Then in the United Provinces there was a train robbery at Kakori railway station, which electrified the nation. Ramprasad Bismil, Ashfaqulla Khan, Roshan Singh, Rajendra Lahiri and Chandrashekhar Azad held up the 8-Down Mail at the small station of Kakori just outside Lucknow and escaped with the railway treasury. The government immediately cracked down on the revolutionaries and all of them except Chandrashekhar Azad were captured. Four were hanged and twenty-one young men sentenced to jail in the Kakori Conspiracy Case. Chandrashekhar Azad would then join Bhagat Singh in Punjab for a while till he was killed in a shoot-out in a park in Allahabad.
In 1928 Lala Lajpat Rai had died in Lahore probably from injuries sustained after a beating by the police while leading a procession against the Simon Commission. Bhagat Singh idolized Lajpat Rai and it led him, Shivaram Rajguru, Sukhdev Thapar and Chandrashekhar Azad to assassinate a police officer named Saunders who had ordered the lathi charge. The original plan was to kill the police chief, but they killed Saunders instead. The Hindustan Socialist Republican Army put up posters justifying the revolutionary policy of personal assassination by saying, ‘the murder of a leader respected by millions of people at the unworthy hands of an ordinary police official … was an insult to the nation. It was the bounden duty of young men of India to efface it … we regret to have had to kill a person, but he was part and parcel of that inhuman and unjust order which has to be destroyed.’
After a while, there was change in the thinking of the revolutionaries, especially those led by Bhagat Singh. He and his comrades, who were all educated, thoughtful young men, were gradually coming to the conclusion that single acts of terrorism could get them publicity, but they would not lead to freedom. They had finally realized that for a freedom struggle to succeed people had to rise together and overwhelm the colonial power, and that was not happening. So they felt more propaganda for their cause was required. On 8 April 1929 Bhagat Singh and B.K. Dutt went into the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi and threw bombs and leaflets into the well of the chamber from the visitor’s gallery. The bombs were small explosives that did not hurt anyone and Bhagat Singh said they were thrown ‘to make the deaf hear’.
The plan was to get arrested and promote their cause during the trial. Soon the authorities discovered Bhagat Singh’s connection to the Saunders killing, and Rajguru and Sukhdev Thapar were also arrested. Soon their names were on every ones lips. As Jawaharlal Nehru writes, ‘He became a symbol; the act was forgotten, the symbol remained, and within a few months each town and village in Punjab, and to a lesser extent in the rest of northern India, resounded with his name.’ Bhagat Singh’s aim of creating awareness had succeeded brilliantly.
The whole country watched the trial with bated breath as Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev used every opportunity to popularize their cause. They would enter the court fearlessly shouting ‘Inquilab Zindabad!’ and singing Bismil’s song, ‘Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamare dil me hai’ (our hearts are filled with the desire for martyrdom) and ‘Mera rang de basanti chola’ (dye my clothes in the saffron hues of courage and sacrifice). At that time Gandhi and the viceroy Lord Irwin were negotiating issues, leading to the Gandhi-Irwin Pact. In spite of the fact that he did not agree with Bhagat Singh’s strategy of violence and terrorism, Gandhi pleaded with the viceroy for his life but failed to convince the government. Gandhi faced a hostile reception when he arrived in Karachi for the Congress session as many felt that he had not done enough. Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev were found guilty and hanged on 23 March 1931. Bhagat Singh was only twenty-four years old.
He was a man of action, but also an intellectual whose beliefs were still evolving. Bhagat Singh was a surprisingly mature thinker for someone so young and his voracious reading had by 1929 already led to his doubting the usefulness of terrorism and individual acts of assassination. His study of socialism and Marxism had made him believe that any freedom struggle could succeed only if the people rose up in protest. He began the Punjab Naujawan Bharat Sabha in 1926 to take this message to the peasants in the rural area and the factories workers in the towns.
Bhagat Singh was also very aware of the dangers of communalism and at many public meetings he told the people that it was as dangerous as colonialism as it could divide the nation. As a matter of fact, he even criticized his hero Lajpat Rai when Rai began to take on the role of the spokesman of the Hindus. Among the rules of the Punjab Naujawan Bharat Sabha was: ‘To have nothing to do with communal bodies or other parties which disseminate communal ideas’ and ‘to create a spirit of general toleration among the public considering religion as a matter of personal belief of man’. A week before his death he wrote an article titled ‘Why I Am an Athiest’ and in it he said he was ‘trying to stand like a man with an erect head to the last; even on the gallows’.
The revolutionary movement created a band of immensely popular young martyrs, but the movement slowly died in the face of a systematic and ruthless government crackdown. The revolutionaries failed because even though their individual acts of bravery and martyrdom were idolized by people, they did not lead to a mass uprising. As a matter of fact, they did not know how to organize such a movement among people. What they did achieve was create a greater awareness of the freedom struggle. They filled the hearts and minds of the people with a passion for independence and the courage to step out and embrace every sacrifice. They made Indians conscious of their rights and inspired them to take pride in their martyrdom. It was this selfless, fiery eagerness to court even death for his convictions that made ‘Shaheed’ Bhagat Singh an inspiration in his life and a legend afterwards.
Bal Gangadhar Tilak
Swaraj is my birthright and I shall have it.’
—Bal Gangadhar Tilak
At the prison in Mandalay in Burma, the prisoner was kept in virtual solitary confinement in a tiny, claustrophobic cell. In the six years he stayed there he taught himself French, German and Pali, and wrote a 900-page study of the Bhagavad Gita. As the prison warders rationed the supply of paper and pencil, he would use every scrap of paper and write till the end of the pencil lead. When he was finally freed, there were four hundred books stacked around his cell.
Bal Gangadhar Tilak was born on 23 July 1856 in the coastal town of Ratnagiri in Maharashtra. His father Gangadhar Pant was a schoolteacher. Young Tilak had a quick, impatient mind and in school he would irritate his teachers by solving maths problems even before the teacher had finished writing it down on the blackboard. After a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from the Deccan College, Poona, he studied law but instead of becoming a lawyer, chose to teach. Later he became involved in journalism with G.G. Agarkar and G.M. Namjoshi.
The three friends felt that the first step towards gaining independence was modern education. At that time illiteracy was widespread and traditional education was outdated as it put more emphasis on the study of ancient literature. Students spent their time memorizing Sanskrit shlokas, not studying science and mathematics. Tilak and his friends started the New English School in Poona in 1880, where both traditional and modern subjects were taught. Then with the support of Sir James Fergusson, the governor of Bombay, a college named after their patron was inaugurated in the city. Today Fergusson College is one of the finest institutions in the country.
More than education, it was journalism that became Tilak’s way to reach out to people. In 1881 he launched two newspapers—the Kesari (Lion) in Marathi and the Mahratta in English. The prospectus of the Kesari announced boldly, ‘There is undoubtedly a growing tendency towards flattery under the British rule, and all honest people would admit that this tendency is undesirable and detrimental to the interests of the people. The articles in the proposed newspaper will be in keeping with the name given to it.’
Probably unnerved by this militant declaration, their landlord refused to allow a printing press in the newspaper office. So overnight they carried the machine to the premises of the New English School, then worked all night to assemble it. Next morning cop
ies of the paper, literally hot from the press, were distributed door to door. Agarkar was the first editor of the Kesari but it was the hard-hitting and topical writings of Tilak that caught the imagination of the people. Tilak wrote editorials openly critical of the government, something most journalists avoided doing in those days. He never minced his words: one editorial asked scathingly, ‘Has the Government Lost Its Head?’ Within a year Kesari had the highest circulation for any Indian-language newspaper in the country.
At a time when we take a free press for granted it is hard to understand how courageous Tilak was. This was a time when the British were considered mai baap, the faultless and benevolent powers whose actions were not to be questioned. The Europeans had encouraged the belief that they had come to India to raise a backward country out of the dark ages, and Indians suffered from a deep sense of inferiority. And here was Tilak looking the ‘superior’ British straight in the eye, finding them wanting and demanding the rights of the people. And he made the people aware that colonialism was for the profit of the colonial power, not the benefit of the colonized people. The Europeans were in India not to save them but to make money. It was the poor Indians who were paying for the palaces of the aristocracy in England.
Tilak knew that no nationalist movement could succeed without the support of the masses and he was seeking a way to unite people and revive their pride in being Indians. The first was the celebration of the Ganesha Festival. For ten days there were puja and lectures on scriptures, tamasha dances and music—and cleverly hidden between them were messages of nationalism. Then he felt that young people needed an Indian hero who would inspire them; he chose Chhatrapati Shivaji and launched an annual festival to celebrate Shivaji as a symbol of bravery and independence. Soon these festivals were being celebrated in cities as far away as Calcutta, Karachi and Madras, and Tilak was being called ‘Lokmanya—one who is revered by the people.’
In 1896, Tilak came into direct conflict with the government when there was a famine and farmers received no help from the administration. Tilak wrote about the money in the Famine Insurance Fund, which was not being used to help the farmers. Then he asked the farmers to refuse to pay their taxes. The official response was truly bizarre. Instead of starting famine relief, they arrested many of Tilak’s followers.
Then in 1897 bubonic plague broke out in Poona. As this was a highly contagious disease, patients had to be quarantined quickly. The job of locating and quarantining patients was given to an officer named Rand and he and his men acted with great insensitivity. In those days women lived in purdah and there was also the belief in untouchability, so when the soldiers entered homes without warning and took away people roughly, there was a huge uproar. Indians working to help the plague victims were harassed. Tilak tried to suggest ways to solve the problem but Rand refused to listen.
Even though the city was ravaged by the epidemic, on 22 June 1897 the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria’s reign was celebrated with a grand party at the Government House. While returning from the celebrations, Rand and his assistant Lt. Ayerst were shot dead and the killers fled into the night. Poona was put under curfew as the police started searches. The administration suspected that Tilak was part of the conspiracy because he had written critical editorials against Rand. Later, when Damodar Chaphekar was arrested and confessed to killing Rand, he insisted that he had acted alone, but the government’s distrust of Tilak persisted.
The police could find no evidence to connect Tilak to the murder, yet there were shrill editorials in the pro-government Anglo-Indian press demanding his arrest. Finally the government prosecutor charged him with sedition, saying his writing incited people to violence. Tilak was arrested and put on trial in Bombay. The six Europeans in the jury found him guilty; the three Indians declared him innocent. Tilak was sentenced to eighteen months of hard labour and sent to Yeravada Jail in Poona.
In 1905 the partition of Bengal and the agitation that followed catapulted Tilak to the national stage. The province of Bengal was a huge one, including Orissa, Bihar and Assam, and the government stated it was being divided only to make it easier to govern. The Bengalis were not convinced. They were suspicious because the Bengali-speaking population had been divided on the basis of religion. The area with a Muslim majority had been separated and made the new province of East Bengal with its capital at Dacca. They felt this was an attempt by the government to divide them because they were so vocal in their criticism. There were widespread protests led by men like Bipin Chandra Pal and Aurobindo Ghose.
Tilak was the first leader to realize that the agitation in Bengal could be transformed into a national movement. He declared that the best way to make their voices heard was through economic and political boycott. He said that all foreign goods should be rejected and foreign cloth burnt in bonfires, and that everyone should encourage Indian industries by using Swadeshi goods. This he felt was the way to attain Swaraj—self-government. There were three leaders of this militant plan of action—Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal and Lala Lajpat Rai of Punjab. Their ardent followers called them ‘Lal, Bal and Pal’.
There was a storm in the Congress party. So far, the party led by men like Pherozeshah Mehta, Surendranath Banerjea and Gopal Krishna Gokhale had been a very elite body of western educated men who felt that the only way to gain self-government was through constitutional means. So for twenty years they had been politely petitioning the government, requesting political reforms. Most of the time, the government did not even bother to reply to their letters. These leaders felt that India was not ready for any form of self-government and people had to be educated first before they talked of Swaraj. Tilak, on the other hand, was convinced that the only way to make the government listen was to take their agitation to the streets and launch a mass agitation against the partition of Bengal.
Tilak’s call for a militant but peaceful protest struck a chord among people who could never relate to the westernized and very ‘propah’ Congress leaders. Unlike the leaders who felt that the people were dumb masses that had to be led very gradually towards freedom, Tilak spoke directly to people and his popularity soared. In 1906, when he went to attend the Congress session in Benaras, he was welcomed at the railway station by a noisy crowd of thousands. Here, addressing the people, he declared his political strategy was ‘militancy, not mendicancy’. Stop begging; stand up and fight.
The younger generation that had been drifting away from the Congress were enthused by Tilak’s call to arms and among them was Aurobindo Chose. At the session, Tilak spoke of a strategy of ‘passive resistance’ because he knew well no armed revolt could succeed. Lajpat Rai explained ‘passive resistance’ as having three goals: ‘To awaken the masses and liberate them from the ‘hypnotic’ spell of the British rulers, to create a love of liberty and a spirit of sacrifice for the nation’s freedom cause, and finally to gain independence.’ The idea was that people should make it impossible for the government to operate by not paying taxes, by refusing to join the army and by boycotting foreign goods. One day Gandhi would name similar protests ‘Non-cooperation’ and ‘Civil Disobedience’.
The Congress now became divided between the old guard led by Gokhale, called the Moderates, and Tilak and his allies—dubbed the Extremists. Both Gokhale and Tilak, being shrewd and experienced politicians, were keen to work together and willing to compromise. They understood that a rift in the national movement would only benefit the government, but the young members refused to listen to reason. Next year at the session in Surat, the young hot-heads disrupted proceedings with loud protests; amid chaotic scenes a shoe came flying up to hit Banerjea and the police had to be called in. The session had to be abandoned and the party ended up divided, to the great satisfaction of the government.
The government now passed an act that gave district magistrates the power to confiscate a printing press if they felt it was printing seditious material. Newspapers like the Kesari and Aurobindo Ghose’s Bande Mataram immediately came under scrutiny. The Bombay Go
vernment then decided to prosecute Tilak for ‘… bringing or attempting to bring into hatred and contempt and exciting or attempting to excite disloyalty and feelings of enmity towards His Majesty and the Government …’. At the trial Tilak’s counsel was Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Tilak spoke in his own defence. When he was sentenced to six years’ deportation the government had hoped the sentence would instil fear in people. It had the opposite effect—people came out into the streets to protest and Bombay went on strike.
Tilak spent six years in jail in Mandalay and it ruined his health. He was welcomed back enthusiastically by the Congress. The party had become very inactive after Surat and most members had by then realized that Tilak’s strategy was the right one. He was given a standing ovation and even addressed the Muslim League. He also formed the Home Rule League—this was different from the one started by Annie Besant, but the two organizations worked together.
In 1918 Tilak went to England to fight a libel case he had filed against Sir Valentine Chirol, who had written slanderous things about him in a book. Tilak lost the case but took the opportunity to address many public meetings and meet influential intellectuals like the playwright George Bernard Shaw and the philosopher Sidney Webb of the Fabian Society. Fighting the case had financially ruined him, but to his delight he came back to discover that the people of Poona had collected three lakh rupees for him.
A Flag, a Song and a Pinch of Salt Page 13