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A Pioneer

Suniti Kumar Ghosh: His Contributions to Indian Historical Studies–II

Amit Bhattacharyya

What was Gandhi’s Real Plan?

Now there was an added fire in the statements and speeches of Gandhi, Patel and Prasad. At a press meet dated 14 July Gandhi declared that “This is an open rebellion of a non-violent character” and stressed “that there is no room for negotiations in the proposal for withdrawal”. He told the press that he would not court imprisonment, Courting imprisonment “is too soft a thing”. “If dragged into jail”, he could fast. His intention was “to make the thing as short as possible”. He said that “free India will make common cause with the Allies”. But he was not sure whether free India would take part in militarism or choose to go the non-violent way”. He declared that it would be his “biggest movement”. (CWG, LXXVI, 294-7, 298-9, 303, emphasis added cited in Ghosh, p.224-25).

Patel’s speeches too, Ghosh as points out, were breathing fire. At different public meetings in Gujarat and Bombay, he declaimed that it was Gandhi’s last struggle and it would be “short and swift”. (Shankardass, Vallabhabhai Patel, 244; see also Prasad, Autobiography, 532).

In the new situation, as S.K. Ghosh writes, “they were not squeamish about violence. Gandhi came to regard the cutting of telegraph and telephone wires and removing rails or fishplates as non-violent if the motives were not to injure innocent people (Ibid, 535-6, emphasis added). Congress president Azad impressed on prominent Congressmen from different parts of the country that, if the Government put behind bars the Congress leaders, “the people would be free to adopt any method, violent or non-violence, to oppose the violence of the Government in every possible way”.(Azad, op.cit, 81, emphasis added, cited in Ghosh, p,225). At a press conference at Ahmedabad on 28 July, Patel said:

“All the struggles launched by the Congress so far were of a restricted character. This time the movement would be unrestricted… Civil war and anarchy may occur during the struggle but the movement will not be stopped for it”.

Ghosh observes that this then became the refrain of the speeches and statements of the Congress leaders. Formally wedded to non-violence, the leaders did not rule out violence (Ibid, p.225).

The AICC met at Bombay on 7 and 8 August and adopted a resolution demanding that Britain should quit India.

The pertinent question is: Did Gandhi and his associates really seek a confrontation with the British imperialists to achieve independence? Or, was Gandhi’s ‘Quit India’ a threat which would suffice to frighten the British imperialists and the United Nations on the eve of the anticipated Japanese invasion to come to a settlement with them?

Ghosh argues: “If the Congress leaders were really serious about a struggle, it is difficult to explain why no concrete program of action was placed before the people, who were asked to ‘do or die’? (p.226). As Nehru wrote: “There was no direction, no program”. “So, neither he [Gandhi] nor the Congress Working Committee”, as Nehru points out, “issued any kind of directions, public or private, except that people should be prepared for all developments, and should, in any event, adhere to the policy of peaceful and non-violent action” (FICCI, Correspondence and Relevant Documents relating to Important Questions Dealt with by the Federation during the year 1943-44, New Delhi, 1944, pp.110, 245-6 cited in Ghosh, p.226). They also made “no arrangements for the functioning of the Congress after they had been removed from the scene”. S. Gopal hits the nail on its head by pointing out that “it was almost as if the Working Committee wished to escape to prison and to avoid decision…” (S. Gopal, op.cit, cited in Ghosh, ibid.)

Ghosh asks, “Did Gandhi and his associates expect that the unorganized, disunited and unarmed masses without any central leadership to guide them would be able to win in a struggle with the armed forces of the Allied powers and liberate themselves”? What was the situation? As Ghosh reminds us, the Muslims were mostly hostile. Jinnah issued a statement that the CWC’s resolution of 14 July was intended to blackmail the British and force them to fulfill the congress objective of establishing a “Hindu raj”, “thereby throwing the Muslims and other minorities and interests at the mercy of the Congress raj” (CWG, LXXVI, p.368, fn.2). The CPI. Which had some hold on the working class in Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Kanpur, etc. had declared that the imperialist war had changed into a worldwide anti-fascist war and that it was the task of the Indian people to support the Allies and not take any step that would weaken the defence against Japan. Even the Congress leadership itself was disunited.

Commenting on the Congress leaders’ refusal to place any programme of action, D.D. Kosambi, has said that though they knew that arrest was imminent and though most of them “had prepared for the event by setting their family affairs and personal finances in excellent order”, not one of them “ever thought of a plan of action for the Congress as a whole”. What does this refusal to draw up a plan of action signify? Kosambi sums it up in his own brilliant way stating that this refusal “was quite brilliant, no matter how futile it may have seemed on a national revolutionary scale… If the British won the war, it was quite clear that not favoured Japan; if on the other hand (and they had only to attack immediately in force for the whole of the defence system to crumble) they could certainly not accuse the congress of having helped the British” (D.D. Kosambi, Exasperating Essays, pp.16-17).

The reality is that though Gandhi had been declaring that it was an “open rebellion”, that there was “no room left for negotiations”, “no question of last chance”, he actually left the field open for negotiations. Instead, on 15 July, the day after the Working Committee adopted a “Quit India” resolution, he, as Ghosh points out, sent his disciple Mira Behn(daughter of a former British Admiral), to see that Viceroy, the Commander-in-Chief and General Harley (TOP, II, pp.407-08; Mahadev Desai to Amrit Kaur, 15 July 1942, Wikenden Report, p.236). The Viceroy refused to see her since Gandhi was talking of an open rebellion. Gandhi’s emissary assured Laithwaite, Viceroy’s private secretary, that Gandhi “would do all he could to guide the movement on non-violent lines” (Ghosh, India and the RajII, p.229). However, the British government refused to entertain the Congress claim.

On receiving Mira Behn’s report, Gandhi’s secretary Desai issued what has been describes as “a most significant statement”. It said “that there appeared to be some misunderstanding about Gandhi’s intentions” and that “it was not correct to say that Gandhiji had decided to launch an open non-violent rebellion against the British” (AbulKalam Azad, India Wins Freedom, Madras 1988, p.81).

Although Gandhi preferred to play for time, the Viceroy and his Council refused to wait. Gandhi and almost all members of the Working Committee and other prominent Congressmen were put under arrest in the early hours of August.

Immediately after arrest, Gandhi, as Ghosh observed, “became a sadder and wiser man” (Ibid, p.231). That morning Azad found him “looking very depressed”. Azad observed: “I have never seen him looking so dejected… Now that his calculations had proved wrong, he was uncertain as to what he should do”. (Azad, op.cit., p.85).

However, as a BBC official remarked: “The arrest of the leaders had the usual effect of enshrining them once again as national heroes”.

The Quit India Struggle
The ‘Quit India’ struggle was described by Linlithgow in a cable to Prime Minister Winston Churchill as by far the most serious rebellion since that of 1857, the gravity and extent of which we have so far concealed from the world for reasons of military security” (TOP, II,p.853).There is a detailed description of it in the book.

S.K. Ghosh observed: “It was a rebellion of the people, mainly a peasant revolt in which leaders had no role to play for some time except that they had popularized a slogan–‘Quit India’–coined by an an American journalist. After some time, they played a negative role; they did whatever they could to liquidate it”.

When the Congress leaders took refuge in the Aga Khan Palace or prisons and other Congressmen were arrested and their organization was banned, students on strike, people observed hartals, held meetings and demonstrations and took out processions defying government orders almost all over India. They tried to hoist Congress flags atop government buildings and there were clashes everywhere between the demonstrators and police leading to deaths in many areas.

The most common forms of struggle were attacks on centres of British power like police stations and treasuries and on means of communications such as railway stations and post offices and cutting of telegraph and telephone wires–all intended to paralyze the government. There were pitched battles in many places. The railways most affected were East Indian, Bengal, North-Western, Madras and South Marhatta. There was hardly any non-rent or no revenue movement. It was an entirely new leadership thrown up by struggles and mostly unknown before. Students, Forward Bloc, CSP activists and Kisan Sabha workers in some places played an active part.

The AICC members, Congress Socialists, Gandhians and others who escaped arrest, formed a central organizing body and tried to function in the name of the Congress. It drew up a programme of action which endorsed violent attacks on symbols of government authority, sabotage and capture of power. When early in 1943, Gandhi condemned violence and sabotage activities, there was a split in the body. SuchetaKripalini and other Gandhians, withdrew from the body.

Of the battles that took place in urban areas, Patna’s reached a great intensity. When a big procession of students on 11 august was fired upon by the police and seven students were killed and many wounded, there was a revolt of the people. Next day, there was no trace of British rule. Urban proletarians replaced students as leaders of the revolt. Similar developments took place also in Chimur, Bombay, Pune, Ahmedabad, Ballia, Calcutta and Balurghat.

The struggle became more intense in a number of rural areas. In the Balasore district in Orissa, the people revolted and braved police firing to wipe out the authority of the government for some time. In the Jeypore estate (now Koraput), and Talchar, firings and even machine-gunning from the air were resorted to put down the revolts. In the Madras Presidency, several police stations were destroyed. A parallel government led by the Congress socialists functioned for some months in Ahmedabad, drawing its support from the Hindu middle classes of the city (Ghosh, II, pp. 232-34).

Medinipur in South-West Bengal with its long tradition of militant of militant anti-imperialist struggle of the peasants and of the national revolutionaries was one of the few places in India where the people suffered the cruelest oppression by the government as also by Nature.

Even before the ‘Quit India’ call, the people of Medinipur (especially of the Tamluk and Kanthi sub-divisions) launched struggles against the government’s ‘denial policy’, procurement and removal of rice and paddy from the district.

The Congress committees in Kanthi and Tamluk were reorganized, ridding themselves of those who strictly adhered to non-violence, and set up War Councils with Forward Bloc and other Congress representatives. Training camps for volunteers were set up in Tamluk sub-division and a Mukti Bahini (Liberation Army) and a BhaginiSena(Army of Sisters) were organized. Important roads were dug up at places, culverts were blown up, telegraph and telephone lines were cut off and poles uprooted on the night of 28 September by thousands of villagers according to plan in the Tamluk sub-division. Next day began mass attacks on police stations for the capture of the entire area.

While leading a large contingent for the capture of the police headquarters at Tamluk, Matangini Hazra, an intrepid lady of 73, fell down along with nine others to police bullets(Freedom Struggle in Tamluk I: Sarbadhinayak, 26-28, cited in Ghosh, ibid, p.235). Several police stations were captured. British Indian troops were rushed in, assisted by aeroplanes, ready to drop bombs, but the people fought on.

No doubt, it was a real people’s war. Except most Muslims and a few communists, the entire people including Krishak Samiti activists supported the struggle. Parallel administrations were set up. To crush this struggle, the army and the police set new records in savagery: “It was a tale of mass arrests, killing, destruction of homes, raping, even gang-raping, of women, as well as of heroic resistance” (Ghosh, ibid, p.235).

To make the situation worse, a fierce, a fierce cyclone swept over Kanthi and Tamluk on the night of 16-17 October leaving a train of devastation. Tens of thousands perished; there was neither food nor drinking water for the survivors; and epidemics followed. The news was censored and not allowed to reach the outside world. And when the people suffered from the ravages of the cyclone, the raids by the combined forces continued. There was a setback in Kanthi after December 1942.

The TamraliptaJatiya Sarkar (National Government of Takluk) was set up on 17 December to resist the marauders including decoits, arrange for relief and rehabilitation of cyclone-affected people, preserve law and order and administer justice. Biplabi, a journal they had been bringing out, became the organ of the Jatiya Sarkar.

The Jatiya Sarkar decided to eliminate local informers. It had to fight the alien government as well as local landlords, the rich landowners and unscrupulous merchants whom they had to force to unearth their hoarded stocks of food and whose profiteering at the cost of the lives of the people they had to curb. The requisitioned stocks were distributed among the people and the consumption per capita was rationed. As expected, their actions came to be openly condemned by the ‘votaries of non-violence’. Hitesh RanjanSanyal observed:

“As a matter of fact, the Quit India Movement of Tamluk and Kanthi had outgrown the Congress and for that matter all other political parties. The veterans of the past satyagrahas had submitted to the newly emerging forces which represented the mood and aspirations of the common people” (Hitesh Ranjan Sanyal, ‘The Quit India Movement in Medinipur Diastrict’ in G. Pandey, The Indian Nation in 1942, p.68, cited in Ghosh, ibid).

Despite utmost efforts, the British rulers could not crush the people’s war. The person who came to their rescue was, as many times before, the ‘apostle of non-violence’ himself. S.K. Ghosh observes: But the rebellion that the forces of the alien raj could not defeat, was killed by Gandhi’s injunctions about non-violence and denunciations of secrecy and sabotage activities”. He personally toured the area and at the end of august 1944, the leaders of the struggle decided to call it off from 1 September, disband the Jatiya Sarkarand the militia and suspend the publication of Biplabi (Ghosh, p.236).

Anti-colonial movements of similar nature, but not of the same magnitude took place also in Rampurhat of Birbhum, West Bengal, Satara, East Khandesh, Pune, Kolaba, Broach, Belgaum and Surat in Maharashtra.

The Quit India revolt, mainly a peasant rebellion in widely scattered places, revealed the potentialities of the Indian people. As Ghosh points out, “it showed that the main force of an anti-imperialist democratic revolution in a country like India is the peasantry. What ensured its defeat was the lack of a revolutionary theory and a well-knit organization” (Ibid, pp.237-38).

[To be concluded]

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Vol 57, No. 29, Jan 12 - 18, 2025