Anil Nauriya - Indian Struggles in 1917 : On the eve of the Russian Revolution
Seldom in history do
things happen suddenly; they are often years in the making. It is known that
during his South Africa years Mahatma Gandhi had
corresponded with Leo Tolstoy, described by Lenin in 1908 as the mirror of the
Russian Revolution. This correspondence was three or four years prior to
Gandhi’s last major agitation in South Africa, in which tens of thousands of
Indian mine workers and plantation workers and other indentured workers struck
work.
By the time the
Russian Revolution took place in 1917, Gandhi had already been back in India
for two years, barely a month before the death of one of two leading statesmen
who had guided Gandhi’s politics in his South African life, Gopal Krishna
Gokhale. The other, Dadabhai Naoroji, the Grand Old Man of India, would pass
away shortly in the midst of the coming struggle in Champaran, Bihar.
The Marxist Socialist
Narendra Deva, a keen student of Lenin’s life and writings, would observe that
the Bolshevik Revolution placed the masses at the centre-stage of history for
the first time.
In India, too, 1917
was a curtain-raiser to events two years later that would mark the beginning of
mass involvement in the movement for freedom. As Gandhi’s critic M N Roy
acknowledged in his memoirs, Lenin looked upon Gandhi “as the inspirer and
leader of a mass movement” and “a revolutionary”. But what is
significant is that while 1917 saw Gandhi devising methods of struggle to bring
about institutional changes that would also lead to self-government, or swaraj,
each of the four struggles preceded the climax of the Russian Revolution and
was connected with the peasantry as well as labour.
The Indentured
Ultimatum: One of Gandhi’s
earliest ultimatums to the Government was to end indentured emigration from
India. Recruitment of indentured labour for South Africa’s Natal province had
ended in 1911, but continued for Fiji and some other places. In 1915, Viceroy
Charles Hardinge had himself urged abolition, but the authorities in London
were reluctant. They wanted the Colonies utilizing such labour “(to have)
reasonable time to adjust themselves to the change”, hoping to delay the
inevitable as long as possible. On February 26, 1917,
Gandhi gave an ultimatum to end indentured recruitment by May 31, failing which
he would advise a passive resistance struggle. If the request was not acceded
to, he said, “all practical steps should be taken to prevent Indians from
leaving the country for labour in Fiji.” The pressure had its effect.
Recruitment of indentured labour from India was stopped on March 12, 1917.
Champaran: His confidence in
passive resistance strengthened, Gandhi now turned his attention to the
grievances of peasants in Champaran. By April 15, he had reached Bankipore,
Patna and from there, later the same day set out for Motihari in Champaran
district. India and Russia were
moving, almost step for step, even if they were to different beats. Gandhi’s
country was under colonial rule, while in independent Russia the Tsarist
monarchy had abdicated more than a month ago. The day after Gandhi reached
Champaran, Lenin, who had been in Switzerland till then, reached Petrograd,
(now St Petersburg). On April 16, 1917, Gandhi sent instructions that his
Kaiser-i-Hind medal be returned to the British regime; an order to leave the
district, meanwhile, had been served on Gandhi and he had refused to obey. He
had been arrested on his way to a village to inquire into the condition of
indigo workers.
After struggles,
surveys, and enquiries in the district, the Champaran Agrarian Act followed.
The legislation abolished the Tinkathia system under which ryots had to set
apart a certain proportion of their best land for the landlord’s crops. In retrospect, some
historians have argued that the amendments then made did not go far enough.
This somewhat Trotsky-like criticism may well be valid; yet the relevant
question to ask would be what, if anything, the later Kisan Sabhas that emerged
in Bihar in the decades before India’s independence and which are believed to
have been active and radical, did to take the Champaran struggle forward.
Fact is, Champaran
initiated a wider engagement of the national movement with peasant struggles.
It did not come about entirely as a matter of chance. When Gandhi was still in
South Africa in 1908 there had been indigo-related disturbances in Champaran.
This had revived memories of similar struggles in some Bengal districts from
the 1860s. On January 8, 1910, Gandhi’s South African journal Indian Opinion
had devoted its entire front page to an account from the Calcutta press on this
19th century struggle which referred to the courage and self-sacrifice of the
indigo ryots of Bengal as being without parallel in the world . Gandhi’s
journal had described that struggle as “thrilling” and commented that passive
resistance “can have no better illustration”. It had thus become an inspiration
for and vindication of the passive resistance then being conducted in South
Africa.
Internments in the
Home Rule agitation: In the year following
Gandhi’s return to India, two Home Rule Leagues had been founded by Annie Besant
and Bal Gangadhar Tilak, respectively. In June 1917 Annie Besant and some of
her associates were interned in Ootacamund. At this juncture Gandhi, who was in
Motihari, Champaran, again advised passive resistance. In a letter at the end
of June to J B Petit of Bombay, an early supporter from his South Africa days,
Gandhi wrote : “The descent at the present moment upon the villages by you, Mr
Jinnah and such other leaders cannot but end in arrests. This propaganda must
be carried on in spite of Government prohibition and to that extent it may be
considered illegal but for a passive resister not unlawful. There are various
other methods which I am unwilling to advise until passive resistance in its
present form has soaked into us a bit.”
There are two noteworthy
features about Gandhi’s advice to J B Petit from Champaran. Firstly: go to the
villages. In this attempt to reach out to the peasantry, Gandhi seems to
anticipate the later emphasis on the peasantry within international Marxism
which would come with Dimitrov in Bulgaria and Mao in China; he was reflecting
also an obvious compulsion of India’s social formation of the time, in that the
peasant-based population was overlaid with a further layer of a full-blown
foreign colonialism.
In the two scenarios,
Lenin had gravitated towards the workers and soldiers. Gandhi moved toward the
peasantry, which was drawn to the national movement as never before. Secondly,
there is in Gandhi’s communication to Petit evidence of an attempt at some
planning of the sequence of the moments of passive resistance. There were countrywide
protests against the internments leading to withdrawal of the orders against
Annie Besant and her associates by September 1917.
The Social
Struggles of 1917: Perhaps the most
fascinating of the four major Indian struggles of 1917 was the one against
untouchability and the way this was reflected in the political and social
conferences held in Godhra, Gujarat, from November 3, 1917, some four days
before the climax of the Russian Revolution. The political conference was
attended also by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, whose trial and sentence had been
followed and commented on by Lenin in 1908. Echoing the underlying
message of the other struggles embarked on during the year, in his presidential
address, Gandhi told the Political Conference on November 3, “We have to demand
swaraj from our own people. Our appeal must be to them. When the peasantry of
India understands what swaraj is, the demand will become irresistible.”
He called for the
entire law on indenture to be repealed: “It is no part of our duty to look to
the convenience of the Colonies.” The inter-religious question and the social
inequalities prevailing in India had characteristics not known in many other
countries, including Russia. Repeatedly, in 1917, Gandhi spoke for Hindu-Muslim
accord. In the Godhra conferences he lashed out against the practice of
untouchability. At least since September 1915, when he had taken in a Dalit and
his family into his settlement in Ahmedabad and encountered some resistance
over it, he had been considering “the
efficacy of passive resistance in social
questions” such that this would “embrace swaraj.”
The Social Conference
at Godhra, which was presided over by Gandhi, on November 5, 1917 included
persons from the so-called untouchable communities and was attended by, among
others, Abbas Tyabji and Vithalbhai Patel. “Do not suppose”, Gandhi told his
listeners, “that that community belongs to a lower status; let the fusion take
place between you and that community, and then you will be fit for swaraj.” . Two days after the
extraordinary Social Conference held at Godhra, precisely a century ago, the
Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd and inaugurated the Russian Revolution
that would affect the course of history by creating a state that became for
more than 70 years a countervailing force to the old colonial powers.
Along with the forces
of nationalism that swept across the world in the 20th century, the new
countervailing power too contributed, even by its mere existence, to the demise
of colonialism. At the same time it also unleashed forces which both
strengthened and through premature zeal, weakened the nationalist movements and
sometimes even contributed to dividing them.
