G.D. Birla, who called himself Gandhi's "pet-child" and whom Gandhi called one of the "mentors" whom "God has given me", was effusive in his expressions of loyalty to the British imperialists during the second phase of civil disobedience and worked hard to terminate it "once and for all". We shall return to his role later. One of Birla's chief lieutenants, D.P. Khaitan, saw Bengal governor Anderson in May 1932 and conveyed "the distinct impression that...he would be ready to co-operate with the Government in any constructive work".(17)
When the second phase of civil disobedience opened, there was no all-India centre to direct the struggle, no programme, no plan. In urban Bengal, mainly the petty bourgeois youth and students came out to defy the official measures, held meetings, took out processions, hoisted Congress flags, picketed shops selling Lancashire cloth and liquor, were thrashed mercilessly by the police, and many of them were sent to prison.
Contraband salt was manufactured in Tamluk and Contai (Kanthi) in Midnapore (Medinipur) district as a symbolic anti-imperialist protest. Movements for boycott of union boards and non-payment of the chowkidari tax developed in some areas of Medinipur and other places. Peasants in the Arambagh sub-division of Hooghly district and in some thanas of Bankura district waged a no-rent struggle. The survey and settlement operations were boycotted in Arambagh. The leadership of these struggles was provided by local Congressmen.
In the rural areas of East Bengal the Muslim and Namashudra peasantry remained aloof from the Congress-led civil disobedience movement. In the urban areas the Muslim petty bourgeoisie had little interest in it.
During these years of world-wide economic depression, when the prices of jute and paddy fell steeply, peasant discontent was widespread. Peasant associations sprang up in several districts -- Tippera (Tripura), Noakhali, Mymensingh, Rangpur, Rajshahi, Bogura, Faridpur, Jessore, Medinipur. They launched campaigns for withholding payment of rent to landlords and interest to moneylenders.(18)
The Tripura Krishak Samiti, led by both Hindus and Muslims, had started a powerful no-rent movement in the district of Comilla in 1930-31. It was directed against moneylenders, too. It spread to Noakhali and other neighbouring districts towards the end of 1931.
What most alarmed the rulers was the upsurge in the activities of national revolutionaries which followed in the wake of the Chittagong armed uprising. In 1930, 11 British officials (including Lowman, Bengal's inspector-general of police; Hodson, Dacca's district superintendent of police; and Col. Simpson, the inspector-general of prisons), and 10 non-officials were shot dead by national revolutionaries; and 12 British officers and 14 non-officials were injured.(19)
In 1931, among the British officials shot dead were Peddie, a particularly notorious district magistrate of Medinipur, and Stevens, district magistrate of Comilla. Durno, Dacca's (Dhaka's) district magistrate and Villiers, president of the European Association, were seriously wounded. In 1932, Douglas, Peddie's successor as Medinipur's district magistrate, and Ellison, district superintendent of police, Tripura, were among those killed. An unsuccessful attempt on the life of Bengal Governor Stanley Jackson was made by a girl student at the convocation of the Calcutta University in February 1932. Burge, who succeeded Douglas as the district magistrate of Medinipur, was shot dead in 1933 and in the following year an unsuccessful attempt to kill John Anderson, then governor of Bengal, was made. The wave of revolutionary violence, the immediate targets of which were individuals notorious for their crimes against the people, did not die down until 1934.
To combat the revolutionary violence, black acts and ordinances, giving sweeping powers to the police to arrest and detain without trial and adopt other measures, setting up special procedures and tribunals to hold trials, and gagging the press, followed one after another. Twenty separate Acts were framed to deal with the national revolutionaries.(20) By January 1932, 272 institutions were declared illegal. Thousands were arrested, tortured and sent to prison or detention camps. Many were shot or hanged.
To poison the relations between the two communities, Hindu and Muslim, a serious riot was engineered by the raj's men and non-official Europeans in August-September 1931 in Chittagong town, which was left at the mercy of hooligans for three days after the assassination of a notorious police officer Ashanullah. In September 1931, as noted before, unprovoked firing and assault with bayonets and lathis on the political prisoners detained without trial at the Hijli Detention Camp were resorted to.
John Anderson, who was "credited with the worst features of the `Black and Tan' operations in Ireland",(21) was sent by the British government in March 1932 as governor of Bengal to suppress the wave of revolutionary violence.(22) Arriving in Bengal, he introduced "methods of repression that had no precedent anywhere in India". Learning from his rich experience in Ireland, he created in Bengal some of the horrors perpetrated there. Let us quote Nehru:
"...the world remembers Jallianwala Bagh and the `crawling order' and the many other ferocious accompaniments of Martial Law. Soon followed the era of the Black and Tans in Ireland with their blood lust and reprisals. And now we see the government in India again excelling itself in this manner in parts of Bengal. Chittagong and Midnapur, like Amritsar, have become black symbols of the working of imperialism and of the attempt to humiliate a great nation."(23)
The issue of identity cards in large areas to all Hindus -- men and women -- between 12 and 25, externments and internments, even forced internments of the entire people of an area in their homes for weeks, sunset law, curfew, the stationing of punitive police forces, imposition of collective fines, the death penalty for possession of arms, flag marches by British and Garhwali soldiers in the villages of several districts, deployment of army battalions, including one British infantry battalion, in Medinipur, Chittagong, Dhaka, Mymensingh, Rangpur, Comilla and Bankura were a few of the measures undertaken.
Yet fear gripped the minds of many British officials and other Britishers. For instance, Barisal's district magistrate, Donovan, grew panicky, resigned his post and left the country. "Panic was so great at Chittagong that a force of several thousand policemen had to be stiffened by regular troops and a Royal Navy flagship came up to the harbour to raise sagging morale."(24)
For about three years Surya Sen, the leader of the Chittagong uprising, and some of his associates remained underground in the villages near the town. The villagers gave them shelter and protected them, undeterred by official intimidation and terror or by baits like remission of punitive taxes. Not only Hindus but also many poor Muslims -- peasants, boatmen and others -- gave the rebels their willing help.(25) In an encounter with a joint military and police party led by a British captain in June 1932, which had surrounded the house in which Surya Sen and four of his comrades had taken shelter, the captain and two of the revolutionaries were killed, while Surya Sen and two others escaped. But, after an exchange of fire in February 1933 with a unit of Gurkha Rifles, Surya Sen and one of his comrades, Tarakeswar Dastidar, were captured; they were executed on the night of 12 January 1934. Their dead bodies were taken before dawn to a battle cruiser in the high seas and sent to watery graves. The rulers seemed afraid of cremating them on land.
The national revolutionaries started losing faith in terrorist methods in 1931 and felt attracted towards Marxism. An Intelligence Bureau publication noted that "the early months of 1931 witnessed a remarkable manifestation of the Communist spirit amongst all classes of terrorists in Bengal....The demand for Communist literature [from "detenus in the various jails and detention camps up and down the country wherever Bengal terrorists were confined"] exceeded all bounds and when it was refused by the authorities it was smuggled in by sympathetic extraneous hands."(26)
The regime of terror in Bengal lasted several years. As Nehru wrote on 4 October 1937,
"Bengal, as in the past, so today, keeps the lead in repression and suppression of civil liberties. Even now hundreds of organizations are banned there, especially in the districts of Midnapur and Chittagong. It takes one's breath away to learn that in Chittagong district alone about 23,000 persons (official figure) are interned or restricted in their activities by government orders. Large numbers of detenus are still there in Bengal, untried or unconvicted, but kept in concentration camps for years."(27)
Besides, there were many hundreds of political prisoners in Bengal jails and in the Andamans.
In U.P. civil disobedience in its second phase was more or less an urban phenomenon with flag-hoistings, meetings, demonstrations and picketing of foreign cloth and liquor shops in defiance of official bans. Women also participated in them. Arrests and beating, even caning, were regular features.
True to the assurance the Congress Working Committee, at its meeting between 29 December 1931 and 1 January 1932, had given to the landlords, the Congress would not "let Civil Disobedience in rural areas develop into an anti-landlord campaign".(28)
Several districts of U.P. had been a storm-centre of anti-feudal and anti-imperialist struggle during 1930 and 1931 despite the Congress leaders' efforts to contain it. Owing to the combined efforts of the big landlords and their musclemen, the raj and the Congress leaders, there was an ebb-tide in the U.P. peasant movement during the second phase of civil disobedience.
Though some remissions in payment of revenue and rent were granted by the government, the peasant distress showed few signs of abatement. Nor did repression on them cease. Peasants put up some resistance against extortion of rent and taxes but, as Gyanendra Pandey observes, "In general however the movement had lost its momentum".(29)
The Patidars of Gujarat did not respond quite warmly to the call of the Congress for a fresh fight. As noted before, they regarded the Gandhi-Irwin pact as a betrayal and nursed the grievance that their confiscated lands sold away to others had not been returned. Moreover, the government relentlessly extorted from them not only the current revenue but arrears, even punitive fines in some cases. Repeated appeals of Gandhi to the government brought them no redress. So they had no heart in a renewed fight.
The local Congress leaders of Kheda district used the adjoining towns and villages of the princely state Baroda as a sanctuary and led processions carrying Congress flags into Kheda villages. Only in six villages the Patidars withheld revenue payment by February 1932. The government repression on them was severe and, by the middle of the year, only two villages still refused to pay the revenue. Gradually the no-revenue campaign was over.(30)
Bombay city caused some worry to the raj and to the millowners who were opposed to civil disobedience. It was not the workers who rallied to the struggle but the petty bourgeoisie and, curiously, the comprador merchants, whom A.D.D. Gordon calls `marketeers'. While the petty bourgeoisie wanted freedom from the British yoke, the `marketeers' had a more limited aim. Since 1919 they had been fighting for control over the raw cotton market. Their speculative activities harmed the interests of the millowners, big Indian and European cotton merchants and exporters. The latter and the government sought to establish their control over the market in raw cotton through legislation and in other ways. The `marketeers' were also troubled by the slump in the cotton market since early 1930. They observed frequent hartals, and the Mulji Jetha market, the main cotton market in Bombay, remained closed on many of the days -- 93 out of the 159 working days between January and August 1932.(31) H.P. Mody, then President of the Bombay Millowners' Association, wrote: "the `continuous' hartals being observed in various markets, and the suspension of business activities on the part of certain sections of the trade have completely dislocated business, and brought about a paralysis of the economic structure, particularly in Bombay."(32) Exasperated by the frequent hartals and boycott of British firms, the millowners tried to bypass the Bombay market and go in for cheap American cotton. The marketeers' move to agitate for boycott of the mills which opted for foreign cotton was scotched by Gandhi. One reason which prompted hartals was the desire of the brokers to escape ruin caused by the disastrous fall in raw cotton prices. When the Bombay government introduced a new legislation, `Cotton Contracts Bill' of 1932, and made some concessions to the brokers their `civil disobedience' came to a happy end.(33)