The Great Repression

by Chitranshul Sinha

  6

  Dark Acts and the Black Act

  Things became so bad (for the British) that on 10 December 1917 Lord Chelmsford, the governor general of India, decided to appoint a committee to investigate and report on the nature and extent of ‘criminal conspiracies’ connected with the revolutionary movement in India, and to examine and consider the difficulties which arose for the British government as a result of the revolutionary movement. The committee was tasked with advising the government on the enactment of legislation to tackle the problem. Justice Sidney Rowlatt 1 was given the presidentship of the committee, as a ‘strong judicial element’ was considered necessary for proper examination of the questions raised by the government. The other members of the committee were Sir Basil Scott, 2 Diwan Bahadur C.V.K. Sastri, 3 Sir Verney Lovett 4 and Provash Chandra Mitter. 5 The committee was directed to assemble in Calcutta in January 1918 to commence work and was given access to all documentary evidence in possession of the government pertaining to the existence and extent of the revolutionary movement in India. 6w

  The committee duly assembled in January 1918 and carried out its mandate over a period of four months. It held forty-six sittings, out of which forty-two were held in Calcutta and four in Lahore. The sittings were in camera away from the public gaze and in secret. The governments of Bengal, Bombay, Madras, Bihar and Orissa, Central Provinces, United Provinces, Punjab and Burma along with the government of India placed documentary evidence before the committee. In many cases, documentary evidence was supported by personal testimonies from government officials and, in some cases, members of the public who did not hold any official position. The report of the Sedition Committee was presented to the secretary of the Home Department of the government of India on 15 April 1918 by Justice Rowlatt. 7

  In the summary of conclusions at Chapter XV of the report, the Sedition Committee stated that after investigating all the conspiracies connected with the revolutionary movement, it reached the conclusion that the Bombay revolutionaries were purely Brahmin and mostly Chitpavan Brahmin. The Bengal revolutionaries were mostly educated young men from the middle class whose propaganda had been elaborate, persistent and ingenious, resulting in murders and robberies. According to the report, in Punjab most revolutionaries were returning emigrants from America who indulged in bloodshed and caused the Ghadar Movement of 1915. The committee found that the revolutionary movement largely failed to take root in the Central Provinces, United Provinces, Madras, Bihar and Orissa. However, Burma was somewhat affected by the Ghadar Movement, but it was contained by the government. It will be worthwhile to take a brief look at the findings of the Sedition Committee with regard to revolutionary activities in Bombay, Bengal, Punjab and Madras since the turn of the twentieth century.

  The report noted that the first conviction of Tilak in 1897 for sedition did not put an end to seditious writings by the vernacular press in Bombay. In fact, Shivraj Mahadeo Paranjpe, an associate of Tilak, started publishing a vernacular titled Kal. The seditious contents of Kal led to Paranjpe’s arrest in 1899 but he was released with a warning. He again risked prosecution for sedition in 1900, 1904, 1905 and 1907 but the government for some reason left him alone despite seriously considering action against him. He was finally tried and convicted for sedition in 1908. Another vernacular newspaper which faced prosecutions for sedition was Vihari. Three successive editors of Vihari were tried and convicted for sedition in 1906, 1907 and 1908. 8

  At the same time, London also became a centre of revolutionary movement with the foundation of the India Home Rule Society by Shyamaji Krishnavarma in 1905. Krishnavarma had gone from Bombay to London to set up the society with the object of securing Home Rule for India and for it to serve as a machine to spread awareness about the Indian cause in England. Amongst one of the early members of the society was Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, better known as Veer Savarkar. He was the younger brother of Ganesh Savarkar, whose trial for sedition has been discussed in the previous chapter. He joined the society in 1906. The base of operations of the society set up by Krishnavarma in London was called India House. According to the Sedition Committee report, India House became a ‘centre of sedition’, drawing attention to the society. A question was raised in the British House of Commons in July 1907 inquiring what the government planned to do about Krishnavarma. Due to the heat on him, Krishnavarma relocated to Paris. By 1909, Vinayak Savarkar rose to the leadership of India House. The ‘Indian Sociologist’, the mouthpiece of the society, was prosecuted for sedition in England and its editors imprisoned in July and September 1909. All this was about the same time as Ganesh Savarkar’s conviction for sedition in 1909 after which Madan Lal Dhingra assassinated Sir William Curzon Willie in London as retribution. Dhingra was also a member of India House. 9

  Vinayak Savarkar, enraged by his brother’s incarceration, escalated anti-British activities and entrusted copies of a pamphlet titled ‘Vande Mataram’ to an associate to be distributed in Bombay. The pamphlet was in support of Madan Lal Dhingra and called upon Indians to ‘Terrorise the officials, English and Indian, and the collapse of the whole machinery of oppression is not very far’. It advocated separate political assassinations as the ‘best conceivable method of paralysing the bureaucracy and arousing the masses’. However, the carrier of the pamphlets was arrested upon his arrival in Bombay. 10

  The report also noted the activities and prosecution of secret societies like Abhinav Bharat in Nashik and Satara and Nav Bharat in Gwalior. It concluded that the first revolutionary crime was the Rand murder in Pune in 1897, subsequent to which Tilak was prosecuted for sedition for the first time, and that revolutionary crimes had grown due to revolutionary activities of Brahmins of the region. It attributed most activities to Chitpavan Brahmins, who, the report claimed, were ultra-orthodox and consequently anti-Muslim and anti-British. The committee squarely laid the blame on the Poona vernacular press for its anti-British writings and recognized Tilak as the leader of the ‘Poona extremists’. 11

  About Bengal, the report discussed the history of the revolutionary movement in the region and the partition of Bengal. Both these aspects have already been written about in the previous chapter. However, mention must be made of the secret societies of East Bengal which were declared unlawful in January 1909. These societies were the Dacca Anusilan Samiti, Swadesh Bandhab Samiti, Brati Samiti, Suhrid Samiti and Sadhana Samiti. They took the form of youth associations but secretly carried out revolutionary and seditious activities and inflicted major damage upon the British government. The revolutionary movement in Bengal finally drove the government to reunify East and West Bengal into a single entity by the end of 1911. Nevertheless, revolutionary activities in reunified Bengal continued beyond 1911. 12

  In one instance, on 26 June 1916, a group of revolutionaries calling themselves the Western Bengal Party robbed a house in Calcutta and allegedly stole Rs 11,500. Two days later, the victim received a letter titled ´Bande Mataram’ from the ‘Bengal Branch of Independent Kingdom of United India’ saying, ‘Gentlemen, Six honorary officers of our Calcutta Finance Department have taken a loan of Rs 9,891.1.5 from you, and have deposited the amount in the office noted above on your account to fulfil our great aim. The sum has been entered in our ca book on your name at 5 per cent per annum. By the grace of God if we be successful we will pay the whole amount with the interest at one time.’ The letter, signed by one J. Balamanta, the ‘Finance Secretary to the Bengal Branch of Independent Kingdom of United India’, also vowed to return two valuable items which they realized were pledged to someone by the victim within two weeks! 13

  It is unclear whether they followed up on their promise or not as they were arrested within a month of the robbery.

  The First World War (1914–18) and the years leading up to it brought Indian revolutionaries close to the Germans who shared their anti-British sentiments. The committee noted that Friedrich von Bernhardi 14 in his 1911 book, Germany and the Next War, had hoped for the Hindu and Mohammedan nationali
sts of Bengal (and India) to combine forces to ‘create a very grave danger capable of shaking the foundations of England’s high position in the world’. 15

  In fact, in October 1914, one Chempakaraman Pillai started working with the German Foreign Office in Berlin and set up the ‘Indian National Party’, which included Lala Hardayal, Taraknath Das, Barkatulla, Chandra K. Chakrabarti and Heramba Lal Gupta. Their main task was to create and disseminate anti-British propaganda and to turn Indian prisoners of war captured from the British army towards the German cause. From 1914 onwards, there was a concerted effort by the Germans to help organize an uprising in Bengal by helping Indian revolutionaries with the supply of weapons and cash via sea and land. The plot was foiled by the British government, and finally all attempts to procure arms from the Germans were abandoned by the Bengal revolutionaries. 16

  In Punjab, the committee reported that by 1907 there were attempts in Amritsar and Ferozepur to arouse feelings of disloyalty, which were considerably successful. Seditious meetings and propaganda were widespread in Rawalpindi, Sialkot, Lyallpur and Lahore, the hub of the anti-British campaign in Punjab. In introducing the Prevention of Seditious Meeting Bill, 1907, the Indian viceroy told the Legislative Council:

  We cannot afford to forget the events of the early spring, the riots at Lahore and gratuitous insults to Europeans, the Pindi riots, the serious view of the Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab on the state of his province, the consequent arrest of Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh, and the promulgation of the Ordinance, and contemporaneously will all this, a daily story from Eastern Bengal of assault, of looting, of boycotting and general lawlessness, encouraged by agitators, who with an utter disregard for consequences, no matter how terrible, have by public addresses, by seditious newspapers, by seditious leaflets, by itinerant secret agents, lost no opportunity of inflaming the worst passions of racial feelings. 17

  Revolutionaries from Punjab found their way to America in 1911. Lala Hardayal, an associate of Krishnavarma and Vinayak Savarkar, set up a press in San Francisco called Jugantar Asram, which published the anti-British newspaper called Ghadr, which means ‘mutiny’. The multilingual newspaper was widely circulated amongst Indians in America and forwarded to India, where it preached mutiny against the British. His organization was called the Ghadr Party, which found wings both in America and Canada, with the large Sikh immigrant population in the latter country adding to the numbers. Many of the Ghadr revolutionaries started returning to India on Japanese ships during the First World War but were impeded by the British government which had received intelligence on the party. The government promulgated an ordinance restricting the entry of the emigrants to arrest them upon arrival, or if they acted suspiciously. The Ingress into India Ordinance took away the right to trial and right to appeal in order to expedite the prosecution of revolutionaries and ‘sedition-mongers’. It attempted to ensure prompt suppression of revolutionary activities. 18

  However, the government needed stronger measures in order to counter revolutionary and seditious activities in Bengal and Punjab, for which it enacted the Defence of India Act, 1915, which was swiftly passed by the Legislative Council. The Act reiterated the provisions of the ordinance and took away the right to trial and appeal from persons accused of seditious activities. It established Special Tribunals for the trial of revolutionary crimes. Known as the Lahore Conspiracy Trials, nine batches of revolutionaries were tried by the Special Tribunals established by the Defence of India Act, resulting in twenty-eight hangings and numerous transportations and imprisonments. 19

  On seditious literature, the judgment in the first case stated, ‘There is no doubt the establishment of a press in India was one of the methods they intended to further their designs. The success in seducing people which the Ghadr had attained in America was sufficient encouragement for this course to be adopted in India; and it is common knowledge that Indians are easily swayed by that which is print.’ The judgment in the second case found that sedition was actively preached in the villages of Punjab and among regiments of Indian soldiers. It stated, ‘Ghadr newspaper and its progeny (verses, leaflets, etc.) were distributed in every place where the revolutionaries hoped to gain adherents, and particularly among troops.’ The Sedition Committee found that the Ghadr Movement could not have been suppressed quickly without the Defence of India Act and the Ingress Ordinance as any delay in preventive actions and punishments would have increased the problems of the British government. 20

  Special mention must be made of seditious activities in Madras, parts of which have been discussed in the previous chapter. The committee noted the seditious activities of a Tamil newspaper named India which was published in Madras. Its editor, Srinivas Iyengar, was convicted for sedition by the Madras High Court for publishing three articles in May and June 1908. This forced the newspaper to shut shop in Madras. The publication of the newspaper was moved to Pondicherry from where it continued seditious publications with added vigour. At about the same time, one Nilakanta Brahmachari travelled across southern India along with Shankar Krishna Aiyar propagating the ideas of Swadeshi and preaching sedition. Their ranks were joined by V.V.S. Aiyar, a close associate of Vinayak Savarkar at India House, who travelled to Pondicherry via Paris and taught revolver shooting to revolutionaries. A press called the Feringhi Destroyer Press published seditious pamphlets and called for the banishment of foreigners from India and the establishment of Swarajya. Things came to a head in June 1911 when one Vanchi Aiyer, an official of the Travancore kingdom, assassinated the district magistrate of Tinnevelly 21 in a railway carriage. He was aided by Shankar Krishna Aiyar who was also arrested for the assassination. He carried with him a letter stating that every Indian was trying to drive out the English to restore Swarajya and Sanatana Dharma. 22

  In July 2011, Madame Bhikaji Cama, a leading Indian revolutionary based in Paris, wrote in her publication called Bande Mataram, ‘When the gilded slaves from Hindustan were parading the streets of London as performers in the royal circus and were prostrating themselves like so many cows at the feet of the King of England, two young and brave countrymen of ours proved by their daring deeds at Tinnevelly and at Mymensingh that Hindustan is not sleeping.’ 23

  The Sedition Committee report blamed the rise of revolutionary activities in southern India on the influence of revolutionaries from Bengal, Paris and Pondicherry, and did not consider the movement in Madras as indigenous. It was of the view that the movement was due to the influence of the Bengal revolutionaries.

  The committee also made a note of our old friends, the Wahhabis. As you may recall, the Wahhabi Movement was the most proximate cause for the enactment of Section 124A. It had died down in the second half of the nineteenth century but raised its head again in the second decade of the twentieth. The Wahhabis were also known as the Mujahidin. In February 1915, fifteen students from Lahore dropped out of their colleges and joined the Mujahidin in Kabul. In January 1917, another eight joined the Mujahidin all the way from eastern Bengal. There were other arrests in the North-West Frontier Province, where people were carrying large sums of money they had collected in their native districts for the Mujahidin cause. The cause stemmed from international events. The British did not support Turkey in the Balkan wars in 1912 and 1913, which led to the loss of territories for the Islamic Ottoman Empire due to losses inflicted by the Christian Balkan armies. In 1914, Turkey joined the alliance against Britain which further strengthened Muhammadan resentment against the British government in India. 24

  In August 1916, the British government discovered a conspiracy known as the Silk Letters Conspiracy. It was a plot to disrupt British rule by attacking the north-west frontier, hand in hand with a Muhammadan uprising in the country. The plotters were working in cohorts with members of the Ghadr Party. The conspiracy was named for some letters written on yellow silk intended for people abroad and containing an intention to ally with Turkish forces. The letters fell into the hands of the British and the plot was foiled. The committee reporte
d that this plot established the anxiety of some Muslim revolutionaries in India to provoke sedition and rebellion in the country. The committee stated, ‘Always they preach sedition.’ However, it also noted that the general Muslim citizenry and a strong government worked as safeguards against the extremists. 25

  The Sedition Committee had two major laments. One, the criminal procedural law led to protracted trials which took months at a time and thus caused delay in convictions. Two, the trials and convictions for revolutionary crimes did not have a deterring effect on other revolutionaries.

  For example, Jugantar suffered five prosecutions for sedition between June 1907 and June 1908. However, the imprisonment of its editors and publishers had no lasting effect as they were simply replaced by other individuals. In fact, the sales of Jugantar kept increasing to the extent that crowds of people caused obstructions on the streets of Calcutta in their rush to obtain its copies. The Newspapers (Incitement to Offence) Act, 1908, was introduced by the viceroy, who said, ‘The seeds of its wickedness have been sown amongst a strangely impressionable and imitative people—seeds that have been daily nurtured by a system of seditious writing and seditious speaking of unparalleled violence, vociferating to beguiled youth that outrage is the evidence of patriotism and its reward a martyr’s crown.’ 26