The Hindus of Bombay, as Ravinder Kumar writes, answered the call for renewed civil disobedience "with a muted response", while the Muslims were more active than before in opposing it. On his return from the second RTC, Shaukat Ali, who was given a rousing reception in the city, held Gandhi responsible for the `communal tangle' and the failure of the RTC. Bombay witnessed an ugly communal riot in April and a worse one followed in May 1932. According to Kumar, "the riots of 1932 marked the end of civil disobedience in Bombay..."(34)
In north Bihar, there were massed attacks on the police and police stations between January and March 1932, breaking all the norms of Gandhian satyagraha. As Stephen Henningham says, it was the members of the rural elite -- small landlords and rich peasants -- who took the leading part in the civil disobedience movement. The attachment of property by the government was not relished by the landed elements and the movement could hardly be sustained. "By mid-March [1932] the Viceroy reported that in Bihar and Orissa protest was on the `downgrade', and he repeated this assessment throughout the year."(35)
At this time anti-feudal struggles broke out in the princely states -- Jammu and Kashmir, Alwar (in Rajasthan), etc. Jammu and Kashmir had been sold by the British to a Dogra chieftain, who became the maharaja of Kashmir. The people, steeped in poverty and deprived of all basic democratic rights, rose in revolt against the feudal prince and landlords in 1931-2. The Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference, later renamed Jammu and Kashmir Political Conference, was set up to lead the people's armed struggle. It was with the help of British troops that the ruler was able to put down the uprising by the end of 1932.
In Alwar, too, an armed struggle developed against the feudal lords in 1932. The main participants were the Muslim peasants inhabiting the northern part of the state. They besieged the state capital, disrupted all communications between it and the outside, and attacked both Hindu and Muslim landlords. British troops rushed to the help of the prince and suppressed the revolt with extreme savagery by the end of 1933.
There were uprisings also in several other native states, besides Jammu and Kashmir and Alwar. They were all put down by British troops.
It may be irreverent but not irrelevant to ask what treatment was meted out by the British colonialists to the Indian leaders who were (and are) supposed to have been leading India's freedom struggle, when those who responded to their call and defied official bans non-violently were victims of extreme savagery.
The following cases are illustrative, not exhaustive.
As the `dictator' of the all-India Congress, Sarojini Naidu, a former Congress president and member of the Congress Working Committee for many years, was leading the civil disobedience struggle for liberation from colonial rule in March 1932 from the residence of a member of the Viceroy's Executive Council. This fact was disclosed in the Central Legislative Assembly on 23 March 1932.(36)
One more instance of the exemplary kind of relationship that existed between the British imperialists and the Congress stalwarts. Mangaldas Pakvasa, a Bombay solicitor, who later rose to high positions during the Congress regime, wrote to Sir Pheroze Sethna on 16 September 1933 that Vallabhbhai Patel had been suffering from want of a political companion since 9 September when Pakvasa was released. Sir Pheroze immediately wrote to Sir Samuel Hoare, the Secretary of State, to redress the wrong. Sir Purshotamdas Thakurdas, when informed by Pakvasa, saw the Bombay governor and wrote to the Secretary of State with the same request. Both these big compradors who had close relations with the British colonialists showed remarkable solicitude for Patel in distress and his grievance was removed.(37)
These big compradors were close to the Congress leaders. Sir Purshotamdas, on whom the British raj showered many honours for his loyal services and who was a comprador par excellence,(38) opposed the non-co-operation movement and actively combated the civil disobedience movement in 1930-1 and 1932-3. But as we have noted, he was, as Vallabhbhai Patel observed, "more our man than anyone else's". The Birlas were even closer to both the Congress high command and the British imperialists.
The struggle suffered from some inherent weaknesses. It was neither planned nor organized by the leaders whom the people looked up to. Instead of waging an anti-imperialist struggle, they were anxious to co-operate with the raj.
Second, because of Muslim alienation from the Congress, for which the Congress leaders were no less, if not more, responsible than British imperialism and Muslim and other communal organizations, Muslim participation in the struggle was negligible. Since the failure of the non-co-operation movement, the Muslims feared that a Congress-initiated movement was a movement intended to achieve Hindu domination.
Third, the Communist Party, though weak and disorganized at the time, made the mistake of not participating in it. The working class, which joined it at some places at the initial stage in a militant way, became indifferent soon after. The Congress leaders' hostility to their demands and indifference to their plight caused by the economic crisis of 1929-33 did not inspire much confidence in them.
Fourth, the participation of the peasantry also was far less than in the earlier periods -- 1920-2 and 1930-1. In U.P., Gujarat, Bengal, Andhra and so on, the Congress leaders and the Gandhi-Irwin pact had stifled, more or less with success, the anti-imperialist, anti-feudal struggles of the peasantry.