1947 : Behind the Turning Point, Beyond Official Mythology
On 1 July 1947, Hong Kong returned to China. The peaceful, bloodless’ end of British colonialism in Asia made for a spectacular television show. Was the dawn of Indian independence fifty years ago an equally amicable affair? A non-violent, bloodless wonder, as the describe it in history books?
Indeed, official propagandists take great pains to market the myth that Indian independence is the greatest victory that has been achieved anywhere in the world through the path of non-violence. But the fact is that no violent revolution in the world has perhaps paid the kind of price that we have had to pay for our fragmented freedom. The colossal loss of lives in communal riots leading up to India’s eventual Partition remains the most telling testimony to the utter hypocrisy of the non-violence myth. This cruel and cowardly vivisection of the erstwhile undivided country left tens of thousands of men, women and children dead and many more uprooted from their hearth and home and history. The great martyrs of our freedom struggle had certainty not shed their blood for such a disgraceful end.
But there is more to the mythology of India’s struggle for independence than this dichotomy between violence and non-violence. Official history virtually reduces this massive churning in the world’s biggest colony to an account of successive sessions of the Indian National Congress and then how Gandhi with his magic wand woke up the helpless Indian people from their slumber and ignorance. We are told how through three major countrywide campaigns – Non-Cooperation, Civil Disobedience and Quit India — spaced over three decades the “Father of the Nation” groomed his children for gradually taking over power from the British masters.
If the ordinary people, workers and peasants, figure in this story of how India won her freedom, they do so only as numbers. Faceless, nameless numbers. As the tens of thousands routinely responding to the calls given by Gandhi and his Congress. At times maybe even overstepping the limits set for them, forcing Gandhi to pull them up. But they are never shown in action as men and women fighting their own battle with their own vision, dynamism and initiative and trying to become arbiters of their own collective destiny.
The working people are thus not only denied their due in the present. They are also denied their role in the past. They are sought to be delinked from their own past and turned into permanent refugees relegated to the margins of history. It is therefore extremely important to break through the shackles of official history and reclaim our glorious legacy. The legacy that lights up our existence today and gives ou justified sense of pride in our own identity’.
Between Then and Now : History Lives on
Ours is of course not a blind battle over past history. It is part of a larger war. The war for a fair today and a just tomorrow. For, as the Communist Manifesto declared one hundred and fifty years ago, “in the movement of the present” we also “represent and take care of the future of that movement”.
1947 did not mark the end of imperialist domination in India. It only changed the context and imperialism changed its forms and methods. Today India and most of the countries known collectively as the third world are faced with a renewed imperialist offensive that comes with the brand name of liberalisation and globalisation. It is all very well to argue that in the changed world situation it is impossible for any imperialist power to recolonise India. But as a people whose basic needs and interests are being daily trampled upon in the economy, as a nation whose economic sovereignty and very dignity have come under such a dark cloud, can we really draw any comfort from any such ‘guarantee’ against recolonisation?
1947 did not put an end to the sordid saga of bourgeois betrayal and bankruptcy either. It only opened a new chapter. And fifty years down the line, the signs of betrayal are today strewn all around.
Look at the audacity with which the Indian bourgeoisie and their trusted political representatives are selling away our very dignity and key national interests. Look at the vicious venom with which communal fascism is again raising its ugly head in the India of the 90s. Look at these shameless schemers and scamsters who are ruling the roost in our much trumpeted parliamentary democracy. And look at the appalling conditions of the overwhelming majority of our people, languishing in their own homeland without land and freedom, bread and jobs …’
Yet we cannot go on lamenting and complaining about all this. No messiah is going to dear this mess for us. We will have to do it ourselves.
On the occasion of the golden jubilee of the country’s independence, when we pay tribute to the great heroes and martyrs of our freedom movement and recall with pride the glory of our predecessors — workers, peasants and other progressive patriotic Indians — who had fought so valiantly for the liberation of this country, we also rededicate ourselves to this revolutionary task of transforming the present and the future.
Peasant Upsurges and Tribal Revolts
PEASANT rebellions and tribal revolts were the two main, often overlapping, expressions of resistance against British rule in the 18th and 19th centuries. Anthropologist Kathleen Gough has compiled a list of no less than 77 peasant uprisings during the British period.
The Sannyasi Rebellion that shook vast areas in Bengal and Bihar in the second half of eighteenth century was one of the earliest instances of peasant resistance against British rule. The introduction of Permanent Settlement saw the flame of peasant rebellion engulf the southern region of Tamil Nadu. Palayankottai near Tirunelveli was the epicentre of this massive upsurge led by Veerapandaya Kattabomman. Kattabomman questioned the very legitimacy of British tax claims: “The sky gives us water and land gives us crops, why should we then pay taxes to you?” The Wababi Uprising in Bengal led by Titu Meer and his peasant followers in early 1830s combined aspects of religious reform and peasant insurgency. On the eve of the First War of Independence in 1857, the Birbhum-Rajmahal-Bhagalpur section of the Bihar-Bengal border region witnessed the great Santhal Uprising against the extortionist alliance of the police, landlords, moneylenders and court officials. The names of Sidho and Kano, the legendary heroes of this uprising, as also of Baba Tilka Manjhi who led an earlier phase of Santhal rebellion in 1784-85, are still widely remembered in Eastern India.
Recent researches have also established the fact that the First War of Independence in 1857 had an unmistakably pronounced peasant content. British colonialism went on to win this war and consolidate its grip over India, but the fire of peasant insurgency and tribal revolts continued to simmer over large parts of the country. Between 1836 and 1919, the Malabar region of Kerala recorded 28 outbreaks of Moplah Rebellion. Despite misleading religious overtones, it was essentially a revolt of Muslim leaseholders and landless labourers against Hindu upper caste landlords and their British benefactors. In 1860s Bengal witnessed the popular Indigo Rebellion, peasants rebelling against the forcible introduction of indigo cultivation by British planters.
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An Everlasting Disgrace
This is indeed a pretty state of things in a civilized army in the nineteenth century; and if any other troops had committed one-tenth of these excesses how would the indignant British press brand them with infamy. But these are the deeds of the British army, and therefore we are told that such things are but the normal consequences of war. … The feet is, there is no army in Europe or America with so much brutality as the British. Plundering, violence, massacre – things that everywhere else are strictly and completely banished — are a time-honoured privilege, a vested right of the British soldier. … For twelve days and nights there was no British army at Lucknow – nothing but a lawless, drunken, brutal rabble, dissolved into bands of robbers far more lawless, violent and greedy than the sepoys who had just been driven out of the place. The sack of Lucknow in 1858 will remain an everlasting disgrace to the British military service.
— Engels on the role of the British army in India in 1857(box end)
The hills of the Godavari Agency region in Andhra also reverberated to repeated outbursts of rebellion through the nineteenth century. The British-backed mansabdar’s attempt to enhance taxes led to the outbreak of a major revolt in March 1879 over an area as vast as 5,000 square miles and it could be suppressed by November 1880 only with the use of six regiments of Madras infantry. The transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century was rocked by the legendary Ulgulan (Great Tumult) of Birsa Munda in the region south of Ranchi. At the heart of this great rebellion lay the popular tribal will to defend their traditional khuntkatti (joint holdings) rights and reject the imposition of beth begari (forced labour) by alien landlords.
It is true that most of these early peasant upsurges and tribal revolts were localised or at best regional affairs and not all-India campaigns. It is also true that these acts of rebellion were not propelled by any grand vision or conscious doctrine of a free and democratic modern India. Rather they were rooted in the appalling conditions of rural existence-persistence of famine or a near-famine situation, acute social oppression, feudal coercion and a reign of unmitigated loot and plunder by an alliance of powerful rural forces under the protective umbrella of British colonialism. No wonder, religious customs, tribal traditions and elements of caste, locality and a host of other pre-modern identities often overlapped and intermingled in these early expressions of popular unrest. Yet there was something very genuine and solid about these revolts, which stands out in sharp contrast to the politics of collaboration and measured opposition pursued by and large by the business and mercantile community as well as sections of the newly emerging middle class intelligentsia in the period which followed.
Arrival of the Indian Working Class
THE first footsteps of the Indian working class could be heard in the second half of the nineteenth century. Facilitated by the introduction of railways in 1853, industries like cotton textile and jute as well as coal mining and tea plantation began to come up in different parts of the country. Early instances of workers trying to organise and revolt against their oppressive living and working conditions date back almost to the same period. Strikes of non-industrial workers like palanquin bearers and scavengers have also been recorded in the dosing years of nineteenth century.
Quite understandably, the formation of trade unions proper was preceded by the launching of various welfare organisations often by non-worker philanthropist citizens. At a time when the working class was still in its inception or infancy, with no tradition of trade unions or factory acts or labour laws, clear demarcation between various forms of organisation and categories of demands was often not possible. But given the fact that the mill managements were overwhelmingly white and the air was heavy with the humiliation and hatred generated by a racist, colonial order, even the most ordinary and primary attempts to organise the workers and articulate their demands tended to acquire an unmistakable political significance.
Swadeshi: The First Surge of Working Class Action
THE first surge of working class action came in the wake of Partition of Bengal and the subsequent swadeshi agitation. On 19 July, 1905 Curzon issued his fiat partitioning Bengal. This sinister application of the British strategy of divide-and-rule in one of the most sensitive Indian provinces anticipated the eventual vivisection of the country in 1947. The Partition of Bengal provoked angry outbursts not only in Bengal itself but also in distant Maharashtra, a sure sign of the rise of a popular national consciousness.
In a two-pronged campaign, spearheaded primarily by the so-called extremist wing of the Indian National Congress led by Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Bipin Chandra Pal (the famous Lal-Bal-Pal trio), people were urged on the one hand to boycott British goods and promote Swadeshi ways on the other. Most of the Swadeshi leaders advocated the use of religious idioms to mobilise the masses. Tilak came up with the idea of celebrating Ganesh and Shivaji Utsavs.
This was also the formative phase for revolutionary terrorists. The attempt made by Khudiram Basu and Prafulla Chaki at Muzaffarpur on April 30, 1908, on the notorious British magistrate Kingsford was the most well-known terrorist action of this early period. But beyond this interface between religious revivalism and revolutionary terrorism, Swadeshi also had a distinct working class dimension.
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Calcutta in Mourning
Yesterday was one of the most memorable days in the history of the British administration of India. It being the day on which the Bengal Partition scheme took effect, … the people of Calcutta, irrespective of nationality, social position, creed and sex, observed it as a day of mourning … From the small hours in the morning till noon, the bank of the Ganges from Bagbazar to Howrah presented a unique spectacle. It looked, as if it were, a surging sea of human faces. The scene in the roads and streets of Calcutta was quite novel and was perhaps never before witnessed in any Indian city. … All the mills were closed and the mill hands paraded the city in procession. The only cry that was heard was that of Bande Mataram”.
– Anmrita Bazar Patrika, Calcutta, 17 October, 1905(box end)
The first real trade union, the Printers’ Union, was formed on 21 October, 1905 in the midst of a stubborn strike in government presses. During July-September 1906, workers in the Bengal section of the East Indian Railway launched a series of strikes. On 27 August there was a massive assertion of workers at the Jamalpur railway workshop. The rail strikes would become more decisive and widespread between May and December 1907 covering important centres like Asansol, Mughalsarai, Allahabad, Kanpur and Ambala. Between 1905 and 1908, strikes were also quite frequent in the jute mills of Bengal. In March 1908, workers at the foreign-owned Coral Cotton Mills at Tuticorin in Tirunelveli district of the then Madras province went on a successful strike. Efforts to suppress the Coral mill workers led not only to protest strikes by municipal workers, sweepers and carriage-drivers, but municipal offices, law courts and police stations at Tirunelveli town too were attacked by the masses.
More importantly, Swadeshi signalled the arrival of the working class as a political force with workers beginning to take to the streets together with students and peasants demanding freedom and democracy. Militant street fights would soon become the order of the day. In the first week of May 1907, about 3,000 workers of the Rawalpindi workshop and hundreds of fellow workers from other factories joined the students in a huge protest demonstration against the conviction of the editor of the journal Punjabee for publishing ‘seditious’ matters. Peasants from nearby areas also joined this militant rally and virtually everything with a British connection came under attack.
Lenin Hails the Political Awakening of Indian Workers
MEANWHILE the Russian revolution of 1905 had failed but not before it had inspired the entire international working class movement with a new vision and with a brand new weapon: the mass political strike. When Bipin Chandra Pal was arrested, the Calcutta journal Nabasakti wrote on 14 September, 1907: “The workers of Russia today are teaching the world the methods of effective protest in times of repression – will not Indian workers learn from them?”
This anticipation soon came true in Bombay. The arrest of Tilak on 24 June, 1908 provoked a storm of protest not only in Bombay but also in industrial centres like Nagpur and Sholapur. While court proceedings were on, workers would explode in protest and clashes would ensue with the police and military. In one of these street battles, on 18 July, several hundred workers were wounded and many killed. The next day some 65,000 workers belonging to 60-odd mills went on strike. Dock workers of Bombay also joined the movement on 21 July. On July 22, Tilak was sentenced to six years of rigorous imprisonment. In protest, for six days striking workers converted Bombay into a veritable battle field.
Lenin hailed this heroic assertion of Bombay workers as an inflammable material in world politics: “… in India the street is beginning to stand up for its writers and political leaders. The infamous sentence pronounced by the British jackals on the Indian democrat Tilak … evoked street demonstrations and a strike in Bombay. In India, too, the proletariat has already developed to conscious political mass struggle — and, that being the case, the Russian-style British regime in India is doomed!”
Gandhi’s Grammar of Passive Resistance
THE Swadeshi agitation led to a temporary split between the moderate and extremist wings of the Congress. But away from the Congress split, the Swadeshi aftermath had already seen a significant upswing in revolutionary terrorism in Bengal. The Yugantar and Anushilan groups emerged as the two key centres and in spite of the revocation of Partition in December 1911, the Bengal terrorists continued to gain in strength and popularity. The foremost leader of this school, Jatin Mukherjee (Bagha Jatin), died a hero’s death near Balasore on the Orissa coast in September 1915.
Revolutionary terrorism also struck strong roots among Indian expatriates, mostly Sikhs, in British Columbia and United States. The famous Ghadr (revolution) movement began in 1913 in San Francisco. In contrast to the Hindu overtones of early Bengal terrorists, Ghadrites invoked the 1857 legacy of Hindu-Muslim unity. Many of the terrorists and Ghadrites were to be transformed eventually into communist activists.
With the outbreak of the First World War, British imperialists intensified their reign of repression in India. Even after the war was over, the British tried to perpetuate and legalise the war-time suspension of basic rights by pushing through the so-called Rowiatt Act. War had also meant unprecedented economic misery for the great majority of the Indian people while for the business and mercantile Community it was a god-send opportunity to reap fabulous super-profits. On the whole, the unfolding post-war situation was ripe for a major popular offensive.
Official history designates this offensive as Rowlatt Satyagraha and describes it as the first major effect ot the Gandhian magic on the Indian people, Gandhi had already developed his theme of passive resistance or satyagraha in the course of his campaigns in South Africa between 1907 and 1914. Returning to India in 1915 he also gathered some first-hand experience from the popular peasant agitations at Champaran in Bihar and Kheda in Gujara. Rajasthan too witnessed the rise of a peasant movement led, first by Sitaram Das at Bijolia in 1913, and then by a former revolutionary, Bhoop Singh alias Vijay Singh Pathtk in 1916. No-tax, no-rent slogans had evolved naturally in the course of these peasant agitations.
The official Gandhi-led campaign took off with a one-day hartal on a Sunday (30 March, 1919) and in spite of repeated postponements and deliberate dilution by Gandhi it went on to grow into a wider non-cooperation movement. The movement reached its peak between November 1921 and February 1922 before being abruptly called off by Gandhi following the killing of 22 policemen by angry peasants at Chauri Chaura in Gorakhpur district of UP on 5 February, 1922.
While Gandhi’s unilateral decision to withdraw the movement on 11 February, 1922 was resented by most Congress leaders, there was virtually no protest against the barbaric repression let loose on the Chauri Chaura peasants. Of the 225 Chauri Chaura accused, no less than 172 were initially sentenced to death; eventually 19 were hanged and the rest transported. Till date, Chauri Chaura has a memorial for the killed policemen, but none for the persecuted peasants.
Brutal Repression and Upswing in Worker-Peasant Action
BRITISH colonialists tried their level best to crush the post-war popular upsurge through sheer repression. The worst instance of repression in this period was the barbaric Jallianwallahbagh massacre in Amritsar on 13 April, 1919. The infamous General Dyer who executed this massacre defended it in terms of “producing a moral effect” and his only regret was that had he not run out of ammunition he could have killed many more! In the face of such acute state terror and Gandhian vacillation and dilution, if the Indian people succeeded in producing a different ‘moral effect’ on the British administration, it was largely due to the powerful working class initiative and wider expressions of peasant discontent.
Among the powerful peasant movements of this period, mention must be made of the popular peasant agitation in UP against the arbitrary rent collection and other coercive practices by the Avadh talukdars. This agitation which acquired a strong base in Pratapgarh, Rae Bareli, Sultanpur and Faizabad districts of UP was led by Baba Ramchandra; a one-time indentured labourer in Fiji who combined a lot of Ramayana
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Thus Spake the Butcher
I fired and continued to fire till the crowd dispersed, and I considered that this is the Least amount of firing which would produce the necessary moral and widespread effect it was my duty to produce if I was to justify my action. If more troops had been at hand the casualties would have been greater in proportion. It was no longer a question of merely dispersing the crowds but one of producing a sufficient moral effect, from a military point of view, not only on those who were present, but more specially throughout the Punjab. There could be no question of undue severity….
— Gen. Dyer’s report to the General Staff Division, 25.08.1919
Tagore Renounces Knighthood in Protest
The disproportionate severity of the punishments inflicted upon the unfortunate people and the methods of carrying them out, we are convinced, are without parallel in the history of civilised governments. … the very least that I can do for my country is to … voice… the protest of the millions of my countrymen … The time has come when the badges of honour make our shame gliding in their incongruous context of humiliation, and I for my part wish to stand shorn of all distinctions, by the side of those of my countrymen, who, for their so called insignificance, are liable to suffer a degradation not lit for human beings…
— Rahindranath Tagore’s letter to the Viceroy, 31.05.1919
(box end)
with his calls of kisan solidarity and would even describe Lenin as the dear leader of kisans. In the Mewar region of Rajasthan, Motilal Tejawat organised a powerful movement of the Bhil tribe. In August 1921, the Malabar region of Kerala was rocked by a fresh round of the intermittent Moplah rebellion. In the early 1920s, Punjab saw a powerful upsurge of the Jat Sikh peasantry in the form of the Akali-led Curudwara reform movement aimed at liberating the Sikh shrines from the clutches of corrupt British-backed mahants. And between 1919 and 1921, Satara district of Maharashtra witnessed a powerful anti-landlord anti-mahajan peasant upsurge led by the Satyashodhak Nana Patil who would go on to emerge as a popular communist peasant leader in the state.
Parallel to this upswing in peasant movement, there was a strong strike wave sweeping across the country. The following figures quoted from a 1923 publication (cited by Sumit Sarkar in Modem India) give an idea about the depth and sweep of the strike-wave:
Period: 4.11.19-2.12.19 # Place: Kanpur # Industry: Woollen mills # Participation : 17,000
Period: 7.12.19-9.01.20 Place: Jamalpur # Industry: Railway workers # Participation : 16,000
Period: 9.01.20-18.01.20 # Place: Calcutta # Industry: Jute mills # Participation : 35,000
Period: 2.01.20-03.02.20 # Place: Bombay # Industry: General strike # Participation : 2,00,000
Period: 20.01.20-31.01.20 # Place: Rangoon # Industry: Mill workers # Participation : 20,000
Period: 31.01.20 # Place: Bombay # Industry: British India Navigation Co. # Participation : 10,000
Period: 26.01.20-16.02.20 # Place: Sholapur # Industry: Mill workers # Participation : 16,000
Period: 24.02.20-29.03.20 # Place: Jamshedpur # Industry: TISCO # Participation : 40,000
Period: 9.03.20 # Place: Bombay # Industry: Mill workers # Participation : 60,000
Period: 20.03.20-26.03.20 # Place: Madras # Industry: Mill workers # Participation : 17,000
Period: May 1920 # Place: Ahmedabad # Industry: Mill workers # Participation : 25,000
There were 110 strikes in Bengal in the second half of 1920 alone.
Workers’ Organisation Acquires All India Shape
IT was in the midst of such a powerful countrywide assertion of the working class that the first central organisation of Indian workers came into being. The All India Trade Union Congress was founded in Bombay on 31 October, 1920. Tilak was a key inspiration behind the birth of AITUC, but he expired on 1 August, 1920, three months before the actual inception of the organisation.
The inaugural session had all the fervour of a new-found proletarian identity, but ft could not move out of the Congress trajectory of constitutional reforms. In his presidential address, Lala Lajpat Rai emphasised the role of organised labour as the antidote against capitalism as well as “militarism and imperialism … the twin children of capitalism” and underscored the need to “organise our workers (and) make them class conscious”; but with regard to the British government he said the attitude of labour should be “neither one of support nor that of opposition.”
The “Manifesto to the Workers of India” released on this occasion by the first General Secretary of AITUC, Dewan Chaman Lall, called upon the “Workers of India” to “assert your right as arbiters of your country’s destiny”. It reminded them that they must remain “part and parcel” of the movement for national freedom and urged them to “cast all weakness… and … tread the path to power and freedom”. Vice-President Joseph Baptista, however, waxed eloquent about “the higher idea of partnership”, emphasising that mill-owners and labourers “are partners and co-workers and not buyers and sellers of labour”.
The second, conference of AITUC (30.11.1921 – 02.12.1921) held at the coal-town of Jharia in Dhanbad district of today’s Bihar (reckless and faulty mining by BCCL has unfortunately jeopardised the very existence of this historic working-class centre which also hosted the ninth AITUC session in December 1928 that called for transforming India into a Socialist Republic) was, however, much more emphatic about the goal of the Indian workers and the people at large. “The time has now arrived”, the conference declared, “for the attainment of swaraj by the people”. The Jharia session was an extraordinary event-some fifty thousand people, most of them coal miners and other workers from nearby areas and their family members, participated in this unprecedented show of worker power.
Gandhian Apathy for the Working Class and AITUC
IN some circles Gandhi is also credited to be the founding fattier of Indian trade union movement. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Gandhi did have an early encounter with the Ahmedabad working class in 1918, but it was not from the point of view of organising workers into trade unions. At the behest of his friend and noted textile magnate Ambalal Sarabhai and other mill-owners of Ahmedabad, he intervened in a conflict over “plague bonus” and mediated for a 35% wage increase with the owners offering 20% and workers demanding 50%. At a time when in the late 20s, textile workers all over the country would fight for a hike in wages, Gandhi would urge Ahmedabad workers not to embarrass their employers during a period of depression. “Faithful servants serve their masters even without pay”, he would advise.
He advocated the concept of trusteeship, asking workers to look at mill-owners as trustees and resolve all disputes through arbitration. The Textile Labour Association that he built up was accordingly named Majoor Mahajan. He got the Ahmedabad mill-owners to donate generously for his Sabarmati Ashram while striking workers were mobilised to carry out much of the construction work.
In fact, Ahmedabad workers did not really figure effectively in Gandhi’s own campaign plans nor did he try to mobilise them in support of the peasants. Yet Ahmedabad workers would raise Rs. 1,300 through one-anna collection for the agitating peasants of Bardoli in Surat. And a few days before the heinous Jallianwallahbagh massacre, when the British rulers issued orders preventing Gandhi from entering Delhi or Punjab, Ahmedabad exploded in violent protests. For two days, 11 and 12 April, 1919 Ahmedabad was virtually captured by the city’s textile workers. 51 government buildings were burnt down and railway and police stations were set on fire also in the nearby town of Viramgam. The British administration damped down martial law and official estimates speak of 28 persons being killed and 123 injured in army action. Highly disturbed by this eruption of mass violence on his home ground of Ahmedabad, Gandhi confessed to a “Himalayan blunder” and quickly catted off the satyagraha.
Gandhi did at times speak of organising workers in other industrial centres too on the lines of his Ahmedabad model of trusteeship and ‘amicable arbitration’. But perhaps anticipating the impossibility of such a mission he never really embarked on such an exercise. In fact, he showed absolutely no interest in the foundation of AITUC or in directing its affairs at any point of time. He was perhaps the only exception among front-ranking Congress leaders to have kept aloof from the AITUC even in those early years when the communists had not yet become a major force in the trade union movement. Perhaps this alarmist apathy stemmed from his apprehension that a working class organised on an all-India scale would only militate against the typical Gandhian equilibrium in the Congress-led coalition of socio-political forces and ideological currents.
Worker Vanguards Embrace Communism
THE 1920s saw an infectious rise of political activism in almost all major working-class centres. New states joined the map of the working class movement. In May 1921, tea gardens of Assam, especially at Chargola in Surma valley witnessed a major upsurge of tea workers leading to a massive exodus of some 8,000 workers from the valley. Sporadic struggles were again reported in December 1921 from the tea gardens of Darrang and Sibsagar districts. On November 17, 1921, workers in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras played a key role in organising a highly successful countrywide hartal (general strike) in protest against the visit of the Prince of Wales. Madras had just witnessed a bitter four-month-long strike from July to October at the Buckingham & Camatic Mills. As many as seven workers were killed by the police in the course of this strike. On 1 May, 1923, elderly Madras lawyer and labour leader Singaravelu Chettier organised the first major May Day celebration in India on the Madras beach. Singaravelu was critical of the repeated brakes applied by Gandhi on the non-cooperation movement and went on to be among the communist pioneers in the country. North Western Railway witnessed a major strike lasting from April to June 1925. Textile strikes, of course, continued to rock Bombay at regular intervals.
This was also the period that saw the beginning of introduction of communist ideology in the Indian working class movement. Communist circles began to operate among Indian expatriates as well as inside the country. On December 26, 1925, leaders of various communist circles active in the country met at Kanpur and formally launched the Communist Party of India. In the 1920s, communists also operated from within organisations called workers’ and peasants’ parties apart, of course, from the Congress. Such parties became quite active and popular in Bengal, Bombay, Punjab, UP and Delhi. In Punjab the party was known as the Kirti Kisan Party and was formed at Jallianwallahbagh in Amritsar on the ninth anniversary of the infamous massacre.
Workers Demand Complete Independence
To stem the rising tide of working class movement, the British government came up with the highly restrictive Trade Unions Act legislation in 1926. This Act virtually declared all unregistered unions as illegal and placed all sorts of restriction on trade unions collecting and contributing funds for political purposes. Ironically, this was in sharp contrast to the prevailing norms in Britain where trade unions formed the backbone of the Labour Party and played a key role in the country’s politics. But this retrograde and restrictive piece of hypocritical legislation could hardly dampen the rising spirit of working class movement.
In February 1928, 20,000 workers marched in Bombay against the arrival of the all-white Simon Commission. The Lilooah rail workshop witnessed a major struggle from January to Jury 1928, From 18 April to September 1928, T1SCO workers went on a protracted strike. Bombay had yet another massive textile strike from April to October 1928. July 1928 saw a brief but very bitter strike on the South Indian Railway. Its leaders, Singaravelu and Mukundlal Sircar, got jail sentences while a worker striker, Perumal, was extemed for life to the Andamans. The most spectacular assertion of the working people could be seen in Calcutta where in December 1928, thousands of workers led by the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party of Bengal marched into the Congress session, occupied the pandal for two hours and adopted resolutions demanding Purna Swaraj or complete independence.
Alluri Sitarama Raju to Bhagat Singh: Inquilab Zindabad
THE beginning of the 1920s had witnessed a great example of peasant guerrilla war in Andhra. From August 1922 to May 1924, Alluri Sitarama Raju and his band of hundred tribal peasant guerrillas waged a successful war against the British state over an area of about 2,500 square miles in the hills of the Godavari Agency region. With his accurate ambushes and successful raids on police stations, Raju won the grudging admiration of the British as a formidable guerrilla tactician. The Madras Government spent Rs. 15 lakh to suppress the rebellion with the help of the Malabar Special Police and the Assam Rifles. Raju was finally caught while he was bathing in a pond, and after inflicting heavy torture on this great fighter the British administration shot him dead on 6 May 1924. Incidentally, the fiftieth anniversary of India’s independence also marks the birth centenary of this legendary peasant revolutionary.
If Alluri Sitarama Raju symbolised the courage and capacity of the rural poor to wage a militant battle for independence, Bhagat Singh held out a really potent promise of a much more meaningful freedom that could have been ours. In September 1928, he and his comrades set up the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army at a meeting held on the ruins of Delhi’s Ferozeshah Kotla. In one of its first actions, the HSRA avenged the assault on Lajpat Rai (he was seriously injured by the police white leading an anti-Simon protest march at Lahore on 30 October, 1928 and finally succumbed to death on 17 November) by killing the guilty police official Saunders at Lahore in December 1928. On 8 April, 1929 Bhagat Singh and Batukeswar Dutta threw bombs in the Legislative Assembly even as discussion was on in the Assembly on the anti-labour Trades Disputes Bill and a bill to bar British communists and other supporters of Indian independence from coining to India.
While carrying out such specific terrorist actions under the HSRA banner, Bhagat Singh and his comrades also built up an open youth organisation in the name of Naujawan Bharat Sabha. Awaiting his execution in jail, Bhagat Singh undertook a systematic study of Marxism and wrote, among other things, the path-breaking pamphlet Why I Am an Atheist. The most remarkable thing about Bhagat Singh was that his transition
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Inquilab Zindabad!
It takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear. With these immortal words uttered on a similar occasion by Valliant, a French Anarchist martyr, do we strongly justify this action of ours.
Without repeating the humiliating history of the past ten years … we see that this time again, while the people expecting some more crumbs of reforms from the Simon Commission are ever quarreling over the distribution of the expected bones, the Government is thrusting upon us new repressive measures like the Public safety and Trades Disputes Bills while reserving the Press Sedition Bill for the next session. The indiscriminate arrests of labour leaders working in the open clearly indicates whither the wind blows.
In these extremely provocative circumstances, the HSRA in all seriousness, realising their full responsibility, had ordered its army to do this particular act so that a stop be put to this humiliating farce….
Let the representatives of the people return to their constituencies and prepare the masses for the coming revolution. And let the Government know that while protesting against the Public Safety and the Trades Disputes Bills and the callous murder of Lala Lajpat Rai, on behalf of the helpless Indian masses, we want to emphasise the lesson often repeated by history that it is easy to kill individuals but you cannot kill ideas. Great empires have crumbled while ideas have survived. The Bourbons and the Czars fell, while revolutions marched triumphantly over their heads. … Long Live Revolution.
– Excerpts from the leaflet issued by Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt while throwing bombs in the Legislative Assembly on 8.4.1929
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Lenin Day in Lahore Court
Before proceedings commenced today in the Lahore Conspiracy case, all the eighteen accused who entered the Court room with red scarves round their necks took their seats in the dock amidst shouts of Long Live Revolution’, ‘Long Live the Communist International’. ‘Long Live Lenin’, ‘Long Live the Proletariat’ and ‘Down, Down with Imperialism’.
Bhagat Singh informed the Magistrate that he and his fellow accused were celebrating the day as Lenin Day and requested him to convey the following message to the President. Third international at Moscow at their cost. The message runs: On the occasion of the Lenin Day we express brotherly congratulations on the triumphant march of Comrade Lenin’s mission. We wish every success for the great experiment carried on in Soviet Russia. We wish to associate ourselves with the world revolution movement. Victory to Workers’ Regiment. Woe to the Capitalists Dawn with Imperialism…
– Hindustan Times, 26 January, 1930(box end)
from revolutionary terrorism to Marxism did not take place merely in the realm of abstract ideology, in the process he also showed every sign of developing a deep-going analysis of Indian society as well as a comprehensive revolutionary programme to transform it.
With his matchless patriotism, absolute determination, revolutionary heroism and tremendous leadership qualities, Bhagat Singh had the unmistakable potential of growing into a radical pole of the freedom movement and providing a real challenge to the political supremacy of Gandhi and Nehru. Congress made little attempts to save the life of this great revolutionary, but in the hearts of the people Bhagat Singh and his comrade Chandrashekhar Azad who gave many a slip to the British police but finally embraced martyrdom in the course of a surprise police encounter at the Alfred park of Allahabad, remain indisputably the two most legendary martyrs of India’s independence struggle. Singh’s clarion call, Inquilab Zindabad, has become the permanent war cry of every Indian struggle for justice, freedom and democracy.
Meerut ‘Conspiracy’ and Civil Disobedience
While Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru were executed on March 23, 1931, no less than 31 communist leaders and organisers of the working people were facing a farcical trial under the so-called Meerut Conspiracy Case. Among the arrested communist leaders were also three British communists – Benjamin Francis Bradley, Phillip Spratt and Lester Hutchinson – who were working shoulder to shoulder with their Indian comrades in a common mission to organise the Indian working class. The Meerut communists used the trial as an effective platform for exposing the real nature of the British rule in India and propagating the communist goals of revolution and national independence. The trial invited international opposition and under pressure from British trade unions and the international working class movement in general, the High Court had to reduce the absurd prison sentences declared earlier by the sessions court.
This was also Hie period of the second major Gandhian exercise in waging a mass political struggle, the Civil Disobedience Movement. While pressure was mounting inside the Congress for launching a decisive struggle for complete independence, Gandhi served an 11-point ultimatum to the British rulers on 31 January, 1930. Interestingly, it did not include the demand for granting even Dominion Status to India, let alone complete independence. Gandhi defended the 11 demands on the ground that they would facilitate wider spread of the movement and greater involvement of larger sections of the society. Five of these were common democratic demands (of course, with a Gandhian tinge): 50% cuts in army expenditures and civil service salaries, total prohibition, release of all political prisoners, reform of the CID and changes in the Arms Act to allow popular control of issue of firearm licences. Three demands catered to specific aspirations of the Indian bourgeoisie, viz., lowering of the rupee-sterling exchange ratio, protection of Indian textile industry and reservation of coastal shipping for Indians. The other two pertained primarily to the interests of the landed peasantry: 50% reduction in land revenue and abolition of salt tax and government monopoly in salt. Conspicuously absent were any specific demands of the working class and the landless rural poor!
Sholapur Commune and Chittagong Armoury Raid
In spite of this characteristic Gandhian apathy for the industrial working class and the landless rural poor, these classes vigorously participated in the ensuing civil disobedience movement. From 12 March to 6 April, Gandhi accompanied by 71 inmates of his ashram drawn from different parts of the country undertook the famous Dandi March. The issue of salt served as a simple yet very potent rallying point and the movement soon assumed a countrywide mass dimension. The arrest of Nehru in the middle of April led to bitter clashes between mill workers at Budge Budge near Calcutta and the police. The mood of the jute mill workers of Bengal was then quite upbeat, only the previous year they had organised a highly successful general strike in jute mills to beat back the employers’ bid to increase working hours from 54 to 60 hours a week. Calcutta transport workers too waged a militant struggle. A major upsurge was also witnessed at Peshwar in North Western Frontier Province. The city continued to be rocked for ten days on end following the arrest of Badshah Khan (the Frontier Gandhi) and other leaders on 23 April, 1930 leading to the imposition of martial law on May 4. Refusal by the Garhwal regiment led by Chandra Singh Garhwali to open fire on peaceful demonstrators at Peshawar opened up a new possibility of fraternisation between the fighting people and the armed forces. Dock labourers in Karachi and Choolai Mill workers in Madras were also up in arms.
The climax came at Sholapur following Gandhi’s arrest on 4 May. The entire work force in the textile industry went on strike from 7 May onward. Till martial law was clamped down on 16 May, the town remained virtually under workers’ control. Liquor shops were burnt down and police outposts, law courts, the municipal building and the railway station all came under attack. Something like a parallel government seemed to have token over the entire township and if soon became well-known across the country as the celebrated case of the Sholapur Commune.
Meanwhile, revolutionary terrorism was also scaling new heights in Bengal. On 18 April, 1930, the Chittagong (Chattogram in Bengali) group of revolutionaries led by “Masterda” Surya Sen succeeded in capturing the local armoury. They also issued an Independence Proclamation in the name of the Indian Republican Army. Notable in the Chittagong group was the role of women like Preetilata Waddedar and Kalpana Dutt. On 8 December, 1930, the trio of Binoy, Badal and Dinesh carried out a striking raid on the government headquarters in Calcutta’s Writers Building.
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Surya Sen’s Appeal
Dear Soldiers of Revolution,
The great task of Revolution in India has fallen on the Indian Republican Army.
We, in Chittagong. have the honour to achieve the patriotic task of Revolution for fulfilling the aspirations and urge of our nation….
I, Surya Sen, President of the Indian republican army, Chittagong Branch, do hereby proclaim the existing Council of the Republican Army in Chittagong to form itself into a Provisional Revolutionary Government to carry out the following urgent tasks:
1. To defend and maintain the victory gained today;
2. To extend and intensify the armed struggle for National Liberation;
3. To suppress the enemy agent within;
4. To keep the criminals and looters in checks;
5. And to take further course of action that this Provisional Revolutionary Government will decide later.
This Provisional Revolutionary Government expects and demands full allegiance, loyalty and active cooperation from every true son and daughter of Chittagong….
With full confidence in victory in our Holy War of Liberation.
No mercy to the British Bandits! Death to the iraiiors and looters!
Long live Provisional Revolutionary Government!
— Surya Sen made this appeal after the first round of Chittagong action on 18 April, 1930(box end)
From Round Table to Provincial Governments
WHILE the Civil Disobedience Movement drew a massive countrywide response, British colonialists initiated discussions on various aspects of a new constitutional arrangement. The First Round Table Conference (RTC-I) which began in London in January 1931 was boycotted by Gandhi and the Congress. Gandhi in fact assured the nation that this time round there would be no stopping the movement till the goal was reached. Yet it did not take Gandhi long to eat his words. On 5 March, 1931 Gandhi signed a pact with Viceroy Irwin virtually on the lines of RTC-I.
Historical researches have shown that this climbdown had more to do with growing bourgeois pressure for conciliation and constitutional participation than anything else. Gandhi also joined the Second RTC in October 1931, but when nothing came out of it he had to renew the Civil Disobedience Movement in January 1932. The administration was of course quick to arrest all leaders and unleash severe repression. By the second half of 1932, Gandhi beat a retreat and began to concentrate on Harijan welfare. This shift, however, enabled him to foil the British gameplan of introducing a separate electorate for the “untouchables”; he launched a fast unto death and eventually succeeded in securing an agreement between caste Hindu and untouchable leaders which came to be known as the Poona Pact. According to this pact, the joint Hindu electorate stayed, but more seats were reserved for the “untouchables” than were promised by the British under the separate electorate plan.
Gandhi’s emphasis on Harijan welfare enabled the Congress to secure die broad allegiance of this significant social base, a base which stood by the Congress till recently. But on this front too, he confined himself to limited social reforms and largely humanitarian work without opposing the caste system as a whole or touching the basic socio-economic concerns of the so-called untouchables and low caste people. In fact Gandhi combined his pro-Harijan activities with a categorical defence of the reactionary Varnasrama system. Ambedkar strongly differed with him on this score. The social reform movement in Maharashtra launched earlier by Jotiba Phule and Pandita Ramabai was far more advanced. In south India too, the movement against untouchability took on a radical thrust and adopted a higher agenda. In Tamil Nadu, “Periyar” E V Ramaswamy Naicker’s Self-Respect Movement openly denounced Brahmanism, he hailed the Soviet Union and opened his journal, Kudi Arasu (The Republic), to the atheist and socialist writings of Singaravelu, Chettiar. In neighbouring Kerala, the movement of the Ezhava community led by Sri Narayana Guru went beyond the bottom-line of temple-entry rights to wider social reforms.
Meanwhile, the focus of the Congress went on to shift away from mass struggles to participation in elections and provincial governance. This was the period of consolidation of the Indian bourgeoisie. The Great Depression of 1929-32 signified both a crisis as well as an opportunity for Indian capitalists. Old colonial ties in trade and industry loosened a bit; the share of non-traditional items went up in imports as that of textile declined; and with British companies setting up subsidiary units in diverse fields, the industrial map of India spread beyond the Bombay-Ahmedabad region to Bengal and south India. The fledgling Indian bourgeoisie wanted the Congress to switch over from the agitational mode to participation in governance so that it could best exploit the unfolding opportunities.
In August 1935, British Parliament passed the Government of India Act. Though the Act did not meet even the minimum demands raised by the Congress in the course of the Civil Disobedience Movement and RTC negotiations, the party participated in the 1937 elections held on the basis of this new Act. The Congress won absolute majorities in five out of the eleven provinces (Madras, Bihar, Orissa, Central Provinces and United Provinces), but it also succeeded in forming governments in Bombay, North West Frontier Province and eventually in Assam as well.
Congress Rule in Provinces: An Early Pointer
THE twenty-seven months of Congress rule in the provinces served as a clear early pointer to the conservative character of the Congress-led social coalition. A whole set of democratic demands of the working class and the peasantry had already come to be articulated not only by the AITUC and the All India Kisan Sabha (formed in Lucknow in April 1936 under the presidentship of Swami Sahajanand Saraswati) but also in various AICC sessions and by the Bihar and UP PCCs. The Kisan Manifesto of August 1936, for example, demanded abolition of zamindari a graduated tax on agricultural incomes in excess of Rs. 500, cancellation of debts, 50% cut in revenue and rent, full occupancy rights to all tenants, abolition of forced labour and restoration of customary forest rights. The Congress governments in the provinces refused to take any significant step in this direction. Analysts found the chief merit of Congress agrarian legislations to be that “its treatment of landlords was not intolerably severe”.
The tenancy bill proposed by the Bihar government was considerably watered down in the face of landlords’ threat to go on civil disobedience in September 1937 and in three months Azad and Rajendra Prasad would negotiate a secret agreement with landlords in Patna. Statutory tenants in Avadh region of UP were, however, raised to the level of hereditary occupancy raiyats, bakasht lands from which occupancy raiyats were earlier evicted in Bihar were partially restored, grazing fees abolished in Bombay and reduced in Madras.
Even these limited agrarian reforms were forced on the Congress governments by a massive peasant movement. In Bihar, kisans even marched right into the Assembly house and occupied its seats for some time in the first session under the Congress ministry. Sahajanand moved increasingly to the Left and advocated militant struggles with slogans like Danda hamara zindabad (Long live our lathis!). In October 1937, the Kisan Sabha adopted the red flag as its banner; the Comilla conference in May 1937 denounced Gandhian class collaboration and proclaimed agrarian revolution as the ultimate aim and the April 1939 Gaya conference called for unity with landless labourers.
The betrayal was perhaps even more glaring on the working class front. While in Bengal, the Congress Working Committee expressed solidarity with the jute workers who went on a massive general strike from March to May 1937 and denounced the non-Congress Fazlul Haq ministry for adopting repressive measures, similar measures continued to be freely applied by Congress ministries in other provinces. In Assam, during the Digboi oil strike of 1939 against the British-owned Assam Oil Company, the Congress ministry led by N C Bordoloi allowed free use of the war lime Defence of India rules to crush the strike. And in Bombay, the Congress ministry rushed through the Bombay Trades Disputes Act in November 1938 which was far worse than the earlier 1929 version of the Act. It imposed compulsory arbitration thereby making virtually all strikes illegal and raised the prison-penalty for illegal strikes from three months to six months. The Bombay Governor found the Act “admirable” white Nehru found it “on the whole … a good one”. Barring the Gandhian labour leaders of Ahmedabad, the entire trade union movement opposed this draconian Act; 80,000 workers attended a protest rally in Bombay on 6 November addressed among others by Dange, Indulal Yajnik and Ambedkar and the next day the entire province observed a general strike.
India Drawn into the Vortex of Second World War
THE second world war was virtually in the making for quite some time before it actually broke out in late 1939. On 3 September, 1939, the Viceroy unilaterally associated India with Britain’s declaration of war on Germany without even pretending to consult the provincial Indian ministries or the Indian leaders. The Congress had little option to continue in office in this war situation and on 29-30 October Congress ministries resigned in all the eight provinces where they were in power.
But despite popular opposition to the war, the Congress was still not ready for any vigorous anti-war action. The Ramgarh Congress in March 1940 talked of civil disobedience “as soon as the Congress organisation is considered fit enough for the purpose”. Finally in October 1940, Gandhi sanctioned a very restricted individual satyagraha – starting with Vinoba Bhave on 17 October and Nehru on 31 October, Congress leaders were to individually court arrest by making anti-war speeches. This turned out to be by far the weakest and most lacklustre of Gandhian campaigns.
The Communist Party, which remained banned since 1934 and was consequently operating secretly and through mass organisations like AITUC and the Kisan Sabha as well as under the banner of the Congress Socialist Party formed in the mid-30s too opposed the British decision to drag India into the war. To articulate a united Left opposition to the war the CPI also took the initiative to form a Left Consolidation Committee which included Subhas Chandra Bose, Jai Prakash Narayan, PC Joshi, MN Roy, Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, NG Ranga and others with Subhas Bose as its convener.
But the LCC soon broke down as equations underwent a sea-change and diametrically divergent views surfaced among different political trends with Germany invading the Soviet Union on 22 June, 1941. Saving the Soviet Union and defeating fascism became the topmost priority of the communist party, a position which was more or less shared by pro-Nehru sections within the Congress as well. Subhas Bose on the other hand advocated collaborating with the Germany-Japan axis to corner the British government in India. Quite uncharacteristically, this situation found Gandhi striking a very militant posture.
Quit India: Unprecedented Countrywide Upsurge
ON 8 August, 1942, at Gandhi’s behest the Congress Working Committee adopted the famous Quit India resolution calling for “mass struggle on non-violent lines on the widest possible scale”. Anticipating immediate arrest of the Congress leadership, the resolution even asked “every Indian who desires freedom and strives for it … (to) be his own guide”. Gandhi delivered his celebrated “Do or die” speech and for once even went to the extent of saying “if a general strike becomes a dire necessity, I shall not flinch”, Nehru told the session that “It is Gandhiji’s feeling that Japan and Germany will win. Tints feeling unconsciously governs his decision”.
All Congress leaders were arrested and removed by the early morning of August 9. With the British unleashing wholesale repression, almost the entire country exploded in violent protests.
What eventually came to be known as the great Quit India rebellion was thus a largely spontaneous outburst, led in pockets by socialist leaders working underground and local-level Congress activists. Bombay and Calcutta were rocked by continuous strikes. Striking workers clashed with the police in Delhi, and in Patna, control over the city was virtually lost for two days following a major confrontation in front of the Secretariat on 11 August. The Tata steel plant was completely closed down for 13 days from 20 August with the TISCO workers refusing to resume work till a national government was formed. Ahmedabad textile workers were also on strike for no less than three and a half months. As many as 11 B & C Mills workers died in police firing in Madras.
In the second phase of the Quit India Movement the focus shifted to the countryside with students in large numbers fanning out into village India. Communication lines were destroyed on a massive scale and riding on the crest of a powerful peasant upsurge there came into being a number of local “National Governments”, most notably at Tamluk in Midnapur district of Bengal, Satara in Maharashtra and Talcher in Orissa.
The scale and intensity of the upsurge can be assessed from the following official figures. By the end of 1943, 91,836 people had been arrested, 1060 had been killed by police or army firing white 63 policemen died combating the upsurge and 216 defected, almost all of them in Bihar. 208 police outposts, 332 railway stations and 945 post offices had been destroyed or severely damaged and 664 bomb explosions reported, primarily from Bombay.
It must be admitted here that while Gandhi correctly sensed and reflected the restless mood of the masses, the Communist Party found itself completely out of tune. The ban on the party was lifted in July 1942 and in May 1943 the party held its First Congress. But the specific backdrop of the war situation hung so heavily on the party that the First Congress could do little to prepare the party for a really effective intervention. On the working class front, the communists opposed all strikes during this period and Comrade B T Randive presented a “Report on Production” to the First Congress. The report almost mistook colonial India for the socialist USSR and went to the absurd length of making the following paralysing formulation about the role of the working class: “Their (the workers’) patriotism and our propaganda must teach them that production is the sacred trust given by the nation, and only by executing that trust in spite of all obstacles that they are able to appeal to the nation for improvement in labour conditions and legitimately demand better standards of pay, fair wages, etc., and that only thus do they become one with the nation”.
Glory and Shame of the Tumultuous forties
FOR the Congress, Quit India was the last exercise in mass struggle. As the war came to a victorious end against fascism, British imperialism found itself considerably weakened. To prevent any repetition of a mass upsurge on the Quit India scale and best preserve their long-term interests in India, Britain quickly initiated the process of negotiations for the eventual transfer of power. Indian capitalists were also in great hurry to have an early transfer primarily because they were afraid that delay would only raise the profile of the working class and the communists in the future alignment of forces in free India. The fear of a revolution was quite real both for British imperialists and their would-be Indian successors.
But with the Congress having long got isolated from the broad Muslim masses in Bengal and Punjab and the Muslim League having consolidated its position through successive rounds of negotiations – of course, with generous encouragement from the British pastmasters of the divide-and-rule strategy – the logic of the negotiations led inexorably to the carving out of a Muslim-majority Pakistan. Every Congress leader could see this happening and it was ironic that Gandhi, the man who was known all along as the “dictator of the Congress” and whose greatest forte was his magical ability to arouse and control the masses, found himself cast away as a lonely dissenter by the cruel turn of history.
Perhaps the only way Partition could have been avoided was by changing the very terms of discourse and the balance of forces. Such an alternative was not historically impossible and the series of communist-led mass upsurges did brilliantly hold out such a promise. After the ill-conceived isolation of 1942, communists were soon back in mass action in a big way. With exemplary zeal and dedication, the Communist Party organised massive relief operations in the wake of the severe 1943 famine. Mention must be made here of the excellent role played in this relief work as well as in all subsequent mass upsurges by the communist-led progressive cultural activists of the Indian People’s Theatre Association.
In an increasingly communally surcharged situation when almost all established leaders were busy angling for their own loaves of power, the working people marching and fighting under the great red banner were the only force to uphold the ideals of communal harmony and secularism, selfless sacrifice and progressive anti-imperialist nationalism.
INA Trials and the Great Naval Mutiny of Bombay
ON 21 October, 1943, when the Second World War had nearly entered its last phase, Subhas Chandra Bose issued his famous Delhi Chalo call from Japanese-controlled Singapore. He announced the formation of the Azad Hind Government and the Indian National Army, the latter had rallied about 20,000 of the 60,000 Indian prisoners of war in Japan. Between March and June 1944 the INA made its brief entry into India, laying siege to Imphal along with Japaneestroops. But this campaign ended in an utter military failure even though it had a great psychological impact on the popular Indian mind.
In November 1945 British rulers began public trial of INA soldiers in Delhi’s Red Fort. This provoked a very powerful and determined wave of protests in Calcutta. On 20 November, students took out nightlong procession demanding release of INA prisoners and when two students were killed in police firing, thousands of taxi drivers, tram workers and corporation employees joined the students. Pitched battles were fought on Calcutta streets on 22-23 November leaving 33 people killed in police firing. Between 11 and 13 February, Calcutta was shaken by a second wave of protests when Abdul Rashid of INA was sentenced to seven years’ rigorous imprisonment 84 people were killed and 300 injured during these three days of street battle.
While Calcutta exploded in protest over the INA trials, Bombay was rocked by the heroic naval mutiny. The sequence of events had a close resemblance to the Black Sea Fleet mutiny in the Russian revolution of 1905 which has been immortalised by the great Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein in his all-time classic Battleship Potemkin. In India there has been no film on the Bombay mutiny, but playwright director Utpal Dutt did pay tribute to the great naval fighters in his inspiring play Kallol in the 60s.
On 18 February, 1946, ratings in the Bombay signalling school Talwar went on hunger-strike against bad food and racist insults. The strike soon spread to Castle and Fort Barracks on shore and 22 ships in Bombay harbour raised the Congress, League and Communist flags on the mastheads of the rebel fleet. The Naval Central Strike Committee combined issues like better food and equal pay for white and Indian sailors with the demands of release of INA and other political prisoners and withdrawal of Indian troops from Indonesia. On 21 February, fighting broke out at Castle Barracks when ratings tried to break through the armed encirclement. By 22 February the strike had spread to naval bases all over the country involving no less than 78 ships, 20 shore establishments and 20,000 ratings.
The Bombay unit of CPI, supported by Congress Socialist leaders like Aruna Asaf Ali and Achyut Patwardhan organised a general strike on 22 February and despite Congress and League opposition 30,000 workers struck work, almost all mills were closed and according to official figures 228 people were killed and 1046 injured in street fighting. Senior Congress leaders only intervened to end the mutiny. On 23 February, Patel succeeded in persuading the ratings to surrender on the assurance that their demands would be conceded and nobody would be victimised. But the assurance was soon forgotten with Patel pointing out that “discipline in the Army cannot be tampered with”, Nehru emphasising the need to curb “the wild outburst of violence” and Gandhi condemning the ratings for setting bad “a unbecoming example for India”.
The Great Working Class Actions of July 1946
1946 also saw a massive wave of working class struggles and peasant insurgency crossing all previous records. The strike-wave this year recorded 1629 stoppages involving 1,941,948 workers. And with government employees too throwing in their full weight, strikes increasingly became all-India affairs. Most significant in this context was the July strike of postal and telegraph employees. On July 11, 1946, Hie Postman Lower Grade Staff Union went on an indefinite strike. The All India Telegraph Union too joined in. By July 21, posts and telegraph employees all over Bengal and Assam also threw in their lot. Bombay and Madras observed solidarity industrial strikes on July 22 and 23 respectively. On July 29, general strike was observed in Bengal and Assam.
The same day, Calcutta witnessed a massive rally, which has perhaps had very few parallels since in terms of spontaneous mass involvement, firm in its belief that “this historic general strike has marked the beginning of a new chapter of unity and fighting consciousness in the labour movement of the country”. The trike wave continued in 1947 with Calcutta tram workers striking work for 85 days. Kanpur, Coimbatore and Karachi also emerged as prominent centres of working class action.
It is rather painful to believe that following the Muslim League’s call for Direct Action on 16 August, 1946, the city of Calcutta would also set in motion a disastrous chain of communal killings. With rival underworld gangs battling it out with unbridled ferocity, some 4,000 people had already been killed and 10,000 injured in Calcutta by August 19. As would almost always happen in communal killings in India ever since, more Muslims were killed in Calcutta than Hindus. Patel would cynically write to Cripps, “In Calcutta the Hindus had the best of it. But that is no comfort”.
Tebhaga, Punnapra-Vayalar, Telengana …
THIS was also the peak period for the Communist-led peasant movement. Soon after the Calcutta communal killings of August, in September 1946, the Bengal unit of Kisan Sabha launched the popular tebhaga agitation demanding two-thirds crop share for the sharecropper. North Bengal emerged as the storm centre of this militant and immensely popular peasant upsurge. Apart from Thakurgaon sub-division of Dinajpur and neighbouring areas of Jalpaiguri, Rangpur and Malda districts of North Bengal, the tebhaga movement also acquired great depth in Mymensingh (Kishoreganj), Midnapur (Mahisadal, Sutahata and Nandigram) and 24 Parganas (Kakdwip) districts in the rest of Bengal.
In the Travancore-Cochin belt of Kerala, communists had already developed a strong base among coir factory workers, fishermen, toddy-tappers and agricultural labourers. In 1946 as the rulers of this princely slate started toying with the idea of introducing the so-called American model of presidential system communists vowed to throw the American model into the Arabian sea. Severe repression was unleashed on communist activist in Alleppey region. Against this backdrop a political general strike began in the Alleppey-Shertalai area from 22 October and on October 24, a partially successful raid was carried out on the Pimnapra police station. Martial law was clamped down on 25 October and on 27 October, the armed forces stormed the volunteer headquarters at Vayalar near Shertalai after A veritable bloodbath According lo conservative estimates, at least 800 people were killed in this rather short-lived Punnapra-Vayalar uprising.
If Punnapra-Vayalar was short-lived, Telengana, lasting from July 1946 to October 1951, provided the classic example of protracted communist-led peasant guerrilla war. The uprising began on 4 July 1946 when the henchmen of one of the biggest and most oppressive Telangana landlords killed a village militant, Doddi Komarayya in Jangaon taluka of Nalgonda district who had been trying to defend a poor washer-woman’s small piece of land. Spreading from the Jangaon, Suryapet and Huzurnagar talukas of Nalgonda, the flames of peasant resistance soon engulfed the neighbouring Warangal and Khammam districts.
Armed guerrilla squads began to take shape from early 1947 in the face of brutal repression. The struggle reached its zenith between August 1947 and September 1948. At its peak, the Telengana uprising covered three million people in 3,000 villages spread over 16,000 square miles. There were 10,000 village defence volunteers and 2,000 regular squad members. Like tebhaga, Telengana too had a high degree of women’s participation which made a signal contribution to the movement’s overall impact. In his account of the Telengana struggle, P Sundarayya, who was one of its key leaders, has described the great emancipating and multi-dimensional impact of the movement particularly in the liberated areas, ranging from implementation of basic land reforms and betterment in the conditions of the rural poor to improvement in the status of women and spread of progressive social and cultural values. But most importantly, Telengana pulsated with a tremendous revolutionary spirit and symbolised the first major and comprehensive application of revolutionary communist strategy in India.
Telengana also held an accurate mirror to the actual nature of the transition that took place in 1947. While an oppressed peasantry continued to fight for thoroughgoing land reforms and complete overthrow of feudalism without which a predominantly agricultural country like India could never have real freedom, the Congress government banned the Communist Party and rushed in its army to quell the rebellion in September 1948. According to a conservative estimate at least 4,000 communist fighters and peasant militants were killed in the course of the Telengana uprising and at least another 10,000 subjected to indescribable physical torture, many of whom eventually succumbed to death.
Having already allowed the country to be partitioned on communal lines, the “Iron Man” of modern India, Sardar Patel embarked on his mission to integrate a partitioned India. The powerful State People’s Movement and uprisings like Punnapra-Vayalar and Telengana had already shaken the foundation of the 600-odd princely states Patel completed the job of integrating these states by offering lucrative privy purses to the “dispossessed” princes. Several members of this princely tribe were also respectfully accommodated in the emerging dispensation of power and privileges as Governors, Ministers and “Dignitaries” with diverse designations.
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Impressions 1946
There’s rebellion today
Rebellion on every side,
And I’m here
Recording its daily diary,
No-one has ever seen
Such rebellion,
Waves of defiance
Swelling in every direction;
All of you, come down
From your castles in the air –
Can you it?
A new history
Is being written by strikes,
Its covers engraved in blood.
Those who are daily despised
And downtrodden
Look – today they are all prepared
Swiftly moving forward together;
And I too am there behind them,
That’s why I’m carrying on
Recording this daily diary –
There’s rebellion today!
Revolution on every side!!
– Sukanta Bhattacharya
(1926-1947)
India Today : Mounting Challenges Beckon Us
If the independence struggle had any economic promise, its planks undoubtedly were: agrarian reforms, industrialisation and guaranteed livelihood for the working people. In the first two decades after independence the state did carry out a loose implementation of zamindari abolition in lieu of hefty compensation followed by a package of land ceiling and tenancy legislations. This was accompanied by an active pursuit of a kind of state-capitalist policy to facilitate the growth of an Indian capitalist class which would however never sever its umbilical cord with imperialism. But today even those limited land reforms are being reversed and the industries are being handed over on a platter to the Indian monopolies and foreign multinationals. And a secure livelihood still remains the basic dream for millions of toiling Indians, the dream that often lies buried in unreported starvation deaths and ‘successful’ suicide bids.
As for secularism and democracy, the two much-touted comerstones of our Constitution, where the chariot that began its journey in the midst of wholesale communal killings and systematic anti-communist state repression has reached today in its golden jubilee year is there for the whole world to see. Toppling of the first-ever communist-led government in Kerala in the 50s, detention of a vendible war on the CPI(ML) movement in the wake of the Naxalbari uprising, nineteen months of unmitigated terror under the banner of Internal Emergency, the November 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom in the capital, demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya under state protection and the subsequent spree of anti-Muslim communal killings are some of the milestones we can and must never forget.
Finally, whatever has happened to the banner of nationalism and the goal of making India claim her pride of plate in the comity of nations? In the hands of our ruling classes nationalism or “national unity and integrity”, to use Hie official catchphrase, has long been reduced to a slogan to be invoked only when India goes to war with Pakistan or China – we did that four times in five decades – or with her own people in the North-East, Kashmir or Punjab. The land of nearly one billion people and thousands of years of rich history has been reduced to a virtual non-entity in the international arena.
The farce is now being made complete with the Sangh Parivar trying to steal the worm-out mantle of nationalism from a beleaguered Congress. It is no secret that the saffron brigade’s only role in the freedom movement was to render loyal service to the Indian capitalists and landlords and to the imperialist gameplan of divide-and-rule by organising communal riots and at times working as downright agents and informers of British imperialism.
And if at all there was a moral core in the Gandhian fabric of national awakening, how mercilessly has it been torn asunder by the hundreds of scams that seem to be the only flowers blossoming these days in the paradise of Indian democracy!
It is against this backdrop of bourgeois betrayal and bankruptcy that the working class will have to step in and assert itself. It is evident that despite the heroic role and matchless sacrifice of the working people, the leadership of the independence movement remained in the hands of the conservative coalition of capitalists and landlords and in the name of independence it actually struck a deal with imperialism. This course of national movement now seems to have reached its logical dead-end. Yesterday’s patriotic pretenders have today turned into outright betrayers and traitors.
The need of the hour is obviously to cry a hall and reverse this course. And it clearly calls for asserting working class leadership and establishing the supremacy of an altogether different social coalition with the worker-peasant alliance at its core. What India needs today is a Second War of Independence, a second war in which the working class and its genuine allies will march at the forefront of the nation with the red flag crimson with the blood of our great heroes and martyrs. Let the glorious legacy of the Indian people’s great fight for freedom inspire us in this direction. Let us draw our lessons from the achievements as well as failures of our predecessors and rise to the occasion. Inquilab Zindabad!
