing, accepted that the poverty and misery of the Indian people was the result not only of colonial domination but also of the internal socio-economic structure of Indian society which had, therefore, to be drastically transformed. The impact of the Left on the national movement was reflected in the resolution on Fundamental Rights and Economic Policy passed by the Karachi session of the Congress in 1931, the resolutions on economic policy passed at the Faizpur session in 1936, the Election Manifesto of the Congress in 1936, the setting up of a National Planning Committee in 1938, and the increasing shift of Gandhiji towards radical positions on economic and class issues. The foundation of the All-India Students’ Federation and the Progressive Writers’ Association and the convening of the first All- India States’ People’s Conference in 1936 were some of the other major achievements of the Left was also very active in the All-India Women’s Conference. Above all, two major parties of the Left, the Communist Party, and the Congress Socialist Party had been formed and were being built up.

Discussed in Chapters 23, 25 and 39.