THE spark for the Swadeshi Movement was the British decision to partition Bengal. Viceroy Curzon's scheme, ostensibly for "administrative convenience", to divide Bengal into Eastern and Western provinces, was indeed a major provocation.
First, the Congress, and political activity in general, were strongest in Bengal. And Curzon had an obsessive hatred of the Congress: "The Congress", he wrote to the Secretary of State, "is tottering to its fall, and one of my great ambitions while in India is to assist it to a peaceful demise." His Secretary of State, on the other hand, differed.
Congress leaders, of course, were unhappy with Curzon's hostility, and compared him unfavourably with earlier, more liberal, Viceroys. Gokhale complained that "the bureaucracy was growing frankly selfish and openly hostile to national aspirations. It was not so in the past." (Note two points about Gokhale's remark. First, he focusses on the bureaucracy, instead of the British rulers - in other words he confirms Wood's assessment, quoted earlier, to the effect that the Congress was only agitating against the Anglo-Indian bureaucracy, not the Empire itself. Secondly, the focus on the present bureaucracy and the glorification of past Viceroys both opened up the way for reconciliation with a future bureaucracy and a future Viceroy.)
A second aspect of Curzon's decision to partition was the desire to fuel communal feeling. In the new province of East Bengal, Hindus, largely landlords, would be in a minority to Muslim tenants and sharecroppers. In a speech in Dacca in February 1904 Curzon offered East Bengal Muslims the prospect of "unity which they have not enjoyed since the days of the old Mussulman viceroys and kings". Thus Curzon hoped to play up the ambitions of Muslim zamindars to counter those of the Hindu zamindars.
Curzon expected opposition to his scheme from the Congress. But the Congress was such an ineffective body, and had so little mass base, that it looked as if he had little to fear. What he did not take into account was the situation developing outside the Congress.
India was undergoing a period of steep price rise between 1904 and 1908 (the price index, with 1890-94=100, climbed from 106 in 1904 to 116 in 1905, 129 in 1906, and 143 by 1908). Labour in all the industrial regions was beginning to get organised. International events were offering stirring examples to the Indian national bourgeoisie (such as it was), the petty-bourgeoisie, and even the proletariat. Japan's victory over Tsarist Russia in the 1904-5 war enormously excited people throughout Asia as demonstrating that an Asian people could fight back an imperial power (Japan herself was, however, fast on her way to becoming an imperial power). The fledgling Indian national bourgeois elements yearned to emulate the Japanese example. The Chinese boycott of American goods in protest against American immigration laws also suggested a weapon of struggle for Indians. The first Russian Revolution of 1905, though unsuccessful, provided a striking prospect of the possible overthrow of autocracy.
Down to July 1905, moreover, the Partition plan of Bengal had been opposed spontaneously. The Congress had provided a forum and its usual methods had been extensively used - petitions, press campaigns, public meetings of zamindars, and delegate conferences. The total failure of all these methods compared unfavourably with the foreign examples which had received so much attention in the Bengali papers. At this point there was, in reaction, a spontaneous boycott of British goods in some mofussil areas of Bengal. It was followed by a mass meeting under Congress auspices. And the Swadeshi movement was on its way.
Various sections participated in the Swadeshi agitation for different reasons, and these differences got reflected in the movement. For instance, Hindu zamindars of East Bengal who were opposed to the Partition so as not to become a religious minority in a situation of increasing peasant unrest, employed openly communal propaganda throughout their agitation - promoting Shivaji-utsavs, image-worship, Hindu ceremonies, and so on. This propaganda infected the entire movement, and weakened it considerably as communal riots broke out in Mymensingh in 1907-8. But many Muslims nevertheless joined the movement: among the noted Swadeshi agitators were men like Ghaznavi, Rasul Din Mohammed, Dedar Bux, Moniruzzaman, Ismail Hussain Siraji, Abul Hussain, Abdul Gafur, and Liakat Husain. The 10,000-strong joint Hindu-Muslim student procession in Calcutta on September 23, 1905, also testified to the potential for communal solidarity on the Swadeshi issue. The fact that it could not triumph has to be ascribed to British divide-and-rule policies and to zamindars' objectively furthering the designs of the British by heightening communal propaganda.
But it was not merely the immediate issue of Partition which explains the response from the masses of Bengalis. As Aurobindo Ghosh (at the time an "extremist") put in April 1907, the revocation of Partition soon came to be regarded as only "the pettiest and narrowest of all political objects". The appeal of the Swadeshi movement was its straightforward mass approach and its rejection of "prayer-petition" politics. Along with this movement came enunciated and widely propagated theories for not simply a limited reform of British rule, but its complete overthrow. It was this prospect that frightened the Congress; and throughout the movement the tussle between these trends is evident.
Let us follow the sequence of events. After Curzon's proposal to partition Bengal became known (December 1903), Congress-style protest meetings and petitions were carried out for more than one and a half years, with absolutely nil effect on the British.
On July 19, 1905, Curzon went ahead with his partition plan. Within days, spontaneous protests were organised in a large number of mofussil areas where the pledge for a boycott of British goods was taken. No doubt in Bengal, with its history of a large number of artisans and weavers having been ruined in the nineteenth century by imports of British goods, the call must have been particularly appropriate. In Calcutta, too, students organised meetings where the Swadeshi call was taken up.
By August, even Congress leaders such as Surendranath Banerjea were forced to take up the Boycott call. On August 7, 1905, in a public meeting at the Calcutta Town Hall, the Boycott Resolution was passed. Tilak had attempted a boycott of foreign cloth in 1896, but failed to elicit such response. The response in Bengal was overwhelming: By September 1905, the sale of British cloth in some districts fell to between six and 20 per cent of original levels. Public burning of foreign cloth and the setting up of village samitis took place spontaneously. One of these samitis, the Swadesh Bandhab Samiti of Barisal, headed by the schoolteacher Aswinikumar Dutt, attained remarkable popularity for its social and humanitarian work among the largely Muslim peasantry. It was reported even in 1909 to have 175 village branches.
The Swadeshi movement also saw a remarkable upsurge in labour organisation, with the added feature of active public sympathy with the strikers. Among the strikes of this period (1905-8) in Bengal were those of clerical staff, Calcutta tram workers, jute workers, railway workers (of various categories, from clerical staff to coolies), and press workers. The Swadeshi movement in Bengal also saw the emergence of labour unions and professional agitators. Bombay, Madras and Punjab also witnessed the growth of a spontaneous anti-imperialist labour movement - the most famous example being the 1908 strike of Bombay textile workers in protest against Tilak's arrest.
Some scholars, in an effort to paint the Congress as a nationalist body, explain its limitations as being those of a national bourgeoisie, revolting against colonial rule but eager to safeguard its own property against the mass revolt. They explain that various Congress betrayals of the mass movements were due to fear that the national bourgeoisie too might be threatened by the popular upsurge.
However, the Swadeshi movement was not really a worker-peasant movement in that sense. Aswinikumar Dutt was not organising peasants to struggle against zamindars, and Tilak was not organising workers to struggle against Indian mill-owners. (Indeed, Tilak took reactionary positions on a number of issues, including communalism, reform of Hindu customs, and relations between peasants and moneylenders/landlords.) It is only in the post-1910 period that socialist ideas of any form began entering Indian nationalist propaganda. The Swadeshi movement, which came earlier, aimed mainly for a militant struggle against foreign political and economic rule. But even this, as we shall see, the Congress leadership could not tolerate: clearly the Congress leadership did not stand even for national independence.
As early as November 1905, the Congress leaders felt things had got too far. They managed to call off the boycott of British educational institutions on November 16, 1905. The appointment of the reputedly liberal Morley as Secretary of State and Minto as Viceroy was seized upon as a reason for ending the boycott. Gokhale proclaimed at the December 1905 Congress at Benares: "Gentlemen, how true it is that to everything there is an end! Thus even the Viceroyalty of Curzon has come to an end!" He went on to extol Lord Ripon as having kindled the flame of National Consciousness and the Congress.
At a time when the boycott movement was raging in Bengal, the Benares Congress passed no resolution supporting it. Only in protesting against the repressive measures against it did they fleetingly refer to the movement, and that too in a manner that suggests not a defence of the movement but a plea that it be excused. Thus: "the people there had been compelled to resort to the boycott of foreign goods as a last protest, and perhaps the only constitutional and effective means left to them of drawing the attention of the British public." (emphasis added)
The impending visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales would have been a splendid occasion for the Congress to protest at least against the repression on the Swadeshi agitators. Instead, the Congress leaders moved a resolution "most humbly and respectfully" welcoming the Prince and Princess. Those in the Subjects Committee who disagreed (eg, Tilak) were in a minority, and had agreed in a compromise to abstain from the voting on this "unanimously passed" resolution.
Gokhale's speech at the 1905 Congress, while seeming magnanimously to pardon the Swadeshi agitators, also held out a threat to them if they continued to intensify their agitation. On the boycott of British goods he stated that the Bengali people carried on their movement
"with a two-fold object - first as a demonstration of their deep resentment at the treatment they were receiving, and secondly to attract the attention of the people in England to their grievances, so that those who were in a position to call the Government of India to account might understand what was taking place in India.... But a weapon like this must be reserved only for extreme occasions.... Above all, let us see to it that there are no fresh divisions in the country in the name of Swadeshism. No greater perversion of its true spirit could be imagined than that.."
However, the "extremists", as the nationalists were then called, were not willing to be tamed in this fashion. Other regions were entering the struggle, too. In contrast to sections of the Swadeshi movement in Bengal and in Maharashtra which were infected by Hindu communalism an anti-feudal, anti-imperialist peasant movement with broad communal unity was being built up in Punjab along the Chenab. The sympathy aroused by the 1907 strike of the workers of North-Western State Railway - which ran across the Chenab - alarmed the Punjab Lieutenant-Governor. Lala Lajpat Rai played a minimal and unwilling role in the movement, being too closely tied to trading-moneylending sections to be enthusiastic at a peasant agitation. The real organisers were men like Ajit Singh, whose Anjuman-i-Mohabban-i-Watan played an active mass agitational role among both peasants and workers in areas such as Lahore, Ferozepur, and Rawalpindi. (The group later turned to revolutionary politics.)
Madras also saw the rise of "extremist" politicians such as Chidambaram Pillai and the working class agitator Subramania Siva. They began addressing almost daily meetings, preaching extended boycott, Swaraj, and, reportedly, violent methods to win it. By February 1908, Siva was making statements such as "If the coolies stood out for extra wages European mills in India would cease to exist" (February 26); and, in another speech, "the Russian revolution had benefited the people and revolutions always brought good to the world" (February 23). Apparently as a direct result of Siva's speeches, workers at the foreign-owned Coral Cotton Mills went on strike, and a 50 per cent rise in wages was obtained in early March. The British attempted to stop the meetings and to prosecute Pillai and Siva, but this resulted in the closing of shops, protest strikes by municipal and private sweepers and by carriage-drivers in Tuticorin, attacks on municipal offices, law courts, and police stations in Tirunelveli, and firing in both towns on March 11-13, 1908.
In Maharashtra, under the leadership of Tilak, religious festivals were organised with political messages (a practice that was, however, to prove harmful to the anti-imperialist movement in the long term), bonfires of foreign cloth were organised, mass picketing of liquor shops was conducted (the British earned large tax revenues off liquor, and so encouraged its consumption in India), and working-class meetings were held in Bombay. The message of these meetings was not against Indian millowners; yet the very extension of militant mass activity against imperialism into the very fortress of Dinshaw Wacha and Pherozeshah Mehta alarmed the "moderates".
By the 1906 session of the Congress the "extremists" (ie, the radical nationalists) in the Congress, by their sheer numbers and popularity, seemed poised to take over the Congress. One factor was the decision to hold the session at Calcutta. The audience (excluding the delegates) numbered 20,000 - over four times that normally present at earlier Congresses. "Extremists" from different provinces had forged some links in the interim, and there were attempts to elect one of them President for the Congress. The move was scotched by the "moderates" electing the aged and respected Naoroji instead. The 1906 Congress leadership was forced to accept four resolutions which they were unhappy with: on the partition of Bengal, on the boycott movement, on Swadeshi, and on self-government. However, the 1906 Congress was by no means a radical affair. The leadership managed to tone down each resolution considerably and to make them ambiguous. Thus "Swaraj" became "the system of government obtaining in the self-governing British colonies". The effort of the "extremists", to have the resolution in support of the Bengal boycott movement extended to cover other provinces, was defeated. And the Congress leaders were determined to review even such limited defeats at the next session.
The "moderates" made sure that the mistake of locating the Congress at Calcutta was not repeated. The site of the 1907 Congress was originally to have been Nagpur - a Tilak stronghold where the local delegates (always a disproportionately large section of the delegates) would have swung the issue in favour of the "extremists". However, the Mehta-Wacha-Gokhale combine, with its greater control over the actual machinery of the Congress, got the location transferred to Surat - a stronghold of the "moderates". Since, by convention, the local Reception Committee also chose the President, this also ensured a "moderate" President.
In the interim between the 1906 and 1907 Congress sessions, the Congress leaders, especially Gokhale, made several statements reinterpreting the four 1906 resolutions. For example, on February 4, 1907, Gokhale made his oft-quoted remark that "I want India to take her proper place among the great nations of the world, politically, industrially, in religion, in literature, in science and in arts...." But few Indians today have heard the continuation of that quotation: "I want all this and I feel at the same time that the whole of this aspiration can, in its essence and its reality, be realised within this Empire". (emphasis added) On February 9, he effectively repudiated the main slogan of Bengal, - viz, boycott:
"I am sure most of those who speak of this `boycott' mean by it the use, as far as possible, of Swadeshi articles in preference to foreign articles. Now such use is really included in the Swadeshi, but unfortunately the word `boycott' has a sinister meaning to it - it implies a vindictive desire to injure another, no matter what harm you may thereby cause yourself. And I think we would do well to use only the word Swadeshi to describe our present movement, leaving along the word `boycott' which creates unnecessary ill-will against ourselves. Moreover, remember that a strict `boycott' of foreign goods is not at all practicable in our present industrial condition...."
He thus gave the movement a twist and reinterpretation which was to become a point of diversion within the movement.
It is not surprising that the "extremist" delegates at the 1907 Congress believed the rumours that the four Calcutta resolutions were going to be revoked (in fact, the resolutions were later dropped or amended).
The atmosphere of the Surat Congress is conveyed in the account of a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian who witnessed the Congress. After the proposal of Rash Behari Ghosh, the confirmed "moderate", as President:
"...the deep murmur was heard again, and one shrill voice cried, `Never!'"...(Surendranath Banerjea seconded Ghosh's nomination.) Hardly had his immense voice uttered ten words when, like the cracking of thunder begins before the lightning ceases, the tumult burst, and no word more was heard.
"Waving their arms, their scarves, their sticks, and umbrellas, a solid mass of delegates and spectators on the right of the Chair sprang to their feet and shouted without a moment's pause. Over their head was the label `Central Provinces' - Central Provinces where Nagpur stands and the Congress was to have been; `Remember Nagpur!' they cried; `Remember Midnapur!' where, during the Bengal Provincial Conference a week or two before, Surendranath had attempted to keep the peace against the `extremists', and had actually sat on the same platform as the Superintendent of Police!" (C.H. Phillips, ed. Evolution of India and Pakistan, 1858-1947, documents, London, 1962)
The police intervened; they dispersed the delegates, and took away some of them. The Congress had split. The Guardian correspondent later met Tilak, who was unhappy at the split: he knew that his sections had as yet no alternative organisational set-up to speak of. (Tilak's later career was to expose certain underlying weaknesses in his position.) He was hoping for some way in which to re-enter the Congress; but the "moderates" were not interested in allowing any "extremists" back in. Clearly the number of "extremist" delegates was large: even the "moderates" estimated that the number of delegates at the start amounted to 1,600 (interestingly, unlike other Congresses, the 1907 Congress preserved no full list of delegates - perhaps to cover up the real number); after the split, the remainder were only 900.
These 900 met the following day and, under the stewardship of the Wacha-Mehta-Gokhale-Banerjea combine, drafted "a notice" declaring the Congress's determination to work "by strictly constitutional means", and all meetings for the attainment of self-government "have to be conducted in an orderly manner, with due submission to the authority of those who are entrusted with the power to control their procedure". The 1907 Congress called a special Congress to be held in Allahabad in April 1908. There, each delegate had to sign the First Article of a newly-drawn-up Constitution. The Article, which became known as the "Creed", reiterated the same principles as this 1907 notice.
The split was not, as official Congress historians have attempted to depict, the result of a tragic misunderstanding. Even the Guardian correspondent reported that the impending revision of the Calcutta resolutions was the real reason for the split:
"The difference in the remaining resolution was vital. It went to the root of the difference between the parties, and for the sake of it alone the proposed changes remain worthy of notice. In the original Calcutta resolution the Congress was `of the opinion that the Boycott Movement inaugurated in Bengal by way of protest against the Partition was and is legitimate'. In the new form proposed for discussion in the Subjects Committee, the wording ran: `this Congress is of the opinion that the Boycott of foreign goods resorted to by Bengal by way of protest against the Partition of that province was and is legitimate'. All the difference between the moderates and extremists - just the one point which made genuine conciliation impossible - lay implied in that small difference of wording... `Boycott Movement' might mean the rejection of almost anything - the rejection of foreign goods, of foreign justice, foreign appointments, foreign education, foreign authority, taxation, Government itself. Already, it had been so interpreted, both at the Calcutta Congress and frequently throughout the year. To yield on this point would be to hand over the Congress to the extremists forever, to abandon the first principles of the Congress, which had been to work out the salvation of India in association with the British rulers.... If these first principles were not to be abandoned, if the Congress was to be pledged to call upon India to go her own way, regardless of the English people and the English government, the Congress as it had hitherto existed might as well give up the pretence of existence, and bequeath its effects to a new and different force." (emphasis added)
The "moderate" leaders were anxious not to give up their "pretence of existence", particularly as they knew they would soon be supported by the pretence of reform: In 1906, even as the Boycott struggle raged and was repressed, Secretary of State Morley called in the "moderate" leaders for discussions on possible reforms of the Councils.
By 1907, the "moderate" leaders were quivering with anticipation at the imminent reforms.
By 1908, they were joyous at the Morley-Minto proposals, expressed "deep and general satisfaction", praised "the high statesmanship which dictated this act of the Government", and tendered "sincere and grateful thanks" personally to Morley and Minto.
If they had reservations in 1909, these were centrally regarding what they called "the excessive and unfairly preponderant share given to the followers of one particular religion" (ie, Muslims) in weighing the separate electorates.
The Indian Councils Act was actually a farcical exercise in mass deception. It pompously introduced the principle of "elections". What this amounted to was merely a minority of indirectly elected members in the Central Legislative Council and a majority of indirectly elected members in the Provincial Councils. The Councils themselves allowed only some powers of discussion, putting of questions, and sponsoring of resolutions. These Councils had no control over administration or finance, let alone defence or foreign policy. The reforms were made with the express intent of isolating the growing nationalist movement. Lord Morley indeed explained this in a most telling manner to the House of Lords:
"There are three classes of people whom we have to consider in dealing with a scheme of this kind. There are the extremists who nurse fanatic dreams that some day they will drive us out of India.... The second group nourish no hopes of this sort, but hope for autonomy or self-government of the colonial species and pattern. And then the third section of this classification ask for no more than to be admitted to co-operation in our administration."I believe the effect of the Reforms has been, is being, and will be to draw the second class, who hope for colonial autonomy, into the third class, who will be content with being admitted to a fair and full co-operation." (emphasis added)
No such sweet persuasion was employed on the radical nationalists (the so-called "extremists"). The British made sure that they had no time to start a rival Congress. Repression had already started with the police's forcible entry into the 1906 Barisal conference of Dutt's Bandhab Samiti, where they beat up a large number of the participants. The Bande Mataram slogan was banned. Even more systematic repression followed with the agitations in Punjab and the rise of the revolutionary terrorists in Bengal. The major measures included the banning of "seditious" meetings in specific areas (May and November 1907), Press Acts enabling the seizure of presses (June 1908, February 1910), the Criminal Law Amendment Act (December 1908) which permitted bans on the principal samitis in Bengal, and deportations.
Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh were deported in May 1907; nine Bengal leaders including Aswinikumar Dutt were deported in December 1908; Chidambaram Pillai and others from Madras were arrested; and Tilak was sentenced to six years in prison on July 22, 1908.
The Congress and the Indian masses had clearly opposing attitudes towards this repression. The Congress was, first of all, frankly terrified of the possibility that it might be associated in the Government's mind with the extremists. Gokhale told the "extremists" in 1907:
"You do not realise the enormous reserve of power behind the Government. If the Congress were to do anything such as you suggest, the Government would have no difficulty in throttling it in five minutes."
The moderates looked frantically for some means to separate themselves from those facing repression. H.A. Wadya, close associate of Pherozeshah Mehta, declared that the extremists were "the worst enemies of our cause" (emphasis added), and said "the union of these men with the Congress is the union of a diseased limb with a healthy body, and the only remedy is surgical severance, if the Congress is to be saved from death by blood poisoning."
Thus the First Resolution of the Congress of 1908 was passed to tender "its loyal homage to his Gracious Majesty the King-Emperor." While the Congress mildly regretted the deportation and urged that the Government give the deportees a fair trial, it effectively endorsed the black laws of 1908, though in round-about phrasing:
"XI. Resolved - That this Congress deplores the circumstances which have led to the passing of Act VII of 1908 and Act XIV of 1908, but having regard to their drastic character and to the fact that a sudden emergency alone can afford any justification for such exceptional legislation, this Congress expresses its earnest hope that these enactments will only have a temporary existence in the Indian Statute Book." (emphasis added)
No resolution was passed in the 1908 Congress regarding Tilak or his stiff sentence of six years' imprisonment.
The workers and nationalists of Bombay reacted differently. Strikes, stone-throwing and clashes began with the start of Tilak's trial (July 13), and the British soon had to call out the army. On the day Tilak was convicted, on July 22, the cloth shop employees of the Mulji Jetha Market in Bombay called for a six-day hartal - one day for each year of Tilak's imprisonment. It was the Bombay working-class, the textile workers particularly, that fulfilled this hartal by leaving work in practically all the mills till July 28. However, the police reports of the period speak of remarkable heroism being shown by even shopkeepers and small merchants, some of whom died in the firing. The entire city, the mill area in particular, witnessed a virtual insurrection as policemen's guns were answered by large-scale stone-throwing. According to official figures, police firings killed 16 and wounded 43. In Pandharpur too (Sholapur district) there was a riot in protest, organised and participated in by (what police records state to be) "lower-caste men".
Though the "extremists" had an emerging mass base, they had as yet a very poor organisational network. The split forced them out of the Congress before their own linkages were secure; and thereafter, government repression dispersed them before they could pose a challenge to the Congress with an alternative body.
It was with the sense of a need for organisation, the sense of intense bitterness at the Congress, and the realisation that the liberation of India would have to be won by force, that led to the emergence of the revolutionary terrorists. (We are referring to them here as "terrorists" because they did not have a clear programme of mass struggle. However, it should be noted that their acts did not strike terror into the hearts of common people.) Many Swadeshi movement radicals joined the movement: among them, Ajit Singh's group in Punjab and the Tirunelveli radicals after the arrest of Pillai and Siva. These early revolutionaries' special contribution was in putting forward a conscious alternative path of struggle to the Congress's peaceful petitioning. Jugantar (which along with Bande Mataram and Sandhya was one of the leading magazines representing this trend) wrote about the police assault on the peaceful Barisal conference:
"The 30 crores of people inhabiting India must raise their 60 crores of hands to stop this course of oppression. Force must be stopped by force."
Even the boycott was envisioned not as a purely peaceful activity. In a series of articles in Bande Mataram in April 1907, Aurobindo Ghosh ridiculed the idea of "peaceful ashrams and swadeshism and self-help" as inadequate. Instead, he visualised an "organised and relentless boycott" of British goods, education, justice and administration; chalked out a programme of civil disobedience of unjust laws, a social boycott of loyalists; and called for armed struggle if British repression went too far.
The revolutionary terrorists called for immediate armed action by all those patriots who were prepared to make the sacrifice. They pitted themselves consciously against the Congress arguments. Jugantar appealed in 1907:
"And what is the number of English officials in each district? With a firm resolve you can bring British rule to an end in a single day.... If we sit idle, and hesitate to rise till the whole population are goaded to desperation, then we shall continue to sit idle till the end of time.... Without blood, O Patriots! will the country awake?" (Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885-1947, Madras, 1983.)
Though the revolutionary terrorists did not lead mass struggles against the British, their heroic acts and sacrifices won them enormous popularity among the common people. Among the major groups were the Abhinav Bharat (centres in Nasik, and led by V. Savarkar), the Anushilan Samity (based in Dacca and led by Pulin Das), the Jugantar group (led by Jatindranath Mukherji) and the group led by Rash Behari Bose and Sachindranath Sanyal. These groups carried out several armed raids to raise funds, executions of English officials (especially of sadistic and racist district magistrates), and a few spectacular attempts on the lives of major officials. Some of their more famous actions included the unsuccessful attempt in 1907 on the life of the lieutenant governor of Bengal, the 1908 attempt on the life of the notorious Muzaffarpur district magistrate Kingsford, the 1909 execution of the Nasik district magistrate, the 1909 London execution of the India Office bureaucrat Curzon-Wyllie, and the 1912 attempt on the life of the Viceroy Lord Hardinge.
The sheer heroism of these men, who carried out these acts in the face of certain death, moved the people. The would-be assassins of Kingsford (their bomb instead killed two Englishwomen and left Kingsford unscathed), Prafulla Chaki and Khudiram Bose, became heroes of Bengal. Chaki shot himself in captivity while Bose was tried and hanged. Folk songs in their memory were composed and sung all over the country.
These men were not the propagators of a working-class revolution. For the most part, the revolutionary terrorists had no Left or Socialist leanings, until much later. Yet it is a telling comment on the Government of "free" India that it has blotted out the names, acts, and words of these men from our history books, or castrated the actual content of what they said and did so as to make it possible to "honour" them in the same breath as the Congress leaders are honoured. These martyrs faced execution by the British with heroism: said Madan Lal Dhingra, the assassin of Curzon-Wyllie, as he went to the scaffold:
"Neither rich nor able, a poor son like myself can offer nothing but his blood on the altar of his Mother's deliverance.... May I be re-born of the same Mother and may I re-die in the same sacred cause, till my mission is done and she stands free for the good of humanity and to the glory of God."
Far more brutal than the British who hanged Dhingra have been our Congress governments. The British made these men famous martyrs; the government of "free" India has denied them their place in history.
The Congress of the time, however, was more straightforward. Madan Mohan Malaviya, President of the 1904 Congress, expressed the deep sorrow of the Congress for the murders of Curzon-Wyllie, Dr. Lalkaha, and Dr. Jackson, and for the attempt on the life of the Viceroy. He bitterly attacked Madan Lal Dhingra, and declared that the Congress's desire was to work for the greater and greater consolidation of the Union of India and England. The 1908 Congress itself had recorded in a Resolution its
"emphatic and unqualified condemnation of the detestable outrages and deeds of violence which have been committed recently in some parts of the country and which are abhorrent to the loyal, humane and peace-loving nature of His Majesty's subjects". (emphasis added)
Among the many lasting achievements of the Swadeshi movement were its contribution to anti-imperialist culture - whether in Rabindranath Tagore's earlier writings, in Subramania Bharati's poems, or, most importantly, in the vast number of extremely popular patriotic folk songs, folk plays, and other forms of people's art. The writings of "extremist" journalists also philosophically advanced the Indian liberation struggle. For instance, as Indian "extremists" started building contacts with Irish radicals, a sense of the world-wide anti-imperialist movement (which had, of course, nourished the beginnings of Swadeshi - as in its drawing inspiration from China and the Russian Revolution) was getting enunciated.
Bande Mataram wrote (in 1909, by which time it was being brought out from Europe by Madame Cama), "Dhingra's pistol shot has been heard by the Irish cottier in his forlorn hut, by the Egyptian fellah in the field, by the Zulu labourer in the dark mine..."
While Aurobindo Ghosh's fanatic Hinduism severely limited his anti-imperialist politics and ultimately led him, for fear of British repression, into the safety of ashram life, other groups had no such limitations. The pamphlet Oh Martyrs (1907), for instance, evokes the memory of 1857, when "the Firinghee rule was shattered to pieces and the swadeshi thrones were set up by the common consent of Hindus and Mohammadans..." When Madame Cama unfurled the flag of "free" India at the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International, the design contained, besides the words "Bande Mataram", both Hindu and Muslim symbols.
It is not surprising that, given the experiences of these nationalists with the Indian ruling classes, they should have by and large stopped looking towards them for guidance. The next rational step was towards Marxist and other Left-wing ideas. The earlier convert among these men to Marxism was Hemchandra Kanungo, the organiser of the group which produced Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki. Before he began political work, he had been to Paris, where, under the guidance of a Russian emigre, he received some military training and political exposure. He returned an atheist and a Marxist. However, it was only with the Ghadr rebellion, and even more clearly in the post-1917 period, that Marxist influence came to bear on the Indian national liberation movement.
Resolution I of the 1912 Congress placed "on record its sense of horror and detestation at the dastardly attempt made on the life of His Excellency the Viceroy, who has by his wise and conciliatory policy and earnest solicitude to promote the well-being of the millions of His Majesty's subjects won the esteem, the confidence, the affection and the gratitude of the people of India". Thus the Congress set its seal of approval on the repression unleashed by the British on the revolutionaries. Between 1908 and 1918, the British killed 186 revolutionaries, sentenced many others to transportation, deported others, and arrogated to themselves a set of sweeping legal powers.
Despite this repression, the constant threat of unrest could only be temporarily curbed; it could not be eliminated. In 1911, the British conceded on the partition question, and Bengal was re-united. Instead of claiming a victory for the people's six years of struggle, the Congress chose this as yet another occasion to extol the virtues of British rule: A Congress spokesman declared that "every heart is beating in unison with reverence and devotion to the British Throne, overflowing with revived confidence in and gratitude towards British statesmanship".
Thus we have seen, in the Swadeshi movement, a capsule form of the pattern that was to be repeated with practically the whole of the freedom struggle uptil 1947: First, a major anti-imperialist wave would begin spontaneously; the Congress would do its best to check it and petition the British for some purely token concession to appease it; the movement would assume major proportions, and the genuinely nationalist elements in the Congress cadre would force the Congress leadership to give it at least limited verbal support (while the leadership would continue to plot ways to wash its hands of the struggle); the movement would assume a violent form and clearly enunciate its aim as the complete overthrow of British rule, political and economic; the Congress leadership would stab it in the back, form an open alliance with the British and effectively endorse the Raj's repression. Finally - and this is the most remarkable and ingenious part of the pattern - the entire movement (its conception, its struggle, its sacrifices, its mass appeal) would get ascribed by all the official historians and textbooks to the Congress! Surely no greater brutality than this could be committed to the memory of those who gave their lives in these freedom struggles.
Having described the Swadeshi agitation in detail, we propose to deal with the further developments of this pattern more succinctly.
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