There were other unpleasant developments. Gandhi was quite anxious to fulfil the terms of the agreement with Irwin and instructed Congress Committees to do so and to see that land revenue and rent were paid by the peasants.(32) Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and, to a minor extent, the NWFP caused much worry to Gandhi, Patel and Nehru. In Gujarat, according to the terms of the Gandhi-Irwin agreement, the Patidar peasants, whose movable and immovable properties had been confiscated during the Civil Disobedience Movement and sold away for a song, would not get them back; the mukhis or village patels who had resigned their jobs in response to Gandhi's call and had been replaced would not be reinstated. Gujarat was sullen and all Gandhi's exhortations and promises to redress the wrongs failed to cheer the people up. Gandhi exhorted "the Satyagraha Farmer" in the name of "dharma" to pay up the land revenue "even at the cost of some hardship to ourselves".(33)
Emerson, the Home Secretary, appreciated that "Gandhi himself had done his utmost to get the revenue-payers to play the game.... There seemed to be no difference in principle between the Government of India, the local Government and Mr Gandhi."(34) In April Lord Willingdon succeeded Irwin as Viceroy of India. The raj was relentless in extorting, even by using force, not only current revenue but also arrears at a time when prices of agricultural produce had fallen steeply and when the peasants had suffered greatly during the civil disobedience movement. Vallabhbhai Patel wrote to Nehru from Ahmedabad: "The opponent is firing heavily and the Congress here is completely out of action. Poor peasantry believing in Bapu's word paid all their current dues. Now they are being prosecuted for past arrears."(35)
Uttar Pradesh, Nehru's province, was another headache for the leaders. When Nehru informed Gandhi of large-scale evictions of tenants because of their inability to pay high rents on account of the catastrophic fall in prices of agricultural products, Gandhi advised him to seek an interview with U.P. Governor Malcolm Hailey. He added: "We must not be in any shape or form, directly or indirectly, party to the breach [of the settlement].... Government and the Congress are supposed to be co-operating with each other. Earlier, on 23 May, after seeing the U.P. Governor and prominent talukdars of U.P., Gandhi issued a manifesto. While describing the governor as sympathetic and suggesting some remission in certain districts, he asked the statutory and non-occupancy tenants to pay 50 per cent of the rent and the occupancy tenants 75 per cent. He advised them to pay more if they were able to do so. He said: "Congressmen cannot, we do not, seek to injure the zamindars.... When millions become untruthful and violent, it will mean self-destruction. You will therefore suffer injury without retaliation."(36)
"Forcible collections" and "wholesale ejectments" of tenants from their lands led to a situation which, as Nehru said, "in most other countries would have resulted in a big peasant rising". "I think", Nehru added, "it was very largely due to the efforts of the Congress which kept the tenants from indulging in violent activity. But there was an abundance of violence against them." In a "Note on U.P. Rent and Revenue Situation", dated 18 April 1931, Nehru wrote that Congress leaders like him were trying to bring under control the peasants "embittered by economic misfortune and by harassment from the landlords and sometimes the police". "In spite of this great provocation however", wrote Nehru, "the peasantry has been generally kept in control and the lapses on their part, regrettable and unfortunate as they were, have been few."(37)
The raj was "hopeful, in the words of the U.P. Governor, of `being able to utilise his [Gandhi's] influence' in the solution of rural difficulties".(38)
In mid-June, Gandhi was advising Mohanlal Saksena, an important Congress leader of U.P.:"On your side it is all well, so long as you hold the kisans in check. But Jawaharlal's presence must now ease the situation. He has no difficulty with the kisans and restraining them." Nehru, after regretting the "great hardships" and "miserable condition", chided the kisans of Allahabad for having resorted to violence at some places. He asked them to "remember, whether the zamindars ill-treat you or not, you will not ill-treat them". He exhorted the peasants who were evicted from their lands and homes, harassed in the law-court, forced into debt-slavery or oppressed in other ways to suffer all such persecutions "patiently and courageously".(39) He decried every kind of resistance by the kisans -- violent or non-violent. He was opposed to peasant panchayats(40) deciding civil and criminal cases, imposing fines and advising social boycott. While he claimed that he was "a greater socialist than perhaps others", he assured Raja Rampal Singh, a big landlord: "I do not want to accelerate a class war between the zamindars and the tenants."(41) But in the fierce class war that was raging he, like Gandhi and other big Congress leaders, played a role that helped the zamindars to suppress the tenants.
But despite them, "peasants in many places", to quote Gyanendra Pandey, "took matters into their own hands and resisted oppression in whatever way they could". There was "agitation among groups of peasants in districts from Farrukhabad to Azamgarh. Violent clashes occurred in several districts where the Congress was not strong enough to bring about `compromise' solutions and `discipline' the peasants. In June-July 1931 the situation was considered particularly dangerous in Bara Banki, Rae Bareli, Unnao and parts of Allahabad, and in Bara Banki gatherings of armed villagers were reported to have become common."(42)
Naturally, Nehru heartily disliked the `extremist' peasant leaders like Kalka Prasad, who were preaching `no rent', organizing peasants on militant lines and helping to develop what was "almost an insurrectionary situation" (to borrow Pandey's expression). Nehru tried by all means to isolate them, and the raj on its part co-operated by trying to put them behind bars. In order to suppress the peasant struggle against the agrarian system and the colonial state machinery, led by Baba Ramchandra, Kalka Prasad and other militant leaders, the Nehrus set up in May 1931 a separate Kisan Sangh as a Congress wing flaunting the creed of non-violence with Sitla Sahai, close to the Congress leadership, as its president. The Congress leadership took disciplinary action against those who "offended against the creed [of non-violence] or otherwise misbehaved [sic] themselves". To quote Gyanendra Pandey, the "Intelligence Department observed in October 1931 that all had been quiet in Rae Bareli since Nehru's visit in June.... What, however, is astonishing is the amount of unexpected (and indeed unrecognized) aid that the regime received from the conscious actions of an ostensibly `radical' Congress leadership."(43)
Quiet prevailed in Rae Bareli but several other districts remained unquiet. Gandhi and Nehru also appealed to the government to be reasonable and grant certain concessions. They sought to play the role of intermediaries between the government and the peasants, but the raj would not allow them to play that role. The raj was remorseless. In U.P., it not only helped the landlords to extort as much rent from the tenants as possible but also imposed in certain areas a punitive tax of 20 per cent of the rent. "Brutality of combined Government-landlord action" was a feature.(44)
The situation became a desperate one. On 15 October the Allahabad District Congress Committee was forced to seek permission from the UPPCC to start a no-rent and no-revenue campaign, much to the anguish of Nehru, who greatly regretted the step in his communications to the Chief Secretary, U.P. Government and the Private Secretary to the Viceroy.(45)
On 16 October Nehru wrote to Gandhi, who was then in London:
"It is really deplorable to what a pass we have reduced the tenants largely because of the advice we gave. They followed the advice for a while and talked of paying 8 annas and 12 annas... but... they were proceeded against and finally ejected. Meanwhile of course there were all manner of acts of oppression.... Not only were they ejected from their lands but they were sent to prison and fined for trespass."
On the same day he sent two cables -- one to Gandhi, informing him of the Allahabad DCC's request for permission, and the other to Congress president Patel, wanting the Working Committee to consider the situation. Gandhi authorized him to take whatever steps he thought necessary. U.P. Governor Hailey "felt that Jawaharlal was bluffing, and that the telegraphic correspondence with Gandhi was as much meant for the official censor as for themselves".(46)
Though armed with Gandhi's permission as well as the Congress president's, Nehru said on 23 October at the Allahabad District Kisan Conference: "Satyagraha is the only effective weapon which could allay the distress, but that weapon has to be laid aside for the moment on account of the truce. The Congress therefore is helpless...." But, despite his advice, the Kisan Conference resolved that the tenants of the whole district would resort to a no-rent campaign if the government refused to accept their demands. So, on 28 November, Nehru conveyed his "deep regrets" to the Viceroy that the Congress had been "compelled to advise the peasantry in Allahabad district to withhold payment of rent and revenue till relief is obtained", but assured him "that we tried our utmost to avoid it [this course] and to find a way out of the difficulty".(47)
Nehru was in the somewhat difficult situation of a person who must save his face before the people for the sake of his political career and must at the same time collaborate with the imperialist-feudal combine and invoke `ideological' and political `principles' to thwart any peasant resistance. In a statement to the press on the U.P. Instigation and Emergency Powers Ordinance of 14 December, issued by the raj to stamp out all peasant resistance, Nehru congratulated himself and his colleagues on the work accomplished by them: "...I make bold to say that there is no instance anywhere of an agrarian movement on such a vast scale and accompanied by so much suffering and repression remaining peaceful to such a remarkable extent. This has solely been due to our insistence on non-violence."(48)
Writing in the Communist International, a contributor correctly observed:
"Gandhi and his inseparable pandit Jawaharlal Nehru... constantly called on the oppressed and enslaved India to give up any idea of violence, thus clearing a path for themselves through the mass movement to negotiations with the Viceroy and to the Round Table Conference."(49)
The North-West Frontier Province, where rebellion was widespread, was another province which Gandhi tried to bring under control. With the restoration of British rule in the Peshawar city on 4 May 1930, violent anti-imperialist struggle engulfed different districts including the tribal areas. A British author wrote:
"For the first time in nearly a century of British rule has the Frontier capital been attacked and threatened, not by a foreign enemy, but by tribesmen, in theory subjects of the British Crown. Never in history has sedition been allowed such complete freedom to paralyse the authority."(50)
Machine-gunning, bombing from the air -- dropping as many as 6,000 bombs in a single day -- and so on were resorted to to quell the revolt. More of it later.
After signing the agreement with Irwin, Gandhi sought the government's permission to proceed to the NWFP to restore peace there, sent his son Devdas Gandhi on the same mission, and directed Ghaffar Khan to "smooth [the] trouble".(51) He prescribed khadi work for the rebellious Pathans expecting that it would have a calming influence on them.
Gandhi also did whatever he could to "counteract the growth of the violent revolutionary movement".
Before his execution, Sukhdev, Bhagat Singh's comrade, wrote from his prison cell to Gandhi that Gandhi's open calls to the revolutionaries to give up their struggles were helping the colonial rulers to isolate them from the people and hunt them down. Pointing out that Gandhi's "appeals amount to preaching treachery, desertion and betrayal among them", Sukhdev suggested that, if Gandhi did not really want to join hands with the alien rulers, he should either discuss the problem in detail with "some revolutionary leaders -- there are so many in jails -- and come to terms with them" or he should "stop these appeals". In his open reply to Sukhdev's letter after his execution, Gandhi, condemning the Sukhdevs as "political assassins", refused to do either of the two things suggested by Sukhdev.(52)
As days passed and as the activities of the national revolutionaries scaled new heights with the Chittagong uprising, Gandhi's denunciations of them grew more fierce keeping pace with the intensification of the savage repression on them and on the people by the colonial rulers.
A moderate delegate to the second RTC remarked: "Bengal is treated as in a state of war." From 1930 onwards every engine of repression was being used. Ordinance after ordinance was issued and black acts were passed to gag the press and stamp out every manifestation of resistance by the people. State terrorism was at its height. More of it in the next chapter.
One instance may be cited here. There was indiscriminate firing and bayonet-charge on the detenus in the Hijli detention camp on 16 September 1931, two detenus were killed and many wounded.(53) The mass rally held in Calcutta to denounce the brutal murders was presided over by Rabindranath Tagore, then more than seventy. Rabindranath had always been frankly critical of the methods of the national revolutionaries but he admired their cause and their heroic self-sacrifice and stood by them whenever they were victims of savage repression. And he hated the imperialist oppressors.
Several DCCs in Bengal urged the Congress leadership to register the protest of the people against the atrocities. The North Calcutta DCC sought permission for starting satyagraha on these issues. J.M. Sengupta, then president of the Bengal PCC and member of the Working Committee, wired on 17 September to Congress president Patel: "Chittagong and Bengal appeal to you as President to fix all-India day for protest against Chittagong atrocities."(54) Far from responding to the appeals, the `national' leaders joined the imperialist chorus in full-throated denunciation of the national revolutionaries.(55)
On 8 May 1931 Gandhi, whom Nehru's trusted friend V.K. Krishna Menon called "the so-called apostle of truth and non-violence", assured Sir Darcy Lindsay: "many of us are doing everything we can to counteract the growth of the violent revolutionary movement." All this should not be construed as the mahatma's flights of disinterested idealism. Lest his useful work, complementary to that of the colonial rulers, should be overlooked, Gandhi assured the British monarch's deputy in India: "I am trying in all humility to overtake the mischief as far as it is humanly possible." In his reply of 31 July, the Viceroy expressed his appreciation of Gandhi's role.(56)
Gandhi and Nehru sought to mobilize the Congress and the people against the revolutionaries -- a task which the alien rulers could not do. At the AICC meeting, held on 6 August, Gandhi moved a resolution calling upon "Congress organizations to carry on special propaganda against all acts of public violence [violence by the people, not by the rulers] even when provocation is given for such deeds". It also appealed "to the nationalist press to use all its influence in this behalf". Gandhi deprecated "harping on the violence of Government and applauding the sacrifice and courage of our youths". His complete silence over the reign of terror unleashed by the British imperialists in Bengal was eloquent. In the lengthy memorandum that Gandhi submitted to the Home Secretary of the Government of India in July, detailing the "breaches of peace" by the government and acts of repression, there is not a word about the savage atrocities on the revolutionaries and the people in Bengal.(57)
Nehru preached: "we do not follow the military method. The beauty is that even one man can fight a whole army. It is a fight of the soul, of the inner strength" (as if the Nehrus possessed greater strength of the soul than those who courted indescribable suffering, even death, for what they believed to be the cause of Indian freedom). Nehru wrote: "...it becomes essential for us even from the lower ground of expediency to counteract with all the strength that we have any attempts at violence.... Thus they [the revolutionaries] must be condemned on human grounds as well as on political grounds." Nehru condemned the cries of "Down with Union Jack" and they were stopped by the Congress.(58)
The contradiction of the Congress leaders with British imperialism was non-antagonistic: they wanted it to be resolved through "conference and consultation". But their contradictions with peasants, workers and petty bourgeois youth who followed the path of struggle against imperialism was antagonistic. While trying to put down their resistance they invoked the "creed" of non-violence, in which, according to G.D. Birla, Gandhi's `pet child', nobody believed. (58a)
Despite the Congress leaders' co-operation and "disciplined obedience" and their fervent appeals, British rulers refused to grant even minor concessions to make matters somewhat easy for them in Gujarat or U.P. Already in April 1931, the British Indian government under the new Viceroy, Willingdon, had begun to draft a new, comprehensive emergency powers ordinance.(59) Home Secretary Emerson's note on his four-day long interview with Gandhi in mid-May states that Gandhi "realizes the renewal of the Civil Disobedience Movement will compel Government to hit hard and hit at once and I have made this perfectly clear to him on many occasions.... he does not want another fight".(60)
The raj, as noted before, dismissed the Congress leaders' claim to act as the intermediary between the government and the peasants and Gandhi submitted. All appeals of Gandhi to Willingdon and even to Irwin that the Viceroy should nominate M.A. Ansari, a former Congress President, as a delegate to the RTC, as had been agreed to by Irwin, were rejected. (Interestingly, the Congress Working Committee, keen on Ansari's participation in the RTC as a counterpoise to the other Muslim delegates, could, if it wanted, nominate Ansari as a Congress delegate, but it chose to have Gandhi as its sole plenipotentiary.)