Under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi the Congress emerged as a great nationalist forum of all shades and opinions voicing anti-imperialist sentiments. During Gandhi’s first Civil Disobedience movement (1920-22), its roots spread out among all classes of people. The formal acceptance of Swaraj as the goal of the Congress really converted Non-Cooperation into a mass movement. Gandhi’s catchy slogan ‘Swaraj in one year’ stirred the masses into action. The suspension of Non-Cooperation in February, 1922 created widespread disappointment and precipitated an open division in the leadership of the Congress. The Government took advantage of the situation to take resort to a policy of repression. It invoked Bengal Regulation III of 1816 and promulgated an ordinance providing for summary arrest and trial before special commissioners. The British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, delivered his ‘steel frame’ speech, praising the work and efficiency of the I.C.S. cadre. This was in tune with the shift in policy which virtually repudiated the principles of self-government and strengthened the autocratic British regime.

A sense of disillusionment led many at this stage to question the efficacy of Gandhian methods of struggle. Was it at all possible to train millions of people in the philosophy of non-violence? Even if it was possible, how long would it take? Gandhi was now behind the bars and there was no definite political programme before the country. The Hindu-Muslim unity was fast disappearing. Acute Hindu-Muslim tensions and outbreak of communal violence dissipated national energies. The Constructive Work of the Congress, an essentially socio-economic programme of amelioration, could not attract the upper middle class intellectuals. They had never appreciated Gandhi’s emotional and metaphysical approach to politics. They looked at politics from the plane of reality, and were keen to rescue the Congress and its politics from the demoralisation that had set in after the withdrawal of Non-Cooperation.

Background

1.    The abrupt withdrawal of the Non-Cooperation Movement by Gandhi after the Chauri Chaura incident of February 1922 had demoralising effect on many Congress leaders and led to a sharp decline in the national movement. The All India Congress membership went down to 106,000 in March 1923, and was only 56,000 in May 1929.

2.    The Swarajist programme of wrecking dyarchy from within petered out into council and municipal politicking. The ‘No Changer’ group which emphasised upon Gandhian Constructive Work in villages remained scattered and kept themselves aloof from the political developments.

3.    The remarkable Hindu-Muslim unity of the Non-Cooperation Khilafat days dissolved into widespread communal riots in the mid-1920s. For example, there was a violent anti-Hindu outburst at Kohat in the N.W. Frontier Province in September 1924. Three waves of riots in Calcutta between April and July 1926 killed about 138 people. In the same year there were communal disturbances in Dacca, Patna, Rawalpindi, Delhi and United Provinces. Communal organizations proliferated with Hindu Sabhas and Swarajists often having virtually identical membership in some places. Negotiations with Jinnah over the Nehru Report plan for an alternative constitution broke down in 1927-28 largely because of Hindu Mahasabha opposition and Jinnah’s obstinacy in relation to it.

 There were many signs of the growth of anti imperialist movement from 1928 onwards.

 These signs were visible in:

1.    Demonstration and hartals in town in the course of the boycott of the Simon Commission.

2.    Militant communist led workers’ movement in Bombay and Calcutta which alarmed Indian businessmen and British officials and capitalists alike,

3.    The revival of revolutionary groups in Bengal and Northern India (like HSRA[1] introducing a new secular and socialistic tone).

4.    Peasant movements in various regions, particularly the successful Bardoli Satyagraha led by Vallabhbhai Patel in Gujarat in 1928 against the enhancement of land revenue.

5.    Contradictions were enormously sharpened by the impact of the World Depression which set in from late 1929. Business groups were not happy with the British tariff policy. Lancashire textile imports were going up again, and there were growing conflicts in Calcutta between the Birlas and British Jute interests and in Bombay over coastal shipping. The workers facing large scale retrenchment started agitations with unprecedented militancy and organization. Rural tensions were sharpened by stagnation in agrarian production and by British efforts to enhance land revenue in Ryotwari areas in the late 1920s till the Bardoli victory halted such endeavours permanently. But socio-economic tensions did not necessarily or automatically take an anti British turn, for the immediate oppressors would most often be Indian Zamindars, moneylenders, or millowners, groups which could have nationalist connections, or which nationalists generally tried to keep on their side. Yet a massive country wide upsurge did take place in 1930.

6.    During this period when the Congress Left was emerging, under Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhash Bose slogans of Purna Swaraj rather than of only Dominion Status were voiced.  After much hesitation, Gandhi accepted this change in Congress creed at the Lahore session in December 1929, setting the stage for the next major round of countrywide struggle in 1930-34.

Throughout 1928 and 1929 we find that political and economic tensions between British domination and a variety of Indian interests increased.

The Lahore Congress (1929) had left the choice of the precise methods of non-violent struggle for Purna Swaraj to Gandhi. It was resolved that a Manifesto or pledge of Independence would be taken all over India by as many people as possible on 26 January 1930. On this date civil disobedience was supposed to commence. It was declared as Independence Day.

Gandhi’s efforts

Gandhi was still not sure of his plan of action. Before launching the movement he once again tried for compromise with the Government. He placed ‘eleven points’ of administrative reform and stated that if Lord Irwin accepted them there would be no need for agitation. The important demands were:

1)   The Rupee-Sterling ratio should be reduced

2)   Land revenue should be reduced by half and made a subject of legislative control,

3)   Salt tax should be abolished and also the government salt monopoly

4)   Salaries of the highest grade services should be reduced by half

5)   Military expenditure should be reduced by 50% to begin with

6)   Protection for Indian textiles and coastal shipping

7)   All political prisoners should be discharged.

8)   Total Prohibition of intoxicants

9)    Doing away with services of CID

10) Freedom to keep arms to citizens for self protection

11) Protective policy for the foreign cloth

To many observers this charter of demands seemed a climb-down from Purna Swaraj. But Gandhi cleared any doubts by highlighting that if all the demands were accepted by the British, their rule in India will no longer be profitable and they would be forced to quit. The Government response to Gandhi’s proposal was negative.

Beginning of the movement

Gandhi took the decision to start the movement on 12 March 1930 by starting the Historic March from his Sabarmati Ashram to Dandi beach accompanied by his 78 selected followers. There Gandhi and his followers broke the law by manufacturing salt from the sea. The Programme of the movement was as follows:

a)   Salt law should be violated everywhere.

b)   Students should leave colleges and government servants should resign from service.

c)   Foreign clothes should be burnt.

d)   No taxes should be paid to the government.

e)   Women should stage a Dharna at liquor shops, etc.

The choice of salt as the central issue appeared puzzling initially. Events quickly revealed the enormous potentialities of this choice. “You planned a fine strategy around the issue of salt” Irwin later admitted to Gandhi. Salt was a concrete and a universal grievance of the rural poor, which was almost unique in having no socially divisive implications. With regard to food habits salt was a daily necessity of the people. It also carried with it the implications of trust, hospitality, mutual obligations. In this sense it had a far-reaching emotional content. Moreover the breaking of the salt law meant a rejection of the Government’s claims on the allegiance of the people. In coastal areas where over the previous century indigenous salt production had been ruined by British imports, illegal manufacture of salt could provide the people a small income which was not unimportant. The manufacture of salt also became a part of Gandhian methods of constructive work like Khadi production. Rural Gandhian bases everywhere provided the initial volunteers for the salt Satyagraha. Above all, the Dandi March and the subsequent countrywide violation of the salt law provided a tremendously impressive demonstration of the power of non-violent mass struggle.

What came to be undermined were the entire moral authority of the government and its self-image of being the paternalistic guardian of the poor. An additional District Magistrate reported from Midnapur (Bengal) in November 1930 that even old villagers were talking “insolently - the ordinary cultivator simply squatted on his haunches and laughing sarcastically said, ‘We know how powerful the Sarkar is”

Movement spreads

Social boycott of police and lower-level administrative officials led to many resignations. That the British realized the gravity of the threat was revealed by the sheer brutality of repression, as “unresisting men - (were) methodically bashed into a bloody pulp”, in the words of the American journalist Webb Miller. But the spectacle of unarmed, unresisting satyagrahis standing up to abominable torture aroused local sympathy and respect as nothing else could have done. The brutal repression invoked memories of innumerable acts of petty oppression by police and local officials, linking up the all India struggle with the lived day-to-day experiences of the villagers. Sympathy quickly turned into participation, spreading the movement far beyond the fairly narrow confines. And such participation often took violent forms, with crowds of villagers attacking police parties. The Gandhian restraints had been weakened, anyway, by the early removal of most of the Congress cadres by arrests.

While the salt Satyagraha was at its height, British alarm was depended by three major outbursts, outside or going beyond the confines of Gandhi’s Civil Disobedience.

i)     On 18 April 1930, Bengal revolutionaries inaugurated the most powerful and heroic epoch in the history of the terrorist movement by seizing the Chittagong armoury and fighting a pitched battle on Jalalabad hill on 22 April. Revolutionary terrorism accompanied the whole history of Civil Disobedience in Bengal, with 56 incidents in 1930 (as compared to 47 for the decade 1919-1929). The Chittagong leader Surya Sen managed to remain underground in villages till as late as 1933, and there was the evidence of a new level of peasant sympathy. For the first time Muslims were also included in what had been a movement of educated middle class Hindu youth alone.

ii)    In Peshawar on 23 April 1930, the arrest of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan provoked a massive upsurge, and a platoon of Garhwal Rifles (Hindu soldiers facing a Muslim crowd) refused to open fire, an instance of patriotic self-sacrifice, non-violence, and communal unity which deserves to be better remembered.

iii)   The industrial city of Sholapur in Maharashtra in early May 1930 saw a textile workers’ strike, attacks on liquor shops, police outposts and government buildings, and even something like a parallel government for a few days.

The onset of the monsoon made illegal salt manufacture difficult and the Congress switched over to other forms of mass struggle, all characterised by a similar pattern of careful choice of socially non-divisive issues, followed by their broadening and radicalization through a variety of populist initiatives. The Working Committee in May 1930 sanctioned non-payment of land revenue in Ryotwari areas, an anti-choukidari (village police) tax in zamindari regions (not, significantly enough, no-rent), and ‘forest satyagraha’: peaceful violation of forest laws restricting age-old tribal and poor peasant rights to free fodder, timber and other forest produce. The government struck back at no-tax movements through largescale confiscations of property, yet thousands of peasants heroically stood their ground, at times migrating en masse to neighbouring princely states. Rural movements repeatedly went beyond the prescribed Gandhian bounds, through violent confrontations with the police at many places, and massive tribal invasions of forests in Central Provinces, Maharashtra and Karnataka. The rumour spread that the British Raj was coming to an end.

Response of different sections

Urban intelligentsia support for Gandhian nationalism was perhaps less in evidence in 1930 than during the Non-Cooperation Movement and there were few instances of lawyers giving up practice or students leaving official institutions to join national schools. Militant urban educated youth tended to be attracted more by revolutionary terrorism in Bengal, and in north Indian towns Bhagat Singh’s popularity briefly rivaled that of Gandhi himself. The most obvious weak point of nationalism as compared to 1919-22, was of course Muslim participation which remained low on the whole except in Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan’s NWFP and places like Delhi; for example only 9 out of 679 Civil Disobedience prisoners in Allahabad between 1930 and 1933 were Muslims. Social discontent turned communal in Dacca town and Dishoreganj village in May and July 1930, and there were large scale riots in Kanpur in March 1931, soon after the Gandhi-Irwin Pact. Unlike Non-Cooperation, Civil Disobedience did not coincide with any major labour upsurge. There were frequent hartals in towns, but the Congress did not include industrial or communication strikes in its programme, much to the relief of British officials.

Such lags were largely made up by the massive peasant mobilization and considerable support from business groups, at least during the early months of Civil Disobedience. The movement, unlike Non-Cooperation, implied violations of law, arrests, and beatings up right from the beginning, and the number of jail goers was 92,214; more than three times the 1921-22 figures. Support from Ahmedabad mill owners, Bombay merchants and petty traders (industrialists in the city being less enthusiastic), and Calcutta Marwaris headed by GD Birla can be cited as examples of the solidarity of the Capitalists with the national movement at this stage. For example, the merchants in many towns took a collective pledge to give up import of foreign goods for some months. Combined with picketing and the overall impact of the Depression, there was a spectacular collapse of British cloth imports, from 1248 million yards in 1929-30 to only 523 million yards in 1930-31.

A novel and remarkable feature of the Civil Disobedience Movement was the widespread participation of women. The handful of postgraduate women students in 1930s still went to class escorted by their teachers, and yet there were women from far more socially conservative professional, business or peasant families, picketing shops, facing lathis, and going to jail. A U.P. Police official felt that “the Indian woman is struggling for domestic and national liberty at the same time ...’ However, this sudden active role of women in politics did not produce any significant change in the conditions of women in or outside the family. Gandhian non-violence, after all, did not entail any drastic violation of the traditional image of women; rather, it was male action that had in some ways been ‘feminized’, through the emphasis upon self-sacrificing acceptance of suffering. The one form of women’s participation which came to be quite sharply condemned was an active role in direct terrorist action, including assassination as happened several times in Bengal. Even Rabindranath Tagore, usually much in advance of others in questions of women’s roles, then wrote a novel - Char Adhyay (1934) - condemning such ‘unfeminine’ behaviour.

Regional variations

The recent spate of regional studies of Civil Disobedience has brought to light interesting variations and internal tensions. Gurjara - more specifically, Kheda district, Bardoli taluka of Surat, Ahmedabad, and the Gujarati business-cum-professional community of Bombay City - had become the classic heartland of controlled mass mobilization through Gandhian Satyagraha. Gandhian strategies and controls fitted in well with the interests of substantial landholding peasants like Patidars of Kheda and Bardoli, where in the absence of big zamindaris, rent was not much of an issue. Rural movements tended to be more uninhibited where Congress organization was weaker, or where internal zamindar-peasant divisions were quite sharp. Thus in Central Provinces, Maharashtra or Karnataka, where Non-Cooperation had made little inroads, the Gandhian ideas had the flavour and vagueness of novelty, a near millenarian flavour could still be seen which was absent in the well-established strongholds like Gujarat, coastal Andhra or Bihar. In the United Provinces, district level comparisons have brought out clearly this inverse relationship between organization and militancy. Parts of Agra district, with a strong Congress organisation and few big zamindars, followed the Bardoli pattern; talukdar-dominated Rae Baraeli, saw powerful pressures from the peasants. In Bara Banki, where khadi or charka were little in evidence, local activists were preaching that land was a gift of God and could not belong to zamindars alone. In Bengal, with its relatively weak and faction-ridden Congress, a near-coincidence of class with communal divisions in the eastern districts, and the presence already of a left alternative, the pattern was even more complex. There were powerful Gandhian rural movements in parts of West Bengal like Midnapur, Arambagh sub-division, and Bankurata Praja movement was developing among Muslim rich peasants which was aloof or hostile regarding Civil Disobedience; and in one Muslim-majority district, Tippera, Congress activists were combining agrarian radicalism with nationalism in ways branded as ‘rank Bolshevism’ by Government officials and local Hindu landlords.

The truce months, march-december 1931

Around September-October 1930, Civil Disobedience entered a second, more contradictory, phase. Pressures for no-rent were mounting as the Depression began having its major impact, and the UP Congress had to reluctantly sanction non-payment of rent in October. Incidents of poor peasant and tribal militancy and violence multiplied in many areas. At the same time, official reports began speaking of a marked decline of enthusiasm and support among urban traders, many of whom started breaking earlier pledges not to sell imported goods. Thakurdas warned Motilal Nehru that “the capacity of the commercial community for endurance” had reached its limits, and industrialists like Homi Mody denounced the “frequent hartals which dislocated trade and industry”. Possibly the enthusiasm of substantial peasants in the face of ruthless British seizure of property had started flagging too. Almost all leading Congress leaders were put behind bars. This was probably the context for Gandhi’s rather sudden retreat. He initiated talks with Irwin on 14 February 1931, which culminated in the Delhi Pact of 5 March. The pact is popularly called GANDHI-IRWIN PACT. The salient features of this accord were:

i)     The agreement arrived at the First Round Table Conference shall further be deliberated upon in another Round Table Conference.

ii)    Indian National Congress will withdraw the Civil Disobedience Movement immediately and effectively in all respects.

iii)   The boycott of British goods would also be withdrawn forthwith.

iv)  The Government agreed to withdraw ordinances promulgated in relation to the Civil Disobedience Movement. Those political prisoners against whom there were no allegations of violence were to be set free and penalties that had not been realised were to be remitted. Indemnities would be paid to those who had suffered in the movement.

V)   The Government was neither to condone breach of the existing law relating to salt administration nor would the salt Act be amended. Nonetheless, government was to permit the collection and manufacture of salt freely to the people living within a specified area from the sea-shore.

The Congress working committee was divided when it met on 5 March, 1931 to discuss the results of the talks. Many people hailed it as a Victory because the Viceroy had to negotiate a settlement. Others were not happy. Gandhi agreed to attend the Round Table Conference, more or less on British terms, in sharp contrast to his stand uptill the end of January 1931. Even Gandhiji’s request for remitting the death sentence on Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru was turned down by the Viceroy, and they were executed on 23rd March.

The Gandhi-Irwin Pact had ambiguous consequences. Many others besides Nehru felt dismayed by the unexpected halt, long before attaining the proclaimed goal of Purna Swaraj, and peasants who had sacrificed land and goods at the Congress behest must have felt particularly let down. There was even a black flag demonstration against Gandhi when the Karachi Congress opened a few days after the execution of Bhagat Singh. The session, however, ratified the new policy, with Nehru, having spent some sleepless nights, moving the key resolution accepting the Delhi agreement. More fundamentally, it can be argued that the Truce meant the loss of some crucial months during which the Congress restrained no-tax and no-rent movements precisely when rural discontent was at its height, with the Depression having its initial impact, and when sheer economic distress had not as yet ruined the potential for largescale struggle. The Congress did give the call for no-tax again, in January 1932, but by that time the psychological moment had gone.

Gandhi’s entry into the Second Round Table Conference also proved a virtual fiasco. The first Conference, in January 1931, with Civil Disobedience still at large and the Congress boycotting it had been marked by Ramsay MacDonald’s novel offer of responsible government at the centre. But its two characteristics were a Federal assembly on which princes who joined would nominate their own members, and a series of “reservations and safeguards” to maintain British control over defence, external affairs, finance, and economy. Having accepted this as the framework for discussing, Gandhi as sole Congress representative at the second RTC found himself involved in endless squabbles with Muslim leaders, the Scheduled Caste representative Ambedkar who had started demanding separate electorates for untouchables, and princes. The British watched this gleefully. The Congress had clearly been out maneuvered.

Yet the impact of the Pact and truce months was not entirely negative. The British after all, had to negotiate with Gandhi on terms of equality and courtesy for the first time, and this was something deeply resented by many died-hard officials. The released Congressmen seem to have gone back to their villages and towns with undiminished confidence, almost as victors. The Congress organization expanded rapidly in the countryside, and the general mood was quite different from the fragmentation and decline after 1922. The Congress in fact was seeking to establish itself as the alternative, more legitimate centre of authority, starting arbitration courts to settle local disputes, and trying to mediate in zamindar raiyat conflicts. Meanwhile popular pressures were also building up in many areas, most notably no-rent agitation in the United Provinces, which the provincial Congress eventually permitted in December 1931. A powerful anti-Maharaj movement in Kashmir under Sheikh Abdulla was an indication that political unrest was reaching out to princely states (there was to be a revolt in Alwar two years later), even though the Congress leadership still refused to intervene in princely India.

This was the overall context for the British decision of a pre-emotive strike against the Congress before it got any stronger, taken by the new Right-Wing National Government and Viceroy Willingdon in late 1931. The new policy has been described as one of ‘Civil martial law’. Sweeping ordinances banning all Congress organizations on 4 January 1932 (272 of them in Bengal alone), abrogating all civic freedom without formally declaring military rule in order to force the Congress to wage an unequal and defensive battle were promulgated. On 4 January 1932, a fresh batch of Congress leaders including Gandhi and Sardar Patel were arrested. Now attempts to treat political prisoners as common criminals became more common than ever before.

Out maneuvered and facing repressive measures on an entirely unprecedented scale, the national movement still fought on valiantly for about a year and a half. 120,000 people were jailed in the first three months-an indication, however, not so much of a more extensive movement than in 1930, but of more intense and systematic repression, for the figures soon began to decline fairly fast. Bombay city and Bengal were described as the “two black spots” by Willingdon in April 1932: Gujarati small traders wee still staunchly with the Congress, and Bengal remained a nightmare partly because of sporadic agrarian unrest, and more due to terrorism (104 incidents, the highest ever, in 1932; 33 in 1933). Rural response seems to have been less on the whole than in 1930, though a village like Ras in Kheda was still withholding revenue in 1933, despite confiscation of 2000 acres, public whipping, and electric shocks.

As the mass movement gradually declined in face of ruthless repression, political ‘realism’ combined with economic calculations of certain sections of Indians pushed Indian big business towards collaboration with the British, Bombay millowners concluded the Lees-Mody Pact in October 1933, aligning with the Lancashire out of fear of Japanese competition. Ahmedabad businessmen and GD Birla bitterly denounced this Betrayal, but Birla and Thakurdas from 1932 onwards were themselves pressing the Congress for a compromise.

Gandhi in jail not unnaturally began to think in terms of an honourable retreat. He suspended Civil Disobedience temporarily in May 1933, and formally withdrew it in April 1934.

Individual Satyagraha

The Mahatma decided to make Harijan work the central plank of his new rural constructive programme. This was his answer to the British policy of ‘Divide and Rule’ which found expression in the official Communal Award declared early in 1932 by Ramsay Macdonald. The Award provided for separate Hindu, ‘Untouchable’ and Muslim electorates for the new Federal legislatures, treating Hindus and Harijans as two separate political entities. Gandhi opposed this Award. He demanded reservation of more seats for Harijans within the Hindu electorate. Ambedkar, the Harijan leader, accepted Gandhi’s stand. Another section of Congressmen preferred to go back to Council politics, and so the scenario of the mid 1920s appeared to be repeating itself. The 1935 Government of India Act was considerably more retrogressive than earlier drafts, for it was drawn up at a point when the British seemed triumphant.

Aftermath

That the Government’s sense of ‘victory’ had been largely illusory was quickly revealed, when the Congress swept the polls in most provinces in 1937. The Congress had been defeated by superior brute force, but its mass prestige was as high as ever. The Left alternatives emerged from the logic of Civil Disobedience itself, for the Movement had aroused expectations which Gandhian strategy could not fulfill. At the level of leadership, Nehru (and, less consistently, Bose) voiced the new mood, emphasising the need to combine nationalism with radical social and economic programmes. Some Congress activists formed a socialist ginger-group within the party in 1934. Kisan Sabhas with anti-zamidar programmes developed rapidly in provinces like Bihar and Andhra. The Communists, too, were recovering from the Meerut arrests[2] and their own folly of keeping away from Civil Disobedience, and a significant section of disillusioned terrorists and Gandhian activists were moving towards them.

In this changed situation, the dominant groups within the Congress were able to retain control only by a series of adjustments and openings towards the left, though usually at the level of programmatic statements and not action. Thus land reforms directed towards curbing and eventually abolishing zamindari were coming to be included in the official Congress programme by the mid-1930s, in total contrast to all earlier pronouncements. An early indication of such a shift was the Karachi declaration on fundamental rights and economic policy, made-significantly-just after the Gandhi-Irwin Pact: This declaration was very moderate in content, yet reductions were promised, for the first time, not only in revenue but in rent, and living wages and trade union rights also entered the Congress programme. Peasant upsurges which had constituted so much of the real strength of Civil Disobedience like the labour unrest of the late 1920s had not been entirely futile. Though crucial political controls within the national movement remained elsewhere, much of the Congress language and rhetoric, and some actual policies, did have to take a leftward direction as a consequence of the growing assertiveness of these sections of Indian society.