When the Royal Treasury was looted in the Kakori bound train, look at the violent retribution the British unleashed on the North Indian revolutionaries and when the whole country's treasure was being looted by the British, the Mahatma launched his non-violent struggle, taking care that we gave them maximum love to melt their hearts. At every point he denounced any masculine resistance to the barbarous British and called the revolutionaries misguided patriots. This effeminate stance in Gandhiji's capricious passive resistance precisely allowed the British to do what they liked and eventually, with the help of Congressmen like Nehru, Patel, Prasad and the like, and with that Muslim League mastermind, Jinnah, even emboldened them to partition our motherland.
From the day Gandhi stepped into the national freedom struggle in 1917 at Champaran, the freedom movement gained mass base but became easier for the British to control with their modern machinery of the police and the armed forces. And the extreme revolutionaries they suppressed with the bullet, the bayonet, the dreaded incarceration in their numerous sub-human jails and the hangmen's noose, whenever the occasion arose. They used Gandhi and his movement as the safety valve for the public's giving vent to their anger much like they had used earlier the Moderates within the Congress.
The British used arms to suppress the revolutionaries and they understood only the language of force. This the revolutionaries gave them and struck terror in their hearts but Gandhi ever came in the way of their gaining greater support and sympathy from the masses with his constant deriding of their violent methods and his attempts to lower them in the eyes of the masses by his public denunciation of them, although, he maintained his double speak by simultaneously praising their sincere patriotism as well. Gandhi's protege, Jawaharlal Nehru, carried this double speak to a far greater refinement as he consistently altered his political stance regarding issues to suit his personal conveniences and to favour his future political prospects.
And then there were the betrayers who sold information to the British about the whereabouts of the absconding revolutionaries after their acts of terror and armed uprising. These Mir Jaffers got so many revolutionaries arrested and sent to the gallows that it is at once a shame and a cause for anger that such should have been the character of so many Indians then. Unfortunately, the Mir Jaffers still abound in our country and these have received their legacy not only from their informer predecessors but also from their perfidious political leaders of the era prior to independence.
Written by Sugata Bose
Photo : Rajendranath Lahiri
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