The vast numbers of ordinary people who had, right from the 1920s, supported/participated in the nationalist elite-led part of the movement for independence were betrayed. But they didn’t realize it, for there was no revolutionary leadership, politically and ideologically mature, to guide them. The people thus “cherished illusions about the goals of the political representatives” of Indian big business, Congress, and Muslim League leaders, elite nationalists, “who were out to strike a bargain with imperialism.” Indeed, “within less than a year [following 1946] a qualitative change in the situation was brought about by the skilful moves of the raj and its collaborators.” And, in “less than two months and a half this vast subcontinent was partitioned, boundaries demarcated, assets divided and two new dominions brought into existence!” It can also be said that all these imperialist maneuvers were put through “because Congress and Muslim League were willing participants in it.”90
Clearly the Indian nation in the making was not a uniform and homogenous entity—the dominant and the exploited classes in the nation had conflicting interests and needs. The nation was largely imagined and depicted by elite nationalists in an iconography that was Hindu, these nationalists representing the interests and rights of non-Muslim big business but camouflaging the same as the nation’s interests and rights. In reality, what was being created was the ground for a dependent “independent” nation with sections of that big business already forging ties with U.S. monopoly capital. Elite nationalism was undermining the nation, for independence was to be brought about via a gentle decolonization, the two dominant arguments in the aftermath of the Second World War being the British colonialists’ “change of heart” and the efficacy of non-violent opposition. Gandhi was adept at playing the “dual role of saint for the masses and champion for big business,” as the discerning American journalist Edgar Snow is said to have pithily remarked.
Gandhi and the Congress Party’s role and attitude in one of the freedom movement’s most significant high points, in 1945–46, have already been touched upon. In the three other high points, mass movements against British rule, the ones initiated by the Congress Party with Gandhi in the lead, complete control over the masses was a precondition. In the first of these, the Non-Cooperation Movement (1921–22), mass rage and fervor had already been aroused earlier by the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre and Khilafat, and when violence erupted in Chauri Chaura, the movement was called off, and the masses fell in line, for they looked up to Gandhi the saint, indeed, Gandhi alone, for guidance. The Congress Party and Gandhi insisted on, in his words, “peaceful rebellion” in the Civil Disobedience Movement (1930–34 with breaks in between) too, with no-rent campaigns against the landlords, dependent allies of the colonialists, simply not permitted, for despite the stated goal of “complete independence,” in reality, it was intended to be a controlled mobilization for forcing constitutional concessions. Incidences of violence, including those in Chittagong,91 Peshawar, and Sholapur, did not however lead to its suspension, for, in the courting of arrest, the Congress leaders were out of the way of the masses. But unlike the Hindu-Muslim unity of the Khilafat and Non-Cooperation years of 1919–21, Muslim participation in the Civil Disobedience Movement was low, this because of inter-religious communal strife in the 1920s.
Mass anger and disgust against British rule was at a peak in 1942, and so the “Quit India” movement was violent right from the beginning, more so because the Congress leadership was forced out of the way of the masses by the pre-emptive arrests, because of which the Congress organization couldn’t intervene to condemn, denounce, and put an end to violent rebellion. It was only when Gandhi was released from jail in May 1944 that he began to severely condemn the underground movement and called upon the rebels to surrender. But by then the movement had gone through three phases of militancy—the first, violent protests in the cities, the second, the shift of militancy to the countryside, with underground activity, including the use of revolutionary terror, especially in the United Provinces and Bihar, and the third, the running of parallel governments in places like Satara in Maharashtra, Midnapore in Bengal, and Talchar in Orissa. Gandhi, Nehru, and the Congress Party always condemned militant actions, especially peasant, tribal, and urban bouts of violence, strikes, and, of course, revolutionary terror.
With the brutal crushing of the Quit India Movement, in the context of the Second World War and what then seemed like an imminent Japanese invasion of India, and earlier, the post-1905 armed struggles in Bengal, the Ghadar movement, the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, the Chittagong uprising, and the RIN revolt of February 1946, independence was not to be the precursor of a democratic revolution. As the historian Indivar Kamtekar put it: “Independence” was a handing over “at one stroke” of the entire territory and state apparatus of the Raj “to the leaders of the Congress and the Muslim League” in a “single negotiated transaction.” The courageous soldiers and officers of the Indian National Army were refused admission into the ranks of what became the Indian armed forces. And, no one, not even Marxist historians, bothered to ask about the fate of the 20,000 mutineers of the RIN.92
The elite nationalist leaders simply substituted themselves to take the place of the British colonialists in office, primarily to secure their own power and privileges and to transfer to Indian big business the unfair advantages that were a legacy of the colonial period, all within the framework of dependence on the dominant imperialist powers. U.S. imperialism had, after all, been pressuring its British counterpart to dismantle its empire and this was exactly what was to transpire. Very soon, the elite nationalist leaders were to prove their utter insensitivity to mass misery. The poor peasants in the Telangana countryside in the late 1940s, fighting for New Democracy, were humiliated, beaten, and tortured by the Indian Army, sent in by the elite nationalists to bring back the landlords and the moneylenders, and thereby restore the status quo. Driven to the wall, it was not easy for these unlettered peasants to turn into revolutionary fighters—this could never have been the first time around.
In power after independence, the elite nationalists of the Congress Party promoted a historiography of a heroic past, largely the part of the independence struggle they had led, and even historians calling themselves Marxists joined the bandwagon. The state embarked on a multiplication of its offices, privileges and pelf—“development administration” was the new kid in town and on the block—with the elite nationalist patrons directing the process from the top downward. During a crisis of legitimacy, however, adept maneuvering in a parliamentary democracy based on universal adult franchise didn’t come easy, as was evident in the two years preceding the Emergency.
POPULAR UPHEAVALS PRECEDING THE EMERGENCY
Despite Mrs. Gandhi’s huge electoral victories in the parliamentary and state assembly elections of 1971 and 1972, these following the 1969 split in the Congress Party, two states, Gujarat and Bihar, were headed for popular flareups.93 In Gujarat, the home state of Mrs. Gandhi’s main political opponent, Morarji Desai, the state Congress committee opted for Desai’s Congress (Organization), Congress (O) hereafter, but after the 1971 elections, Mrs. Gandhi’s Congress (Requisition) increasingly attracted opportunist defectors from its rival. Feudal allegiance to Mrs. Gandhi was all that seemed to count, with each contending faction within her party claiming to be more loyal than the others. Political degeneration took hold, and, very soon, public cynicism about the garibi hatao (remove poverty) program ran high, even as the Congress (Requisition) rode comfortably to power in the 1972 state assembly elections in Gujarat.
In the internal scramble for power that followed, backed by the Congress “High Command” and the state’s