So India waited after the war; resentful, rather aggressive, not very hopeful, but still expectant. Within a few months, the first fruits of the new British policy, so eagerly waited for, appeared in the shape of a proposal to pass special laws to control the revolutionary movement. Instead of more freedom, there was to be more repression. These Bills were based on the report of a committee and were known as the Rowlatt Bills. But very soon they were called the “Black Bills” all over the country, and were denounced everywhere and by every Indian, including even the most moderate. They gave great powers to the government and the police to arrest, keep in prison without trial, or to have a secret trial of, any person they disapproved of or suspected. A famous description of these Bills at the time was: na vakil, na appeal, na dalil. As the outcry against the Bills gained volume, a new factor appeared, a little cloud on the political horizon which grew and spread rapidly till it covered the Indian sky.
This new factor was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. He had returned to India from South Africa during war-time and settled down with his colony in an ashram in Sabarmati. He had kept away from politics. He had even helped the government in recruiting men for the war. He was, of course, very well known in India since his satyagraha struggle in South Africa. In 1917 he had championed with success the miserable downtrodden tenants of the European planters in the Champaran District of Bihar. Later he had stood up for the peasantry of Kaira in Gujrat. Early in 1919 he was very ill. He had barely recovered from it when the Rowlatt Bill agitation filled the country. He also joined his voice to the universal outcry.
But this voice was somehow different from the others. It was quiet and low, and yet it could be heard above the shouting of the multitude; it was soft and gentle, and yet there seemed to be steel hidden away somewhere in it; it was courteous and full of appeal, and yet there was something grim and frightening in it; every word used was full of meaning and seemed to carry a deadly earnestness. Behind the language of peace and friendship there was power and the quivering shadow of action and a determination not to submit to a wrong. We are familiar with that voice now; we have heard it often enough during the last fourteen years. But it was new to us in February and March 1919; we did not quite know what to make of it, but we were thrilled. This was something very different from our noisy politics of condemnation and nothing else, long speeches always ending in the same futile and ineffective resolutions of protest which nobody took very seriously. This was the politics of action, not of talk.
Mahatma Gandhi organized a Satyagraha Sabha of those who were prepared to break chosen laws and thus court imprisonment. This was quite a novel idea then, and many of us were excited but many shrank back. Today it is the most commonplace of occurrences, and for most of us it has become a fixed and regular part of our lives!
As usual with him, Gandhi sent a courteous appeal and warning to the Viceroy. When he saw that the British Government were determined to pass the law in spite of the opposition of a united India, he called for an all-India day of mourning, a hartal, a stoppage of business, and meetings on the first Sunday after the Bills became law. This was to inaugurate the Satyagraha movement, and so Sunday, April 6,1919, was observed as the Satyagraha Day all over the country, in town and village. It was the first all-India demonstration of the kind, and it was a wonderfully impressive one, in which all kinds of people and communities joined. Those of us who had worked for this hartal were amazed at its success. It had been possible for us to approach only a limited number of people in the cities. But a new spirit was in the air, and somehow the message managed to reach the remotest villages of our huge country. For the first time the villager as well as the town worker took part in a political demonstration on a mass scale.
A week before April 6, Delhi, mistaking the date, had observed the hartal on the previous Sunday, March 31. Those were days of an amazing comradeship and goodwill among the Hindus and Muslims of Delhi, and the remarkable sight was witnessed of Swami Shraddhanand, a great leader of the Arya-Samaj, addressing huge audiences in the famous Jame Masjid of Delhi. On March 31, the police and the military tried to disperse the great crowds in the streets and shot at them, killing some people. Swami Shraddhanand, tall and stately in his sanyasin’s garb, faced with bared chest and unflinching look the bayonets of the Gurkhas in the Chandni Chowk. He survived them, and India was thrilled by the incident; but the tragedy of it is that less than eight years later he was treacherously stabbed to death by a Muslim fanatic, as he lay on his sick-bed.
Events marched rapidly after that Satyagraha Day on April 6. There was trouble in Amritsar on April 10, when an unarmed and bareheaded crowd, mourning for the arrest of its leaders, Drs. Kitchlew and Satyapal, was shot at by the military and many were killed; it thereupon took its mad revenge by killing five or six innocent Englishmen, sitting in their offices, and burning their bank buildings. And then a curtain seemed to drop on the Punjab. It was cut off from the rest of India by a rigid censorship; hardly any news came, and it was very difficult for people to enter or leave the province. There was martial law there, and the agony of this continued for many months. Slowly, after weeks and months of agonized suspense, the curtain lifted and the horrible truth was known.
I shall not tell you here of the horrors of the martial-law period in the Punjab. All the world knows of the massacre that took place on April 13 in the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, when thousands fell dead and wounded, in that trap of death from which there was no escape. The very word “Amritsar” has become a synonym for massacre. Bad as this was, there were other and even more shameful deeds all over the Punjab.
It is difficult to forgive all this barbarity and frightfulness even after so many years, and yet it is not difficult to understand it. The British in India, by the very nature of their domination, feel always that they live on the edge of a volcano. They have seldom understood or tried to understand the mind or heart of India. They have lived their life apart, relying on their vast and intricate organization and the force behind it. But behind all their confidence there is always a fear of the unknown, and India, in spite of a century and a half of rule, is an unknown land to them. Memories of the Revolt of 1857 are still fresh in their minds, and they feel as if they lived in a strange and hostile country which might turn at any moment on them and rend them. Such is their general background. When they saw a great movement rising in the country, hostile to them, their fears grew. When news of the bloody deeds that took place in Amritsar on April 10 reached the high officials of the Punjab in Lahore, their nerve failed them completely. They thought that this was another bloody revolt on a big scale, like the one of 1857, and that the lives of all English people were in danger. They saw red, and they determined to strike terror. Jallianwala Bagh and martial law and all that followed were the consequences of this attitude of mind.
One can understand, although one cannot excuse, a frightened person misbehaving, even though there was no real reason for his fright. But what amazed and angered India even more was the contemptuous justification of the deed many months afterwards by General Dyer, who had been responsible for the firing at Amritsar, and his subsequent barbarous neglect of the thousands of the wounded. “That was none of my business,” he had said. Some people in England and the government mildly criticized Dyer, but the general attitude of the British ruling class was displayed in a debate in the House of Lords in which praise was showered on him. All this fed the flames of wrath in India, and a great bitterness arose all over the country over the Punjab wrongs. Inquiry committees had been appointed both by the government and the Congress to find out what had actually occurred in the Punjab. The country awaited their report.
From that year April 13 has been a National Day for India, and the eight days from April 6 to April 13 the National Week. Jallianwala Bagh is now a place for political pilgrimage. It is an attractively laid out garden now, and much of the old horror of it has gone. But the memory lingers.
That year, in December 1919, by a curious coincidence, th
e Congress was held in Amritsar. No great decision was arrived at by this Congress because the result of the inquiries was awaited, but it was evident that the Congress had changed. There was now a mass character about it and a new, and for some of the old Congressmen a disturbing, vitality. There was Lokamanya Tilak, uncompromising as ever, attending his last Congress, for he was to die before the next one was held. There was Gandhi, popular with the crowd, and just beginning his long period of domination over the Congress and Indian politics. There came also to the Congress, straight from prison, many leaders who had been involved in monstrous conspiracy cases during the martial-law days and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment, but were now amnestied, and the famous Ali Brothers just released after many years’ detention.
The next year the Congress took the plunge, and adopted Gandhi’s programme of non-co-operation. A special session in Calcutta adopted this, and later the annual session in Nagpur confirmed it. The method of struggle was a perfectly peaceful one, non-violent as it was called, and its basis was a refusal to help the government in its administration and exploitation of India. To begin with there were to be a number of boycotts—of titles given by the foreign government, of official functions and the like, of law-courts both by lawyers and litigants, of official schools and colleges, and of the new councils under the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms. Later the boycotts were to extend to the civil and military services and the payment of taxes. On the constructive side stress was laid on hand-spinning and khaddar, and on arbitration courts to take the place of the law-courts. Two other most important planks were Hindu-Muslim unity and the removal of untouchability among the Hindus.
The Congress also changed its constitution and became a body capable of action, and at the same time it laid itself out for a mass membership.
Now, this programme was a totally different thing from what the Congress had so far been doing; indeed, it was quite a novel thing in the world, for the Satyagraha in South Africa had been very limited in its scope. It meant immediate and heavy sacrifices for some people, like the lawyers, who were called upon to give up their practices, and the students who were asked to boycott the government colleges. It was difficult to judge it, as there were no standards of comparison. It is not surprising that the old and experienced Congress leaders hesitated and were filled with doubt. The greatest of them, Lokamanya Tilak, had died a little before this. Of the other prominent Congress leaders only one, Motilal Nehru, supported Gandhi in the early stages. But there was no doubting the temper of the average Congressman, or the man in the street, or the masses. Gandhi carried them off their feet, almost hypnotized them, and with loud shouts of Mahatma Gandhi ki jai, they showed their approval of the new gospel of non-violent non-cooperation. The Muslims were as enthusiastic about it as the others. Indeed, the Khilafat Committee, under the leadership of the Ali Brothers, had adopted the programme even before the Congress did so. Soon the mass enthusiasm and the early successes of the movement brought most of the old Congress leaders into it.
I cannot examine, in these letters, the virtues and defects of this novel movement or the philosophy underlying it. That would be too intricate a question, and perhaps no one can do it satisfactorily enough except the author of the movement, Gandhi. Still, let us look at it from an outsider’s point of view and try to understand why it spread so rapidly and successfully.
I have told you of the economic pressure on the masses and their steadily worsening condition under foreign exploitation and the growth of unemployment among the middle classes. What was the remedy for this? The growth of nationalism turned people’s minds to the necessity for political freedom. Freedom was not only necessary because it was degrading to be dependent and enslaved, not only because, as Tilak had put it, it was our birthright and we must have it, but also to lessen the burden of poverty from our people. How was freedom to be obtained? Obviously, we were not going to get it by remaining quiet and waiting for it. It was equally clear that methods of mere protest and begging, which the Congress had so far followed with more or less vehemence, were not only undignified for a people, but were also futile and ineffective. Never in history had such methods succeeded or induced a ruling or privileged class to part with power. History, indeed, showed us that peoples and classes who were enslaved had won their freedom through violent rebellion and insurrection.
Armed rebellion seemed out of the question for the Indian people. We were disarmed, and most of us did not even know the use of arms. Besides, in a contest of violence, the organized power of the British Government, or any State, was far greater than anything that could be raised against it. Armies might mutiny, but unarmed people could not rebel and face armed forces. Individual terrorism, on the other hand, the killing by bomb or pistol of individual officers, was a bankrupt’s creed. It was demoralizing for the people, and it was ridiculous to think that it could shake a powerfully organized government, however much it might frighten individuals. As I have told you, this kind of individual violence was even given up by the Russian revolutionaries.
What, then, remained? Russia had succeeded in her revolution and established a workers’ republic, and her methods had been mass action backed by army support. But even in Russia the Soviets had succeeded at a time when the country and the old government had simply gone to pieces, as a result of the war, and there was little left to oppose them. Besides, few people in India knew at that time about Russia or Marxism, or even thought in terms of the workers or peasants.
So all these avenues led nowhere, and there seemed to be no way out of the intolerable conditions of a degrading servitude. People who were at all sensitive felt terribly depressed and helpless. This was the moment when Gandhi put forward his programme of non-co-operation. Like Sinn Fein in Ireland, it taught us to rely on ourselves and build up our own strength, and it was obviously a very effective method of bringing pressure on the government. The government rested very largely on the co-operation, willing or unwilling, of Indians themselves, and if this co-operation were withdrawn and the boycotts practised, it was quite possible, in theory, to bring down the whole structure of government. Even if the non-co-operation did not go so far, there was no doubt that it could exert tremendous pressure on the government, and at the same time increase the strength of the people. It was to be perfectly peaceful, and yet it was not mere non-resistance. Satyagraha was a definite, though non-violent, form of resistance to what was considered wrong. It was, in effect, a peaceful rebellion, a most civilized form of warfare, and yet dangerous to the stability of the State. It was an effective way of getting the masses to function, and it seemed to fit in with the peculiar genius of the Indian people. It put us on our best behaviour and seemed to put the adversary in the wrong. It made us shed the fear that crushed us, and we began to look people in the face as we had never done before, and to speak out our minds fully and frankly. A great weight seemed to be lifted from our minds, and this new freedom of speech and action filled us with confidence and strength. And, finally, the method of peace prevented to a large extent the growth of those terribly bitter racial and national hatreds which had always so far accompanied such struggles, and thus made the ultimate settlement easier.
It is not surprising, therefore, that this programme of non-cooperation, coupled with the remarkable personality of Gandhi, caught the imagination of the country and filled it with hope. It spread, and at its approach the old demoralization vanished. The new Congress attracted most of the vital elements in the country and grew in power and prestige.
Meanwhile new councils and assemblies had been put up under the Montagu-Chelmsford scheme of reform. The Moderates, now called Liberals, had welcomed them, and had become ministers and other officials under them. They had practically merged into the government and had no popular backing. The Congress had boycotted these legislatures, and little attention was paid to them in the country. All eyes were turned to the real struggle outside, in the towns and villages. For the first time, large numbers of Congress workers had gone to th
e villages and established Congress committees there and helped in the political awakening of the villagers.
Matters were coming to a head and, inevitably, the clash occurred, in December 1921. The occasion for this was the visit of the Prince of Wales to India, which had been boycotted by the Congress. Mass arrests took place all over India, and the gaols were filled with thousands of “politicals”. Most of us had our first experience of the inside of a prison then. Even the president-elect of the Congress, Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das, was arrested, and Hakim Ajmal Khan presided in his place at the Ahmedabad session. But Gandhi himself was not arrested then, and the movement prospered, and the number of those offering themselves for arrest always exceeded those who were arrested. As the well-known leaders and workers were removed to prison, new and inexperienced and sometimes even undesirable men (and sometimes even secret police agents!) took their place, and there was disorganization and some violence. Early in 1922 a collision occurred at Chauri Chaura near Gorakhpur in U.P. between a crowd of peasants and the police, and this ended in the peasants burning the police station with some policemen inside it. Gandhi was greatly shocked at this and some other incidents, which showed that the movement was becoming disorganized and violent, and, at his suggestion, the Congress Executive suspended the law-breaking part of non-co-operation. Soon after this Gandhi was himself arrested, tried, and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. This was in March 1922, and thus ended the first phase of the non-co-operation movement.
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India in the Nineteen Twenties
Glimpses of World History Page 106