IT is in the light of such growing revolutionary forces at the time that we need to view the Congress's role in the 1928-29 nationalist upsurge. Labour unrest also scaled new heights: In 1928-29, there were 203 strikes and lock-outs involving 506,851 workers with a loss of 31,647,404 working days. Much of this, including the massive Bombay textile workers' strike of April-October 1928 and the first general strike of Bengal jute mill workers in August 1929, was under Communist leadership.
The announcement of the all-white Simon Commission, on November 8, 1927, to formulate India's future, excited a powerful wave of nationalist resentment. At each stop of the Commission (starting with Bombay on February 3, 1928) it was greeted with massive protests. In these protests, it was almost always students and youth that took the lead.
At Lahore railway station, the Simon Commission was similarly greeted by thousands of students, schoolboys, and railway workers. When, in the police beating-up of demonstrators, Lala Lajpat Rai was injured (he subsequently died of the injuries), protests in other cities intensified. (The Lahore demonstration apparently consisted largely of Naujawan Bharat Sabha men - the Congress itself being rather weak in Lahore. Dhanwantari and Ahsan Itahi of the Sabha openly led the people, but allowed Lala Lajpat Rai to keep the limelight - despite the Sabha's disillusionment with the Lala's increasingly communal politics and his growing "moderateness" towards the Raj. When the lathi-charge began, led by Saunders, one blow hit the Lala, who immediately ordered: "in view of this barbarous attack by the police, I suspend the demonstration." As he was officially heading the demonstration, it was not long before the crowd was dispersed.)
The year 1928 saw youth conferences and leagues in practically every province - among them the Bombay Youth League, the Berar Youth Conference, the U.P. Youth Conference, the All-Bengal Students' Conference. Politically the most important of such youth mass organisations, and dominating the Punjab Left by 1928, was the Naujawan Bharat Sabha.
The Congress went through a peculiar series of contortions trying to keep up with such events. At the Madras Congress in 1927, in the absence of Gandhi, Jawaharlal proposed, and the delegates passed, a resolution demanding complete independence. The delegates, however, rejected supplementary clauses defining Swaraj as immediate and complete withdrawal. The undefined "Swaraj" remained the Congress creed. Gandhi sharply rebuked Jawaharlal for his 1927 action. And Jawaharlal soon apologised. By the following year, the Congress leadership contradicted the 1927 resolution.
The 1928 Nehru report (prepared by a committee headed by Motilal Nehru) was meant to be the Indian National Congress's counter to the Simon Commission and was the Congress's first effort to draft a constitutional framework. However, it explicitly advocated, not complete independence, but Dominion status.
The Independence for India League, which sprang up in opposition to the Nehru Report, was in fact headed by Motilal's son, Jawaharlal. It was these ever brave and radical posturings of Jawaharlal that excited alarm among the Indian capitalist funders of the Congress, and led to a series of backstage manoeuvres which we shall presently discuss.
Gandhi returned to active politics as he saw the growing unrest. The 1928 Congress was the last chance he had to stave off a full- fledged mass movement for complete independence. When delegates objected to the Nehru Report, he agreed to the compromise that it would not be regarded as an actual withdrawal of the demand for complete independence, and that if this demand were not accepted by December 31, 1929 (Gandhi proposed December 1930, but he had to concede to 1929), the Congress would demand complete independence.
An alternative proposal for demanding complete independence was defeated by only 1,350 to 973 - a close vote, again indicating how substantial were the difficulties Gandhi was facing in controlling the nationalists, even those within the Congress.
The Calcutta Congress also witnessed a remarkable scene in which over 20,000 workers, under the banner of the Workers' and Peasants' Party (a front organisation of the Communists) marched into the hall where the proceedings were going on, took over the pandal for two hours, passed resolutions demanding complete independence, and raised slogans for an "Independent Socialist Republic of India". Congress organisers were highly displeased. Not only the Congress, but the imperial rulers as well, must have taken this as a warning: It was less than four months later that the Meerut Conspiracy Case began.
Meanwhile the Hindustan Republican Association was being reorganised. On September 9 and 10, 1928, many of the major revolutionaries (not including the Communists) of northern India gathered secretly at Ferozeshah Kotla, set up a new collective leadership (discarding some of the old leaders they felt were acting as restraints), elected Chandrashekhar Azad as their Commander-in-Chief, and, most importantly, adopted socialism as their creed, inserting the word "Socialist" into their name.
The Hindustan Socialist Republican Army was rapidly moving from the phase of individual actions to one of building a revolutionary movement. Although their major action after the reorganisation was the assassination of the officer that killed Lajpat Rai, the motives behind the action were significant. For one, the action was not taken merely to avenge Lajpat Rai's death. (The revolutionaries had, in fact, themselves circulated a leaflet in 1924 comparing Lajpat - who had turned to communal politics and "moderate" tactics - to the traitor Judas.) The action was taken because Lajpat Rai's death had evoked enormous popular resentment. Secondly, the assassination was carried out as the Sabha's popularity and mass membership were growing. "The action", said Bhagat Singh, "will rouse the masses and strengthen the movement." Thirdly, the revolutionaries announced their aims publicly in a notice posted the day after Saunders' death:
"...Despite opposition we shall keep aloft the flag of revolution and even from the rungs of the scaffold we shall give forth the slogan-Inquilab Zindabad!
"We do not enjoy killing an individual, but this individual was ruthless, mean, and part and parcel of an unjust system. It is necessary to destroy such a system. This man has been killed because he was a cog in the wheel of British rule. This government is the worst of all governments.
"We are sorry to shed human blood, but bloodshed is necessary for a revolution. We aim at a revolution that will end exploitation of man by man.
`LONG LIVE REVOLUTION'
BALRAJ, (the alias for Chandrashekhar Azad), Commander-in-Chief, H.S.R.A."
In fact, Bhagat Singh's group immediately gained enormous popularity, not only in the Punjab but throughout North India, as a result of this. Nehru wrote in his autobiography that Bhagat Singh "became a symbol, the act was forgotten, the symbol remained, and within a few months each town and village of the Punjab and to a lesser extent the rest of northern India, resounded with his name." It is no coincidence that, in the 1929 Congress, held in Lahore - the centre of the Sabha's activities - Jawaharlal Nehru described himself as "a socialist and a republican": words that echoed exactly the name of Bhagat Singh's organisation. It was with Bhagat Singh and his image that Nehru had to compete for leadership of the youth of India - such was the strength and popularity of the revolutionaries.
The H.S.R.A. was responsible for a number of other major "terrorist" actions, including an attempt to blow up Viceroy Irwin's train near Delhi 1929, and a whole series of similar actions in Punjab and U.P. towns in 1930 (26 being recorded in Punjab that year alone). However, their single most important action was the throwing of bombs into the Legislative Assembly by Bhagat Singh and Bakuteshwar Dutt on April 8, 1929.
The bombs themselves were not intended to injure anyone (as indeed they did not); they were for demonstrative effect. The background to the action was as follows. Beginning in March 1929, the British Government had unleashed a reign of terror on the rapidly-growing labour movement in India. By March 20, 31 of India's most important labour leaders (largely, but not all, Communists) were arrested. They included Dange, Mirajkar, Ghate, Joglekar, Adhikari, Nimbkar, Alve, and Kasle from Bombay; Muzaffar Ahmed, Kishorilal Ghosh, Dharani Goswami, Gopen Chakraborti, Radharaman Mitra, Gopal Basak, and Sibnath Bannerji from Calcutta; Sohan Singh Josh, who had associated closely with Bhagat Singh and whose Kirti Kisan Party co-operated with the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, from Punjab; P.C. Joshi and Viswanath Mukherji from U.P., as well as three English Communists active in the Indian trade union movement. They were implicated in a conspiracy case, and the trial was to be staged at Meerut. This was the famous Meerut conspiracy case.
While the Congress condemned the arrests, it was an open secret that the leadership was somewhat relieved and mounted no nationwide campaign for their release. The agitation was instead taken up by Left forces in India and internationally. It was this that ultimately succeeded in reducing the stiff sentences.
Certainly the arrests crippled the radical wing of the Congress. The arrested included no less than eight members of the All India Congress Committee. Immediately, however, the arrests did not prevent activities of the labour movement, which in April 1929 saw the beginning of yet another Communist-led general strike in Bombay's textile mills. However, the Meerut conspiracy case did manage to tie up 31 of India's most important Communist leaders for three of the most volatile years of the national upsurge - 1929-32 - and so left the field open to the Congress leadership. This crippled the participation of the organised working class in the movement. Lord Irwin, indeed, expressed his satisfaction at "having these Communists out of the way at a difficult time".
Labour unrest drew the Indian capitalist closer than ever to the Raj, and the British were quick to respond to their repressive needs. In April 1929, the British government was to introduce two bills to smash the labour movement. The first was the Trade Disputes Bill, to effectively ban strikes. The second was the Public Safety Bill, to give the police sweeping powers of preventive detention. The Congress opposed both bills in a token fashion - ie, there were only some speeches in the Legislature (there, too, the Indian Quarterly Register noted that "an unusually large number of Congress members were absent" during the debate on the Public Safety Bill). The court statement of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru explains their decision to throw the bombs at the end of the debate in the Legislature on these two bills:
"In the same manner we fail to comprehend the mentality of public leaders, who help to squander public time and money on so manifestly a stage-managed exhibition of India's helpless subjection. We have been ruminating on all this, as also on the whole-sale arrests of the leaders of the labour movement. The introduction of the Trade Disputes Bill brought us into the Assembly to watch its progress. The course of the debate only served to confirm our conviction that the toiling millions of India had nothing to expect from an institution that stood as a menacing monument to the strangling of the exploited and the serfdom of the helpless labourers."Finally an insult, which we considered inhuman and barbarous, was hurled on the devoted heads of the representatives of the entire country and the starving and struggling millions were deprived of their primary rights and the sole means of economic welfare." (emphasis added)
Thus it is clear that the action of Bhagat Singh and his comrades bore a direct relation not to terrorism but to the labour movement and the mass struggle for political rights.
The court statement further clarified that the act was not aimed at any individual, but at a system:
"(When) Lord Irwin... described it as an act against no individual, but against the constitution itself, we readily recognised that the true significance of the incident had been correctly appreciated." (emphasis added)
The statement refuted the Gandhian theory of non-violence, and classed the Congress leaders in one sense with the British rulers:
"Force when aggressively applied is `violence' and is unjustifiable. But when it is used in the furtherance of a legitimate cause, it has its own moral justification. Elimination of force at all costs is utopian and the new movement which has arisen in the country, and of which we have given a warning, is inspired by the ideals which guided Guru Gobind Singh, Shivaji, Kamal Pasha, Reza Khan, Washington, Garibaldi, Lafayette, and Lenin. As both the Indian government and the Indian public leaders appeared to have shut their eyes and closed their ears against the existence and voice of this motive, we have felt it our duty to sound the warning, where it could not go unheard."
The revolutionaries did not imagine that their solitary act would change the ruling order:
"...revolution does not necessarily mean sanguinary strife, nor is there any place in it for individual vendetta. It is not the cult of the bomb or the pistol. By `revolution' we mean that the present order of things, which is based on manifest injustice, must change. Producers or labourers, in spite of being the most necessary elements of society, are robbed by their exploiters of the fruits of their labour and are denied of their elementary rights.... On the other hand, capitalists, exploiters, parasites of society squander millions on mere whims.... Radical change is, therefore, necessary and it is the duty of those who realise this to reorganise society on a socialist basis. Unless this is done, and the exploitation of man by man and nation by nation, which goes masquerading as a civilising force, but in reality is imperialism, is brought to an end, the suffering and carnage with which humanity is threatened today cannot be prevented and all talk of ending wars and ushering an era of universal peace, is undisguised hypocrisy. By revolution we mean the ultimate establishment of an order of society, in which the sovereignty of the proletariat should be recognised and as a result of which the world federation should redeem humanity from the bondage of capitalism and the misery and the peril of wars."...revolution is the inalienable right of all men. Freedom is the improscribable birthright of all. The toiler is the real sustainer of society. The sovereignty of the people is the ultimate destiny of workers. For these ideals and for this faith we shall welcome any suffering to which we shall be condemned. To this altar of revolution we bring our youth as incense, for no sacrifice is too great for so magnificent a cause. We are content to await the advent of the revolution.
`LONG LIVE REVOLUTION.'"
On June 12, 1929, Bhagat Singh and Dutt were sentenced to transportation for life. However, the Government soon connected Bhagat Singh to the assassination of Saunders, and involved him, Sukhdev, and Rajguru in the Lahore conspiracy case. Meanwhile, the nationwide popularity of the H.S.R.A. prisoners had soared.
When Jatin Das died in September 1929, after 63 days of a jail hunger-strike demanding proper status as a political prisoner, a two-mile-long procession followed his funeral bier in Calcutta. Bhagat Singh wrote in prison:
"Our Party should have a military wing. Let me make myself clear. It is said that I am a terrorist, but in reality, I have been all along a revolutionary with definite ideals and ideology.... it is my considered opinion that bombs cannot serve our purpose. This is proved by the history of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association. Throwing bombs is not only useless, but is often harmful as well. They are to be used on certain occasions only. Our chief aim should be to mobilise the toiling masses."
On October 7, 1930, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, and Rajguru were sentenced to death. Nine others were sentenced to stiff terms of imprisonment (seven of them for life). On the next day, spontaneous hartals convulsed not only Lahore but all the major cities in northern India. Lahore was the most agitated with the police undertaking many arrests of students (including 17 women). The police entered D.A.V. college and beat up 80 students and a professor badly.
The Naujawan Bharat Sabha convened a large meeting in Bradlaugh Hall, and on the field outside Mori Gate, a crowd of 12,000 collected for a public protest meeting. Even the official history of the Congress by Pattabhi Sitaramayya, which almost deified Gandhi, was forced to note:
"It is no exaggeration to say that, at that time, Bhagat Singh's name was as widely known all over India and as popular as Gandhi's."
A confidential Intelligence Bureau account, "Terrorism in India (1917-36)", declared:
"...for a time, he bade fair to oust Mr. Gandhi as the foremost political figure of the day."
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