The Brits were careful not to make a martyr of Gandhi. They, thus, kept him comfortably confined in the precincts of the Aga Khan Palace during those years of the Second World War, post the start of the seditious Quit India Movement of August, 1942, while they incarcerated the more dangerous revolutionaries like Veer Savarkar, Sachindranath Sanyal, Kalpana Dutta and Barin Ghosh, at different times, though, in the dreaded Cellular Jail in the Andaman Islands. Subhas Chandra Bose and Lokmanya Tilak had been imprisoned in the hostile Mandalay Jail in erstwhile Burma, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Rajguru, Batukeshwar Dutta, Jatin Das and the like in the horrendous Lahore Jail but Jawaharlal Nehru was given sentenced the privileged prison term at the Comfortable Naini Jail with amenities adequately available for quiet contemplation and the authoring of books. Even Tilak had authored his Geeta Rahasya in the Mandalay Jail but it was under far worse confining conditions. So did Savarkar write in his animal incarceration condition in the Cellular Jail.
There was clearly a policy of no-tolerance for the revolutionaries by the British Indian administration and they sentenced them in terms of the perceived degree of danger to the Crown from them. The most dangerous revolutionaries were summarily executed by hanging after trial. The next in line in terms of threat to the Crown were deported to Kalapani, that is, the Andamans where they would be made to live like animals and die like despicable creatures whose depiction is yet to be adequately dramatised on celluloid for the commoner to comprehend. The next category of revolutionaries were deported to Burma to be interned in the Mandalay Jail there, prison conditions being bad enough there for recounting. The next in order were jailed at the Alipore Jail where Aurobindo Ghosh and his co-revolutionaries had been confined in less than human conditions, or in the Lahore Jail of equally despicable conditions where Bhagat Singh and his comrades went on fast in protest against the existing prison conditions. Then there were Ambala, Gorakhpur, Faizabad and others where prison conditions were not as good as Yerwada or Naini or the Aga Khan Palace Jail.
So, you see, there was a distinct policy followed by the British to snuff out the slightest trace of revolution form the freedom movement by inflicting the severest sentences on the revolutionaries while preserving the moderates and the pacifists like Gandhi and his non-violent brigade by sending them for far shorter terms to far more comfortable houses of confinement. The rest I leave it to you to your judgement to arrive at your conclusions about who the British feared most and whose fear forced them out of the shores of India for good in 1947.
Written by Sugata Bose
Photo : top - Aga Khan Palace Jail ; bottom - Cellular Jail in the Andaman Islands.
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