WAS GANDHI EVER INCARCERATED BY THE BRITISH IN THE CELLULAR JAIL? WHY NOT?

Gandhiji was a convenient candidate for the British to bank on to filter out violent revolutionary fervour and thus avoid a bloody conflict with India's revolutionaries. The British found in Gandhi a God-sent helpmate in their bid to maintain the Raj for they knew that his brand of passive non-violent resistance would never become a force potent enough to end their imperial hegemony over India. The British Indian Army, comprising mainly Indian soldiers, they could bank on to control Gandhian resistance. So, they touched not Gandhi as he was their buffer against the real threat of the violent revolutionaries among whom ranked Bose as their 'enemy number one'.

The British were delighted to find in Gandhi such a self-deluded ally of the Raj, unwittingly though for Gandhi it must be said, and took all possible measures to prop him up as the face of freedom-seeking India while waiting patiently to let the self-styled Mahatma wither away of old age and senility when his movement would die a natural death. They were, however, highly wary of Bose who they thought was the real danger and so, they could not even rest while imprisoning him within the Indian subcontinent and chose to banish him to Europe to gain health, imagining that it would cut him off from the mainstream of the Congress' movement and isolate him into insignificance. But such a sweet outcome was not to be as Bose used his hiatus in Europe to establish links with European powers for future revolution against the British when times would be propitious.

So far as the other revolutionaries who had been deported to the Andamans to be incarcerated in the notorious Cellular Jail where the most inhuman third degree torture was inflicted upon them, Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Azad and the softies were not party to it. And why would they, after all, be banished there? Were they not unwitting allies to the British with their toothless emasculate movement which rightfully earned the scorn of Hitler as testified by Bose post his meeting with the German Fuhrer and which the British, whenever they liked, could at will smash to smithereens?

Yes, it must be admitted that the satyagrahis of Gandhi never had to endure the horrendous torture in prison cells the violent revolutionaries had to bear nor did they ever sacrifice so much of blood and body as the extremists did. They troubled the British Government but never truly threatened their existence in India. The British, in turn, thought it best not to repress them as brutally as they did the armed revolutionaries. Consequently, Gandhi and his brigade never had the privilege to taste true third degree torture under the British in the island of hell, and failed in the process, thereby, to graduate to the realm of real revolution and a like estimation in the public imagination. Would it were otherwise!

There the revolutionaries were living hell across the black waters in the Cellular Jail and here the Mahatma and his men were parleying with the predators for a peaceful transfer of power! Robben Island was there, for sure, but there was no Nelson Mandela inhabiting it. The Mahatma was adorning the Aga Khan Palace instead. No wonder he was so popular among the masses, for how many can muster such courage and strength of character to endure the assaults to human dignity in a colonial British jail that the armed revolutionaries laughingly did for the motherland?

Now, I hope, my friend, you have been reasonably responded to in your query by this writer and I thank you for having raised this contentious issue whose clarification rendered to you has in effect helped clear some of the cobwebs in my mind too.

May the martyrs' blood reddening the waters of the southern sea never dilute to oblivion! May their sacrifices and sacrileges suffered under duress at the hands of the barbarous British never fail to inspire kindred souls with the fire of real revolution and not its caricature that supposedly brought us freedom, a fact not testified adequately by historical evidence, rather negated by contrary narratives of the armed assault of the INA which in sooth liberated us but whose saga remains a tale untold for untold reasons! Bande Mataram! Jai Hind!

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Comments :
Maj Gen Gagandeep Bakshi This is a very accurate analysis of how the British made use of the non-violent movement which they found very convenient and non-threatening.