Charkha, gun, a common link

Away from the limelight, the commemoration of another centenary has also begun. With the 75th anniversary of Bhagat Singh’s martyrdom on March 23 this year having gone largely unnoticed, left groups across the country are keen to ensure that his birth centenary — he was born on September 27,1907 — becomes an occasion to pay homage to the revolutionary tradition of which he is the most famous icon.

If Mahatma Gandhi remains the indubitable Father of the Nation, Bhagat Singh has come to represent the forsaken son. Gandhi may have been loved and venerated by the masses but angry young Indians in the 1930s were bitterly disappointed with his attitude to the revolutionaries (or “terrorists”, as they were then described). It is still a matter of debate whether Gandhi was unable or unwilling to save Bhagat Singh and his comrades from the gallows. Many felt at the time that Gandhi ought to have insisted on commutation of their death sentence and release of the Bengal revolutionaries in his negotiations with Lord Irwin. Under the Gandhi-Irwin Pact of February 1931, the civil disobedience movement was suspended in exchange of the release of all satyagrahis from jail — but Bhagat Singh was hanged a month later and hundreds of young men and a few women in Bengal and elsewhere who planned or executed violent attacks to overthrow alien rule languished for long terms in prison.

That schism — pitting Gandhi against Bhagat Singh, the charkha versus the gun — has led generations to believe that the revolutionary or violent stream was antithetical to the Gandhi-led “mainstream” freedom struggle. Congressmen may commend the heroism and self-sacrifice of a Bhagat Singh or a Khudiram Bose but they retain the belief that the revolutionaries played, at best, a peripheral role in gaining India’s freedom. Similarly, those who see themselves as standard-bearers of the radical legacy think of Gandhi as an adversary who never appreciated the work of the revolutionaries.

A closer study of the freedom struggle, however, reveals that far from being binary opposites, the two streams shared a rich, textured and nuanced relationship marked by both conflict and confluence at different points in history.

The revolutionary stream took place at a time when there was no real Congress movement in India. In that sense, they were pioneers in the freedom struggle even though the Congress was formally in existence since 1885.

The British Raj was much more afraid of the violent school than it was of the Congress. After the end of the war, it set up the Rowlatt Committee to study “the nature and extent of the criminal conspiracies connected with the revolutionary movement in India”. The committee’s recommendations led to the Revolutionary and Anarchical Crimes Act, 1919. The first nationwide protest against the Rowlatt Act was led by none other than Mahatma Gandhi who had arrived in India four years before.

What is less well known is that the revolutionaries too plunged into the first non-cooperation movement launched by Gandhi in 1920-21. After the 1920 Nagpur session, when membership was opened to all on the payment of four annas (25 paise), the Congress became a truly mass platform and the revolutionaries joined it in great numbers. In Bengal, for instance, hundreds of young men who belonged to the Anushilan or Jugantar “terrorist” outfits became Congressmen and fully participated in Gandhian satyagraha.

Gandhi’s decision to abruptly call off the movement after the Chauri Chaura incident in February 1922 came as a great disappointment and led to what British intelligence records describe as the second phase of the revolutionary movement, marked by an upsurge in violent attacks and the formation of the Hindustan Republican Association which counted both Punjab and Bengal “terrorists” as its members. Similarly, Gandhi’s refusal to call for Complete Independence at the Calcutta session of the Congress in 1928, at a time when the Simon Commission Boycott movement had created nationwide ferment, led to the third phase, ignited by the Chittagong Armoury Raids.

But the links with the Congress never snapped. Surya Sen, who led the Chittagong Uprising, for instance, was also the District Congress Committee secretary and his young army shouted “Mahatma Gandhi ki Jai” when they successfully raided the armouries on an April night in 1930.

The revolutionaries, whether in Bengal or Punjab, always regarded themselves as integral to the national movement, believing that both non-violent satyagraha and an armed struggle could be carried out simultaneously. As the manifesto of Bhagat Singh’s Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, The Philosophy of the Bomb, put it: “While the revolutionaries stand for winning independence by all the forces, physical as well as moral, at their command, the advocates of soul force would like to ban the use of physical force. The question, therefore, is not whether you will have violence or non-violence, but whether you will have soul force plus physical force or soul force alone.”

Gandhi, on his part, may have abhorred their methods but he never doubted their sincerity nor underestimated their appeal. He told an audience in London in September 1931: “We have in our midst, I know, a school of violence also. I have endeavoured ..to win them from what we hold is an error; but at the same time I know there is a common cause, even between them and ourselves. They are burning to attain the freedom… which is India’s birthright.”

He also skilfully used the threat posed by the revolutionaries in his negotiations with the British. At the plenary session of the Round Table Conference in London in December 1931, he said: “I want to turn the truce that was arrived at, at Delhi, into a permanent settlement. But for heaven’s sake, give me, a frail man, 62 years gone, a little bit of a chance. Find a little corner for him and the organisation he represents. If you will work (with) the Congress for all it is worth, then you will say goodbye to terrorism; then you will not need terrorism. Today you have to fight the school of terrorists which is there with your disciplined and organised terrorism, because you will be blind to the facts or the writing on the wall. Will you not see that we do not want bread of wheat, but we want bread of liberty; and without that liberty, there are thousands today who are sworn not to give themselves peace or give the country peace?”

The bread of liberty, truncated and bloody, was finally delivered in 1947 but the dough had been kneaded for close to 200 years by hands that wielded both the charkha and the gun. The overlapping of the two centenaries is not, perhaps, such a coincidence after all for it gives us an opportunity to celebrate the freedom struggle’s twin and entwined legacies, still being played out even 60 years after Independence.