The rebel peasants were conscious, anti-colonial political actors, and yet, leaders of the British Indian Association, and later, those of the Indian National Congress, condemned the revolt. Jawaharlal Nehru referred to the “feudal character” of the revolt, as did the British communist Rajni Palme Dutt, who called the revolt “the last attempt of the decaying feudal forces, of the former rulers of the country, to turn back the tide of foreign domination,” even as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, living witnesses to those times, had respectively characterized it as “a national revolt” and a “great rebellion.”83
Another great peasant rebellion of the colonial period, the last one, which was being waged even as the elite nationalist leadership of the Congress Party and the Muslim League were negotiating the terms of the “transfer of power,” was the 1946–51 armed struggle of the peasantry in Telangana under communist leadership. As the eminent historian Ranajit Guha characterizes this armed peasant struggle:84
Starting off as a movement against eviction and extortion it assumed, by 1946, under communist leadership, the size and character of a peasant war aimed at the destruction of the princely state of Hyderabad ruled by the Nizam, the largest and most powerful of all the many feudal principalities lovingly fostered by the raj. The struggle, limited at first to 150 villages, had already involved ten times as many by the summer of 1947 when India became independent. A number of liberated zones complete with people’s courts and people’s militia had already emerged out of the guerrilla war by 1948 when the new regime headed by Nehru and Patel (Vallabhbhai Patel, India’s first home minister) sent in its army with the twin objectives of annexing the Nizam’s territories and liquidating the peasant rebels [my emphasis]. The outcome of this “police action” was the rewarding of the Nizam with a vast pecuniary compensation for the loss of his dynastic kingdom and with elevation to the status of a titular head of state (Rajpramukh) in the new republic when its constitution was inaugurated in 1950. Neither the oppressive officials who had acted as the instruments of the Nizam’s despotism nor the landlords and moneylenders who constituted its social base, came to any harm. On the contrary, a feudal restoration was actively promoted by the Indian army and in its wake the armed constabulary wherever they established themselves in any of the liberated zones. Encouraged and supported by them the landlords and moneylenders flocked back to the villages from which they had fled for their lives and seized again the lands, grain and other property which the peasants had expropriated. The sons of the soil who had fought for the end of feudal rule and for democracy in Hyderabad, who had effectively undermined the Nizam’s authority long before the Congress party leaders were to recognize in him a potential threat to the Indian republic, had their efforts rewarded by a reign of terror imposed on five Telangana districts where the revolt had made the most headway.
It is also necessary to mention the Tebhaga movement in Bengal—initiated in 1946 and led by the Kisan Sabha, the peasant front of the CPI—which demanded that the sharecropper, the bargadar, has the right to two-thirds of the produce, leaving only one-third of it for the landlord, the jotedar. The “Great Rebellion” of 1857, Telangana, 1946–48, and Tebhaga, as well as the many other peasant revolts of the colonial period that Kathleen Gough lists, might then be seen as precursors of “Spring Thunder,” Phase One, and its following phases. Spring Thunder, like the many peasant struggles of the past, at its core, is a battle for democracy. The Indian republic is a rotten liberal political democracy, and the roots of this decay can be traced back to the time of its birth and to the colonial period.
ABORTED DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION
By the mid-1940s, people’s democracies seemed a distinct possibility in the countries where socialist or national liberation struggles were being waged, especially in mainland China, where the forces of the Communist Party of China played a stellar role in the anti-Japanese resistance in the period 1937–45, thereby shifting nationalist opinion progressively in its favor. But also in the national liberation struggles in Vietnam and Indonesia. Moreover, from 1918 onward, British imperialism seemed to be in relative decline, economically, politically, and militarily, and by the end of the Second World War, the United States had emerged as the foremost imperialist power.
India, despite the ideological and political weakness of the CPI and the near absence of revolutionary leadership within it, could also have taken the militant people’s democratic path to liberation. As Ranajit Guha argues, British imperialism, which then had the world’s largest colonial empire,
recognized the writing on the wall in the Quit India movement, in the militant nationalist (though wrong-headed) response to [Subhas Chandra] Bose’s Indian National Army [he took help from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during World War II to try to rid India of British Rule], in the massive strikes of workers, students and poor middle-class employees in the cities, in the emergence of a democratic peasant movement under communist leadership, and most ominously perhaps in the mutiny of the Indian ratings of the Royal Indian Navy [RIN] and spreading disaffection among the Indian ranks in the army and police forces [my emphasis]. Faced thus with the prospect of an armed anti-imperialist upsurge the British government decided to defuse the charge by decolonizing which, in the Indian context, was nothing but a pre-emptive strike against what could have exploded as a full-scale liberation war the size of the vast subcontinent. Hence decolonization was achieved, appropriately enough, not by the destruction of the old colonial state and seizure of power by the people, but by a “transfer of power” from the British to the Indian elite representing big landlord and big business interests which had many links with imperialism and shared with it a common fear of revolutionary developments in the country [my emphasis]. Consequently, the post-colonial state, the product of a legal transaction between the dominant elite groups of Britain and India, found it easy to continue, even as a sovereign republic, much of what was undemocratic—and a good deal was—in the political institutions and political culture of the raj.85
It must be emphasized that all the post-war unrest and rebellion referred to above took place independently of the Congress Party and often in defiance of it. Indeed, even Gandhi condemned the Hindu-Muslim unity of the RIN revolt and the massive militant people’s support it got; he referred to this solidarity as an “unholy” alliance/combination that, in his view, “would have delivered India to the rabble.” He reportedly even went on to say, “I would not want to live up to 125 years to witness that consummation. I would rather perish in the flames.”86 One only has to recall his “repudiation of all responsibility for the “Quit India” movement, his condemnation of sabotage and underground activities associated with it, and his instruction to underground workers to surrender.”87 There seems to have been, at the time, “a certain convergence of interests of … Indian and British capitalists … reinforced in the face of the rising militancy of the Indian working class and peasantry, the unrest among the armed forces and the rise in the influence of the Left political forces in the country.” Indeed, there was an “overall meeting of minds between the imperialist rulers and the Congress leaders about the growing threat from the Left.”88 As “far as the oppressed people were concerned, Congress and Muslim League were on the same side of the barricade as the raj.”
Cooptation of elite nationalists was an important part of British colonialist strategy ever since the aftermath of the Great Rebellion of 1857, and these “nationalists” were willing collaborators in the face of militant struggles of peasants and tribal people that targeted both colonialism and the collective power of the sarkar, sahukar, and zamindar. Of course, the terms of such collaboration/cooption were always under contention. The Government of India Act of 1858, passed by the British Parliament, disbanded Company rule and brought India directly under British sovereignty. Soon to come was the Indian Councils