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India’s Struggle for Independence by Bipan Chandra Chapter 23 From Karachi to Wardha: The years from 1932-34

The Congress met at Karachi on 29 March 1931 to endorse the Gandhi-Irwin or Delhi Pact. Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, and Rajguru had been executed six days earlier. Even though Gandhiji had made every attempt to save their lives, there was anger among the people, especially the youth, as to why he had not refused to sign the Pact on this question. All along Gandhiji’s route to Karachi, he was greeted with black flag demonstrations. The Congress passed a resolution drafted by Gandhiji by which it, ‘while dissociating itself from and disapproving of political violence in any shape or form,’ admired ‘the bravery and sacrifice’ of the three martyrs.’ The Congress endorsed the Delhi Pact and reiterated the goal of Poorna Swaraj.

The Karachi session became memorable for its resolution on Fundamental Rights and the National Economic Programme. Even though the Congress had from its inception fought for the economic interests, civil liberties and political rights of the people, this was the first time that the Congress defined what Swaraj would mean for the masses. It also declared that ‘in order to end the exploitation of the masses, political freedom must include real economic freedom of the starving millions.’ The resolution guaranteed the basic civil rights of free speech, free press, free assembly, and freedom of association; equality before the law irrespective of caste, creed or sex; neutrality of the state in regard to all religions; elections on the basis of universal adult franchise; and free and compulsory primary education. It promised substantial reduction in rent and revenue, exemption from rent in case of uneconomic holdings, and relief of agricultural indebtedness and control of usury; better conditions for workers including a living wage, limited hours of work and protection of women workers; the right to organize and form unions to workers and peasants; and state ownership or control of key industries, mines and means of transport. It also maintained that ‘the culture, language, and script of the minorities and of the different linguistic areas shall be protected.’ The Karachi resolution was to remain in essence the basic political and economic program of the Congress in later years.

Gandhiji sailed for London on 29 August 1931 to attend the Second Round Table Conference. Nothing much was expected from the Conference for the imperialist political and financial forces, which ultimately controlled the British Government in London, were opposed to any political or economic concessions being given to India which could lead to its independence from their control. Winston Churchill, leader of the virulent right-wing, had strongly objected to the British Government negotiating on terms of equality with the ‘seditious fakir’ and demanded strong government in India. The Conservative Daily Mail declared that ‘Without India, the British Commonwealth would fall to pieces. Commercially, economically, politically and geographically it is our greatest imperial asset. To imperil our hold on it would be the worst treason any Briton could commit.’ In India, Irwin was replaced by Willingdon as the Viceroy. In Britain, after December 1931, the Laborite Ramsay MacDonald headed a Conservative-dominated Cabinet with the weak and reactionary Samuel Hoare as the Secretary of State for India. Apart from a few able individuals, the overwhelming majority of Indian delegates to the Round Table Conference (RTC), hand-picked by the Government, were loyalists, communalists, careerists, and place-hunters, big landlords and representatives of the princes. They were used by the Government to claim that the Congress did not represent the interests of all Indians vis-a-vis imperialism and to neutralize Gandhiji and all his efforts to confront the imperialist rulers with the basic question of freedom.

The great Gujarati poet, Meghani, in a famous poem gave expression to the nationalist misgivings regarding the RTC. Addressing Gandhiji on the eve of his departure for London, he sang in the first line: ‘Chchello Katoro Jerno Aa: Pi Jayo Bapu!’ (Even this last cup of poison, you must drink, Bapu!) Gandhiji himself said: ‘When I think of the prospects in London, when I know that all is not well in India . . . there is nothing wanting to fill me with utter despair. . . There is every chance of my returning empty-handed’. That is exactly what happened in London. The British Government refused to concede the basic Indian demand for freedom. Gandhiji came back at the end of December 1931 to a changed political situation.

The higher British officials in India had drawn their own lessons from the political impact of the Delhi Pact which had raised the political prestige of the Congress and the political morale of the people and undermined and lowered British prestige. They, as well as the new Viceroy, believed that the Government had made a major error in negotiating and signing a truce with the Congress, as if between two equal powers. They were now determined to reverse it all. No pact, no truce, no Gandhi-Viceroy meetings, no ‘quarter for the enemy’ became the watchwords of Government policy.

The British policy was now dominated by three major considerations: (a) Gandhiji must not be permitted to build up the tempo for a massive and protracted mass movement, as he had done in 1919, 1920-1 and 1930. (b) The Government functionaries — village officials, police and higher bureaucrats — and the loyalists — ‘our friends’ — must not feel disheartened that Gandhiji was being ‘resurrected as a rival authority to the Government of India,’ and that the Government was losing the will to rule. As the Home Member, H.G. Haig, put it: ‘We can, in my view, do without the goodwill of the Congress, and in fact I do not believe for a moment that we shall ever have it, but we cannot afford to do without the confidence of those who have supported us in the long struggle against the Congress.’ (c) In particular, the nationalist movement must not be permitted to gather force and consolidate itself in rural areas, as it was doing all over India, especially in U.P., Gujarat, Andhra, Bihar, Bengal, and NWFP.

While Gandhiji was in London, the Government of India prepared, in secret, plan for the coming showdown with the nationalist forces. It decided to launch ‘a hard and immediate blow’ against any revival of the movement and to arrest Gandhiji at the very outset. It drafted a series of ordinances which would usher in virtual martial law, though under civilian control.

The shape of things to come had been overshadowed by what happened in U.P., NWFP, and Bengal during the truce period, hi U.P. the Congress was leading a campaign for reduction of rent, remission of arrears of rent and prevention of eviction of tenants for non-payment of rents. By the first week of December, Congress had launched a no-rent, no-revenue campaign in five districts. The Government’s response was to arrest Jawaharlal on 26 December when he was going to Bombay to meet Gandhiji. In the North-Western Frontier Province, the Government continued its severe repression against the non­violent Khudai Khidmatgars (servants of God), also known as Red Shirts because of the color of their shirts, and the peasants they led against the Government’s policy of extracting revenue through cruel methods and torture. On 24 December, their leader, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, was arrested and Peshawar district was occupied by the army. In Bengal, the Government was ruling through draconian ordinances and detaining thousands of political workers in the name of fighting terrorism. In September, the police fired upon political prisoners in Hijli jail, killing two.

Gandhiji landed in Bombay on 28 December. The Congress Working Committee met the next day and decided to resume civil disobedience. On the 31st, Gandhiji asked the Viceroy for a meeting, offering to suspend the decision on civil disobedience till such a meeting. The Viceroy refused to see Gandhiji — the first of many such refusals during the next five years. On 4 January 1932, the Government launched its pre-emptive strike against the national movement by arresting Gandhiji, promulgating ordinances which gave the authorities unlimited power — thus initiating what a historian has described as ‘Civil Martial Law.’ Civil liberties no longer existed and the authorities could seize people and property at will. Within a week, leading Congressmen all over the country were behind bars.

The Indian people responded with anger. Even though Congress entered the battle rather unprepared, the popular response was massive. In the first four months, over 80,000 Satyagrahis, most of them urban and rural poor, were jailed, while lakhs took to the picketing of shops selling liquor and foreign cloth. Illegal gatherings, non-violent demonstrations, celebrations of various national days, and other forms of defiance of the ordinances were the rule of the day.

The non-violent movement was met by relentless repression. The Congress and its allied organizations were declared illegal and their offices and funds seized. Nearly all the Gandhi Ashrams were occupied by the police. Peaceful picketers, Satyagrahis, and processions were lathi-charged, beaten and often awarded rigorous imprisonment and heavy fines, which were realized by selling their lands and property at throwaway prices. Prisoners in jail were barbarously treated. Whipping as punishment became frequent. The no-tax campaigns in different parts of rural India were treated with great severity. Lands, houses, cattle, agricultural implements, and other property were freely confiscated. The police indulged in naked terror and committed innumerable atrocities. At Ras, a village in Gujarat, the non-tax paying peasants were stripped naked, publicly whipped and given electric shocks. The wrath of the Government fell with particular harshness on women. Conditions in jails were made extraordinarily severe with the idea of scaring away women from the Satyagraha. The freedom of the Press to report or comment on the movement, or even to print pictures of national leaders or Satyagrahis, was curtailed. Within the first six months of 1932 action was taken against 109 journalists and ninety-eight printing presses. Nationalist literature — poems, stories, and novels — was banned on a large scale.

The people fought back. But Gandhiji and other leaders had no. time to build up the tempo of the movement and it could not be sustained for long. The movement was effectively crushed within a few months. In August 1932, the number of those convicted came down to 3,047 and by August 1933 only 4,500 Satya.grahis were in jail. However, the movement continued to linger till early April 1934 when the inevitable decision to withdraw it was taken by Gandhiji.

Political activists despaired at the turn the movement had taken. What have we achieved, many asked? Even a buoyant and active person like Jawaharlal gave voice to this sense of despair — accentuated by his separation from his sick wife — by copying a verse in his jail diary in June 1935: ‘Sad winds where your voice was; Tears, tears where my heart was; and ever with me, Child, ever with me, Silence where hope was.’7 Earlier, when Gandhiji had withdrawn the movement, Jawaharlal had felt ‘with a stab of pain’ that his long association with Gandhiji was about to come to an end. Subhas Chandra Bose and Vithalbhai Patel had been much more critical of Gandhiji’s leadership. In a strong statement from Europe, they had said in 1933 that ‘Mr. Gandhi as a political leader has failed’ and called for ‘a radical reorganization of the Congress on a new principle with a new method, for which a new leader is essential.’

The enemies of Indian nationalism gloated over the frustration among the nationalists — and grossly misread it. Willingdon declared in early 1933: ‘The Congress is in a definitely less favourable position than in 1930, and has lost its hold on the public.” But Willingdon and company had completely failed to understand the nature and strategy of the Indian national movement — it was basically a struggle for the minds of men and women. Seen in this light, if the colonial policy of negotiations by Irwin had failed earlier, so had the policy of ruthless suppression by Willingdon. People had been cowed down by superior force; they had not lost faith in Congress. Though the movement from 1930 to 1934 had not achieved independence and had been temporarily crushed, the Indian people had been further transformed. The will to fight had been further strengthened; faith in British rule had been completely shattered. H.N. Brailsford, Laborite journalist, wrote, assessing the results of the nationalists’ most recent struggle, that the Indians ‘had freed their own minds, they had won independence in their hearts.’

And, as we have seen earlier, this hiatus in the movement too was primarily to rest and regroup. Withdrawal of the movement did not mean defeat or loss of mass support; it only meant, as Dr. Ansari put it, ‘having fought long enough we prepare to rest,’ to fight another day a bigger battle with greater and better-organized force.’ Symbolic of the real outcome, the real impact of the civil disobedience, was the heroes’ welcome given to prisoners on their release in 1934. And this became evident to all when the Congress captured a majority in six out of eleven provinces in the elections in 1937 despite the restricted nature of the franchise.

Alone among his contemporaries, Gandhiji understood the true nature and outcome of the Civil Disobedience Movement. To Nehru, he wrote in September 1933: ‘I have no sense of defeat in me and the hope in me that this country of ours is fast marching towards its goal is burning as bright as it did in 1920.” He reiterated this view to a group of Congress leaders in April 1934: ‘I feel no despondency in me. .. I am not feeling helpless. . . The nation has got energy of which you have no conception but I have.” He had, of course, an advantage over most other leaders. While they needed a movement to sustain their sense of political activism, he had always available the alternative of constructive work.

The British policy of ‘Divide and Rule’ found another expression in the announcement of the Communal Award in August 1932. The Award allotted to each minority a number of seats in the legislatures to be elected on the basis of a separate electorate that is Muslims would be elected only by Muslims and Sikhs only by Sikhs, and so on. Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians had already been treated as minorities. The Award declared the Depressed Classes (Scheduled Castes of today) also to be a minority community entitled to separate electorate and thus separated them from the rest of the Hindus.

The Congress was opposed to a separate electorate for Muslims, Sikhs and ‘Christians as it encouraged the communal notion that they formed separate groups or communities having interests different from the general body of Indians. The inevitable result was to divide the Indian people and prevent the growth of common national consciousness. But the idea of a separate electorate for Muslims had been accepted by the Congress as far back as 1916 as a part of the compromise with the Muslim League. Hence, Congress took the position that though it was opposed to separate electorates, it was not in favour of changing the Award without the consent of the minorities. Consequently, though strongly disagreeing with the Communal Award, it decided neither to accept it nor to reject it.

But the effort to separate the Depressed Classes from the rest of Hindus by treating them as separate political entities was vehemently opposed by all the nationalists. Gandhiji, in Yeravada jail at the time, in particular, reacted very strongly.’ He saw the Award as an attack on Indian unity and nationalism, harmful to both Hinduism and the Depressed Classes, for it provided no answers to the socially degraded position of the latter. Once the Depressed Classes were treated as a separate community, the question of abolishing untouchability would not arise, and the work of Hindu social reform in this respect would come to a halt.

Gandhiji argued that whatever harm separate electorates might do to Muslims or Sikhs, it did not affect the fact that they would remain Muslims or Sikhs. But while reformers like himself were working for the total eradication of untouchability, separate electorates would ensure that ‘untouchables remain untouchables in perpetuity.’ What was needed was not the protection of the so-called interests of the Depressed Classes in terms of seats in the legislatures or jobs but the ‘root arid branch’ eradication of untouchability.

Gandhiji demanded that the representatives of the Depressed Classes should be elected by the general electorate under a wide, if possible universal, common franchise. At the same time he did not object to the demand for a larger number of the reserved seats for the Depressed Classes. He went on a fast unto death on 20 September 1932 to enforce his demand. In a statement to the Press, he said:  ‘My life, I count of no consequence. One hundred lives given for this noble cause would, in my opinion, be poor penance done by Hindus for the atrocious wrongs they have heaped upon helpless men and women of their own faith.’

While many political Indians saw the fast as a diversion from the ongoing political movement, all were deeply concerned and emotionally shaken. Mass meetings took place almost everywhere. The 20th of September was observed as a day of fasting and prayer. Temples, wells, etc., were thrown open to the Depressed Classes all over the country. Rabindranath Tagore sent a telegraphic message to Gandhiji: ‘It is worth sacrificing precious life for the sake of India’s unity and her social integrity. Our sorrowing hearts will follow your sublime penance with reverence and love.’ Political leaders of different political persuasions, including Madan Mohan Malaviya, M.C. Rajah and B.R. Ambedkar, now became active. In the end they succeeded in hammering out an agreement, known as the Poona Pact, according to which the idea of separate electorates for the Depressed Classes was abandoned but the seats reserved for them in the provincial legislatures were increased from seventy- one in the Award to 147 and in the Central Legislature to eighteen percent of the total.

Regarding the Poona agreement, Gandhiji declared after breaking his fast: ‘I would like to assure my Harijan friends. that they may hold my life as a hostage for its due fulfillment.’ He now set out to redeem his pledge. First from jail and then from outside, for nearly two years he gave up all other pre-occupations and earned on a whirlwind campaign against untouchability. After his release from prison, he had shifted to Satyagraha Ashram at Wardha after abandoning Sabarmati Ashram at Ahmedabad for he had vowed in 1930 not to return to Sabarmati till Swaraj was won. Starting from Wardha on 7 November 1933 and until 29 July 1934, for nearly nine months, he conducted an intensive ‘Harijan tour’ of the country traveling over 20,000 kilometers by train, car, bullock cart, and on foot. collecting money for the recently founded Harijan Sewak Sangh, propagating the removal of untouchability in all its forms and practices, and urging social workers to leave all and go to the villages for the social, economic, cultural and political uplift of the Harijans — his name for the Depressed Classes.

In the course of his Harijan campaign, Gandhiji undertook two major fasts on 8 May and 16 August 1933 to convince his followers of the importance of the issue and the seriousness of his effort. ‘They must either remove untouchability or remove me from their midst.’ He justified these fasts as answers to his ‘inner voice,’ which, he said, could also be described as ‘dictates of reason.’ These facts created consternation in the ranks of the nationalists, throwing many of them into an emotional crisis. The fast of 8 May 1933 was opposed even by Kasturba, his wife. As the hour of the fast approached, Miraben sent a telegram: ‘Ba wishes me to say she is greatly shocked. Feels the decision very wrong but you have not listened to any others and so will not hear her. She sends her heartfelt prayers.’ Gandhiji’s reply was characteristic: ‘Tell Ba her father imposed on her a companion whose weight would have killed any other woman. I treasure her love. She must remain courageous to the end.’

Throughout Gandhiji’s Harijan campaign, he was attacked by orthodox and social reactionaries. They met him with black flag demonstrations and disrupted his meetings. They brought out scurrilous and inflammatory leaflets against him, putting fantastic utterances in his mouth. They accused him of attacking Hinduism. They publicly burnt his portraits. On 25 June 1934, at Poona, a bomb was thrown on a car believed to be carrying Gandhiji, injuring its seven occupants. The protesters offered the Government full support against the Congress and the Civil Disobedience Movement if it would not support the anti-untouchability campaign. The Government obliged by defeating the Temple Entry Bill in the Legislative Assembly in August 1934. Throughout his fast, Harijan work and Harijan tour, Gandhiji stressed on certain themes. One was the degree of oppression practiced on the Harijans; in fact, day after day he put forward a damning indictment of Hindu society: ‘Socially they are lepers. Economically they are worse. Religiously they are denied entrance to places we miscall houses of God. They are denied the use, on the same terms as Hindus, of public roads, public schools, public hospitals, public wells, public taps, public parks and the like. . . They are relegated for their residence to the worst quarters of cities and villages where they get no social services.’ A second theme was that of the ‘root and branch removal of untouchability.’ Symbolic or rather the entering wedge in this respect was to be the throwing open of all temples to Harijans.

Gandhiji’s entire campaign was based on the grounds of humanism and reason. But he also argued that untouchability, as practiced at present, had no sanction in the Hindu Shastras. But even if this was not so, the Harijan worker should not feel daunted. Truth could -not be confined within the covers of a book. The Shastras should be ignored if they went against human dignity.

A major running theme in Gandhiji’s writings and speeches was the need for caste Hindus to do ‘penance’ and ‘make reparations . . . for the untold hardships to which we have subjected them (the Harijans) for centuries.’ For this reason, he was not hostile to Dr. Ambedkar and other Harijans who criticized and distrusted him. ‘They have every right to distrust me,’ he wrote. ‘Do I not belong to the Hindu section miscalled superior class or caste Hindus, who have ground down to powder the so-called untouchables?’ At the same time, he repeatedly warned caste Hindus that if this atonement was not made, Hinduism would perish: ‘Hinduism dies if untouchability lives, and untouchability has to die if Hinduism is to live.’ (This strong theme of ‘penance’ largely explains why caste Hindus born and brought up in pre-1947 India so readily accepted large scale reservations in jobs, enrolment in professional colleges and so on for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes after independence).

Gandhiji was not in favour of mixing up the issue of the removal of untouchability with the issues of inter-dining and inter-marriage. Restriction on the latter should certainly go, for ‘dining and marriage restrictions stunt Hindu society.’ But they were also practiced by caste Hindus among themselves as also the Harijans among themselves. The present All-India campaign, he said, had to be directed against the disabilities which were specific to the Harijans. Similarly, he distinguished between the abolition of caste system and the abolition of untouchability. He disagreed with Dr. Ambedkar when the latter asserted that ‘the outcast is a by-product of the caste system. There will be outcastes as long as there are castes. And nothing can emancipate the outcaste except the destruction of the caste system. On the contrary, Gandhiji said that whatever the ‘limitations and defects’ of the Vamashram, ‘there is nothing sinful about it, as there is about untouchability.’ He believed that purged of untouchability, itself a product of ‘the distinction of high and low’ and not of the caste system, this system could function in a manner that would make each caste ‘complementary of the other and none inferior or superior to any other.’ In any case, he said, both the believers and the critics of the Varna system should join hands in fighting untouchability, for opposition to the latter was common to both.

Gandhiji also stressed the positive impact that the struggles against untouchability would have on the communal and other questions. Non- Hindus were treated by Hindus as untouchables ‘in some way or the other,’ especially in matters of food and drink, and non-Hindus certainly took note of this fact. Hence, ‘if untouchability is removed, it must result in bringing all Indians together.’ Increasingly, he also began to point out that untouchability was only one form of the distinctions that society made between man and man; it was a product of the grading of society into high and low. To attack untouchability was to oppose ‘this high-and-lowness.’ That is why ‘the phase we are now dealing with does not exhaust all the possibilities of struggle.’ In keeping with his basic philosophy of non-violence, and being basically a 19th century liberal and believer in rational discussion, Gandhiji was opposed to exercising compulsion even on the orthodox supporters of untouchability, whom he described as the Sanatanists. Even they had to be tolerated and converted and won over by persuasion, ‘by appealing to their reason and their hearts.’ His fasts, he said, were not directed against his opponents or meant to coerce them into opening temples and wells etc.; they were directed towards friends and followers to goad them and inspire them to redouble their anti-untouchability work.

Gandhiji’s Harijan campaign included a program of internal reform by Harijans: promotion of education, cleanliness, and hygiene, giving up the eating of carrion and beef, giving up liquor and the abolition of untouchability among themselves. But it did not include a militant struggle by the Harijans themselves through Satyagraha, breaking of caste taboos, mass demonstrations, picketing, and other forms of protests. At the same time, he was aware that his Harijan movement ‘must cause daily increasing awakening among the Harijans’ and that in time ‘whether the savarna Hindus like it or not, the Harijans would make good their position.’

Gandhiji repeatedly stressed that the Harijan movement was not a political movement but a movement to purify Hinduism and Hindu society. But he was also aware that the movement ‘will produce great political consequences,’ just as untouchability poisoned ‘our entire social and political fabric.’ In fact, not only did Harijan work, along with other items of constructive work, enable the Congress cadre to keep busy in its non-mass movement phases, it also gradually carried the message of nationalism to the Harijans, who also happened to be agricultural labourers in most parts of the country, leading to their increasing participation in the national as well as peasant movements.

India’s Struggle for Independence by Bipan Chandra Chapter 22 Civil Disobedience— 1930-31

The Lahore Congress of I929 authorized the Working Committee to launch a programme civil disobedience including non-payment of taxes. It had also called upon all members of legislatures to resign their seats. In mid-February, 1930, the Working Committee, meeting at Sabarmati Ashram, invested Gandhiji with fill powers to launch the Civil Disobedience Movement at a time and place of his choice. The acknowledged expert on mass struggle was already ‘desperately in search of an effective formula.” His ultimatum of 31 January to Lord Irwin, stating the minimum demands in the form of II points, had been ignored, and there was now only one way out: civil disobedience.

By the end of February, the formula began to emerge as Gandhiji began to talk about salt: ‘There is no article like salt outside water by taxing which the State can reach even the starving millions, the sick, the maimed and the utterly helpless. The tax constitutes, therefore, the most inhuman poll tax the ingenuity of man can devise.’ On 2 March, he addressed his historic later to the Viceroy in which he first explained at great length why he regarded British rule as a curse:‘It has impoverished the dumb millions by a system of progressive exploitation . . . It has reduced us politically to serfdom. It has sapped the foundations of our culture . . . it has degraded us spiritually.’ He then informed the Viceroy of his plan of action, as he believed every true Satyagrahi must: ‘…on the 11th day of this month. I shall proceed with such co-workers of the Ashram as I can take, to disregard the provisions of the salt laws. It is, I know, open to you to frustrate my design by arresting me. I hope that there will be tens of thousands ready, in a disciplined manner, to take up the work after me, and, m the act of disobeying the Salt Act to lay themselves open to the penalties of a law that should never have disfigured the Statute-book.’

The plan was brilliantly conceived though few realized its significance when it was first announced. Gandhiji, along with a band of seventy-eight members of the Sabarmati Ashram, among whom were men belonging to almost every region and religion of India, was to march from his headquarters in Ahmedabad through the villages of Gujarat for 240 miles. On reaching the coast at Dandi, he would break the salt laws by collecting salt from the beach. The deceptively innocuous move was to prove devastatingly effective. Even before the march began, thousands began to throng the Sabarmati Ashram in anticipation of the dramatic events that lay ahead. And Gandhiji painstakingly explained his plans, gave directions for future action, impressed on the people the necessity for non-violence, arid prepared them for the Government’s response: ‘Wherever possible, civil disobedience of salt laws should be started . . . Liquor and foreign- cloth shops can be picketed. We can refuse to pay taxes if we have the requisite strength. The lawyers can give up practice. The public can boycott the courts by refraining from litigation. Government servants can resign their posts . . . I prescribe only one condition, viz., let our pledge of truth and non­violence as the only means for the attainment of Swaraj be faithfully kept.’

Explaining the power of civil disobedience, he said: ‘Supposing ten persons from each of the 700,000 villages in India come forward to manufacture salt and to disobey the Salt Act, what do you think this Government can do? Even the worst autocrat you can imagine would not dare to blow regiments of peaceful civil resisters out of a cannon’s mouth. If only you will bestir yourselves just a little, I assure you we should be able to tire this Government out in a very short time.’

He also explained how non-violence enabled the widest participation of the people and put the Government in an unenviable quandary. To a crowd who came to the ashram on 10 March, he said: ‘Though the battle is to begin in a couple of days, how is it that you can come here quite fearlessly? I do not think anyone of you would be here if you had to face rifle-shots or bombs. But you have no fear of rifle-shots or bombs? Why?

Supposing I had announced that I was going to launch a violent campaign (not necessarily with men aimed with rifles, but even with sticks or stones), do you think the Government would have left me free until now? Can you show me an example in history (be it in England, America or Russia) where the State has tolerated violent defiance of authority for a single day? But here you know that the Government is puzzled and perplexed.’

And as Gandhiji began his march, staff in hand, at the head of his dedicated band, there was something in the image that deeply stirred the imagination of the people. News of his progress, of his speeches, of the teeming crowds that greeted and followed the marchers, of the long road lovingly strewn with leaves and festooned with banners and flags, of men and women quietly paying their homage by spinning yam on their charkas as Gandhiji passed, of the 300 village officials in Gujarat who resigned their posts in answer to his appeal, was carried day after day by newspapers to readers across the country and broadcast live by thousands of Congress workers to eager listeners. By the time Gandhiji reached Dandi, he had a whole nation, aroused and expectant, waiting restlessly for the final signal. On 6 April 1930, by picking up a handful of salt, Gandhiji inaugurated the Civil Disobedience Movement, a movement that was to remain unsurpassed in the history of the Indian national movement for the country-wide mass participation it unleashed.

While Gandhiji was marching to Dandi, Congress leaders and workers had been busy at various levels with the hard organizational task of enrolling volunteers and members, forming grass-roots Congress Committees, collecting funds, and touring villages and towns to spread the nationalist message. Preparations for launching the salt Satyagraha were made, sites chosen, volunteers prepared, and the logistics of battle worked out.

Once the way was cleared by Gandhiji’s ritual beginning at Dandi, the defiance of salt laws started all over the country. In Tamil Nadu, C. Rajagopalachari, led a salt march from Trichinopoly to Vedaranniyam on the Tanjore coast. By the time he was arrested on 30 April he had collected enough volunteers to keep the campaign going for quite some time in Malabar, K. Kelappan, the hero of the Vaikom Satyagraha, walked from Calicut to Payannur to break the salt law. A band of Satyagrahis walked all the way from Sylhet in Assam to Noakhali on the Bengal Coast to make salt. In Andhra, a number of sibirams (military style camps) were set up in different districts to serve as the headquarters of the salt Satyagraha, and bands of Satyagrahis marched through villages on their way to the coastal centres to defy the law. On their return journeys, they again toured through another set of villages. The Government’s failure to arrest Gandhiji for breaking the salt law was used by the local level leaders to impress upon the people that ‘the Government is afraid of persons like ourselves,’ and that since the starting of the salt Salyagrah the Government ‘has disappeared and hidden itself somewhere, and that Gandhi Government has already been established.’9 Jawaharlal Nehru’s arrest on 14 April, for defiance of the salt law, was answered with huge demonstrations and clashes with the police in the cities of Madras, Calcutta and Karachi.

On 23 April, the arrest of Congress leaders in the North West Frontier Province led to a mass demonstration of unprecedented magnitude in Peshawar. Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan had been active for several years in the area, and it was his mass work which lay behind the formation of the band of non-violent revolutionaries, the Khudai Khidmatgars, popularly known as the Red Shirts — who were to play an extremely active role in the Civil Disobedience Movement. The atmosphere created by their political work contributed to the mass upsurge in Peshawar during which the city was virtually in the hands of the crowd for more than a week. The Peshawar demonstrations are significant because it was here that the soldiers of the Garhwali regiments refused to fire on the unarmed crowd.

It was becoming increasingly clear that the Government’s gamble — that non-interference with the movement would result in its spending itself out, that Gandhiji’s salt strategy would fail to take off— had not paid off. In fact, the Government had never been clear on what course it should follow, and was, as Gandhiji had predicted, ‘puzzled and perplexed.’ The dilemma in which it found itself was a dilemma that the Gandhian strategy of non­violent civil disobedience was designed to create. The Government was placed in a classic ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ fix, i.e. if it did not suppress a movement that brazenly defied its laws, its administrative authority would be seen to be undermined and its control would be shown to be weak, and if it did suppress it, it would be seen as a brutal, anti-people administration that used violence on non-violent agitators. ‘If we do too much, Congress will cry “repression” . . . if we do too little. Congress will cry “victory,” ‘— this is how a Madras civilian expressed the dilemma in early 1930.” Either way, it led to the erosion of the hegemony of the British government.

The rapid spread of the movement left the Government with little choice but to demonstrate the force that lay behind its benevolent facade. Pressure from officials, Governors and the military establishment started building up, and, on 4 May, the Viceroy finally ordered Gandhiji’s arrest. Gandhiji’s announcement that he would now proceed to continue his defiance of the salt laws by leading a raid on the Dharasana Salt Works certainly forced the Government’s hand, but its timing of Gandhiji’s arrest was nevertheless ill-conceived. It had neither the advantage of an early strike, which would have at least prevented Gandhiji from carefully building up the momentum of the movement nor did it allow the Government to reap the benefits of their policy of sitting it out. Coming as it did at a high point in the movement, it only acted as a further spur to activity, and caused endless trouble for the Government.’

There was a massive wave of protest at Gandhiji’s arrest. In Bombay, the crowd that spilled out into the streets was so large that the police just withdrew. Its ranks were swelled by thousands of textile and railway workers. Cloth-merchants went on a six-day hartal. There were clashes and firing in Calcutta and Delhi. But it was in Sholapur, in Maharashtra, that the response was the fiercest. The textile workers, who dominated the town went on strike from 7 May, arid along with other residents, burnt liquor shops and proceeded to attack all symbols of Government authority — the railway station, law courts, police stations and municipal buildings. They took over the city and established a virtual parallel government which could only be dislodged with the imposition of martial law after 16 May.

But it was non-violent heroism that stole the show as the salt Satyagraha assumed yet another, even more potent form. On May 21, with Sarojini Naidu, the first Indian woman to become President of the Congress, and Imam Saheb, Gandhiji’s comrade of the South African struggle, at the helm, and Gandhiji’s son, Manual, in front ranks, a band of 2000 marched towards the police cordon that had sealed off the Dharasana salt works. As they caine close, the police rushed forward with their steel-tipped lathis and set upon the non-resisting Satyagrahis till they fell down. The injured would be carried away by their comrades on make-shift stretchers and another column would take their place, be beaten to pulp, and carried away. Column after column advanced in this way; after a while, instead of walking up to the cordon the men would sit down and wait for the police blows. Not an arm was raised in defence, and by 11 a.m., when the temperature in the shade was 116 degrees Fahrenheit, the toll was already 320 injured and two dead. Webb Miller, the American journalist, whose account of the Dharasana Satyagraha was to carry the flavour of Indian nationalism to many distant lands, and whose description of the resolute heroism of the Satyagrahis demonstrated effectively that non­violent resistance was no meek affair, summed up his impressions in these words: ‘In eighteen years of my reporting in twenty countries, during which I have witnessed innumerable civil disturbances, riots, street fights and rebellions, I have never witnessed such harrowing scenes as at Dharasana.’

This new form of salt Satyagraha was eagerly adopted by the people, who soon made it a mass affair. At Wadala, a suburb of Bombay, the raids on the salt works culminated on 1 June in mass action by a crowd of 15,000 who repeatedly broke the police cordon and triumphantly carried away salt in the face of charges by the mounted police. In Karnataka, 10,000 invaded the Sanikatta salt works and faced lathis and bullets. In Madras, the defiance of salt laws led to repeated clashes with the police and to a protest meeting on 23 April on the beach which was dispersed by lathi charges and firing, leaving three dead. This incident completely divided the city on racial lines, even the most moderate of Indians condemning the incident, and rallying behind the nationalists. In Andhra bands of village women walked miles to carry away a handful of salt, and in Bengal, the old Gandhian ashrams, regenerated by the flood of volunteers from the towns, continued to sustain a powerful salt Satyagraha in Midnapore and other coastal pockets. The districts of Balasore, Pun and Cuttack in Orissa remained active centres of illegal salt manufacture.

But salt Satyagraha was only the catalyst, and the beginning, for a rich variety of forms of defiance that it brought in its wake. Before his arrest Gandhiji had already called for a vigorous boycott of foreign cloth and liquor shops and had especially asked the women to play a leading role in this movement. ‘To call woman the weaker sex is a libel: it is man’s injustice to woman,” he had said; and the women of India certainly demonstrated in 1930 that they were second to none in strength and tenacity of purpose. Women who had never stepped unescorted out of their homes, woen who had stayed in purdah, young mothers and widows and unmarried girls, became a familiar sight as they stood from morning to night outside liquor shops and opium dens and stores selling foreign cloth, quietly but firmly persuading the customers and shopkeepers to change their ways.

Along with the women, students and youth played the most prominent part in the boycott of foreign cloth and liquor. In Bombay, for example, regular Congress sentries were posted in business districts to ensure that merchants and dealers did not flout the foreign cloth boycott. Traders’ associations and commercial bodies were themselves quite active in implementing the boycott, as were the many mill owners who refused to use foreign yarn and pledged not to manufacture coarse cloth that competed with khadi. The recalcitrant among them were brought in line by fines levied by their own associations, by social boycott, by Congress black-listing, and by picketing.

The liquor boycott brought Government revenues from excise duties crashing down; it also soon assumed a new popular form, that of cutting off the heads of toddy trees. The success of the liquor and drugs boycott was obviously connected with the popular tradition of regarding abstinence as a virtue and as a symbol of respectability. The depth of this tradition is shown by the fact that lower castes trying to move up in the caste hierarchy invariably tried to establish their upper-caste status by giving up liquor and eating of meat.

Eastern India became the scene of a new kind of no-tax campaign — refusal to pay the chowkidara tax. Chowkidars, paid out of the tax levied specially on the villages, were guards who supplemented the small police force in the rural areas in this region. They were particularly hated because they acted as spies for the Government and often also as retainers for the local landlords. The movement against this tax and calling for the resignation of Chowkidars, and of the influential members of chowkidari panchayats who appointed the Chowkidars, first started in Bihar in May itself, as salt agitation had not much scope due to the land-locked nature of the province. In the Monghyr, Saran, and Bhagalpur districts, for example, the tax was refused, Chowkidars induced to resign, and social boycott used against those who resisted. The Government retaliated by confiscation of property worth hundreds and thousands in lieu of a few rupees of tax, and by beatings and torture. Matters came to a head in Bihpur in Bhagalpur on May 31 when the police, desperate to assert its fast-eroding authority, occupied the Congress ashram which was the headquarters of nationalist activity in the area. The occupation triggered off daily demonstrations outside the ashram, and a visit by Rajendra Prasad and Abdul Ban from Patna became the occasion for, a huge mass rally, which was broken up by a lathi charge in which Rajendra Prasad was injured. As elsewhere, repression further increased the nationalists’ strength, and the police just could not enter the rural areas.

In Bengal, the onset of the monsoon, which made it difficult to make salt, brought about a shift to anti-chowkidara and anti-Union Board agitation. Here too, villagers withstood severe repression, losing thousands of rupees worth of property through confiscation and destruction, and having to hide for days in forests to escape the wrath of the police.

In Gujarat, in Kheda district, in Bardoli taluka in Surat district, and in Jambusar in Broach, a determined no-tax movement was in progress — the tax refused here was the land revenue. Villagers in their thousands, with family, cattle and household goods, crossed the border from British India into the neighboring princely states such as Baroda and camped for months together in the open fields. Their houses were broken into, their belongings destroyed, their lands confiscated. The police did not even spare Vallabhbhai Patel’s eighty-year-old mother, who sat cooking in her village house in Karamsad; her cooking utensils were kicked about and filled with kerosene and stone. Vallabhbhai, on his brief sojourns out of jail throughout 1930, continued to provide encouragement and solace to the hard-pressed peasants of his native land. Though their meager resources were soon exhausted, and weariness set in, they stuck it out in the wilderness till the truce in March 1931 made it possible for them to return to their homes.

Defiance of forest Jaws assumed a mass character in Maharashtra, Karnataka and the Central Provinces, especially in areas with large tribal populations who had been the most seriously affected by the colonial Government’s restrictions on the use of the forest. At some places, the size of the crowd that broke the forest laws swelled to 70,000 and above. In Assam, a powerful agitation led by students was launched against the infamous ‘Cunningham circular’ which forced students and their guardians to furnish assurances of good behavior.

The people seemed to have taken to heart Jawaharlal Nehru’s message when he unfurled the national flag at Lahore in December 1929: ‘Remember once again, now that this flag is unfurled, it must not be lowered as long as a single Indian, man, woman, or child lives in India.” Attempts to defend the honour of the national flag in the face of severe brutalities often turned into heroism of the most spectacular variety. At Bundur, on the Andhra Coast, Tota Narasaiah Naidu preferred to be beaten unconscious by a fifteen-member police force rather than give up the .national flag. In Calicut, P. Krishna Pillai, who later became a major Communist leader, suffered lathi blows with the same determination. In Surat, a group of children used their ingenuity to defy the police. Frustrated by the repeated snatching of the national flag from their hands, they came up with the idea of stitching khadi dresses in the three colors of the national flag, and thereafter these little, ‘living flags’ triumphantly paraded the streets and defied the police to take away the national flag!’6 The national flag, the symbol of the new spirit, now became a common sight even in remote villages.

U.P. was the setting of another kind of movement — a no­revenue, no-rent campaign. The no-revenue part was a call to the zamindars to refuse to pay revenue to the Government, the no­rent a call to the tenants not to pay rent to the zamindars. In effect, since the zamindars were largely loyal to the Government, this became a no-rent struggle. The Civil Disobedience Movement had taken a firm hold in the province iii the initial months, but repression had led to a relative quiet, and though no- rent was in the air, it was only in October that activity picked up again when Jawaharlal Nehru, out of jail for a brief period, got the U.P. Congress Committee to sanction the no-rent campaign. Two months of preparation and intensive propaganda led to the launching of the campaign in December; by January, severe repression had forced many peasants to flee the villages. Among the important centers of this campaign were the districts of Agra and Rae Bareli.

The movement also popularized a variety of forms of mobilization. Prabhatpheris, in which bands of men, women, and children went around at dawn singing nationalist songs, became the rule in villages and towns. Patrikas, or illegal news-sheets, sometimes written by hand and sometimes cyclostyled, were part of the strategy to defy the hated Press Act, and they flooded the country. Magic lanterns were used to take the nationalist message to the villages. And, as before, incessant tours by individual leaders and workers, and by groups of men and women, and the holding of public meetings, big and small, remained the staple of the movement. Children were organized into vanar senas or monkey armies and at least at one place, the girls decided they wanted their own separate manjari sena or cat army!

The Government’s attitude throughout 1930 was marked by ambivalence. Gandhiji’s arrest itself had come after much vacillation. After that, ordinances curbing the civil liberties of the people were freely issued and provincial governments were given the freedom to ban civil disobedience organizations. But the Congress Working Committee was not declared unlawful till the end of June and Motilal Nehru, who was functioning as the Congress President, also remained free till that date. Many local Congress Committees were not banned till August. Meanwhile, the publication of the report of the Simon Commission, which contained no mention of Dominion Status and was in other ways also a regressive document, combined with the repressive policy, further upset even moderate political opinion. Madan Mohan Malaviya and M.S. Aney courted arrest. In a conciliatory gesture, the Viceroy on 9 July suggested a Round Table Conference and reiterated the goal of Dominion Status. He also accepted the suggestion, made by forty members of the Central Legislature, that Tej Bahadur Sapru and M.R. Jayakar be allowed to explore the possibilities of peace between the Congress and the Government. In pursuance of this, the Nehrus, father and son, were taken in August to Yeravada jail to meet Gandhiji and discuss the possibilities of a settlement. Nothing came of the talks, but the gesture did ensure that some sections of political opinion would attend the Round Table Conference in London in November. The proceedings in London, the first ever conducted between the British and Indians as equals, at which virtually every delegate reiterated that a constitutional discussion to which the Congress was not a party was a meaningless exercise, made it clear that if the Government’s strategy of survival was to be based on constitutional advance, then an olive branch to the Congress was imperative. The British Prime Minister hinted this possibility in his statement at the conclusion of the Round Table Conference. He also expressed the hope that the Congress would participate in the next round of deliberations to be held later in the year. On 25 January, the Viceroy announced the unconditional release of Gandhiji and all the other members of the Congress Working Committee, so that might be to respond to the Prime Minister’s statement ‘freely and fearlessly.’

After deliberating amongst itself for close to three weeks, and after long discussions with delegates who had returned from London, and with other leaders representing a cross-section of political opinion, the Congress Working Committee authorized Gandhiji to initiate discussions with the Viceroy. The fortnight-long discussions culminated on 5 March 1931 in the Gandhi- Irwin Pact, which was variously described as a ‘truce’ and a ‘provisional settlement.’

The Pact was signed by Gandhiji on behalf of the Congress and by Lord Irwin on behalf of the Government, a procedure that was hardly popular with officialdom as it placed the Congress on an equal footing with the Government. The terms of the agreement included the immediate release of all political prisoners not convicted for violence, the remission of all fines not yet collected, the return of confiscated lands not yet sold to third parties, and lenient treatment for those government employees who had resigned. The Government also conceded the right to make salt for consumption to villages along the coast, as also the right to peaceful and non-aggressive picketing. The Congress demand for a public inquiry into police excesses was not accepted, but Gandhiji’s insistent request for an inquiry was recorded in the agreement. The Congress, on its part, agreed to discontinue the Civil Disobedience Movement. It was also understood that Congress would participate in the next Round Table Conference.

The terms on which the Pact was signed, its timing, the motives of Gandhiji in signing the Pact, his refusal to make the Pact conditional on the commutation of the death-sentences of Bhagat Singh and his comrades, (even though he had tried his best to persuade the Viceroy to do so), have generated considerable controversy and debate among contemporaries and historians alike. The Pact has been variously seen as a betrayal, as proof of the vacillating nature of the Indian bourgeoisie and of Gandhiji succumbing to bourgeois pressure. It has been cited as evidence of Gandhiji’s and the Indian bourgeoisie’s fear of the mass movement taking a radical turn; a betrayal of peasants’ interests because it did not immediately restore confiscated land, already sold to a third party, and so on.

However, as with arguments relating to the withdrawal of the Non Cooperation Movement in 1922 after Chauri Chaura, these perceptions are based on an understanding which fails to grasp the basic strategy and character of the Indian national movement. For one, this understanding ignores the fact which has been stressed earlier — that mass movements are necessarily short-lived they cannot go on for ever, the people’s capacity to sacrifice, unlike that of the activists’,, is not endless. And signs of exhaustion there certainly were, in large and important sectors of the movement. In the towns, while the students and other young people still had energy to spare, shopkeepers and merchants were finding it difficult to bear any more losses and the support from these sections, so crucial in making the boycott a success, had begun to decline by September of 1930. In rural India as well, those areas that had begun their resistance early in the year were fairly quiet in the second half. Through sporadic incidents of resistance and attacks on and clashes with police continued, this was as true of Bengal and Bihar as it was of Andhra and Gujarat. Those areas like U.P., which began their no-rent campaigns only at the end of 1930, still had more fight left in them, but the few instances of militant resistance that carried on and the ability of one or two regions to sustain activity can hardly be cited as proof of the existence of vast reserves of energy all over the country. And what was the guarantee that when those reserves were exhausted, as they were bound to be sooner rather than later, the Government would still be willing to talk? 1931 was not 1946; and as 1932 was to show, the Government could change tack and suppress with a ferocity that could effectively crush the movement. No doubt the youth were disappointed, for they would have preferred their world to end with a bang’ rather than with a whimper’ and surely the peasants of Gujarat were not happy that some of their lands did not come back to them immediately (they were returned after the Congress Ministry assumed office in Bombay in 1937). But the vast mass of the people were undoubtedly impressed that the mighty British Government had had to treat their movement and their leader as an equal and sign a pact with him. They saw this as a recognition of their own strength, and as their victory over the Govemment.ihe thousands who flocked out of the jails as a result of the pact were treated as soldiers returning from a victorious battle and not as prisoners of war returning from a humiliating defeat. They knew that a truce was not a surrender, and that the battle could be joined again, if the enemy so wanted. Meanwhile, their soldiers could rest and they could all prepare for the next round: they retained their faith in their General, and in themselves.

The Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930-31, then, marked a critically important stage in the progress of the anti-imperialist struggle. The number of people who went to jail was estimated at over 90,000 — more than three times the figure for the Non­Cooperation Movement of 1920- 22. Imports of cloth from Britain had fallen by half; other imports like cigarettes had suffered a similar fate. Government income from liquor excise and land revenue had been affected. Elections to the Legislative Assembly had been effectively boycotted. A vast variety of social groups had been politicized on the side of Indian nationalism — if urban elements like merchants and shopkeepers and students were more active in Tamil Nadu and Punjab, and in cities in general, peasants had come to the forefront in Gujarat, U.P., Bengal, Andhra, and Bihar, and tribals in the Central Provinces, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Bengal. Workers had not been missing from the battle either — they joined numerous mass demonstrations in Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras and were in the forefront in Sholapur.

The participation of Muslims in the Civil Disobedience Movement was certainly nowhere near that in 1920-22. The appeals of communal leaders to stay away, combined with active Government encouragement of communal dissension to counter the forces of nationalism, had their effect. Still, the participation of Muslims was not insignificant, either. Their participation in the North-West Frontier Province was, as is well known, overwhelming. In Bengal, middle-class Muslim participation was quite important in Senhatta, Tripura, Gaibandha, Bagura, and Noakhali, and. in Dacca, Muslim students, and shopkeepers, as well as people belonging to the lower classes, extended support to the movement. Middle and upper-class Muslim women were also active.’ The Muslim weaving community in Bihar and in Delhi and Lucknow the lower classes of Muslims were effectively mobilized as were many others in different parts of the country.

The support that the movement had garnered from the poor and the illiterate, both in the town and in the country, was remarkable indeed. Their participation was reflected even in the government statistics of jail goers — and jail-going was only one of the many forms of participation. The Inspector-General of Police in Bengal, E.J. Lowman, expressed the general official bewilderment when he noted: ‘I had no idea that the Congress organization could enlist the sympathy and support of such ignorant and uncultivated people. . . For Indian women, the movement was the most liberating experience to date and can truly be said to have marked their entry into the public space.

India’s Struggle for Independence by Bipan Chandra Chapter 21 Chapter The Gathering Storm — 1927-29

In the years following the end of the Non-Cooperation Movement in 1922, the torch of nationalism had been kept alive by the Gandhian constructive workers who dug their roots deep into village soil, by the Swarajists who kept the Government on its toes in the legislatures, by the Koya tribals in Andhra who heroically fought the armed might of the colonial state under the leadership of Ramachandra Raju from 1922-24, by the Akalis in Punjab, by the Satyagrahis who flocked to defend the honour of the national flag in Nagpur in 1923, and countless others who engaged themselves in organizational, ideological and agitational activities at a variety of levels.

It was, however, from the latter part of 1927 that the curve of the mass anti-imperialist upsurge began to take a marked upward turn. As with the Rowlatt Bills in 1919, it was the British Government that provided a catalyst and a rallying ground by an announcement on 8 November 1927 of an all-White commission to recommend whether India was ready for further constitutional progress and on which lines. Indian nationalists had for many years declared the constitutional reforms of 1919 as inadequate and had been clamoring for an early reconsideration of the constitutional question, but the Government had been adamant that the declared period of ten years must lapse before fresh proposals were considered. In 1927, however, the Conservative Government of Britain, faced with the prospect of electoral & feat at the hands of the Labour Party, suddenly decided that it could not leave an issue which concerned the future of the British Empire in the irresponsible hands of an inexperienced Labour Government and it was thus that the Indian Statutory Commission, popularly known as the Simon Commission after its Chairman, was appointed.

The response in India was immediate and unanimous. That no Indian should be thought fit to serve on a body that claimed the right to decide the political future of India was an insult that no Indian of even the most moderate political opinion was willing to swallow. The call for a boycott of the Commission was endorsed by the Liberal Federation led by Tej Bahadur Sapru, by the Indian Industrial and Commercial Congress, arid by the Hindu Mahasabha the Muslim League even split on the issue, Mohammed Ali Jinnah carrying the majority with him in favour of boycott.

It was the Indian National Congress, however, that turned the boycott into a popular movement. The Congress had resolved on the boycott at its annual session in December 1927 at Madras, and in the prevailing excitable atmosphere, Jawaharlal Nehru had even succeeded in getting passed a snap resolution declaring complete independence as the goal of the Congress. But protest could not be confined to the passing of resolutions, as Gandhiji made clear in the issue of Young India of 12 January 1928: ‘It is said that the Independence Resolution is a fitting answer. The act of appointment (of the Simon Commission) needs for an answer, not speeches, however heroic they may be, not declarations, however brave they may be, but corresponding action.

The action began as soon as Simon and his friends landed at Bombay on 3 February 1928. That day, all the major cities and towns observed a complete hartal, and people were out on the streets participating in mass rallies, processions, and black-flag demonstrations. In Madras, a major clash with the police resulted in firing and the death of one person. T. Prakasam symbolized the defiant spirit of the occasion by baring his chest before the armed policemen who tried in vain to stop him from going to the scene of the killing. Everywhere that Simon went — Calcutta, Lahore, Lucknow, Vijayawada, Poona — he was greeted by a sea of black-flags carried by thousands of people. And ever new ways of defiance were being constantly invented. The youth of Poona, for example, took advantage of the fact that for a long stretch between Lonavala and Poona the road and the rail-track ran within sight of each other. They climbed into a lorry and drove alongside the train that was carrying Simon and Company, waving black flags at them all the way from Lonavala to Poona. In Lucknow, Khaliquzzaman executed the brilliant idea of floating kites and balloons imprinted with the popular slogan ‘Go Back Simon’ over the reception organized in Kaiserbagh by the taluqdars for members of the Commission.

If humour and creativity was much in evidence, so too was popular anger at the manner in which the police dealt with the protesters. Lathi charges were becoming all too frequent, and even respected and senior leaders were not spared the blows. In Lucknow, Jawaharlal and Govind Ballabh Pant were beaten up by the police. But the worst incident happened in Lahore where Lala Lajpat Rai, the hero of the Extremist days and the most revered leader of Punjab, was hit on the chest by lathis on 30 October and succumbed to the injuries on 17 November 1928. It was his death that Bhagat Singh and his comrades were seeking to avenge when they killed the white police official, Saunders, in December 1928.

The Simon boycott movement provided the first taste of political action to a new generation of youth. They were the ones who played the most active role in this protest, and it was they who gave the movement its militant flavour. And although a youth movement had already begun to take shape by 1927, it was participation in the Simon agitation that gave a real fillip to the formation of youth leagues and associations all over the country. Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Bose emerged as the leaders of this new wave of youth and students, and they travelled from one province to another addressing and presiding over innumerable youth conferences.

The upsurge among the youth also proved a fruitful ground for the germination and spread of the new radical ideas of socialism that had begun to reach Indian shores. Jawaharlal Nehru had returned from Europe in 1927 after representing the Indian National Congress at the Brussels Congress of the League against Imperialism. He also visited the Soviet Union and was deeply impressed by socialist ideas. It was with the youth that he first shared his evolving perspective. Although Jawaharlal Nehru’s was undoubtedly the most important role, other groups and individuals too played a crucial part in the popularization of the socialist vision. Subhas Bose was one such individual, though his notion of socialism was nowhere as scientific and clear as Jawaharlal’s. Among groups, the more important ones were the Naujawan Bharat Sabha in Lahore, and the small group of Communists who had formed the Workers’ and Peasants’ Parties with the specific aim of organizing workers and peasants and radicalizing the Congress from within. As a result, the young people who were being drawn into the anti-imperialist movement were also simultaneously becoming sympathetic to the ideas of socialism, and youth groups in some areas even developed links with workers’ and peasants’ struggles.

Lord Birkenhead, the Conservative Secretary of State responsible for the appointment of the Simon Commission, had constantly harped on the inability of Indians to formulate a concrete scheme of constitutional reforms which had the support of wide sections of Indian political opinion. This challenge, too, was taken up and meetings of the All-Parties Conference were held in February, May and August 1928 to finalize a scheme which popularly came to be known as the Nehru Report after Motilal Nehru, its principal author. This report defined Dominion Status as the form of government desired by India. It also rejected the principle of separate communal electorates on which previous constitutional reforms had been based. Seats would be reserved for Muslims at the Centre and in provinces in which they were in a minority, but not in those where they had a numerical majority. The Report also recommended universal adult suffrage, equal rights for women, freedom to form unions, and dissociation of the state from religion in any form. A section of the Muslim League had, in any case, dissociated itself from these deliberations, but by the end of the year, it became clear that even the section led by Jinnah would not give up the demand for reservation of seats for Muslims especially in Muslim majority provinces. The dilemma in which Motilal Nehru and other secular leaders found themselves was not one that was easy to resolve: if they conceded more to Muslim communal opinion, then Hindu communalists would withdraw support and if they satisfied the latter, then Muslim leaders would be estranged. In the event, no further concessions were forthcoming and Jinnah withdrew his support to the report and went ahead to propose his famous ‘Fourteen Points’ which were basally a reiteration of his objections to the Nehru Report.

Young and radical nationalists led by Jawaharlal Nehru had their own, very different, objections to the Nehru Report. They were dissatisfied with its declaration of Dominion Status on the lines of the self-governing dominions as the basis of the future constitution of India. Their slogan was Complete Independence.’ And it was in December 1928, at the annual session of the Congress at Calcutta, that the battle was joined. Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Bose and Satyamurthi, backed by a large number of delegates, pressed for the acceptance of ‘Purna Swaraj’ or complete independence as the goal of the Congress. Gandhiji, Motilal Nehru and many other older leaders felt that the national consensus achieved with such great difficulty on Dominion Status should not be abandoned in such haste and a period of two years be given to the Government for accepting this. Under pressure, the grace of period for the Government was reduced to a year and, more important, the Congress decided that if the Government did not accept a constitution based on Dominion Status by the end of the year the Congress would not only adopt complete independence as its goal, but it would also launch a civil disobedience movement to attain that goal. A resolution embodying this proposal won over the majority of the delegates, and further amendments seeking immediate adoption of complete independence were defeated.

If civil disobedience was to be launched after the end of ‘the present year of probation and grace,’ as Gandhiji called it, then preparations had to begin in right earnest. Gandhiji canceled his plans for a European tour, and explained in the issue of Young India dated 31 January 1929: ‘I feel that I would be guilty of desertion if I now went away to Europe. . . The voice within me tells me that I must not only hold myself in readiness to do what comes my way, but I must even think out and suggest means of working out what to me is a great program. Above all, I must prepare myself for next year’s struggle, whatever shape it may take.’

Gandhiji had of course been preparing the people for the future struggle in multifarious ways. For one, since his release from jail in 1924 on medical grounds, he had been traveling incessantly through the country. By the beginning of 1929, he had already toured Kathiawad, Central Provinces, Bengal, Malabar, Travancore, Bihar, United Provinces, Kutch, Assam, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Orissa, many of them not once but twice. In 1929, in his sixtieth year, he began a tour of Sind, then proceeded via Delhi to Calcutta, then on to Burma, and back to Calcutta. in April, he began a six-week tour of Andhra Pradesh in which he visited 319 villages. In June, he was in Almora in the hills of U.P., and in September he covered the U.P. plains. The end of the year saw him in Lahore for the annual Congress session. He had also planned a visit to Kohat in the North-West Frontier Province but was refused permission by the Government.

The significance of these mass contact tours was expressed by Gandhiji in these words: ‘I travel because I fancy that the masses want to meet me. I certainly want to meet them. I deliver my simple message to them in few words and they and I are satisfied. It penetrates the mass mind slowly but surely.’

While in his pre-1929 tours Gandhiji’s emphasis had been on the constructive programme — khadi, Hindu-Muslim unity, and the removal of untouchability — he now began to prepare the people for direct political action. In Sind, for example, he told the youth to prepare for ‘the fiery ordeal,’ and it was at his instance that the Congress Working Committee constituted a Foreign Cloth Boycott Committee to promote an aggressive programme of boycott and public burning of foreign cloth, in Calcutta, on 4 March, 1929, Gandhiji took the lead in initiating the campaign of public burning of foreign cloth by lighting a bonfire in a public park before a crowd of thousands. The Government issued warrants for his arrest, but allowed him to go to Burma on his scheduled tour and face trial on his return. His arrest sparked off bonfires of foreign cloth all over the country. And when he returned to face trial, another wave of bonfires was lit to defy the Government. Gandhiji warned the people that while they must carry on all manner of preparations for civil disobedience, they must remember that civil disobedience had not yet begun, and that they must as yet remain within the law as far as possible.

Apart from the preparations which the Congress carried on at various levels, there were a number of other developments that kept political excitement in 1929 at fever-pitch. On 20 March 1929, in a major swoop, the Government arrested thirty-one labour leaders, most of them Communists, and marched them off to Meerut, in U.P., for trial. Their arrest was condemned by all sections of the national movement including Gandhiji and the Congress. Youth organizations organized protest demonstrations. On 8 April, 1Q29, Bhagat Singh and Batukeswar Dutt of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army (HSRA) threw harmless bombs in the Central Legislative Assembly and were arrested. In jail, the members of the HSRA went on a prolonged hunger strike demanding better treatment for political prisoners, and in September the death of one of them. Jatin Das on the 64th day of the hunger strike led to some of the biggest demonstrations the country had ever witnessed.

Meanwhile, in May 1929, a Labour Government headed by Ramsay MacDonald took power in Britain and Lord Irwin, the Viceroy, was called to London for consultations. The sequel was an announcement on 31 October: ‘I am authorized on behalf of His Majesty’s Government to state clearly that in their judgment it is implicit in the Declaration of 1917 that the natural issue of India’s progress as there contemplated, is the attainment of Dominion status.’ He also promised a Round Table Conference as soon as the Simon Commission submitted its report. Two days later, a conference of major national leaders met and issued what came to be known as the Delhi manifesto, in which they demanded that it should be made clear that the purpose of the Round Table Conference was not to discuss when Dominion Status should be granted, but to formulate a scheme for its implementation. A debate in the House of Lords on 5 November 1929 on this question had already raised serious doubts about British intentions; and, finally, on 23 December Irwin himself told Gandhiji and the others that he was in no position to give the assurance they demanded. The stage of negotiations was over and the stage of confrontation was about to begin.

The honour of hosting what was, perhaps, the most memorable of the Congress annual sessions went to Lahore, the capital city of Punjab, and the honour of declaring ‘Puma Swaraj’ as the only honourable goal Indians could strive for went to the man who had done more than any other to popularize the idea — Jawaharlal Nehru. It was Gandhiji again who was the decisive voice in investing Jawaharlal Nehru with the office of President in what was to be a critical year of mass struggle. Only three out of eighteen Provincial Congress Committees had wanted Jawaharlal, but recognizing the appositeness of the occasion, and the upsurge of the youth who had made such a glorious success of the Simon Boycott, Gandhiji insisted and as usual got his way. The critics he countered by an assurance: ‘Some fear in this transference of power from the old to the young, the doom of the Congress. I do not. . . “He is rash and impetuous,” say some. This quality is an additional qualification, at the present moment. And if he has the dash and the rashness of a warrior, he has also the prudence of a statesman. . . He is undoubtedly extremist thinking far ahead of his surroundings. But he is humble and practical enough not to force the pace to the breaking point.’ He added: ‘Older men have had their innings. The battle of the future has to be fought by younger men and women. And it is but meets that they are led by one of themselves. Responsibility will mellow and sober the youth, and prepare them for the burden they must discharge. Pandit Jawaharlal has everything to recommend him. He has for years discharged with singular ability and devotion the office of secretary of the Congress. By his bravery, determination, application, integrity, and grit, he has captivated the imagination of the youth of the land. He has come in touch with labour and the peasantry. His close acquaintance with European politics is a great asset in enabling him to assess ours.’

To those who argued that he should himself assume the office because of the delicate nature of the negotiations that would have to be carried out with other parties and the Government, especially on the Hindu-Muslim question, he said: ‘So long as I retain the affection and the confidence of our people, there is not the slightest danger of my not being able without holding office to make the fullest use of such powers as I may possess. God has enabled me to affect the life of the country since 1920 without the necessity of holding office.’ And to the youth, he said: ‘They may take the election of Jawaharlal Nehru as a tribute to their service. . . (and as) proof of the trust the nation reposes in its youth Let them prove worthy of the trust.”

Jawaharlal Nehru’s Presidential Address was a stirring call to action: ‘We have now an open conspiracy to free this country from foreign rule and you, comrades, and all our countrymen and countrywomen are invited to join it.” Nehru also made it known that in his view liberation did not mean only throwing off the foreign yoke: ‘I must frankly confess that I am a socialist and a republican, and am no believer in kings and princes, or in the order which produces the modern kings of industry, who have 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.” He also spelt out the methods of struggle: ‘Any great movement for liberation today must necessarily be a mass movement, and mass movements must essentially be peaceful, except in times of organized revolt. . . And if the principal movement is a peaceful one, contemporaneous attempts at sporadic violence can only distract attention and weaken it.”

On the banks of the river Ravi, at midnight on 31 December 1929, the tricolor flag of Indian independence was unfurled amidst cheers and jubilation. Amidst the excitement, there was also a grim resolve, for the year to follow was to be one of hard struggle.

The first task that the Congress set itself and the Indian people in the New Year was that of organizing all over the country, on 26 January, public meetings at which the Independence Pledge would be read out and collectively affirmed. This program was a huge success, and in villages and towns, at small meetings and large ones, the pledge was read out in the local language and the national flag was hoisted. The text of the pledge bears quoting in full’: We believe that it is the inalienable right of the Indian people, as of any other people, to have freedom and to enjoy the fruits of their toil and have the necessities of life, so that they may have full opportunities of growth. We believe also that if any government deprives a people of these rights and oppresses them, the people have a further right to alter it or to abolish it. The British Government in India has not only deprived the Indian people of their freedom but has based itself on the exploitation of the masses, and has ruined India economically, politically, culturally and spiritually. We believe, therefore, that India must sever the British connection and attain Poorna Swaraj or Complete Independence.

‘India has been ruined economically. The revenue derived from our people is out of all proportion to our income. Our average income is seven p1cc, less than two pence, per day, and of the heavy taxes we pay, twenty per cent are raised from the land revenue derived from the peasantry and three per cent from the salt tax, which falls most heavily on the poor.

‘Village industries, such as hand-spinning, have been destroyed, leaving the peasantry idle for at least four months in the year, and dulling their intellect for want of handicrafts, and nothing has been substituted, as in other countries, for the crafts thus destroyed.

‘Customs and currency have been so manipulated as to heap further burdens on the peasantry. The British manufactured goods constitute the bulk of our imports. Customs duties betray clear partiality for British manufacturers, and revenue from them is used not to lessen the burden on the masses, but for sustaining a highly extravagant administration. Still more arbitrary has been the manipulation of the exchange ratio which has resulted in millions being drained away from the country.

‘Politically, India’s status has never been so reduced, as under the British regime. No reforms have given real political power to the people. The tallest of us have to bend before foreign authority. The rights of free expression of opinion and free association have been denied to us, and many of our countrymen are compelled to live in exile abroad and they cannot return to their homes. All administrative talent is killed, and the masses have to be satisfied with petty village offices and clerkships. ‘Culturally, the system of education has torn us from our moorings, our training has made us hug the very chains that bind us.

Spiritually, compulsory disarmament has made us unmanly, and the presence of an alien army of occupation, employed with deadly effect to crush in us the spirit of resistance, has made us think that we cannot look after ourselves or put up a defense against foreign aggression, or defend our homes and families from the attacks of thieves, robbers, and miscreants. We hold it to be a crime against man and God to submit any longer to a rule that has caused this four-fold disaster to our country. We recognize, however, that the most effective way of gaining our freedom is not through violence. We will prepare ourselves, by withdrawing, so far as we can, all voluntary association from the British Government, and will prepare for civil disobedience including non-payment of taxes. We are convinced that if we can but withdraw our voluntary help, stop payment of taxes without doing violence, even under provocation, the end of this inhuman rule is assured. We, therefore, hereby solemnly resolve to carry out the Congress instructions issued from time to time for the purpose of establishing Poorna Swaraj. ’

India’s Struggle for Independence by Bipan Chandra Chapter 20 Bhagat Singh, Surya Sen, and the revolutionary terrorists

The revolutionary terrorists were severely suppressed during World War I, with most of the leaders in jail or absconding. Consequently, in order to create a more harmonious atmosphere for the Montague-Chelmsford reforms, the Government released most of them under a general amnesty in early 1920. Soon after, the National Congress launched the Non-Cooperation Movement and on the urging of Gandhiji, C.R. Das, and other Leaders most of the revolutionary terrorists either joined the movement or suspended their own activities in order to give the Gandhian mass movement a chance.

But the sudden suspension of the Non-Cooperation Movement shattered the high hopes raised earlier. Many young people began to question the very basic strategy of the national leadership and its emphasis on non-violence and began to look for alternatives. They were not attracted by the parliamentary politics of the Swarajists or the patient and undramatic constructive work of the no-changers.. Many were drawn to the idea that violent methods alone would free India. Revolutionary terrorism again became attractive. It is not accidental that nearly all the major new leaders of the revolutionary terrorist politics, for example, Jogesh Chandra Chatterjea, Surya Sen, Jatin Das, Chandrashekhar Azad, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Shiv Varma, Bhagwati Charan Vohra and Jaidev Kapur, had been enthusiastic participants in the non-violent Non-Cooperation Movement.

Gradually two separate strands of revolutionary terrorism developed — one in Punjab, U.P., and Bihar and the other in Bengal. Both the strands came under the influence of several new social forces. One was the upsurge of working-class trade unionism after the War. They could see the revolutionary potential of the new class and desired to harness it to the nationalist revolution. The second major influence was that of the Russian Revolution and the success of the young Socialist State in consolidating itself. The youthful revolutionaries were keen to learn from and take the help of the young Soviet State and its ruling Bolshevik Party. The third influence was that of the newly sprouting Communist groups with their emphasis on Marxism, Socialism, and the proletariat.

The revolutionaries in northern India were the first to emerge out of the mood of frustration and reorganize under the leadership of the old veterans, Ramprasad Bismil, Jogesh Chatterjea and Sachindranath Sanyal whose Bandi Jiwan served as a textbook to the revolutionary movement. They met in Kanpur in October 1924 and founded the Hindustan Republican Association (or Army) to organize armed revolution to overthrow colonial rule and establish in its place a Federal Republic of the United States of India whose basic principle would be adult franchise.

Before armed struggle could be waged, propaganda had to be organized on a large scale, men had to be recruited and trained and arms had to be procured. All these required money. The most important ‘action’ of the HRA was the Kakori Robbery. On 9 August 1925, ten men held up the 8-Down train at Kakori, an obscure village near Lucknow, and looted its official railway cash. The Government reaction was quick and hard. It arrested a large number of young men and tried them in the Kakori Conspiracy Case. Ashfaqulla Khan, Ramprasad Bismil, Rashan Singh and Rajendra Lahiri were hanged, four others were sent to the Andamans for life and seventeen others were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. Chandrashekhar Azad remained at large.

The Kakori case was a major setback to the revolutionaries of northern India but it was not a fatal blow. Younger men such as Bejoy Kumar Sinha, Shiv Varma and Jaidev Kapur in U.P.,- Bhagat Singh, Bhagwati Charan Vohra, and Sukhdev in Punjab set out to reorganize the HRA under the overall leadership of Chandrashekhar Azad. Simultaneously, they were being influenced by socialist ideas. Finally, nearly all the major young revolutionaries of northern India met at Ferozeshah Kotla Ground at Delhi on 9 and 10 September 1928, created a new collective leadership, adopted socialism as their official goal and changed the name of the party to the 1-Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (Army).

Even though, as we shall see, the HSR.A and its leadership was rapidly moving away from individual heroic action and assassination and towards mass politics, Lala Lajpat Rai’s death, as the result of a brutal lathi-charge when he was leading an anti-Simon Commission demonstration at Lahore on 30 October her 1928, led them once again to take to individual assassination. The death of this great Punjabi leader, popularly known as Sher-e-Punjab, was seen by the romantic youthful leadership of the HSRA as a direct challenge. And so, on 17 December 1928, Bhagat Singh, Azad, and Rajguru assassinated, at Lahore, Saunders, a police official involved in the lathi charge of Lab Lajpat Rai. In a poster, put up by the HSRA after the assassination, the assassination was justified as follows: ‘The murder of a leader respected by millions of people at the unworthy hands of an ordinary police official . . . was an insult to the nation. it was the bounden duty of young men of India to efface it. . . We regret to have had to kill a person but he was part and parcel of that inhuman and unjust order which has to be destroyed.’

The HSRA leadership now decided to let the people know about its changed objectives and the need for a revolution by the masses. Bhagat Singh and B.K. Dutt were asked to throw a bomb in the Central Legislative Assembly on 8 April 1929 against the passage of the Public Safety Bill and the Trade Disputes Bill which would reduce the civil liberties of citizens in general and workers in particular. The aim was not to kill, for the bombs were relatively harmless, but, as the leaflet they threw into the Assembly hail proclaimed, ‘to make the deaf hear’. The objective was to get arrested and to use the trial court as a forum for propaganda so that people would become familiar with their movement and ideology.

Bhagat Singh and B.K. Dutt were tried in the Assembly Bomb Case. Later, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Rajguru and tens of other revolutionaries were tried in a series of famous conspiracy cases. Their fearless and defiant attitude in the courts — every day they entered the court-room shouting slogans ‘Inquilab Zindabad, ’ ‘Down, Down with Imperialism, ’ ‘Long Live the Proletariat’ and singing songs such as ‘Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamare dil mei hai’ (our heart is filled with the desire for martyrdom) and ‘Mera rang de basanti chola’ (dye my clothes in saffron colour (the colour of courage and sacrifice) — was reported in newspapers; unsurprisingly this won them the support and sympathy of people all over the country including those who had complete faith in non-violence. Bhagat Singh became a household name in the land. And many persons, all over the country, wept and refused to eat food, attend schools, or carry on their daily work, when they heard of his hanging in March 1931.

The country was also stirred by the prolonged hunger strike the revolutionary under-trials undertook as a protest against the horrible conditions in jails. They demanded that they be treated not as criminals but as political prisoners. The entire nation rallied behind the hunger- strikers. On 13 September, the 64th day of the epic fast, Jatin Das, a frail young man with an iron will, died. Thousands came to pay him homage at every station passed by the train carrying his body from Lahore to Calcutta. At Calcutta, a two-mile-long procession of more than six lakh people carried his coffin to the cremation ground.

A large number of revolutionaries were convicted in the Lahore Conspiracy Case and other similar cases and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment; many of them were sent to the Andamans. Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, and Rajguru were sentenced to be hanged. The sentence was carried out on 23 March 1931.

In Bengal, too, the revolutionary terrorists started reorganizing and developing their underground activities. At the same time, many of them continued to work in the Congress organization. This enabled them to gain access to the vast Congress masses; on the other hand, they provided Congress with an organizational base in small towns and the countryside. They cooperated with C.R. Das in his Swarajist work. After his death the Congress leadership in Bengal got divided into two wings, one led by Subhas Chandra Bose and the other by J.M. Sengupta, the Yugantar group joined forces with the first and Anushilan with the second.

Among the several ‘actions’ of the reorganized groups was the attempt to assassinate Charles Tegart, the hated Police Commissioner of Calcutta, by Gopinath Saha in January 1924. By an error, another Englishman named Day was killed. The Government came down on the people with a heavy hand. A large number of people, suspected of being terrorists, or their supporters, were arrested under a newly promulgated ordinance. These included Subhas Chandra Bose and many other Congressmen. Saha was hanged despite massive popular protest. The revolutionary activity suffered a severe setback.

Another reason for stagnation in revolutionary terrorist activity lay in the incessant factional and personal quarrels within the terrorist groups, especially where Yugantar and Anushilan rivalry was concerned. But very soon younger revolutionaries began to organize themselves in new groups, developing fraternal relations with the active elements of both the Anushilan and Yugantar parties. Among the new Revolt Groups,’ the most active and famous was the Chittagong group led by Surya Sen.

Surya Sen had actively participated in the Non-Cooperation Movement and had become a teacher in a national school in Chittagong, which led to his being popularly known as Masterda. Arrested and imprisoned for two years, from 1926 to 1928, for revolutionary activity, he continued to work in the Congress. He and his group were closely associated with the Congress work in Chittagong. In 1929, Surya Sen was the Secretary and five of his associates were members of the Chittagong District Congress Committee.

Surya Sen, a brilliant and inspiring organizer, was an unpretentious, soft-spoken and transparently sincere person. Possessed of immense personal courage, he was deeply humane in his approach. He was fond of saying: ‘Humanism is a special virtue of a revolutionary.’ He was also very fond of poetry, being a great admirer of Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam. Surya Sen soon gathered around himself a large band of revolutionary youth including Anant Singh, Ganesh Ghosh, and Lokenath Baul. They decided to organize a rebellion, on however small a scale, to demonstrate that it was possible to challenge the armed might of the British Empire in India. Their action plan was to include occupation of the two main armouries in Chittagong and the seizing of their arms with which a large band of revolutionaries could be formed into an armed detachment; the destruction of the telephone and telegraph systems of the city; and the dislocation of the railway communication system between Chittagong and the rest of Bengal. The action was carefully planned and was put into execution at 10 o’clock on the night of 18 April 1930. A group of six revolutionaries, led by Ganesh Ghosh, captured the Police Armoury, shouting slogans such as Inquilab Zindabad, Down with Imperialism and Gandhiji‘s Raj has been established. Another group of ten, led by Lokenath Paul, took over the Auxiliary Force Armoury along with its Lewis guns and 303 army rifles. Unfortunately, they could not locate the ammunition. This was to prove a disastrous setback to the revolutionaries’ plans. The revolutionaries also succeeded in dislocating telephone and telegraph communications and disrupting movement by train. In all, sixty- five were involved in the raid, which was undertaken in the name of the Indian Republican Army, Chittagong Branch.

All the revolutionary groups gathered outside the Police Armoury where Surya Sen, dressed in immaculate white khadi dhoti and a long coat and stiffly ironed Gandhi cap, took a military salute, hoisted the National Flag among shouts of Bande Mataram and Inquilab Zindabad, and proclaimed a Provisional Revolutionary Government.

It was not possible for the band of revolutionaries to put up a fight in the town against the army which was expected. They, therefore, left Chittagong town before dawn and marched towards the Chittagong hill ranges, looking for a safe place. It was on the Jalalabad hill that several thousand troops surrounded them on the afternoon of 22 April. After a fierce fight n which over eighty British troops and twelve revolutionaries died, Surya Sen decided to disperse into the neighboring villages; there they formed into small groups and conducted raids on Government, personnel, and property. Despite several repressive measures and combing operations by the authorities, the villagers, most of them Muslims, gave food and shelter to the revolutionary outlaws and enabled them to survive for three years. Surya Sen was finally arrested on 16 February 1933, tried and hanged on 12 January 1934. Many of his co-fighters were caught and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.

The Chittagong Armoury Raid had an immense impact on the people of Bengal. As an official publication remarked, it ‘fired the imagination of revolutionary-minded youth’ and ‘recruits poured into the various terrorist groups in a steady stream.’ The year 1930 witnessed a major revival of revolutionary activity, and its momentum carried over to 1931 and 1932. There were numerous instances of death-defying heroism. In Midnapore district alone, three British magistrates were assassinated. Attempts were made on the lives of two Governors; two Inspectors- General of Police were killed. During this three-year period, twenty-two officials and twenty non-officials were killed.

The official reaction to the Armoury Raid and the revival of revolutionary terrorist activity was initially one of panic and, then of brutal reprisals. The Government armed itself with twenty repressive Acts and let loose the police on all nationalists. In Chittagong, it burnt several villages, imposed punitive fine on many others, and in general established a reign of terror. In 1933, it arrested and sentenced Jawaharlal Nehru to a two-year term in jail for sedition. He had in a speech in Calcutta condemned imperialism, praised the heroism of revolutionary youth (even while criticizing the policy of terrorism as futile and out-of-date) and condemned police repression.

A remarkable aspect of this new phase of the terrorist movement in Bengal was the large-scale participation of young women Under Surya Sen’s leadership, they provided shelter, acted as messengers and custodians of arms, and fought, guns in hand. Pritilata Waddedar died while conducting a raid, while Kalpana Dutt (now Joshi) was arrested and tried along with Surya Sen and given a life sentence. In December 1931, two school girls of Comilla, Santi Ghosh, and Suniti Chowdhury, shot dead the District Magistrate. In February 1932, Bina Das fired point blank at the Governor while receiving her degree at the Convocation.

Compared to the old revolutionary terrorists, as also Bhagat Singh and his comrades, the Chittagong rebels made an important advance. Instead of an individual’s act of heroism or the assassination of an individual, theirs was a group action aimed at the organs of the colonial state. But the objective still was to set an example before the youth, and to demoralize the bureaucracy. As Kalpana Joshi(Dutt) has put it, the plan- was that when, after the Chittagong rebellion, ‘the Government would bring in troops to take back Chittagong they (the terrorists) would die fighting — thus creating a legend and setting an example before their countrymen to emulate.’ Or as Surya Sen told Ananda Gupta: ‘A dedicated band of youth must show the path of organized armed struggle in place of individual terrorism. Most of us will have to die in the process but our sacrifice for such a noble cause will not go in vain.’

The Bengal revolutionaries of the l920s and 1930s had shed some of their earlier Hindu religiosity — they no longer took religious oaths and vows. Some of the groups also no longer excluded Muslims — the Chittagong IRA cadre included many Muslims like Sattar, Mir Ahmad, Fakir Ahmad Mian, Tunu Mian and got massive support from Muslim villagers around Chittagong. But they still retained elements of social conservatism, nor did they evolve broader socio-economic goals. In particular, those revolutionary terrorists, who worked in the Swaraj party, failed to support the cause of Muslim peasantry against the zamindars.

A real breakthrough in terms of revolutionary ideology and the goals of revolution and the forms of revolutionary struggle was made by Bhagat Singh and his comrades. Rethinking had, of course, started on both counts in the HRA itself. Its manifesto had declared in 1925 that it stood for ‘abolition of all systems which make the exploitation of man by man possible.’4 Its founding council, in its meeting in October 1924, had decided ‘to preach social revolutionary and communistic principles.’ Its main organ, The Revolutionary, had proposed the nationalization of the railways and other means of transport and large-scale industries such as steel and shipbuilding. The HRA had also decided ‘to start labour and peasant organizations’ and to work for ‘an organized and armed revolution.’

In a message from the death-cell, Ramprasad Bismil had appealed to the youth to give up ‘the desire to keep revolvers and pistols’, ‘not to work in revolutionary conspiracies,’ and to work in ‘the open movement.’ He had asked the people to establish Hindu-Muslim unity and unite all political groups under the leadership of the Congress. He had also affirmed his faith in communism and the principle that ‘every human being has equal rights over products of nature.’

Bhagat Singh, born in 1907 and a nephew of the famous revolutionary Ajit Singh, was a giant of an intellectual. A voracious reader, he was one of the most well-read of political leaders of the time. He had devoured books in the Dwarkadas Library at Lahore on socialism, the Soviet Union and revolutionary movements, especially those of Russia, Ireland, and Italy. At Lahore, he organized several study circles with the help of Sukhdev and others and carried on intensive political discussions. When the HSRA office was shifted to Agra, he immediately set up a library and urged members to read and discuss socialism and other revolutionary ideas. His shirt pockets always bulged with books which he constantly offered to lend his comrades. After his arrest, he transformed the jail into a veritable university. Emphasizing the role of ideas in the making of revolution, he declared before the Lahore High Court: ‘The sword of revolution is sharpened on the whetting-stone of ideas.’ This atmosphere of wide reading and deep thinking pervaded the ranks of the HSRA leadership. Sukhdev, Bhagwati Charan Vohra, Shiv Varma, Bejoy Sinha, Yashpal, all were intellectuals of a high order. Nor would even Chandrashekar- Azad, who knew little English, accept any idea till it was frilly explained to him. He followed every major turn in the field of ideas through discussion. The draft of the famous statement of revolutionary position, The Philosophy of the Bomb was written by Bhagwati Charan Vohra at the instance of Azad and after a full discussion with him.

Bhagat Singh had already, before his arrest in 1929, abandoned his belief in terrorism and individual heroic action. He had turned to Marxism and had come to believe that popular broad-based mass movements alone could lead to a successful revolution; in other words, revolution could only be achieved ‘by the masses for the masses.’ That is why Bhagat Singh helped establish the Punjab Naujawan Bharat Sabha in 1926 (becoming its founding Secretary), as the open wing of the revolutionaries. The Sabha was to carry out open political work among the youth, peasants, and workers. It was to open branches in the villages. Under its auspices, Bhagat Singh used to deliver political lectures with the help of magic lantern slides. Bhagat Singh and Sukhdev also organized the Lahore Students Union for open, legal work among the students.

Bhagat Singh and his comrades also gave expression to their understanding that revolution meant the development and organization of a mass movement of the exploited and suppressed sections of society by the revolutionary intelligentsia in the course of their statements from 1929 to 1931 in the courts as well as outside. Just before his execution, Bhagat Singh declared that ‘the real revolutionary armies are in the villages and in factories.’ Moreover, in his behest to young political workers, written on 2 February 1931, he declared: ‘Apparently, I have acted like a terrorist. But I am not a terrorist. . . Let me announce with all the strength at my command, that I am not a terrorist and I never was, except perhaps in the beginning of my revolutionary career. And I am convinced that we cannot gain anything through those methods.’

Then why did Bhagat Singh and his comrades still take recourse to individual heroic action? One reason was the very rapidity of the changes in their thinking. The past formed a part of their present, for these young men had to traverse decades within a few years. Moreover, effective acquisition of a new ideology is not an event; it is not like a religious conversion: it is always a prolonged historical process. Second, they were faced with a classic dilemma: From where would come the cadres, the hundreds of full-time young political workers, who would fan out among the masses? How were they to be recruited? Patient intellectual and political work appealed to be too slow and too akin to the Congress style of politics which the revolutionaries wanted to transcend. The answer appeared to be to appeal to the youth through ‘propaganda by deed,’ to recent the initial cadres of a mass revolutionary party through heroic dramatic action and the consequent militant propaganda before the courts. In the last stage, during 1930 and 1931, they were mainly fighting to keep the glory of the sacrifice of their comrades’ wider sentence shining as before. As Bhagat Singh put it, he had to ask the youth to abandon revolutionary terrorism without tarnishing the sense of heroic sacrifice by appearing to have reconsidered his politics under the penalty of death.” Life was bound to teach, sooner or later, correct politics; the sense of sacrifice once lost would not be easy to regain.

Bhagat Singh and his comrades also made a major advance in broadening the scope and definition of revolution. Revolution was no longer equated with mere militancy or violence. Its first objective was national liberation — the overthrow of imperialism. But it must go beyond and work for a new socialist social order, it must bend exploitation of man by man.’ The Philosophy of the Bomb, written by Bhagwati Charan Vohra. Chandrasekhar Azad and Yashpal, defined revolution as independence, social, political and economic’ aimed at establishing ‘a new order of society in which political and economic exploitation will be an impossibility’.’ In the Assembly Bomb Case, Bhagat Singh told the cowl. “Revolution,” does not necessarily involve sanguinary strife, nor is there any place in it for individual vendetta. It is not the cult of the bomb and the pistol. By “Revolution” we mean that the present order of things, which is based on manifest injustice, must change.” In a letter from jail, he wrote: ‘The peasants have to liberate themselves not only from foreign yoke bum also from the yoke of landlords and capitalists.” In his last message of 3 March 1931, he declared that the struggle in India would continue so long as ‘a handful of exploiters go on exploiting the labour of common people for their own ends. It matters little whether these exploiters are purely British capitalism, or British and Indians in alliance, or even purely Indians.’ “(Bhagat Singh defined socialism in a scientific manner — it must mean abolition of capitalism and class domination. He fully accepted Marxism and the class approach to society. 1 In fact, he saw himself above all as a Precursor and not maker of the ‘revolution, as a propagator of the ideas of socialism and communism as a humble initiator of the socialist movement in India.’

Bhagat Singh was a great innovator in two areas of politics. Being fully and consciously secular, he understood, more clearly than many of his contemporaries, the danger that communalism posed to the nation and the national movement. He often told his audience that communalism was as big an enemy as colonialism.

In April 1928, at the conference of youth where Naujawan Bharat Sabha was reorganized, Bhagat Singh and his comrades openly opposed the suggestion that youth belonging to religious- communal organizations should be permitted to become members of the Sabha. Religion was one’s private concern and communalism was an enemy to be fought, argued Bhagat Singh.” Earlier in 1927, condemning communal killings as barbaric, he had pointed out that communal killers did not kill a person because he was guilty of any particular act but simply because that person happened to be a Hindu, Muslim or Sikh. But, wrote Bhagat Singh, a new group of youth was coming forward who did not recognize any differences based on religion and saw a person first as a human being and then as an Indian.

Bhagat Singh revered Lajpat Rai as a leader. But he would not spare even Lajpat Rai, when, during the last years of his life, Lajpat Rai turned to communal politics. He then launched a political-ideological campaign against him. Because Lajpat Rai was a respected leader, he would not publicly use harsh words of criticism against him. And so he printed as a pamphlet Robert Browning’s famous poem, ‘The Lost Leader,’ in which Browning criticizes Wordsworth for turning against liberty. The poem begins with the line ‘Just for a handful of silver he left us.’ A few more of the poem’s lines were: We shall march prospering, — not thro’ his presence; Songs may inspirit us, — not from his lyre,’ and ‘Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more.’ There was not one word of criticism of Lajpat Rai. Only, on the front cover, he printed Lajpat Rai’s photograph!

Significantly, two of the six rules of the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, drafted by Bhagat Singh, were: ‘To have nothing to do with communal bodies or other parties which disseminate communal ideas’ and ‘to create the spirit of general toleration among the public considering religion as a matter of personal belief of man and to act upon the same fully.’

Bhagat Singh also saw the importance of freeing the people from the mental bondage of religion and superstition. A few weeks before his death, he wrote the article ‘Why I am an Atheist’ in which he subjected religion and religious philosophy to a scathing critique. He traced his own path to atheism, how he first gave up belief ‘in the mythology and doctrines of Sikhism or any other religion,’ and in the end lost faith in the existence of God. To be a revolutionary, he said, one required immense moral strength, but one also required ‘criticism and independent thinking.’ In the struggle for self-emancipation, humanity had to struggle against ‘the narrow conception of religion’ as also against the belief in God. ‘Any man who stands for progress,’ he wrote, ‘has to criticise, disbelieve and challenge every item of the old faith. Item by item he has to reason out every nook and corner of the prevailing faith.’ Proclaiming his own belief in atheism and materialism, he asserted that he was ‘trying to stand like a man with an erect head to the last; even on the gallows.’

Government action gradually decimated the revolutionary terrorist ranks. With the death of Chandrashekhar Azad in a shooting encounter a public park at Allahabad in February 1931, the revolutionary terrorist movement virtually came to an end in Punjab, U.P. and Bihar. Surya Sen’s martyrdom marked an end to the prolonged saga of revolutionary terrorism in Bengal’ A process of rethinking in jails and in the Andamans began large number of the revolutionaries turned to Marxism and the idea of a socialist revolution by the masses. They joined the Communist Party, the Revolutionary Socialist Party, and other Left parties. Many others joined the Gandhian wing of the Congress.

The politics of the revolutionary terrorists had severe limitations — above all, theirs was not the politics of a mass movement; they failed to politically activate the masses or move them into political actions; they could not even establish contact with the masses. All the same, they made an abiding contribution to the national freedom movement. Their deep patriotism, courage and determination, and sense of sacrifice stirred the Indian people. They helped spread nationalist consciousness in the land; and in northern India, the spread of socialist consciousness owed a lot to them.

India’s Struggle for Independence by Bipan Chandra Chapter 19 The years of Stagnation — Swarajists, No-changers and Gandhiji

The withdrawal of the Non-Cooperation Movement in February 1922 was followed by the arrest of Gandhiji in March and his conviction and imprisonment for six years for the crime of spreading disaffection against the Government. The result was the spread of disintegration, disorganization and demoralization in the nationalist ranks. There arose the danger of the movement lapsing into passivity. Many began to question the wisdom of the total Gandhian strategy. Others started looking for ways out of the impasse.

A new line of political activity, which would keep up the spirit of resistance to colonial rule, was now advocated by C.R. Das and Motilal Nehru. They suggested that the nationalists should end the boycott of the legislative councils, enter them, expose them as ‘sham parliaments’ and as ‘a mask which the bureaucracy has put on,’ and obstruct ‘every work of the council.’ This, they argued, would not be giving up non-cooperation but continuing it in a more effective form by extending it to the councils themselves. It would be opening a new front in the battle.

C.R. Das as the President of the Congress and Motilal as its Secretary put forward this programme of ‘either mending or ending’ the councils at the Gaya session of the Congress in December 1922. Another section of the Congress, headed by Vallabhbhai Patel, Rajendra Prasad and C. Rajagopalachari, opposed the new proposal which was consequently defeated by 1748 to 890 votes. Das and Motilal resigned from their respective offices in the Congress and on 1 January 1923 announced the formation of the Congress-Khilafat Swaraj Party better known later as the Swaraj Party. Das was the President and Motilal one of the Secretaries of the new party. The adherents of the council- entry programme came to be popularly known as ‘pro-changers’ and those still advocating boycott of the councils as ‘no— changers.’

The Swaraj Party accepted the Congress programme in its entirety except in one respect — it would take part in elections due later in the ‘ear It declared that it would present the national demand for self- government in the councils and in case of its rejection its elected members would adopt ‘a policy of uniform, continuous and consistent obstruction within the councils, with a view to make the Government through the councils impossible.’ The councils would, thus, be wrecked from within by creating deadlocks on every measure that came before them.

Both Das (born in 1870) and Motilal (born in 1861) were highly successful lawyers who had once been Moderates but had accepted the politics of boycott and non-cooperation in 1920. They had given up their legal practice, joined the movement as whole time workers and donated to the nation their magnificent houses in Calcutta and Allahabad respectively. They were great admirers of Gandhiji but were also his political equals. Both were brilliant and effective parliamentarians. One deeply religious and the other a virtual agnostic, both were secular to the core. Different in many ways, they complemented each other and formed a legendary political combination. Das was imaginative and emotional and a great orator with the capacity to influence and conciliate friends and foes. Motilal was firm, coolly analytical, and a great organizer and disciplinarian. They had such absolute trust and confidence in each other that each could use the other’s name for any statement without prior consultation.

The no-changers, whose effective head was Gandhiji even though he was in jail, argued for the continuation of the full programme of boycott and non-cooperation, effective working of the constructive programme and quiet preparations for the resumption of the suspended civil disobedience.

The pro-changers and the no-changers were soon engaged in a fierce controversy. There was, of course, a lot of common ground between the two Both agreed that civil disobedience was not possible immediately and that no mass movement could be carried on indefinitely or for a prolonged period. Hence, breathing time was needed and a temporary retreat from the active phase of the movement was on the agenda. Both also accepted that there was need to rest and to reinvigorate the anti-imperialist forces, overcome demoralization, intensify politicization, widen political participation and mobilization, strengthen organization, arid keep up the recruitment, training and morale of the cadre. In fact, the national movement was facing the basic problem that any mass movement has to face: how were they to carry on political work in the movements’ non – active phases?

It was in the answer to this last question that the two sides differed. The Swarajists said that work in the councils was necessary to fill in the temporary political void. This would keep up the morale of the politicized Indians, fill the empty newspaper spaces, and enthuse the people. Electioneering and speeches in the councils would provide fresh avenues for political agitation and propaganda.

Even without Congressmen, said the Swarajists, the councils would continue to function and, perhaps, a large number of people would participate in voting. This would lead to the weakening of the hold of the Congress. Moreover, non­Congressmen would capture positions of vantage and use them to weaken the Congress. Why should such vantage points in a revolutionary fight be left in the hands of the enemy?’ By joining the councils and obstructing their work. Congressmen would prevent undesirable elements from doing mischief or the Government from getting some form of legitimacy for their laws. In other words, the Swarajists claimed that they would transform the legislatures into arenas of political struggle and that their intention was not to use them, as the Liberals desired, as organs for the gradual transformation of the colonial state, but to use them as the ground on which the struggle for the overthrow of the colonial state was to be carried out.

The no-changers opposed Council-entry mainly on the ground that parliamentary work would lead to the neglect of constructive and other work among the masses, the loss of revolutionary zeal and political corruption. The legislators who would go into the councils with the aim of wrecking them would gradually give up the politics of obstruction. get sucked into the imperial constitutional framework, and start cooperating with the Government on petty reforms and piecemeal legislation Constructive work among the masses, on the other hand, would prepare them for the next round of civil disobedience.

As the pro-changer no-changer clash developed, the atmosphere of dismay in nationalist ranks began to thicken, and they began to be haunted by the fear of the repetition of the disastrous split of 1907. Pressure began to develop on the leaders to put a check on their public bickerings.

Both groups of leaders began to pull back from the brink and move ‘wards mutual accommodation. This trend was helped by several factors. First, the need for unity was felt very strongly by all the Congressmen. Secondly, not only the no-changers but also the Swarajists realized that however useful parliamentary work might be, the real sanctions which would compel the Government to accept national demands would be forged only by a mass movement outside the legislatures — and this would need unity. Lastly, both groups of leaders fully accepted the essentiality of Gandhiji’s leadership.

Consequently, in a special session of the Congress held at Delhi in September 1923, the Congress suspended all propaganda against council entry and permitted Congressmen to stand as candidates and exercise their franchise in forthcoming elections.

Gandhiji was released from jail on 5 February 1924 on health grounds. He was completely opposed to council-entry as also to the obstruction of work in the councils which he believed was inconsistent with non-violent non-cooperation. Once again a split in the Congress loomed on the horizon. The Government very much hoped for and banked on such a split. When releasing the Mahatma, the Bombay Government had suggested that he ‘would denounce the Swarajists for their defection from the pure principle of non-cooperation, and thus considerably reduce in legislatures their power for harm.’2 Similarly, Reading, the Viceroy, told the Secretary of State for India, on 6 June 1924: ‘The probability of a split between Swarajists and Gandhiji is increasing . . . Moonje, (The Swarajist leader from the Central Provinces) adds that the Swarajists are now driven to concentrating all their energy on breaking Gandhiji’s hold on the Congress.’

But Gandhiji did not oblige. Step by step, he moved towards an accommodation with the Swarajists. In fact, his approach towards the Swarajists at this stage brings out some of the basic features of his political style, especially when dealing with co­workers with whom he differed, and is therefore, worth discussing, however briefly.

Gandhiji’s starting point was the fact that even when opposing the Swarajist leaders he had full trust in their bonafides. He described their as ‘the most valued and respected leaders’ and as persons who ‘have made great sacrifices in the cause of the country and who yield to no one in their love of freedom of the motherland’4 Moreover, he and Das and Motilal Nehru throughout maintained warm personal relations based on mutual respect and regard. Immediately after his release, Gandhiji refused to publicly comment on council-entry till he had discussions with the Swarajist leaders. Even after meeting them, while he continued to believe in the futility and even harmful character of the Swarajists’ programme, he remained convinced that public opposition to the ‘settled fact’ of council-entry would be counterproductive.

The courageous and uncompromising manner in which the Swarajists had functioned in the councils convinced Gandhiji that, however politically wrong, they were certainly not becoming a limb of imperial administration. To the contrary, he noted, ‘they have shown determination, grit, discipline and cohesion and have not feared to carry their policy to the point of defiance. Once assume the desirability of entering Councils and it must be admitted that they have introduced a new spirit into the Indian Legislatures.”

Gandhiji was also pained by the bickerings in the worst of taste among the proponents of the two schools. As he wrote in April 1924: ‘Even the “changers” and the “no-changers” have flung mud against one another. Each has claimed the monopoly of truth and, with an ignorant certainty of conviction, sworn at the other for his helpless stupidity.’ He was very keen to end such mud-slinging.

In any case, felt Gandhiji, council entry had already occurred and now to withdraw would be ‘disastrous’ and would be ‘misunderstood’ by the Government and the people ‘as a rout and weakness.” This would further embolden the Government in its autocratic behaviour and repressive policy and add to the state of political depression among the people.

The last straw came when the Government launched a full attack on civil liberties and the Swarajists in Bengal in the name of fighting terrorism. It promulgated an ordinance on 25 October 1924 under which it conducted raids on Congress offices and house searches and arrested a large number of revolutionary terrorists and Swarajists and other Congressmen including Subhas Chandra Bose and two Swarajist members of the Bengal legislature, Anil Baran Roy and S.C. Mitra.

Perceiving a direct threat to the national movement, Gandhiji’s first reaction was anger. He wrote in Young India on 31 October: ‘The Rowlatt Act is dead but the spirit that prompted it is like an evergreen. So long as the interest of Englishmen is antagonistic to that of Indians, so long must there be anarchic crime or the dread of it and an edition of the Rowlatt Act in answer.’

As an answer to the Government’s offensive against the Swarajists, he decided to show his solidarity with the Swarajists by ‘surrendering’ before them. As he wrote in Young India: ‘I would have been false to the country if I had not stood by the Swaraj Party in the hour of its need. . . I must stand by it even though I do not believe in the efficacy of Council-entry or even some of the methods of conducting Council Warfare And again ‘Though an uncompromising No-changer. I must not only tolerate their attitude and work with them, but I must even strengthen them wherever I can.”

On 6 November 1924, Gandhiji brought the strife between the Swarajists and no-changers to an end, by signing a joint statement with Das and Motilal that the Swarajist Party would carry on work in the legislatures on behalf of the Congress and as an integral part of the Congress. This decision was endorsed in December at the Belgaum session of the Congress over which Gandhiji presided. He also gave the Swarajists a majority of seats on his Working Committee.

Elections to the legislative councils were held in November 1923. The Swarajist manifesto, released on 14 October, took up a strong anti-imperialist position: ‘The guiding motive of the British in governing India is to secure the selfish interests of their own country and the so-called ref onus arc a mere blind to further the said interests under the pretence of granting responsible government to India, the real object being to continue the exploitation of the unlimited resources of the country by keeping Indians permanently in a subservient position to Britain.” It promised that the Swarajists would wreck the sham reforms from within the councils.

Even though the Swarajists got only a few weeks to prepare for the elections and the franchise was extremely narrow — only about 6.2 million or less than three per cent had the right to vote — they managed to do quite well. They won forty-two out of 101 elected seats in the Central Legislative Assembly they got a clear majority in the Central Provinces; they were the largest party in Bengal; and they fared quite well in Bombay and U.P., though not in Madras and Punjab because of strong casteist and communal currents.

In the Central Legislative Assembly, the Swarajists succeeded in building a common political front with the Independents led by M.A. Jinnah, the Liberals, and individuals such as Madan Mohan Malaviya. They built similar coalitions in most of the provinces. And they set out to inflict defeat after defeat on the Government.

The legislatures, reformed in 1919, had a ‘semblance’ of power without any real authority. Though they had a majority of elected members, the executive at the centre or in the provinces was outside their control, being responsible only to the British Government at home. Moreover, the Viceroy or the Governor could certify any legislation, including a budgetary grant, if it was rejected in the legislature. The Swarajists forced the Government to certify legislation repeatedly at the centre as well as in many of the provinces, thus exposing the true character of the reformed councils. In March 1925, they succeeded in electing Vithalbhai Patel, a leading Swarajist, as the President of the Central Legislative Assembly.

Though intervening on every issue and often outvoting the Government, the Swarajists took up at the centre three major sets of problems on which they delivered powerful speeches which were fully reported in the Press and followed avidly every morning by the readers. One was the problem of constitutional advance leading to self-Government; second of civil liberties, release of political prisoners, and repeal of repressive laws; and third of the development of indigenous industries. In the very first session, Motilal Nehru put forward the national demand for the framing of a new constitution, which would transfer real power to India. This demand was passed by 64 votes to 48. It was reiterated and passed in September 1925 by 72 votes to 45. The Government had also to face humiliation when its demands for budgetary grants under different heads were repeatedly voted out. On one such occasion, Vithalbhai Patel told the Government: We want you to carry on the administration of this country by veto and by certification. We want you to treat the Government of India Act as a scrap of paper which I am sure it has proved to be.’

Similarly, the Government was defeated several times on the question of the repeal of repressive laws and regulations and release of political prisoners. Replying to the official criticism of the revolutionary terrorists, C.S. Ranga Iyer said that the Government officials were themselves ‘criminals of the worst sort, assassins of the deepest dye, men who are murdering the liberties of a liberty-loving race.” Lala Lajpat Rai said: ‘Revolutions and revolutionary movements are only natural . . . there can be no progress in the world without revolutions and revolutionary movements.” CR. Das was no less critical of the Government’s repressive policy. He told the Bengal Provincial Conference: ‘Repression is a process in the consolidation of arbitrary power — and I condemn the violence of the Government for repression is the most violent form of violence —just as I condemn violence as a method of winning political liberty.”

The Swarajist activity in the legislatures was spectacular by any standards. It inspired the politicized persons and kept their political interest alive. People were thrilled every time the all­powerful foreign bureaucracy was humbled in the councils. Simultaneously, during 1923-24, Congressmen captured a large number of municipalities and other local bodies. Das became the Mayor of Calcutta (with Subhas Bose as his Chief Executive Officer), and Vithalbhai Patel. the President of Bombay Corporation, Vallabhbhai Patel of Ahmedabad Municipality, Rajendra Prasad of Patna Municipality, and Jawaharlal Nehru of Allahabad Municipality. The no-changers actively joined in these ventures since they believed that local bodies could be used to promote the constructive programme.

Despite their circumscribed powers, many of the municipalities and district boards, headed by a galaxy of leaders, set out to raise, however little, the quality of life of the people. They did excellent work in the fields of education, sanitation, health, ariti-untouchability, and khadi promotion, won the admiration of friend and foe, and quite often aroused popular enthusiasm.

The Swarajists suffered a major loss when C.R. Das died on 16 June 1925. Even more serious were a few other political developments. In the absence of a mass movement, communalism raised its ugly head and the political frustrations of the people began to find expression in communal riots. Actively encouraged by the colonial authorities, the communalists of all hues found a fertile field for their activities.

Its preoccupation with parliamentary politics also started telling on the internal cohesion of the Swaraj Party. For one, the limits of politics of obstruction were soon reached. Having repeatedly outvoted the Government and forced it to certify its legislation, there was no way of going further inside the legislatures and escalating the politics of confrontation. This could be done only by a mass movement outside. But the Swarajists lacked any policy of coordinating their militant work in the legislatures with mass political work outside. In fact, they relied almost wholly on newspaper reporting.

The Swarajists also could not carry their coalition partners for ever and in every respect, for the latter did not believe in the Swarajists’ tactic of ‘uniform, continuous and consistent obstruction.’ The logic of coalition politics soon began to pull back the Swarajists from militant obstructionism. Some of the Swarajist legislators could also not resist the pulls of parliamentary perquisites and positions of status and patronage.

The Government’s policy of creating dissension among the nationalists by trying to separate the Swarajists from the Liberals, militant Swarajists from the more moderate Swarajists, and Hindus from Muslims began to bear fruit. In Bengal, the majority in the Swaraj Party failed to support the tenants’ cause against the zamindars and, thereby, lost the support of its pro­tenant, mostly Muslim, members. Nor could the Swaraj Party avoid the intrusion of communal discord in its own ranks.

Very soon, a group of Responsivists arose in the party who wanted to work the reforms and to hold office wherever possible. The Responsivists joined the Government in the Central Provinces. Their ranks were soon swelled by N.C. Kelkar, M.R. Jayakar and other leaders. Lajpat Rai and Madan Mohan Malaviya too separated themselves from the Swaraj Party on Responsivist as well as communal grounds.

To prevent further dissolution and disintegration of the party, the spread of parliamentary ‘corruption,’ and further weakening of the moral fibre of its members, the main leadership of the party reiterated its faith in mass civil disobedience and decided to withdraw from the legislatures in March 1926. Gandhiji, too, had resumed his critique of council-entry. He wrote to Srinivasa Iyengar in April 1926: The more I study the Councils’ work, the effect of the entry into the Councils upon public life, its repercussions upon the Hindu-Muslim question, the more convinced I become not only of the futility but the inadvisability of Council-entry.”

The Swaraj Party went into the elections held in November 1926 as a party in disarray — a much weaker and demoralized force. It had to face the Government and loyalist elements and its own dissenters on the one side and the resurgent Hindu and Muslim communalists on the other. A virulent communal and unscrupulous campaign was waged against the Swarajists. Motilal Nehru was, for example, accused of sacrificing Hindu interests, of favouring cow-slaughter, and of eating beef. The Muslim communalists were no less active in branding the Swarajists as anti- Muslim. The result was a severe weakening of the Swaraj Party. It succeeded in winning forty seats at the centre and half the seats in Madras but was severely mauled in all other provinces, especially in U.P.,  C.P., and Punjab.

Moreover, both Hindu and Muslim communalists increased their representation in the councils. The Swarajists also could not form a nationalist coalition in the legislatures as they had done in 1923.

Once again the Swarajists passed a series of adjournment motions and defeated the Government on a number of bills. Noteworthy was the defeat of the Government on the Public Safety Bill in 1928. Frightened by the spread of socialist and communist ideas and influence and believing that the crucial role in this respect was being played by British and other foreign agitators sent to India by the Communist International, the Government proposed to acquire the power to deport ‘undesirable’ and ‘subversive’ foreigners. Nationalists of all colours, from the moderates to the militants, united in opposing the Bill. Lala Lajpat Rai said, ‘Capitalism is only another name for Imperialism . . . We are in no danger from Bolshevism or Communism. The greatest danger we are in, is from the capitalists and exploiters.’17 Motilal Nehru narrated his experiences in the Soviet Union and condemned anti-Soviet propaganda. He described the Public Safety Bill as ‘a direct attack on Indian nationalism, on the Indian National Congress’ and as ‘the Slavery of India, Bill No. 1.’ T. Prakasam said that the Bill’s main aim was to prevent the spread of nationalism among workers and peasants.’ Diwan Chaman Lall, then a firebrand protege of Motilal, declared: ‘If you are trying to preach against socialism if you are demanding powers to suppress socialism, you will have to walk over our dead bodies before you can get that power.’ Even the two spokesmen of the capitalist class, Purshottamdas Thakurdas and G.D. Birla firmly opposed the Bill.

In March 1929, having failed to get the Bill passed, the Government arrested thirty-one leading communists, trade unionists and other leftwing leaders and put them on trial at Meerut. This led to strong criticism of the Government by the nationalists. Describing the arrests as presaging a period of terrorism,’ Gandhi said that the motive behind these prosecutions is not to kill Communism, it is to strike terror.’ He added: ‘Evidently it (the Government) believes in a periodical exhibition of its capacity (supersede all law and to discover to a trembling India the red claws which usually remain under cover.’ The Swarajists finally walked out of the legislatures in 1930 as a result of the Lahore Congress resolution and the beginning of civil disobedience.

Their great achievement lay in their filling the political void at a time when the national movement was recouping its strength. And this they did without getting co-opted by the colonial regime. As Motilal Nehru wrote to his son: ‘We have stood firm.’ While some in their ranks fell by the wayside as was inevitable in the parliamentary framework, the overwhelming majority proved their mettle and stood their ground. They worked in the legislatures in an orderly disciplined manner and withdrew from them whenever the call came. Above all, they showed that it was possible to use the legislatures in a creative manner even as they promoted the politics of self-reliant anti-imperialism. They also successfully exposed the hollowness of the Reform Act of 1919 and showed the people that India was being ruled by ‘ lawless laws.

In the meantime, the no-changers carried on laborious, quiet, undemonstrative, grass-roots constructive work around the promotion of khadi and spinning, national education and Hindu-Muslim unity, the struggle against untouchability and the boycott of foreign cloth. This work was symbolized by hundreds of ashrams that came up all over the country where political cadres got practical training in khadi work and work among the lower castes and tribal people. For example, there was the Vedchi Ashram in Bardoli taluqa, Gujarat, where Chimanlal Mehta, Jugatram Dave and Chimanlal Bhatt devoted their entire lives to the spread of education among the adivasis or kaliparaj; or the work done by Ravishankar Maharaj among the lower caste Baralyas of Kheda district.

In fact, Gandhian constructive work was multi-faceted in its content. It brought some much-needed relief to the poor, it promoted the process of the nation-in-the-making; and it made the urban-based and upper caste cadres familiar with the conditions of villages and lower castes. It provided Congress political workers or cadres Continuous and effective work in the passive phases of the national movement, helped build their bonds with those sections of the masses who were hitherto untouched by politics, and developed their organizing capacity and self-reliance. It filled the rural masses with new hope and increased Congress influence among them.

Without the uplift of the lower castes and Adivasis, there could be no united struggle against colonialism. The boycott of foreign cloth was a stroke of genius which demonstrated to rulers and the world the Indian people’s determination to be free. National schools and colleges trained young men in an alternative, non-colonial ideological framework. A large number of young men and women who dropped out in 1920-21 went back to the officially recognized educational institutions but many often became whole time cadres of the movement.

As a whole, constructive work was a major channel for the recruitment of the soldiers of freedom and their political training — as also for the choosing and testing of their ‘officers’ and leaders. Constructive workers were to act as the steel frame of the nationalist movement in its active Satyagraha phase. It was, therefore, not accidental that khadi bhandar workers, students and teachers of national schools and colleges, and Gandhian ashrams’ inmates served as the backbone of the civil disobedience movements both as organizers and as active Satyagrahis.

The years 1922-27 were a period of contradictory developments. While the Swarajists and Gandhian constructive workers were quite active in their own separate ways, there simultaneously prevailed virulent factionalism and indiscipline in both the camps. By 1927, on the whole, an atmosphere of apathy and frustration had begun to prevail. Gandhiji wrote in May 1927: ‘My only hope therefore lies in prayer and answer to prayer.’

But underneath, after years of rest and recoupment, the forces of nationalism were again getting ready to enter a period of active struggle. This became evident in the rise of youth power and the national response to the Simon Commission.

India’s Struggle for Independence by Bipan Chandra Chapter 18 Chapter The struggles for Gurdwara Reform and Temple Entry

The rising tide of nationalism and democracy inevitably began to overflow from the political to the religious and social fields affecting the downtrodden castes and classes. And many nationalists began to apply the newly discovered technique of non-violent Satyagraha and mobilization of public opinion to issues which affected the internal structure of Indian society. Quite often this struggle to reform Indian social and religious institutions and practices led the reformers to clash with the colonial authorities. Thus, the struggle to reform Indian society tended to merge with the anti-imperialist struggle. This was in part the result of the fact that as the national movement advanced, the social base of colonialism was narrowed and the colonial authorities began to seek the support of the socially, culturally and economically reactionary sections of Indian society. This aspect of the national movement is well illustrated by the Akali Movement in Punjab and the Temple Entry Movement in Kerala.

The Akali Movement developed on a purely religious issue but ended up as a powerful episode of India’s freedom struggle. From 1920 to 1925 more than 30,000 men and women underwent imprisonment, nearly 400 died and over 2,000 were wounded. The movement arose with the objective of freeing the Gurdwaras (Sikh temples) from the control of ignorant and corrupt mahants (priests). The Gurdwaras had been heavily endowed with revenue-free land and money by Maharaja Ranjit Singh, Sikh chieftains and other devout Sikhs during the 18th and 19th centuries. These shrines came to be managed during the 18th century by Udasi Sikh mahants who escaped the wrath of Mughal authorities because they did not wear their hair long. (Many ignorant people therefore believe that these mahants were Hindus. This is, of course, not true at all). In time corruption spread among these mahants and they began to treat the offerings and other income of the Gurdwaras as their personal income. Many of them began to live a life of luxury and dissipation. Apart from the mahants, after the British annexation of Punjab in 1849, some control over the Gurdwaras was exercised by Government- nominated managers and custodians, who often collaborated with mahants.

The Government gave full support to the mahants. It used them and the managers to preach loyalism to the Sikhs and to keep them away from the rising nationalist movement. The Sikh reformers and nationalists, on the other hand, wanted a thorough reformation of the Gurdwaras by taking them out of the control of the mahants and agents of the colonial regime. The nationalists were especially horrified by two incidents – – when the priests of the Golden Temple at Amritsar issued a Hukamnama (directive from the Gums or the holy seats of the Sikh authority) against the Ghadarites, declaring them renegades, and then honoured General Dyer, the butcher of Jallianwala massacre, with a saropa (robe of honour) and declared him to be a Sikh.

Popular agitation for the reform of Gurdwaras developed rapidly during 1920 when the reformers organized groups of volunteers known as jathas to compel the mahants and the Government-appointed managers to hand over control of the Gurdwaras to the local devotees. The reformers won easy victories in the beginning with tens of Gurdwaras being liberated in the course of the year. Symbolic of this early success was the case of the Golden Temple and the Akal Takht. The reformers demanded that this foremost seat of Sikh faith should be placed in the hands of a representative body of the Sikhs,’ and organized a series of public meetings in support of their demand. The Government did n want to antagonize the reformers at this stage and decided to stem the rising tide of discontent on such an emotional religious issue by appeasing the popular sentiment. It, therefore, permitted the Government-appointed manager to resign and, thus, let the control of the Temple pass effectively into the reformers’ hands.

To control and manage the Golden Temple, the Akal Takht and other Gurdwaras, a representative assembly of nearly 10,000 reformers met in November 1920 and elected a committee of 175 to be known as the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabhandak Committee (SGPC). At the same time, the need was felt for a central body which would organize the struggle on a more systematic basis. The Shiromani Akali Dal was established in December for this purpose. It was to be the chief organizer of the Akali jathos whose backbone was provided by Jat peasantry while their leadership was in the hands of the nationalist intellectuals. Under the influence of the contemporary Non-Cooperation Movement — and many of the leaders were common to both the movements — the Akali Dal and the SGPC accepted complete non-violence as their creed.

The Akali movement faced its first baptism by blood at Nankana, the birthplace of Guru Nanak, in February 1921. The mahant of the Gurdwara there, Narain Das, was not willing to peacefully surrender his control to the Akalis. He gathered a force of nearly 500 mercenaries and armed them with guns, swords, lathis and other lethal weapons to meet the challenge of the peaceful Akali volunteers. On 20 February, an Akali jatha entered the Gurdwara to pray. Immediately, the mahantS men opened fire on them and attacked them with other weapons. Nearly 100 Akalis were killed and a large number of jathas under Kartar Singh Jhabbar’s command marched into the Gurdwara and took complete control despite dire warnings by the Deputy Commissioner. The mahant had already been arrested. The Government policy was still of vacillation. On the one hand, it did not want to earn the ire of the Sikhs, and, on the other, it did not want to lose control over the Gurdwaras.

The Nankana tragedy was a landmark in the Akali struggle. As Kartar Singh Jhabbar, the liberator of the Nankana Gurdwara put it, ‘the happening had awakened the Sikhs from their slumber and the march towards Swaraj had been quickened.’ The tragedy aroused the conscience of the entire country. Mahatma Gandhi, Maulana Shaukat Ali, Lala Lajpat Rai, and other national leaders visited Nankana to show their solidarity. The Government now changed its policy. Seeing the emerging integration of the Akali movement with the national movement, it decided to follow a two-pronged policy. To win over or neutralize the Moderates and those concerned purely with religious reforms, it promised and started working for legislation which would satisfy them. It decided to suppress the extremist or the anti­imperialist section of the Akalis in the name of maintaining law and order.

The Akalis, too, changed their policy. Heartened by the support of nationalist forces in the country, they extended the scope of their movement to completely root out Government interference in their religious places. They began to see their movement as an integral part of the national struggle. Consequently, within the SGPC, too, the non-cooperator nationalist section took control. In May 1921, the SGPC passed a resolution in favour of non-cooperation, for the boycott of foreign goods and liquor, and for the substitution of panchayats for the British courts of law. The Akali leaders, arrested for the breaking of law, also refused to defend themselves, denying the jurisdiction of foreign-imposed courts.

A major victory was won by the Akalis in the Keys Affair’ in October 1921. The Government made an effort to keep possession of the keys of the Toshakhana of the Golden Temple. The Akalis immediately reacted, and organized massive protest meetings; tens of Akali jathas reached Amritsar immediately. The SGPC advised Sikhs to join the hartal on the day of the arrival of the Prince of Wales in India. The Government retaliated by arresting the prominent, militant nationalist leaders of the SGPC like Baba Kharak Singh and Master Tara Singh. But, instead of dying down, the movement began to spread to the remotest rural areas and the army. The Non-Cooperation Movement was at its height in the rest of the country. The Government once again decided not to confront Sikhs on a religious issue. It released all those arrested in the ‘Keys Affair’ and surrendered the keys of the Toshakhana to Baba Kharak Singh, head of the SGPC. Mahatma Gandhi immediately sent a telegram to the Baba: ‘First battle for India’s freedom won. Congratulations.’

The culmination of the movement to liberate the Gurdwaras came with the heroic non-violent struggle around Guru-Ka-Bagh Gurdwara which shook the whole of India. Smarting under its defeat in the ‘Keys Affair,’ the Punjab bureaucracy was looking for an opportunity to teach the Akalis a lesson and to recover its lost prestige. It was further emboldened by the fact that the Non­Cooperation Movement had been withdrawn in February 1922. It began to look for a pretext.

The pretext was provided by events at a little known village, Ghokewala, about 20 kilometers from Amritsar. The mahant of the Gurdwara Guru-Ka-Bagh had handed over the Gurdwara to the SGPC in August 1921 but claimed personal possession of the attached land. When the Akalis cut a dry kikkar tree on the land for use in the community kitchen, he complained to the police ‘of the theft of his property from his land.’ The officials seized this opportunity to provoke the Akalis. On 9 August 1922, five Akalis were arrested and put on trial. The Akali Dal reacted immediately to the new challenge. Akali jathas began to arrive and cut trees from the disputed Land. The Government started arresting all of them on charges of theft and rioting. By 28 August more than 4,000 Akalis had been arrested.

The authorities once again changed their tactics. Instead of arresting the Akali volunteers they began to beat them mercilessly with lathis. But the Akalis stood their ground and would not yield till felled to the ground with broken bones and lacerated bodies. C.F. Andrews described the official action as inhuman, brutal, foul, cowardly and incredible to an Englishman and a moral defeat of England. The entire country was outraged. National leaders and journalists converged on Guru-Ka-Bagh. Massive protest meetings were organized all over Punjab. A massive Akali gathering at Amritsar on io September was attended by Swami Shraddhaflafld, Hakim Ajmal Khan and others. The Congress Working Committee appointed a committee to investigate the conduct of the police.

Once again the Government had to climb down. As a face-saving device, it persuaded a retired Government servant to lease the disputed land from the mahant and then allow the Akalis to cut the trees. It also released all the arrested Akali volunteers. With the Gurdwaras under the control of the SGPC, the militant Akalis looked for some other opportunity of confronting the Government since they felt that the larger Gurdwara — the country was not yet liberated. In September 1923, the SGPC took up the cause of the Maharia of Nabba who had been forced by the Government to abdicate. This led to the famous morcha at Jaito in Nabha. But the Akalis could not achieve much success on the issue since it neither involved religion nor was their much support in the rest of the country. In the meanwhile, the Government had succeeded in winning over the moderate Akalis with the promise of legislation which was passed in July 1925 and which handed over control over all the Punjab Gurdwaras to an elected body of Sikhs which also came to be called the SGPC.

Apart from its own achievement, the Akali Movement made a massive contribution to the political development of Punjab. It awakened the Punjab peasantry. As Mohinder Singh, the historian of the Akali Movement, has pointed out: ‘It was only during the Akali movement that the pro-British feudal leadership of the Sikhs was replaced by educated middle-class nationalists and the rural and urban classes united on a common platform during the two-pronged Akali struggle.’ This movement was also a model of a movement on a religious issue which was utterly non-communal. To further quote Mohinder Singh: ‘It was this idea of Liberation of the country from a foreign Government that united all sections of the Sikh community and brought the Hindus, the Muslims and the Sikhs of the province into the fold of the Akali movement.’3 The Akali Movement also awakened the people of the princely states of Punjab to political consciousness and political activity. There were also certain weaknesses with long-term consequences. The movement encouraged a certain religiosity which would be later utilized by communalism.

The Akali Movement soon divided into three streams because it represented three distinct political streams, which had no reasons to remain united as a distinct Akali party once Gurdwara reform had taken place. One of the movement’s streams consisted of moderate, pro-Government men who were pulled into the movement because of its religious appeal and popular pressure. These men went back to loyalist politics and became a part of the Unionist Party. Another stream consisted of nationalist persons who joined the mainstream nationalist movement, becoming a part of the Gandhian or leftist Kirti-Kisan and Communist Wings. The third stream, which kept the title of Akali, although it was not the sole heir of the Akali Movement, used to the full the prestige of the movement among the rural masses, and became the political organ of Sikh communalism, mixing religion and politics and inculcating the ideology of political separation from Hindus and Muslims. In pre-1947 politics, the Akali Dal constantly vacillated between nationalist and loyalist politics.

Till 1917, the National Congress had refused to take up social reform issues lest the growing political unity of the Indian people got disrupted. 11 reversed this position in 1917 when it passed a resolution urging upon the people ‘the necessity, justice and righteousness of removing all disabilities imposed by custom upon the depressed classes.’ At this stage, Lokamanya Tilak also denounced untouchability and asked for its removal. But they did not take any concrete steps in the direction. Among the national leaders, it was Gandhi who gave top priority to the removal of untouchability and declared that this was no less important than the political struggle for freedom.

In 1923, the Congress decided to take active steps towards the eradication of untouchability. The basic strategy it adopted was to educate and mobilize opinion among caste Hindus on the question. The nationalist challenge in this respect came to be symbolized by two famous struggles in Kerala.

The problem was particularly acute in Kerala where the depressed classes or avarnas (those without caste, later known as Harijans) were subjected to degrading and de-humanising social disabilities. For example, they suffered not only from untouchability but also theendal or distance pollution — the Ezhavas and Putayas could not approach the higher castes nearer than 16 feet and 72 feet respectively. Struggle against these disabilities was being waged since the end of the 19th century by several reformers and intellectuals such as Sri Narayan Guru, N. Kumaran Asan, and T.K. Madhavan.

Immediately after the Kakinada session, the Kerala Provincial Congress Committee (KPCC) took up the eradication of untouchability as an urgent issue While carrying on a massive propaganda campaign against untouchability and for the educational and social upliftment of the Harijans, it was decided to launch an immediate movement to open Hindu temples and all public roads to the avarnas or Harijans. This, it was felt, would give a decisive blow to the notion of untouchability since it was basically religious in character and the avarnas’ exclusion from the temples was symbolic of their degradation and oppression.

A beginning was made in Vaikom, a village in Travancore. There was a major temple there whose four walls were surrounded by temple roads which could not be used by avarnas like Ezhavas and Pulayas. The KPCC decided to use the recently acquired weapon of Satyagraha to fight wnouchability and to make a beginning at Vaikom by defyrng the unapproachability rule by leading a procession of savarnas (caste Hindus) and avarnas on the temple roads on 30 March 1924.

The news of the Satyagraha aroused immediate enthusiasm among political and social workers and led to an intense campaign to arouse the conscience of savarnas and mobilize their active support. Many savarna organizations such as the Nair Service Society, Na Samajam and Kerala Hindu Sabha supported the Satyagraha. Yogakshema Sabha, the leading organization of the Namboodins (highest Brahmins by caste), passed a resolution fuvouring the opening of temples to avarnas. The temple authorities and the Travancore Government put up barricades on the roads leading to the temple and the District Magistrate served prohibitory orders on the leaders of the Satyagraha. On 30th March, the Satyagrahis, led by K.P. Kesava Menon, marched from the Satyagraha camp towards the temple. They, as well as the succeeding batches of Satyagrahis, consisting of both savarnas and avarna.s, were arrested and sentenced to imprisonment.

The Vaikom Satyagraha created enthusiasm all over the country and volunteers began to arrive from different parts of India An Akali jatha arrived from Punjab. E.V. Ramaswami Naicker (popularly known as Periyar later) led ajatha from Madurai and undeiwent imprisonment. On the other hand, the orthodox and reactionaiy section of caste Hindus met at Vaikom and decided to boycott all pro-Satyagraha Congressmen and not to employ them as teachers or lawyers or to vote for them.

On the death of the Maharaja in August 1924, the Maharani, as Regent, released all the Satyagrahis. As a positive response to this gesture, it was decided to organize a jatha (a group of volunteers) of caste Hindus to present a memorial to the Maharani asking for the opening of the temple roads to all. Batches of caste Hindus from all over Kerala converged on Vaikom. On 31 October, a jatha of nearly one hundred caste Hindus started their march on foot to Trivandrum. It was given warm receptions at nearly 200 villages and towns on the way. By the time it reached Trivandrum, it consisted of over 1,000 persons. The Maharani, however, refused to accept their demand and the Satyagraha was continued.

In early March 1925, Gandhi began his tour of Kerala and met the Maharani and other officials. A compromise was arrived at. The roads around the temple were opened to avarnas but those in the Sankethan of the temple remained closed to them. In his Kerala tour, Gandhi did not visit a single temple because avarnas were kept out of them.

The struggle against untouchability and for the social and economic uplift of the depressed classes continued all over India after 1924 as a part of the Gandhian constructive programme. Once again the struggle was most Intense m Kerala. Prodded by K Kelappan, the KPCC took up the question of temple entry in 1931 during the period when the Civil Disobedience Movement was suspended. A vast campaign of public meetings was organized throughout Malabar. The KPCC decided to make a beginning by organizing a temple entry Satyagraha at Guruvayur on 1st November 1931.

A jatha of sixteen volunteers, led by the poet Subramanian Tirumambu, whn became famous as the ‘Singing Sword of Kerala,’ began a march from Cannanore in the north to Guruvayur on 21 October. The volunteers ranged from the lowliest of Harijans to the highest caste Namboodiris. The march stirred the entire country and aroused anti-caste sentiments. The 1st of November was enthusiastically observed as All-Kerala Temple Entry Day with a programme of prayers, processions, meetings, receptions and fund collections. It was also observed in cities like Madras, Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi and Colombo (Sri Lanka). The popular response was tremendous. Many all-India leaders visited Malabar. Money and volunteers poured in from everywhere. The youth were specially attracted and were in the forefront of the struggle. The anti-untouchability movement gained great popularity. Many religious devotees transferred the offerings they would have made to the temple to the Satyagraha camp, feeling that the camp was even more sacred than the temple.

The temple authorities also made arrangements. They put up barbed wire all around the temple and organized gangs of watchmen to keep the Satyagrahis out and to threaten them with beating.

On 1 November, sixteen white khadi-clad volunteers marched to the eastern gate of the temple where their way was barred by a posse of policemen headed by the Superintendent of Police. Very soon, the temple servants and local reactionaries began to use physical force against the peaceful and non-violent Satyagrahis while the police stood by. For example, P Krishna Pillai and A.K. Gopalan, who were to emerge later as major leaders of the Communist movement in Kerala, were mercilessly beaten. The Satyagraha continued even after the Civil Disobedience Movement was resumed in January 1932 and all Congress Committees were declared unlawful and most of the Congressmen leading the Satyagraha were imprisoned.

The Satyagraha entered a new phase on 21 September 1932 when K. Kelappan went on a fast unto death before the temple until it was opened to the depressed classes. The entire country was again stirred to its depths. Once again meetings and processions engulfed Kerala and many other parts of the country. Caste Hindus from Kerala as well as rest of India made appeals to the Zamonn of Calicut, custodian of the temple, to throw open the temples to all Hindus; but without any success. Gandhiji made repeated appeals to Kelappan to break his fast, at least temporarily, with an assurance that he would himself, if necessary, undertake the task of getting the temple opened. Finally, Kelappan broke his fast on October 2, 1932. The Satyagraha was also suspended. But the temple entry campaign was carried on ever more vigorously.

A jatha led by A.K. Gopalan toured whole of Kerala on foot, carrying on propaganda and addressing massive meetings everywhere. Before it was disbanded the jatha had covered nearly 1,000 miles and addressed over 500 meetings.

Even though the Guruvayur temple was not opened immediately, the Satyagraha was a great success in broader terms. As A.K. Gopalan has recorded in his autobiography, ‘although the Guruvayur temple was still closed to Harijans, I saw that the movement had created an impetus for social change throughout the country. It led to a transformation everywhere.’

The popular campaign against untouchability and for temple entry continued in the succeeding years. In November 1936, the Maharaja of Travancore issued a proclamation throwing open all Government-controlled temples to all Hindus irrespective of caste. Madras followed suit in 1938 when its Ministry was headed by C. Rajagopalachari. Other provinces under Congress rule also took similar steps.

The temple entry campaign used all the techniques developed by the Indian people in the course of the nationalist struggle. Its organizers succeeded in building the broadest possible unity, imparting mass education, and mobilizing the people on a very wide scale on the question of untouchability. Of course, the problem of caste inequality, oppression and degradation was very deep-seated and complex, and temple entry alone could not solve it. But Satyagrahas like those of Vaikom and Guruvayur and the movements around them did make a massive contribution in this respect. As E.M.S. Namboodiripad was to write years later: ‘Guruvayur Temple Satyagraha was an event that thrilled thousands of young men like me and gave inspiration to a vast majority of the people to fight for their legitimate rights with self-respect. . . It was the very same youth who gave this bold lead, who subsequently became founder- leaders of the worker-peasant organizations that were free from the malice of religious or communal considerations.”

The main weakness of the temple entry movement and the Gandhian or nationalist approach in fighting caste oppression was that even while amusing the people against untouchability they lacked a strategy for ending the caste system itself. The strength of the national movement in this respect was to find expression in the Constitution of independent India which abolished caste inequality, outlawed untouchability and guaranteed social equality to all citizens irrespective of their caste. Its weakness has found expression in the growth of casteism and the continuous existence in practice of oppression and discrimination against the lower castes in post-1947 India.