Footnotes of History:
The forgotten part of Quit India
Movement
Dr. Mrinal Chatterjee
On 8 August 1942 at the All-India Congress Committee session held
at Gowalia Maidan in Bombay, Mahatma Gandhi launched the 'Quit India' movement. He gave a call for 'Do or Die'- karo ya maro.
The British Government swung into action almost immediately
and arrested almost all front-line Congress leadership including Gandhi,
Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel under the ‘Defence of India’ Rules. The
Working Committee, the All India Congress Committee and the four Provincial
Congress Committees were declared unlawful associations under the Criminal Law
Amendment Act of 1908. The assembly of public meetings was prohibited across
the country.
However, the movement erupted across the country like
volcano, even without the top leaders and under severe repressive measures.
Aruna Asaf Ali, then just 33 years old, unfurled the national flag at Gowalia
Maidan in Bombay. In several places, across the country local leaders declared freedom
and formed ‘National Government’s- though most of
them could survive only for few weeks. Without the top leaders and a
well laid out strategy, the movement became rudderless. As a result most
demonstrations had been suppressed by 1944, though upon his release in
1944 Mahatma Gandhi continued his resistance and went on a 21-day fast
before he called off the movement.
Though the Quit India
movement failed to immediately dispel the British from India, it showed the
mood of the public which eventually led them to quit India. There were other
socio-political and geo-strategic reasons too. By the end of the Second World War, Britain's place in the world had
changed dramatically and the demand for independence of India could no longer
be ignored.
The lesser-known part
of Quit India Movement
Many of us know about the role Gandhi and other senior
leaders played in this movement. However, not many know about the leaders at
the grass root level. In fact, a significant feature of the
Quit India Movement was the emergence of what came to be known as parallel
Government in some parts of the country.
The first one was proclaimed
in Balia in East UP under the leadership of Chittu Pandey. Pandey, popularly
known as Sher-E-Balia (tiger of Balia) was born in Rattuchok, a village in
Balia district in UP. He led the Quit India Movement in Balia. He headed the
‘National Government’ declared and established on 19 August 1942 for a few days
before it was suppressed by the British. However, the ‘National Government of
Balia’ succeeded in getting the collector to hand over power and release all the arrested leaders.
In Bihar under the leadership
of Jugal Choudhury peasants fought with the British troups with lighted torches
and boiling oil and for some time took over the justice dispensation system.
In Satara, Maharashtra people
set up a parallel Government known as ‘Prati (which means parallel in Marathi)
Sarkar’. Nana Patel was the head of the Government that lasted for some months.
Y. B. Chavan and Achyuta Patbardhwan were the other prominent leaders of the
movement. Satara emerged as one of the bases on resistance. It was a guerrilla type of struggle,
operated in over 150 villages with overwhelming peasant support. There were
raids on taluka treasuries and armouries. The Prati Sarkar took over many of
the functions of the government. This Parallel government established many
public utilities like a market system, supply and distribution of food-grains
and a judicial system to settle disputes and penalise dacoits and robbers,
pawnbrokers and money lenders. Law and order was entirely in its hands. Under
this government an army was formed named Toofan Sena. It fought the imperial
government by attacking its major establishments like the railways and postal
department. However, the ‘prati sarkar’ fell by 1946 because of several
internal and external reasons.
In Tamluk, West Bengal the
‘Tamralipta Jatiya Sarkar’ (Tamralipta National Government) functioned for
almost two years from December 17, 1942 to August 8, 1944. The chief protagonists were Satish Chandra Samanta, Sushil
Kumar Dhara, Ajoy Mukherjee and Matangini Hazra. It had its own newspaper Biplabi.
Though it was initiated by the call
of Gandhi, but it did not confine itself to the realm of the principles of
Gandhian practice. So far as the region of southeastern Midnapore was concerned
the contradiction between the non-violent and violent forms evaporated in the
face of severe repression perpetrated by the British military-bureaucratic
regime. It was not Gandhi's 'ahimsa' which moved the rebels of Midnapore so
much as his precept 'Do or Die'. A good deal of underground literature
(including that of the 'Biplabi', the mouthpiece of the Tamralipta jatiya
Sarkar) cropped up with that precept as the motto.
It happened in Satara in Maharastra
and also in Bihar and other places. Non-violence took a back seat and people
resorted to violence- even organized violence. In several places- unchecked
violence became the cause of it losing public support.
In his analysis of the specific
nature of the movement of 1942 in Midnapore, Dr. Partha Chatterjee notes that
many senior Congress leaders of the area "both in and out of prison at the
time of the movement, did not approve of the methods adopted. But the new
leadership had no compunctions about 'violence’. In the initial stages of the movement,
each action involved thousands of ordinary peasants engaged in collective
violence against targets that symbolized the power of an oppressive colonial
state. The leadership coordinated the location and timing of these acts. The
supposedly spontaneous violence of peasant resistance was thus sought to be
raised to an entirely different level, where violence becomes a strategic
element in a much more extended, differentiated and complex process of
institutionalized politics.
But somehow it did not succeed, and
the movement ended not with a bang but with a whimper through it was not a
complete failure. While addressing a vast gathering assembled at an evening
prayer meeting at Mahishadal in Tamluk on December 28, 1945 Gandhi said:
"Whatever sufferings you had for the sake of swaraj have not been in vain.
It will bear fruit-one day. No big thing could be achieved without suffering or
sacrifice". He further added that people should always remember that
immense sufferings and sacrifice were needed for realization of God and that
they could not attend swaraj without sufferings.”
India had to wait for two more years
to get independence. But, that is another story.
***
About the author: Journalist turned
media academician Mrinal Chatterjee works as a Professor and Regional Director
at Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), located at Dhenkanal, Odisha.
No comments:
Post a Comment