THE Congress ministries swiftly showed how they could be "partners in this repression and the exploitation of our people". They began by repealing emergency powers they inherited through the 1932 Act. But already, by October 1937, Rajaji in Madras was prosecuting nationalists for "seditious speeches". In September 1938, the A.I.C.C. gave full support to "measures that may be undertaken by the Congress Government for the defense of life and property", condemning "people, including Congressmen... found in the name of civil liberty to advocate murder, arson, looting and class war by violent means ... ". The Congress was, already learning this rhetoric of rulers, and learning to club crime with political dissent.
It did not take Congress governments long to abandon organised labour, which anyway was largely under Communist leadership. The major strikes of the period included the textile strikes in Kanpur, Ahmedabad, Amritsar, and Madras, strikes in Martin Burn iron and steel works and the strike in Digboi oil works in Assam. Despite having protested vigorously during its earlier days the existence of section 144 (which could be used to ban all assembly), Congress now regularly used it on workers.
The character of the Congress was made even clearer by its Bombay Trades Dispute Act of November 1938. This Act introduced compulsory arbitration, six months' jail for "illegal" strikes, and new rules making very difficult the operation of unions not recognised by the management.
Governor Lumley described the Act as "admirable". Subhas Chandra Bose made some private protests against the Act to Patel, but remained silent in public. And Nehru found the Act "on the whole ... a good one". The only ones to protest the Act were the non-Congress parties and unions - mainly the Communists. Some 80,000 people attended the Bombay protest rally addressed by Dange, Ambedkar, and Yagnik on November 6, 1938, and the following day there was a partly successful general strike throughout the province.
Congress colours were even better revealed by the strike in the Digboi oil fields, run by the British-owned Assam Oil Company. The Assam Congress ministry, headed by the tea plantation owner N.C.Bardaloi, failed to implement the somewhat pro-labour award made by an ICS official. In October, with the start of the World War II, the Congress used the newly introduced draconian Defense of India Rules to smash the strike.
The peasantry under Congress rule suffered a similar fate. In the initial stages, the Congress introduced legislation in Orissa to place a lower ceiling on zamindari rents; the proposal was, as expected, vetoed by the Governor, and the Congress dropped the issue.
A Madras Committee's recommendation, suggesting ryot ownership and radical rent-reduction, was quickly shelved. Nearly all the provinces introduced tenancy reforms to reduce slightly the extremely high rents, but the measures were so mild as to get landlord support.
Even the watered-down agrarian programme of the Faizpur session was abandoned, and the Bihar and U.P. PCCs promises to abolish zamindari left unmentioned. When zamindars of Bihar protested the Government's tenancy bill, it was rapidly watered down.
A singular event occurred in Patna in December 1937. Maulana Azad and Rajendra Prasad, on behalf of the Congress, met the landlords and negotiated a secret agreement with them. The landholders' conference held thereafter praised the Bihar government as "very reasonable" adding that "some concessions were secured by zamindars in Bihar which no other government would have allowed".
At the same time, it is hardly surprising that peasant militancy was now turned against the Congress governments. In some areas, Congress betrayal of the peasants helped the growth of communalism: For instance, the Ghaffar Khan ministry in the North West Frontier Province did nothing to alleviate the burning problem of Muslim peasant indebtedness to Hindu and Sikh moneylenders and traders.
Nehru's U.P. Government, on the one hand, antagonised the Muslim elite with is plan of "mass contact" to woo the Muslims into the Congress fold; but it provided no radical agrarian programme to actually win the Muslim peasants over. The result was little other than the heightening of communal tension.
In other areas - notably Andhra, Orissa, and most of all Bihar - peasant struggles took on a clear anti-feudal form. Much, though by no means all, of the movement was Communist-inspired. The foundation of the All-India Kisan Sabha three years earlier had given an impetus to the struggle, and had allowed Communists to widen their peasant contacts.
In October 1937, the red flag was adopted by the A.I.K.S. By 1938, A.I.K.S. membership was half a million.
The May 1938 Comilla conference of the A.I.K.S. was held in (largely Muslim) East Bengal, and was opposed by both the League and the Congress. It attacked Gandhi's "class collaboration", and declared "agrarian revolution" to be its aim. Swami Sahajananda of Bihar vigorously defended the peasants' use of lathis against attacks.
It was indeed in Bihar that the situation became most acute. The Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha membership was 250,000. And, to the horror of the Congress, Bihar peasants marched straight into the first session of the legislature under the Congress ministry, and occupied the seats for some time. Although Sahajananda was nominally a Congressman, District Committees in three districts of Bihar (including Gandhi's own Champaran) banned Congressmen from attending Sahajananda's meetings. Section 144 and armed police pickets were, of course, freely used by the ministry against peasant meetings and to protect landlords' crops. Despite all this effort, from late 1938 to mid-1939, rent-collection in Bihar seemed on the verge of collapse.
Perhaps no better summing up of the Congress Government's achievements is available than that of R.Coupland, the best-known right-wing imperialist historian writing at the time (Indian Politics 1931-42. Report on the Constitutional Problem in India, Part II, Madras, 1944). He praises Congress agrarian legislation: "The merit of the legislation was that... its treatment of the landlords was not intolerably severe". In fact, he feels, "Congress policy might almost be called conservative". He also praises Congress policy on labour. In Ahmedabad, he notes, a Communist-led textile strike was
"as much a challenge to their (the Congress ministers') authority as to the rights of the employers... and, backed by Mr. Vallabhbhai Patel, leading Congressman of the Province, they, at once took steps to strengthen law and order.... (Then, in Bombay:) ... this time the attack was more directly aimed at the Congress Government. It had recently carried its Trade Disputes Bill to prevent `lightning' strikes and lockouts; and the Communists, declaring that the rights of labour had been violated, set themselves to organise an anti-Government demonstration which was to reach its climax in a general strike- throughout the Province on November 7.... In the city itself there was some disorder. Mobs gathered in the streets. Traffic was dislocated. Stones were thrown at the cars in which Mr. Patel and Mr. Munshi, the Home Minister, were driving. At one point the police opened fire, wounding eleven people, two fatally. Seventy-five other cases of injury were reported. Next day order was fully restored."This incident had been a signal proof of the Congress Government in Bombay, and for the rest of its period in office it had little labour trouble."
Coupland thus points out that "the Congress Governments can be said to have stood the test imposed on them in the field of law and order". In fact, he notes their eagerness to respond to the Viceroy's call for an all-India meeting of Home Ministers and high police officials in Simla, in May 1939, largely to co-ordinate the suppression of nationalist "conspiracies". The final resolution even "invited the Central Government to consider the possibility of amending the Indian Penal Code and other enactments so as to strengthen the arm of the law against subversive and provocative agitation and also to protect officials from calumny on the platform and in the Press."
Coupland unintentionally gives a good picture of the Congress's betrayal of the peasants in Bihar:
"In Bihar the kisans were quickly up in arms. They staged a mass-demonstration at the first meeting of the Assembly, and threatened to turn on the Congress Government the old Congress weapons of satyagraha and `civil disobedience', if the promises were not redeemed at once and in full. During the autumn. the agitation grew. Ringleaders' speeches became more inflammatory. Ministers were denounced as bitterly as the landlords, and moderate Congressmen, headed by the Provincial Congress Committee, broke off the alliance they had made with the kisans in the days before they came into power. Meantime Ministers pressed on with legislation. Their tenancy bill was carried in December 1937 and their moneylenders' bill in the following June. But the emollient effect of these measures on the temper of the kisans was transient. By the autumn of 1938 the agitation had become still more widespread and more violent. A notorious incendiary, Swami Sahajanand, was now in control, aided by some of the released `political prisoners' and other members of extremist groups. India, said these fire-eaters, was on the eve of a revolution like the Russian: landlords would soon be abolished and peasant councils rule the country. By the end of the year an organised campaign of lawlessness was in full swing. Riots were frequent. Crops were looted, by night or destroyed as they stood and the land ploughed up. The situation was no better in 1939. Armed police were needed to protect the spring harvesting. Rent-collection was at a stand-still. In the summer, bands of kisan `volunteers' were marching about the country, flying red flags."
Nehru's special role is brought out in the agrarian unrest in U.P.:
"In the United Provinces the `peasant revolt' was not so protracted or so disorderly as in Bihar. The chief trouble was at the outset of the new regime, and was mainly concerned with rent. Many of the cultivators withheld payment in expectation of the general reduction of rent which they had been given to understand in the course of the election campaign would be one of the first results of a Congress Victory. So serious was the effect on the revenue that, in the winter of 1937-38, Ministers were obliged to tour the country explaining the situation and insisting that current rent must be paid. If it were not, they said, they must compel its payment or resign. Discontent with tenancy conditions was also rife, and Communists, released 'political prisoners' and Congressmen on the extreme left were busy inciting tenants against landlords. Nor could the situation be quickly eased by legislation, since the Government's agrarian programme took longer to enact in this Province than in any other. Nevertheless, though violent things were said, there was little serious disorder. Payment of rent was soon resumed. A monster procession of 50,000 kisans invaded Lucknow on March 1, 1938, but, after listening to a speech by the Premier (Nehru), it quietly dispersed. In the following autumn the temperature rose a little after Sahajanand had visited the Province. There were cases of kisans forcibly occupying land and of landlords forcibly ejecting them. But, when in the summer and autumn of 1939 the reform legislation was carried at last on the eve of the Ministry's resignation, there had been no upheaval as alarming as that in neighbouring Bihar. This was partly due, no doubt, to the fact that the Bihari landlords, in the south of the Province at any rate, were more rapacious and the terms of tenancy worse; but it may have can also due to the greater ability of the United Provinces Ministers and to the support publicly afforded them, in the matter of rent payment for example, by Pandit Nehru, whose influence with the mass of the people is nowhere greater than in his native Province".
Thus not only were the Congress ministries junior partners of the British in repressing and exploiting our people, they were the more efficient in executing these tasks.
A major portion of India was not in any of the provinces, but in the princely states. The princely states were merely disguises for direct British rule since the princes had no independent powers at all - they were merely impotent adornments to the British administration. The princely states were marked by the most extreme feudal backwardness and arbitrary rule, and had not even the semblance of elections or representation that the provinces had. Logically, one would have expected the Congress leadership to fight against this system - even if only to extend its own powers. Let us briefly look at what the Congress did to assist the liberation movements in these states.
The Congress Right wing pressed against lending any support to the struggles of people in the princely states, under the argument that these were Indian monarchs.
Gandhi himself strongly disapproved of the 1937 AICC resolution which had appealed "to the people of Indian states and British India to give all support and encouragement" to the struggle going on in the princely state of Mysore. Gandhi managed, by February 1938, to get this changed to "moral support and sympathy" to the states' people's struggles, which were not to be conducted in the name of the Congress.
In fact, a few months later, Gandhi said that even if the princes granted a measure of civil liberties, independent courts, and a reduction of their privy purses, he would be satisfied. Neither integration with the rest of India nor elective government for the people in those States entered his picture.
Here are some examples of his intervention:
(i) In Mysore, the agitation for legalisation of the Congress and for responsible government reached the point where, on April 11 , 1938, in Kolar district, a crowd of 10,000 was fired upon at length, killing 30. The following month, Vallabhbhai Patel concluded a deal with the Dewan Mirza Ismail which legalised the Congress but left all else untouched. The Congress was forced to go in for a second round of agitation by September 1939.
(ii) In Orissa, under the leadership of Socialists and Communists, in various places struggles developed on anti-feudal issues as well as demands for political rights. Tribals fought back the armed power of the princes, with bows and arrows. Gandhi tried to get the Orissan movements called off in return for purely token political reforms in Dhankanal and Talcher.
(iii) In Hyderabad, the campaign for political reforms developed partly through the local Congress, which began a satyagraha in October 1938. A powerful "Vande Mataram" movement began in Osmania University when the Nizam banned that anthem. Gandhi insisted on the Congress movement being called off in December 1938, supposedly on the grounds that it could become communalist - a decision that bewildered the Congress cadre.
(iv) In Travancore, the Communists, working through the state Congress, launched an agitation in August 1938 against the autocracy of Dewan C.P.Ramaswami Iyer. The movement grew despite brutal repression. Alleppey coir-workers went on strike with not only economic demands but demands for political rights as well. The role of Gandhi and other Congress leaders was limited to advising withdrawal of the satyagraha once a few token concessions had been made.
(v) In early 1939, as movements had developed in virtually every princely state, often led by Communists, Gandhi decided to intervene in one particular ongoing struggle in a controlled fashion - in his home state of Rajkot. However, he withdrew satyagraha and fast in Rajkot by May 1939, declaring that even his own fast had been of a "coercive" nature, and therefore not sufficiently non-violent.
Thus we can see that, far from leading the struggles for political rights in the princely states, or even offering solidarity to the ongoing ones, the only role of the Congress was to divert them and attempt to get them called off for purely token concessions.
Gandhi, despite his absence from the Congress party, managed to control its every decision. The remarkable sequence of events leading up to the Tripura Congress of 1939 provided conclusive proof, if that were necessary. Subhas Chandra Bose, though impelled perhaps more by personal ambition than by conviction, linked his candidature for Presidency of the 1939 Congress to a call for a demand for "Swaraj" in the form of a time-bound ultimatum to the British. It was this that won Bose the support of nationalists, socialists and communists in the electoral battle. Despite the fact that Gandhi explicitly named Pattabhi Sitaramayya (later author of the official History of the Indian National Congress) as his nominee, Bose won with 1,580 votes to 1,377. Whatever the character of Bose, the victory clearly marked the predominance of the nationalists among the rank-and- file of the Congress.
Gandhi recognised the forces he was up against: "It is plain to me that the delegates do not approve of the principles and policy for which I stand".
But that statement was double-edged: Gandhi, who still commanded enormous respect among-the rank and file, even though they disagreed with his policies, was now effectively telling the delegates that the vote was a personal blow to his prestige. He declared Sitaramayya's defeat to be "more mine than his".
Next, Gandhi proceeded to blackmail the Congress. He claimed that the Congress was a "corrupt organisation" with "bogus members". And he threatened to split it: "Those who being Congress-minded, remain outside it by design, represent it the most" (referring to himself). "Those, therefore, who feel uncomfortable in being in the Congress may come out."
Immediately 12 of the old 15 Congress Working Committee members resigned their posts on the flimsy excuse that Subhas had cast aspersions on them; Nehru, after some vacillation, joined them in resigning, though on a different pretext.
The actual session at Tripuri (March 8-12, 1939) found Bose quite ill and the Right wing pressing home its advantage. Govindballabh Pant moved a resolution expressing confidence in the old Working Committee and in Gandhi's policies, and asking Bose to nominate his new executive "in accordance with the wishes of Gandhiji". Crucial support for the resolution came from Nehru, but even more crucial silence came from the Socialists, led by Jayaprakash Narayan. The Socialists had been increasingly alarmed by the inroads the Communists had made into the Socialist cadre, and bitter fights had already taken place between the two parties in several areas. Moreover, the Socialist leadership was always ultimately wedded to following Gandhi's leadership, and in this case Gandhi's intervention proved crucial. (Incidentally, the twists and turns of Socialist Party policy are partly explained by the fact - confirmed in an interview with the ex-Socialist leader Minoo Masani - that the CSP received substantial funding from businessmen.)
The effect of the passage of the Pant resolution was to force Bose's resignation from the Congress presidency (not membership) in April 1939. Bose formed the Forward Bloc, a grouping of elements in the Congress whom he claimed were "radical and anti-imperialist" - though his programme and creed as yet did not contradict the non-violent doctrines of the Congress leadership. (Indeed, Bose's role in the labour movement is of a compromising character, and one should remember that Bose's main funders too included several Calcutta big businessmen - among them Lala Shri Ram's brother.) However, his unseating, and later expulsion, for protesting the AICC's resolution prohibiting passive resistance movements with the appropriate Congress Committee's sanction are indications of how little room Gandhi wanted to leave for any dissent to his policies.
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