“Nadir Shah looted the country only once. But the British loot us every day. Every year wealth to the tune of 4.5 million dollar is being drained out, sucking our very blood. Britain should immediately quit India.’’ That’s what the Sindh Times wrote on May 20, 1884, a year before the Indian National Congress was born and 58 years before the ‘Quit India’ movement of 1942 was launched.
Contrary to the view that nationalist sentiments were awoken by the Indian National Congress only when M.K. Gandhi took over its leadership, nationalist feelings in India had been present as early as 1857, and expressions of Indian nationalism manifested themselves in various forms all through the course of British rule.
The Boycott of Foreign Goods
An early form of economic nationalism was seen in Shikarpur (Sindh), when the Pritam Dharma Sabha, set up in 1888, initiated various social reforms, but also inspired the setting up of swadeshi sugar, soap, and cloth mills. The literature produced by the Sabha was considered so revolutionary that, in 1909, three of it’s members, Seth Chetumal, Virumal Begraj and Govind Sharma were all sentenced to five years’ rigorous imprisonment by the British administration.
The partition of Bengal along communal lines in 1905 by the British triggered a nation-wide Swadeshi movement, giving a great fillip to the freedom movement throughout the country. A boycott of foreign goods was proclaimed on August 7, 1905. At this time, the Indian National Congress gave only conditional support to the plan, but a year later, under the influence of more radical leaders like Tilak from Maharashtra, Bipin Chandra Pal and Aurobindo Ghosh from Bengal and Lajpat Rai from Punjab, the Calcutta session of the Congress in 1906 proclaimed for the first time, the concept of ‘swaraj’, i.e. self-rule and called for support to the boycott movement. Although the demand for ‘swaraj’ was only a partial step towards full political and economic freedom for India since India was to remain a part of the British empire, it was an important step towards real independence, and it encouraged several local nationalist groups to participate in the movement to boycott imported goods, and set up local stores where only locally manufactured goods would be sold.
The Emergence of the Ghadar Party
The first Indian political organization to call for complete independence from British rule was the Ghadar Party, organized in 1913 by Indian immigrants in California. The Ghadar movement was remarkable for many reasons. Although Sikhs from Punjab made up the majority of it’s founding members, the movement was completely devoid of any trace of regional or religious chauvinism. It’s platform was uncompromisingly secular and called for a total rejection of any form of caste discrimination. And unlike the Congress, it’s membership was primarily drawn from the working class and poor peasantry. Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus of all castes (including Dalits) were welcomed in the movement without bias or discrimination.
The literature of the Ghadar Party was also the clearest in describing the depth of misery that the common people of India experienced under British rule. They were also amongst the first to anticipate the outbreak of the First World War. Correctly sensing that it was an opportunity for the Indian people to liberate themselves from the yolk of colonial rule, they called for a mass movement for total independence. In their widely distributed poster, “Jang Da Hoka” (Declaration of War) they warned of the danger of Indian soldiers being drawn into the British War effort in the First World War.
Unfortunately, the Congress failed to take advantage of this tremendous opportunity and leaders like Gandhi went as far as campaigning for the British War effort, calling upon Indians to enroll in the British Army. This treacherous and sycophantic policy of Gandhi not only drew biting criticism from Ghadar activists, but opposition from other quarters also emerged.
Nevertheless, by and large, the Congress was a relatively conservative organization at this time and drew stinging criticism from the Ghadarites. Rejecting the notion that freedom could be won by participating in the oppressive bureaucracy of the British or by pleading with the British for reforms or self-rule, the Ghadarites believed that only a militant mass movement that involved workers and peasants and all other sections of Indian society on a non-sectarian basis could succeed. They envisaged an India that would not only be free from exploitation by the British but would also be free from hunger, homelessness and disease. In their vision of India there would be no place for religious superstition or any socially sanctioned inequities.
Although the Ghadar movement started in California, chapters were established all over the world and by 1916, a million copies of their weekly pamphlet were published and circulated. As the movement grew in strength, there were plans to set up cells of the Ghadar party all over India and thousands of young volunteers attempted to return home and initiate local chapters wherever they could. The British, realizing the dangers posed by this extremely radical movement moved quickly and closed in on the revolutionaries. Hundreds were charged for sedition in the five Lahore Conspiracy Cases. According to one estimate, a total of 145 Ghadarites were hanged, and 308 were given sentences longer than 14 years. Several were sentenced to hard labour in the notorious prison known as Kala Pani in the Andamans.
The Ghadarites were especially successful in winning over Indian soldiers in the British Army and enticing them to revolt. Soldiers in the Hongkong regiments were arrested and court-martialed for distributing Ghadar and sent back to India and imprisoned. Two Singapore regiments rebelled in Penang, but the rebellion was brutally crushed. In Rangoon in January 1915, the 130th Baluchi regiment revolted. 200 soldiers of this regiment were court-martialed. Four soldiers were hanged, 69 were given life imprisonment and 126 were given rigorous imprisonment for varying terms.
But in spite of the tremendous repression unleashed by the British against the Ghadarites, the British were unable to stop a mass wave of revolutionary unrest in 1919. The closing months of 1918 and the first months of 1919 saw the opening of a strike movement on a scale never seen before. The Bombay mill strike extended to 125,000 workers. In spite of the Rawlett Act of 1919 that sought to extend the provisions of martial law, a wave of mass demonstrations, strikes, and civil unrest confronted the British authorities. The British rulers were taken by surprise by the courageous resistance of the workers. Unsurprisingly, the British responded with extraordinary measures of repression.
General Dyer’s Jallianawala Bagh masssacre followed the strike wave, when an unarmed crowd of 10,000 Baisakhi celebrators was mercilessly attacked with over 1600 rounds of ammunition. The first six months of 1920 saw an even greater level of mass resistance, with no less than 200 strikes taking place involving 1.5 million workers. It was in response to this rising mass revolutionary tide that the leadership of the Congress was forced to confront its conservatism and give a somewhat more militant face to it’s programme. The ‘non-violent non-cooperation’ movement was thus launched under the stewardship of Congress leaders like Lajpat Rai, Motilal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi.
Other Radical Forces
But in contrast to the Congress, other far more radical forces were already coalescing. The Communist Party of India was formed in 1920, who while demanding complete independence, also stressed the need for giving a radical content to the slogan of swaraj through a definite programme for social and economic change by including such vital questions as abolition of landlordism, end to feudal domination and elimination of caste oppression.
While participating in the freedom struggle, they devoted their energies to the task of organising workers in trade unions, peasants in the Kisan Sabhas, and students in their unions. It was due to these efforts that the national organisations like the All India Kisan Sabha and the All India Students Federation were founded and the All India Trade Union Congress strengthened. The Communists also took the initiative in founding progressive, cultural and literary organisations like the Progressive Writers’ Association and the Indian People’s Theatre Association.
Emergence of the armed revolutionaries
Virtually all the armed revolutionaries had participated enthusiastically in the non-violent non-cooperation movement earlier. But when the non-cooperation movement was suddenly suspended by Gandhi, the more radically minded of the young leaders looked to other leaders for inspiration. In 1904, V.D. Savarkar had organized Abhinav Bharat as a secret society of revolutionaries. Anushilan Samiti and Yugantar were two other such societies. Ideas of armed resistance to British rule were propogated and international centres were established with Madame Cama and Ajit Singh representing the struggle in Europe, and Shyamji Krishnaverma and others organizing chapters in London.
Frustrated and disillusioned by the Congress, the revolutionaries in northern India were the first to reorganize under the leadership of the older veterans, Ramprasad Bismil, Jogesh Chatterjee and Shachindranath Sanyal whose Bandi Jiwan served as a textbook for the revolutionary movement. They met in Kanpur in October 1924 and founded the Hindustan Republican Association to organize armed revolution to overthrow colonial rule.
The advance of the armed struggle required bold and risky actions. Volunteers had to be recruited and trained and arms had to be procured, requiring money—hence raids on the British treasury. On 9 August 1925, ten men held up the 8-Down train at Kakori (a village near Lucknow), to get access to its railway cash. British reaction was quick and hard. Ashfaqulla Khan, Ramprasad Bismil, Roshan Singh and Rajendra Lahiri were hanged, four others were sent to the Andamans for life and seventeen others were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. The Kakori case was a major setback to the revolutionaries of northern India; but it was not a fatal blow. Younger men such as Bejoy Kumar Sinha, Shiv Varma and Jaidev Kapur in U.P., Bhagat Singh, Bhagwati Charan Vohra and Sukhdev in Punjab set out to reorganize the HRA under the leadership of Chandrashekhar Azad. At this time, they were also strongly influenced by socialist ideas. At a Delhi meeting in September 1928, a new collective leadership adopted socialism as their official goal and changed their party’s name to the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (Army).
On 8 April 1929, HSRA embarked on a plan to throw a bomb in the Central Legislative Assembly against the passage of two new repressive bills—the Public Safety Bill and the Trade Disputes Bill. The aim was not to cause any loss of life, but to use the daring action to awaken and energize the Indian masses. It was intended to ‘make the deaf hear’. The objective was to get arrested and to use the trial court as a vehicle to disseminate their dreams and ideas for a new and liberated India.
Bhagat Singh and B.K. Dutt were tried in the Assembly Bomb Case. Later Sukhdev, Rajguru and tens of other revolutionaries were also tried in a series of famous conspiracy cases. Their fearless and unswerving attitudes in court became legendary. Every day they entered the court-room chanting slogans ‘Inquilab Zindabad,’ ‘Down, Down with Imperialism,’ singing songs like Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamare dil mein hai and Mera rang de basanti chola.
In March 1931, Rajguru, Sukhdev, and Bhagat Singh were hanged by the British in spite of tremendous popular opposition to their hanging. Bhagat Singh became a household hero, and his hanging led to an outpouring of grief and sorrow all over the nation.
Just as it seemed that the national movement was completely slipping away from the influence of the Congress, Mahatma Gandhi returned to the mode of non-violent struggle and launched the salt satyagraha (1930-31). Campaigns to boycott imported goods were also launched. With the masses energized once again, a series of anti-British action took place, of which most notable were the raid on the Chittagong Armory and a mutiny by Garhwali soldiers in Peshawar. For ten days, British authority in Peshawar collapsed.
Building up to the Quit India movement
Subhash Chandra Bose attempted to lead a radical revival of the Congress and tried to steer it in a more radical and socialist direction. In 1939, he defeated Gandhi’s nominee Pattabhi Sitaramayya to be re-elected Congress president. But he was ill-prepared to deal with a campaign of non-cooperation launched against him and resigned a few months later to launch an alternative and more radical platform that eventually became the Forward Block in independent India.
The outbreak of the Second World War opened up a new and more determined phase of the struggle against British rule. In 1939 and 1940, strikes and peasant uprisings reached a fever pitch. In 1941, the Indian National Army (INA) was launched by General Mohan Singh in Malaya with the help of the Japanese. He belonged to Sialkot (Punjab) and had been greatly influenced by the killings of Jallianwala Bagh and hangings of the Ghadar Party members during his younger years. In 1943, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose took over the Indian National Army and it was renamed as the Azad Hind Fauj. More than two million Indian civilians living in South-east Asia responded to his call for ‘total mobilization’. In his army of liberation Punjabi, Muslim, Sikh and Pathan professional soldiers fought side by side with Tamil and Malayalee rubber plantation workers. In his Azad Hind Movement Netaji was able to demonstrate by example how to achieve Hindu-Muslim unity and amity and enable women to get their rightful role in public affairs.
By 1942, the Congress too was act boldly, and issued the Quit India call in August. The Quit India Movement of 1942 swept across the length and breadth of the country like a mighty tidal wave bringing in its fold people from all walks of life, arousing in them tremendous patriotic fervour and an irresistible urge to act. Volunteers from groups like the Hindu Mahasabha who had all this while remained aloof from the mass struggle joined in as well. Individual industrialists were emboldened too and encouraged strike actions against the British.
The Role of women
One of the important facets of India’s freedom movement was the growing participation of women. Women played an especially crucial role in the economic boycott campaigns and often participated in the non-cooperation movement with as much or even greater enthusiasm than their husbands or male relatives. In rallies organized by the Congress, women attended in large numbers. When the entire Congress leadership was put in jail in 1942, women leaders like Aruna Asaf Ali and Sucheta Kripalani emerged with Achyut Patwardhan and Ram Manohar Lohia and others to lead the underground resistance. Usha Mehta ran the Congress radio.
The Revolutionary Peasantry, Adivasis and Dalits
The final phase of the Indian freedom struggle also saw peasant struggles rising to new heights of militancy. Throughout the country, Kisan Sabhas had been active in the 1930s. After the Quit-India call, peasants of all classes joined in the freedom struggle. Adivasis and landless peasants were particularly heroic in their struggles. Crushed by the inhumane demands of the Zamindari system, they had to fight a dual war—one against the British and the other against the Indian landlords who collaborated with British rule.
During the course of the freedom struggle, the issue of equality for Adivasis and Dalits came up again and again. Phule, Periyar and Ambedkar emerged as amongst the most prominent of the Dalit leaders. The Ghadar movement, the HSRA and later the INA led the way in breaking down caste and communal barriers. Nevertheless, virtually all the advanced sections of the freedom struggle came to the conclusion that for India to succeed as a modern nation, the issue of equality for Dalits and Adivasis could not be dismissed.
Final push towards freedom
After the Second World War, the momentum created by the Quit India movement led to growing militant actions that weakened British authority in an irreparable way. The World War had compelled the British into setting up Indian Navy units that recruited officers from various parts of India. The Indian naval men were mistreated and discriminated against, leading to a strike call in Februrary 1946. It quickly drew support from the Indian crews of all the 20 vessels anchored in Bombay port. 20,000 naval ratings went on strike. ‘Victory to India’, ‘Long live the Revolution’, and ‘Hindus and Muslims Unite’ were some of their slogans. The struggle soon spread to barracks in Thane and Delhi, and also to ships anchored in Karachi, Calcutta and Vishakapatnam. 200,000 workers in Bombay’s factories downed their tools in solidarity.
The the strike in the Indian Navy played an important role in energizing and emboldening the Indian masses. Militant acts of resistance accelerated. The British realized that they could no longer hold on to India and instead turned their attentions on partitioning India. The Muslim League was more than willing to play an active role in these dangerous and divisive maneuvers.
The Congress although reluctant to accept partition put up a feeble fight. Decades of conservatism prevented it from moving the Indian masses into a struggle against the terror tactics of the Muslim League. Congress leadership remained wedded to non-violence even as the Muslim League was arming it’s separatist volunteers.
Independence was won but at a heavy price that continues to torment the people of the sub-continent through the creation of Pakistan, a state based on the thoroughly reactionary foundation of religious separatism and intolerance.
