Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel

by B Krishna

  Patel said that the British had spread two bogeys in order to defeat Gandhi’s satyagraha. One was Hindu-Muslim conflict; the other was about the Afghans invading the country if the British left India. Patel asked the audience:

  Have you come across a single Muslim who says the salt tax is good and should be maintained? Both the Hindus and Muslims in villages, having identity of interest, support it, and consider the tax as unjust . . . The rulers hold out the threat that if they were not here, the Hindus and Muslims will die fighting. No matter if some of us die. Let those left behind live in peace . . . The rulers also threaten us that if they go away, the Afghans will come in. Oh, the Pathans! And that not a single unmarried girl’s honour will be safe. Haven’t they reduced us to such a helpless state after 150 years of their rule? If 33 crores of us cannot protect ourselves, then what is left for us to do is to commit suicide! But to tolerate such talk is a great insult.10

  Patel ridiculed some other myths spread by the British— especially the inability of Indians to govern, and the British claim of being “trustees in India”. Sarcastically, he asked, “But whose trustees? Who had gone to England to crown them and invite them here? Such talk can no longer be acceptable. No one will accept their threats . . . The Government says that it has given us peace. But of what use is this peace to us when people are suffering from hunger? There is no blood in our veins, nor lustre in the eyes.”

  Calling Gandhi the “Saint of Sabarmati”, Patel said, “That man at Sabarmati, with a handful of bones, has shaken the Empire with his spinning wheel. That is a real wonder. He has built hopes in you . . . Aren’t you going to fulfill them? Wisdom will dawn on the people just as light follows sunrise . . . Freedom’s first page is being written in Gujarat’s history.”11

  Awaiting his arrival at Ras were thousands of enthusiastic villagers. They had gathered under a large banyan tree outside Ras to welcome their Sardar. He was not scheduled to speak. He was to address a public meeting at the nearby village, Kankapura. It was hurriedly decided by the local leaders that he should speak to those who had assembled. A sub-inspector of police, who found out about this from a sweeper, informed Collector Shillidy, whom Patel had earlier thrown out of the Ahmedabad municipality. Shillidy looked upon the occasion as an opportunity to avenge himself by arresting Patel. Patel had merely said, “Sisters and brothers.

  Are you ready for the satyagraha?” A loud “Yes” rent the air. This did not amount to a speech. Yet, Patel was arrested.

  A police party escorted Patel to Borsad for a trial. The collector was brought from the travellers’ bungalow to the Magistrate’s Court. Some pleaders and other gentlemen were cleared out of the court-room. Patel was asked to sit in the adjoining room all by himself with the door closed, whereas in the court-room the collector, the magistrate, and the deputy superintendent of police started the trial. When they had made up their minds, Patel was called in from the other room to hear the judgment. He was asked why he should not be convicted for “disobeying directions given”. As a Gandhian he simply said, “I do not want to defend myself. I plead guilty.” According to Patel, “The Magistrate did not know under which section he was to convict me. He took about an hour and a half to write out a judgment of eight lines.”12 Further, “as the maximum sentence permissible was only three months and 500 rupees fine, he could not impose a greater punishment.”13 Patel was lodged in the Sabarmati jail in a cell meant for prisoners awarded capital punishment. He was treated “just like an ordinary criminal”.

  Patel’s arrest had no valid ground. According to the home member to the government of India, he had delivered many speeches before he was arrested; whereas Patel had told G. V. Mavalankar:

  The only “speech” I made was in reply to the Magistrate’s question. I said to him that I would make a speech, and on that expression of my intention I was arrested . . . The District Superintendent of Police gave me no warning . . . I made no attempt to speak, but I simply mentioned my intention, although I would certainly have spoken if I had not been arrested . . . No evidence was recorded in my presence; nor was I examined during the five minutes that I was in the court-room.14

  Further, neither was a complaint read out to Patel, nor was any witness examined. The lawyers of Ahmedabad, who held him in the highest esteem, were much agitated. The Bar Association passed a resolution, which G. Davis, the district judge, who happened to be a co-student with Patel in Britain for the Bar, dispatched to the High Court.

  Ras staged an epic struggle over Patel’s arrest. After he had been driven away to Borsad, the assembled audience of young and old, men and women, decided to launch a nonviolent, non-cooperation campaign. This involved nonpayment of land revenue and closing down of milk dairies and liquor shops in the village, besides boycott of government officials. Gandhi’s arrival at Ras on 19 March, on his way to Dandi, was befittingly celebrated with the resignation of village officials—the police patel (mukhi), revenue patel, mamlatdar, guards, and sweepers.

  One late evening, news reached Ras that government officials were coming at night to confiscate property of noncooperators. The villagers took an unusual decision to abandon the village. By this time it had become dark and the time for the arrival of officials was nearing. In less than half an hour, 400 families packed whatever they could carry on their shoulders, locked their houses, and moved across to the Baroda state territory about a quarter of a mile away. They put up temporary grass-huts for shelter near the villages of Zarola and Vasana. Happily, they called their “march” hijarat. The Ras émigrés lived a life of untold hardships for five to six months, even braving unseasonal heavy rains. They bore these with courage, cheer, and determination. According to one of their leaders, Ashabhai Patel: “They were living for Gandhi and their Sardar.”

  H. N. Brailsford, a British author-journalist, saw how Gandhi and Patel had “mesmerised the crowds”. Gandhi “is devotedly loved, and so too is his lieutenant, Vallabhbhai Patel. I asked a group of forty or fifty villagers why they faced the risks and hardships. The women, as usual, answered first, and voiced their feeling of personal loyalty. ‘We’ll pay no taxes,’ they said, ‘till Mahatmaji and Vallabhbhai tell us to pay.’ Then the men, slowly collecting their thoughts, voiced their economic grievances: ‘We won’t pay because the tax is unjust’ . . . Finally, they added: ‘We’re doing it to win swaraj’.” According to Brailsford:

  Many villages were totally abandoned. I could see through the windows that every stick of property had been removed. In the silent street, nothing moved till a monkey skipped from a roof across the lane . . . the people had moved across the frontier of British India into the territory of independent Baroda. There, close to the boundary, they camped in shelters of matting and palm leaves, the ground cumbered with their chests and their beds, their churns and the great clay-coated baskets that held their grain. In the hot autumn days, life was just tolerable for hardy villagers in these conditions . . . Even in Baroda, these refugees were not always safe. Their camps had more than once been invaded and the Gaekwar’s territory was violated by the armed British Indian police under an Indian official, who beat with their lathis not only their own people but the Gaekwar’s subjects also.15

  During their absence from Ras, their houses were broken open and looted. The police encamped on the outskirts of the village, and government officials got the crops harvested for sale. Lands were also declared confiscated, and some even sold. Nothing could make the people resile from their resolve. It was only on the conclusion of the Gandhi-Irwin pact that the hijarat was over, and the people returned to their houses in Ras. They “entered the village in a procession, happy and gay, led by a band. The village bore a festive look, decorated with colourful flags and buntings”.16

  Much to Patel’s regret, the Gandhi-Irwin pact did not provide for the return of lands to the peasants. Patel felt deeply for the villagers and comforted them with the assurance: “Don’t worry about your land. It will come back to you knocking at your door.” Which it did, aft
er the Congress had assumed power in Bombay Presidency in 1937.

  The Dandi March was a historic event greater than the Kheda and Bardoli satyagrahas. For the first time, the satyagrahis faced the merciless blows of armed policemen with unparalleled acts of heroism and dauntless courage, undergoing tremendous suffering. They bore all this with absolute calm. The ferocity of attack attracted worldwide sympathy, especially from the American newspapermen who came to India to witness Gandhi’s miracle.

  Webb Miller, of the United Press, wrote:

  Suddenly, at a word of command, scores of native policemen rushed upon the advancing marchers and rained blows on their heads with their steel-shod lathis. Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows. They went down like tenpins. From where I stood, I heard the sickening whack of the clubs on unprotected skulls. The waiting crowd of marchers groaned and sucked in their breath in sympathetic pain at every blow. Those struck down fell sprawling, unconscious or writhing with fractured skulls or broken shoulders . . . The survivors, without breaking ranks, silently and doggedly marched on until struck down . . .

  They marched steadily, with heads up, without the encouragement of music or cheering or any possibility that they might escape serious injury or death. The police rushed out and methodically and mechanically beat down the second column. There was no fight, no struggle; the marchers simply walked forward till struck down . . . The police commenced to savagely kick the seated men in the abdomen and testicles and then dragged them by their arms and feet and threw them into the ditches.17

  Other American journalists saw in the Dandi March a meaningful comparison with the Boston Tea Party which was the harbinger of independence for their country. Like the latter, the former was undertaken in fulfilment of the Independence Resolution passed at the Lahore Congress in December 1929. According to William Shirer: “The day after the Boston Tea Party, John Adams had predicted that it would arouse the country and have ‘important consequences’. He considered it ‘an Epoch in history’; and so was the Dandi March.” In Shirer’s estimation: “The struggle in America had been bloody. Gandhi’s would be bloodless, but just as relentless.”18

  The Dandi March seemed to have shaken Viceroy Irwin. The witness in Shirer has recorded: “The British authorities at first were flabbergasted. They could not understand it.”19 A compromise was reached in the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, which proved Gandhi’s nemesis. At the Round Table Conference in London, he met his Waterloo in the Muslim delegates questioning his credentials to speak on behalf of the Indian Muslims. It was a victory for the British diehards. The defeat Gandhi suffered undermined the astounding success of the Dandi March. The Round Table Conference proved an anticlimax to Dandi. The Congress suffered such a setback as never to go back to Dandi in spirit or in action. The future looked bleak; and the freedom struggle much harsher, even uncertain of the end—receding far on the horizon.

  3

  PARTY BOSS

  Overcoming Challenges to Congress Unity

  The early 1930s witnessed a fundamental change in Congress politics: from Gandhi’s non-cooperation to Tilak’s responsive cooperation—proposed by Tilak at the Amritsar Congress in April 1919. The change was necessitated by two developments. First, the satyagraha in 1932 had met with failure, and there were no immediate prospects for Gandhi to launch another one. Nehru has written: “It was as if we entered unwillingly to battle. There was a glory about it in 1930, which had faded a little two years later . . . So gradually, the civil disobedience movement declined . . . Progressively, it ceased to be a mass movement.”1

  Second, with the enactment of the Act of 1935, India was entering upon parliamentary form of governance, with promise of provincial autonomy. The Congress considered this the best way to take the country towards independence. A Congress Parliamentary Board was constituted, with Patel as chairman. Since the Ahmedabad Congress of 1921, which was Gandhi’s creation, Patel had proved himself a superb party organiser, and a disciplinarian capable of imposing decisions, collectively taken, in a democratic way. He was Gandhi’s choice. The Mahatma considered the Congress safe in his hands, with hope of not only getting his policies and programmes implemented, but, at the same time, as Gandhi desired, keeping disunity at bay and warding off challenges to Congress solidarity till India got her freedom.

  As chairman, Patel’s position was analogous to the general secretary of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. At the Tripuri Congress in 1939, when Subhash Chandra Bose suffered a defeat at the hands of Patel in his challenge to Gandhi, Patel, in M. N. Roy’s apt description, “sat on the dais, a figure of granite, confident of strangulating the ambitious upstart . . . The picture was reminiscent of Stalin when the latter walked up and down in the background of the platform, smoking his pipe with a grim and cynical smile”.2 Patel, however, had none of Stalin’s cunning, nor his diabolical designs to capture absolute power. He was there to defend Gandhi’s position in the Congress. Equally so, to preserve Congress unity

  As chairman, Patel’s major responsibility was to watch and guide the Congress ministers, to pull up defaulting partymen, and to smother revolts even by stalwarts. Had Patel not used—judiciously, democratically and promptly— his “muscle power”, the Congress would have gone the way of the All-India Trade Union Congress, which had been founded by the Congress in 1920 but slipped into the hands of the Communists manoeuvring under the direction of the Communist International. They had posed a great threat to the Congress during the mid-1930s, which only Patel could tactfully avert on time by securing a change in the minds of the Indian Socialists through whose partnership the Communists designed to capture the Congress.

  That was in spite of the Congress being a divided house: the Changers led by Patel, Rajendra Prasad, and Rajagopalachari, and the No-Changers whose sole voice was Nehru, who had been anti-imperialist since 1928, when, along with Subhash Chandra Bose, he had founded the Independence for India League. It was difficult to reconcile Nehru. It was left to Gandhi to rope him in for support to the Changers. Gandhi did that successfully, leaving Patel to manage the Congress organisation as party boss.

  Nehru was away in Germany. Gandhi mollified him by appointing him, without his prior consent, as the next president of the Lucknow Congress in April 1936, thus burdening him with the responsibilities of a president. This veered Nehru away from the path he and Bose had decided upon to follow. On receiving Nehru’s consent, Gandhi wrote to him on 3 October 1935:

  Your letter about the wearing of the next year’s crown was delightful. I was glad to have your consent. I am sure that it would solve many difficulties, and it is the rightest thing that could have happened for the country. Your presidentship at Lahore was totally different from what it would be at Lucknow. In my opinion, it was comparatively plain sailing at Lahore in every respect. It won’t be so in any respect at Lucknow. But these circumstances I cannot imagine anybody better able to cope with than you.3

  Even Rajendra Prasad wrote to Nehru on behalf of the Old Guard on 19 December 1935:

  I know that there is a certain difference between your outlook and that of men like Vallabhbhai, Jamnalal [Bajaj] and myself, and it is even of a fundamental character. But, I suppose, that has been there all these years, and yet we have worked together . . . It is not right to put it as if it were a question of acceptance or non-acceptance of offices . . . no one wants to accept offices for their own sake. No one wants to work the Constitution as the Government would like it to be worked. The questions for us are altogether different. What are we to do with this Constitution? Are we to ignore it altogether and go our way? Is it possible to do so? Are we to capture it and use it as we would like to use it and to the extent it lends itself to be used in that way? Are we to fight it from within or from without, and in what way? It is really a question of laying down a positive programme for dealing with the situation created by the introduction of this Constitution in the light of the circumstances as they exist.4

  Bose, on the other hand, att
empted to kindle a “leftist” fire in Nehru by writing to him on 4 March 1936: “Among the front rank leaders of today, you are the only one to whom we can look up to for leading the Congress in a progressive direction. Moreover, your position is unique, and I think that even Mahatma Gandhi will be more accommodating towards you than towards anybody else. I earnestly hope that you will fully utilise the strength of your public position in making decisions.”

  Bose suggested that Nehru’s “immediate task” would be “twofold: (i) to prevent office-acceptance by all possible means; and (ii) to enlarge and broaden the composition of the Cabinet [the working committee].” If he could do that, he would “save the Congress from demoralisation and bring it out of the rut”.5 Bose’s efforts were reinforced by those of the Congress Socialists.

  Realising that “the presidency did not mean the party’s conversion to Socialism”, Nehru attempted to wrest power from the Old Guard through radical resolutions. The rightwing leaders under Patel’s direction “played their cards most skillfully”, allowing the working committee, which was of the new president’s choosing, to pass the proposals mooted, but got them rejected by the AICC, whereby the responsibility for rejection was of the Congress as a whole, not of a group of individuals. The radical resolutions were not acceptable even to Gandhi. The proposal to allow collective affiliation of trade unions and peasant leagues with the Congress would have shifted the balance of power into the hands of the Leftists outside the party.

  The second proposal, equally radical, was of active Congress participation in agitations in the princely states. Patel was against Congress involvement in the struggle of the states people against their rulers, who were Indians, unless circumstances forced the Congress to do so. Not only were the states people yet incapable of undertaking a struggle, such a step should precede an awakening among them and thus “gradually make them capable of putting up a fight”. Nehru’s two other resolutions were also rejected. One favoured Congress participation in the “Imperial war” in Ethiopia; and the other, not to contest the provincial elections. The last was a major victory for Patel and other members of the Old Guard.