Savarkar

by Vikram Sampath

  Vinayak confronted Barrie after this unfortunate incident. For nearly eight months after the incident, Barrie kept maintaining that Ullaskar was just faking madness just to shirk work. He even mockingly asked Vinayak if he would be the next to go insane, to which Vinayak retorted, ‘After you, surely!’ 66 Vinayak told him firmly that as political prisoners they needed to be treated with some amount of dignity, or at the least, as human beings. If he continued this way, it would not be long before more strikes rocked the jail. In his own words:

  You had said about Indu Bhushan, you remember, that he had hanged himself because he was mad and not because he had suffered from excessive hard labour in this jail? And, then, I had asked you what was the cause of his madness. Why, then, Ullas had gone mad? Can you give me the reason for it? Dare you say, now, that it was anything else than the sufferings in this prison-life? Here they have no hope, no future to look to and no relief in their present state. Day and night they are ground down with labour, day and night they suffer insult and humiliation from you and your creatures. How can they bear it? What wonder that they are off their brains? It is unbearable suffering that brings on insanity and it is insanity that ends in suicide. Ullas and his life are standing testimonials to this fact and you cannot deny it. You manacled him, you kept him hanging for eight days in his cell; he went into fits and loud wailing. That took him to the hospital and that brought him to the stage of madness and he attempted suicide . . . Do treat us fairly henceforth, treat us as political prisoners, or at least, as ordinary prisoners. Do end this suffering. Else we shall have no other way out of it but strike. Not that we shall always win against you; entrenched as you are behind power and authority, the fight is bound to go against us. But we shall have done our best to expose injustice and defend our honour. And that is a great satisfaction. 67

  Barrie however was obdurate. He continued to maintain that Ullaskar was feigning madness, just to shirk his duties.

  The Jail History Ticket was a document that maintained a catalogue of the punishments given to a prisoner. They did not include the regular tasks, such as working on the oil-mill or picking oakum, assigned to anyone. Even the punishments meted out were vastly underrated and reported, lest it catch the government’s attention. A perusal of Vinayak’s Jail History Ticket of this time shows that he was an active participant in the non-cooperation that was going on in the prison. 68 On 19 September 1912, he was found in possession of a letter addressed to another. He makes a mention of this in his memoir too, although the date of that incident is unknown. He refers to a letter in Modi script that he had written to other prisoners on how to go about organizing the strike in the prison. This was confiscated in a search conducted in Vinayak’s cell. As punishment, he was handcuffed in standing position for a week. A similar incident happened on 23 November 1912 when a letter was confiscated from his cell. Following this he was put in solitary confinement for a month. In keeping with the non-cooperation in the prison, Vinayak went on a hunger strike from 30 December 1912 to 2 January 1913 and refused all food and water. All these details ascertain his active involvement in mobilizing fellow prisoners to raise their voice against the cruelty meted out to them. Barrie detested him for this as he was considered the brain behind the disturbances.

  Meanwhile, the political prisoners decided to petition the jail authorities and Vinayak was selected as one of the two representatives. While prisoners who had passed six months of sentence were allowed to work outside the prison, Vinayak and Babarao were never let off even though they had served more than a year. On being asked they were told that the government forbade this. The petition that Vinayak wrote mentioned this. The petition demanded that those who were accused of political crimes must be recognized as political prisoners and not as common convicts accused of thefts and other crimes. As political prisoners they were entitled to certain concessions and facilities. They demanded that they be given proper food, that they be released from inhuman labour and be allowed to interact with each other. On the contrary, the petition argued, political prisoners did not receive even the ordinary facilities given to other convicts, like sending and receiving letters, occasional meeting with relatives and friends, facility to read and write, or being promoted as petty officers. They were not recognized as ordinary prisoners entitled to these concessions and at the same time got no facilities as prisoners belonging to a special class. If they claimed any rights as political prisoners, they were put off with the excuse that ordinary prisoners would resent the partiality shown to them and hence the prison officers would not be a party to such a decision. Summing up, the petition stated that they were subjected, as political prisoners, to all the disabilities of prison life in India and the Andamans, without the compensating facilities afforded to ordinary prisoners in the jails of India, as well as at the Cellular Jail. It ended with a solemn warning that they would no longer tolerate such treatment of political prisoners in the jail. ‘No relief, no concession, then no work’—that was the final resolution on the matter. Barrie totally disregarded the petition and the political prisoners decided to embark on the second strike. They stoutly refused to do any work, or least, even stand up when Barrie sauntered in.

  From 7 September, the prisoners began a series of hunger strikes and work strikes, started by Ladha Ram, former editor of Swaraj. The next resistance came in the form of a political prisoner, Nani Gopal, a young Bengali lad from Chinsura, aged sixteen or seventeen. He had thrown a bomb at the motorcade of a British officer. Nani had been given the work of the oil mill and after a while he resisted it. He was forced to wear clothes made of gunny bags, which was extremely uncomfortable in the humid weather. Consequently, he gave up wearing clothes altogether. The petty officers would pin him down to the ground, forcibly put those clothes on him, sewing them up on his body. But invariably he would end up tearing them off at night. To prevent this, he would be chained and his hands and legs tied. He refused to answer any question posed to him or even turn up for a bath. He would literally be lifted, led to the water reservoir and his body rubbed so hard with dry coconut shreds that his skin would bleed. Nani Gopal went about stark naked and this caused more friction with the authorities. He demanded to be ranked as a political prisoner.

  Barrie decided to cane Nani to teach him a lesson. Vinayak warned him that any such move on his part would have a disastrous impact on other political prisoners and that he should brace himself for the consequences. Moreover, Lord Morley had ruled that such harsh treatment was strictly forbidden for political prisoners. Disregarding this, the caning was ordered and Nani was thrashed within an inch of his life. He bore it resolutely till the time the jailer who was executing it thought that Nani might die and stopped it. He was moved to a district prison in Viper Island for a few days so that he could be away from the malefic influence of the political prisoners who were poisoning his mind. But the jail authorities were mistaken.

  On his return, Nani began a hunger strike. The authorities tried to force-feed him and also poured milk into a pipe thrust into his nose. Barrie feared that his death, close on the heels of Indu’s suicide and Ullaskar’s insanity, would create a flutter. But Nani was obdurate and refused to eat anything. Vinayak tried his best to convince him not to end his life this way but Nani’s hunger strike carried on for several days and he began to lose weight alarmingly.

  Around the same time, there were rumours that the prisoners who were sent outside for work had begun manufacturing bombs in a clandestine factory. Gramophone pins and few pieces of iron—useful components in bomb manufacture—had been discovered near the place where convicts went out to work. Barin Ghose and Upendranath Banerjee, however, have dismissed this in their memoirs as the mischief and fabrication of a fellow prisoner, Lalmohan Saha. In his memoir, Vinayak mentions that one morning there were mass arrests within the Cellular Jail and ‘the cause of all this noise and fury was that the officers had information of a bomb factory started in the island by political prisoners working in the settlement’. He then a
dds, rather enigmatically, that ‘it was not altogether without foundation. But the search and arrests afforded no clue to it.’ 69 This seems to suggest that he did seem to have knowledge or some role in this, although one cannot be sure. He was nonetheless worried about its impact on his sentence. He writes:

  It gave me great anxiety about the future in store for me. I had already suffered enough in one conspiracy case, and I feared what this case would bring to me. We had already been on transportation for life; my life-sentence was fifty years. The Gods that did me that ill-turn may involve me in this and deal even worse with me. I never more thought of being sent out in the settlement. The manufacturing of bombs and the chartering of boats had made that out of question. The officers behaved insolently towards me and told me openly that I should no more think of it. They had final orders from the Government of India that I was not to be released from this jail till I had run my full sentence of fifty years or till I was dead before that time. 70

  The Government of India did not proceed to investigate or frame charges against any of the prisoners due to insufficient evidence. But it was annoyed with the negligence of the local authorities in Port Blair.

  There were also stories about political prisoners chartering boats to help others escape from the jail. Information about the condition of the jail, the suicides and strikes of prisoners and, importantly, the manufacturing of bombs caught the attention of the press in mainland India. Questions began to be raised in the Imperial Legislative Council about the ferment in the Andamans. The government could no longer afford to turn a blind eye. Finally, in October 1913, home member of the Government of India, Sir Reginald H. Craddock, decided to visit the Cellular Jail and interview some of the political prisoners to ascertain their grievances. Eventually, the non-cooperation activities did not seem to be entirely in vain.

  9

  The Jail Chronicles

  Cellular Jail, October 1913

  Sir Reginald Craddock was born into a family with strong links to the British Raj. His father, Major William Craddock, had been attached to the first Gurkha Rifles (also called the Malaun Regiment and also as the King George V’s Own Gurkha Rifles) as a surgeon. An Oxford graduate, Reginald Craddock had risen up the ranks and become a home member of the Government of India. Later, he also served as the governor of Burma. In October 1913, Craddock was headed for an important task to the Andaman Islands. For the longest time, the Government of India had treated the islands and the Cellular Jail as being too distant to cause any trouble. But increasing reports of upheavals and unrests, following the massive publicity of the ill-treatment of prisoners and the looming danger of bombs being manufactured there and shipped to the mainland, had the government on its toes. Craddock was authorized to conduct a thorough inquiry into the affairs at Port Blair, meet as many political prisoners as possible and submit a report to the government. Interestingly, even though Craddock’s visit to the Cellular Jail had been kept a secret from the political prisoners by the jail authorities they were besieged by questions about his visit. This astounded the authorities. It only went to prove that despite the most stringent vigilance the prisoners could not be kept isolated from one another and the outside world. A few prisoners were called out to meet Craddock. These included Vinayak, Hrishikesh Kanjilal, Barin Ghose, Nand Gopal and Sudhir Kumar Sarkar. Craddock also walked past the cells and spoke to Birendra Sen (of the Sylhet group of revolutionaries), Upendra Nath Banerjee, Hotilal Varma and Pulin Behari (leader of the Dacca group).

  Vinayak gives an account of his interview with Craddock. The latter began by sympathizing with this young, talented barrister’s condition, someone who once had a glorious future ahead of him. In reply, Vinayak told him that getting out of prison was entirely in Craddock’s hands. If what he had been hearing about the reforms that were being introduced in India were indeed true, all his friends, including him, who were dubbed revolutionaries would turn to the path of peace. Here, Vinayak was referring to the Morley–Minto reforms of 1909 in administration and the education bills introduced by Gopalkrishna Gokhale. Since 1910, Gokhale had been trying to introduce a bill for compulsory primary education in India. After a lot of dithering, the government had finally agreed. The move received further impetus following the donation of Rs 50 lakh from Emperor George V during the Delhi Durbar. Accordingly, the government too had adopted Gokhale’s recommendations and passed the resolution on education policy on 21 February 1913. In his first letter written from Port Blair on 15 December 1912 to Narayanrao, it is clear that Vinayak was aware of these developments even while being confined at the Cellular Jail.

  Craddock disagreed about Vinayak’s assertion that revolutionaries might eschew the path of violence given the government’s constructive and conciliatory tone of reforms. He asserted that several of Vinayak’s followers still swore by him and planned secret societies and revolutionary activities in India, Europe and even America. When asked if he would write a letter espousing these thoughts, Vinayak agreed on the condition that it would have to be an independent letter from him, not through the government. This was vetoed by Craddock.

  Craddock then proceeded to question him on his grievances. Vinayak gave a detailed account of the atrocities that he and others faced in jail. The chief commissioner of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, M.W. Douglas, who was present at the meeting interjected to say how this could be construed as a complaint. For a political prisoner and a murderer, one who had conspired to overthrow the government, this was the logical consequence. Had Russia been ruling India they would have been packed off to Siberia or even been shot in the back, he exclaimed. It was his good fortune that the British were ruling India and he had got away with such lenience. Vinayak coolly replied:

  I am sure, however, that Russia would not have disarmed India. Today Russia enrolls inhabitants in Siberia as well as foreigners in its army, and appoints them to responsible military posts. And it would have appointed Indians to the same posts, and if it had treated us as you do, we would have beaten them, as we beat and conquered the Mogal Emperors of India. 1

  Craddock went on to say that the Hindu rajas of yore would have had a rebel trampled under the foot of an elephant. Vinayak implored him to not delve into history because the way England brutally treated its rebels was well documented. Holding a mirror to Craddock, he added:

  I know also that in England they dragged a prisoner along the street for felony and hanged him. But these are things of the past by which none should swear today. You don’t hang a thief today in England. The fact is that the benefits of civilization, wherever they may originate, are shared by all alike. Formerly a traitor was trampled under the foot of an elephant, but the victor punished a king by sending him to the block. Charles I and the English rebellion are instances in point. On both the sides the rule now is to follow civilized methods and, as you seemed to agree with us, we appeal to you to treat and judge us accordingly. If you say that you will treat us barbarously, we shall face the situation as best as we can. 2

  Vinayak was thereafter given the option to submit a formal petition stating his case. The same option of petitioning the government was offered to Barin Ghose, Nand Gopal, Hrishikesh Kanjilal and Sudhir Kumar Sarkar. They submitted their petitions accordingly.

  This process of petitioning the government was a legitimate tool available to political prisoners in British India, similar to defending oneself in court through the agency of a lawyer. And Vinayak was a compulsive petitioner. He sent more than ten petitions on various issues during his jail stay in the Andamans and prior to reaching there—like the ones at Byculla jail seeking provisions for milk and books. As a barrister, Vinayak knew the law and also wished to utilize all the provisions available to him under it, to free himself from imprisonment or to alleviate his condition in prison. It is but natural for a man incarcerated for life to explore every available legitimate option to first and foremost release himself. He often expressed this opinion—that a revolutionary’s primary duty was to free himself from t
he clutches of the British in order to return to the freedom struggle.

  In his petition dated 14 November 1913, Vinayak makes several points related to the legal aspects of his case. 3 He states that when he came to the Cellular Jail in 1911, he was the only one classified as ‘D’ (dangerous) prisoner. He was put in solitary confinement for six months and given the hardest of tasks. Despite his good conduct during this time, he was not sent out of the jail like the other convicts even after the lapse of eighteen months. When he petitioned for a promotion, he was told that he was a special-class prisoner and hence it could not be done. When any of them asked for better food or any special treatment they were told that as ‘ordinary convicts’ they could avail no such benefits. He sought to know why on the one hand they were termed special class and denied privilege of promotion, while at the same time they were not considered special class and therefore denied good food or concessions. How could this work both ways? he wondered. Had he been a political prisoner lodged in an Indian jail, he would have earned remission, could send more letters to his family and also get several opportunities to meet them. Had he been considered a transportee 4 alone, as per the usual norms, in about a couple of years he would have been released or could look forward to leave ticket. 5 But he was denied the privileges of both an Indian jail as well as the regulations of the convict colony, having to thereby live with the disadvantages of both sides.

  He requested the government to ‘put an end to this anomalous situation . . . by either sending me to Indian jails or by treating me as a transportee just like any other prisoner. I am not asking for any preferential treatment, though I believe as a political prisoner even that could have been expected in any civilized administration in the independent nations of the world’. It was almost an indirect mockery of British India being uncivilized. Vinayak sought to be sent to an Indian jail where he stood a chance of earning a remission, visits from family members once in four months, more letters, and a moral, if not legal, right to be released in fourteen years. If he could not be released to an Indian jail, as a convict of Port Blair, he had to be allowed out of the Cellular Jail like the others, and also get ticket leaves, which would enable his family to visit him, and other such normal concessions.