A Dithering Congress Adapts Nehru’s Resolution on Purna Swaraj

 

A tribute on his birth anniversary

A Dithering Congress Adapts Nehru’s Resolution on Purna Swaraj

I was fortunate to have come under the spell of Jawaharlal Nehru’s writings which moulded my views on society and state. When I was reading his Autobiography in my student days and during the course my research on Nehru’s contribution to world peace in 1980s, I used to get goosebumps, moved by the intensity with which he conveyed his feelings and narrated the events.  Now I have read it again to refresh my understanding of the man who shaped the freedom movement and the destiny of independent India. The Autobiography, written in prison during the most distressing period of his life, was published in 1936 by John Lane, The Bodley Head, London, and has since been through more than 12 editions and translated in more than 30 languages. The Autobiography, Glimpses of World History and The Discovery of India are published as Classics by Penguin Books.

 

The writing of Autobiography was an attempt to engage his mind to overcome mental turmoil.  As he wrote, “the primary object in writing these pages was to occupy myself with a definite task, so necessary in the long solitudes of goal life, as well as to review past events in India, with which I had been connected, to enable myself to think clearly about them."  He said in the Epilogue: “there was something very real and intensely truthful in much that we did and this lifted us out of our petty selves and made us more vital and gave us an importance that we would otherwise not have had… we were fortunate enough to experience that fullness of life which comes from attempting to fit ideals with action…any other life involving a renunciation of these ideals and tame submission to superior force would have been a wasted existence, full of discontent and inner sorrow.”

 

Nehru’s life was closely intertwined with the history and destiny of modern India. His Autobiography gives a fascinating account of the political awakening of India, its struggle for freedom, and its search to reshape itself as a modern society, rid of the cultural and economic shackles of the past. To understand India of today, it is imperative to read it to understand what preceded it and what gave rise to it. Rabindranath Tagore said: “through all its details there runs a deep current of humanity which overpasses the tangles of facts and leads us to the person who is greater than his deeds and truer than his surroundings.”

 

Nehru attended the Congress of Oppressed Nationalities, held at Brussels in February 1927, representing the Indian National Congress. The representatives from China, Java, Indo-China, Palestine, Syrian, Egypt, Arabs from North Africa and African Negroes were present. A permanent organization called the League Against Imperialism, was formed.  The struggle for freedom was common for all the suppressed nations which united them against imperialism. The colonial powers- England, France Italy etc.- were hostile to any such attempts being made.

 

The Congress was dithering as to its political objective. The old and conservative elements in the Congress were content to have a Dominion Status within the British Empire, and were not prepared for any radical change in the Indian State. However, the younger radical elements in the Congress, represented by Nehru, were impatient and wanted the Congress to take a clear stand on independence.  The battle within the Congress was more ideological. To Nehru, “there should be no doubt about the objective of political independence. This should be clearly understood as the only possible pollical goal.”

 

In 1929, the Provincial Committees of the Congress recommended Gandhi to be the President of the Congress at its Lahore session. But Gandhi, who had been a ‘super-president’, had refused the Presidency, and instead pressed Nehru’s name. And Nehru was elected the President of the Congress, the youngest at the age of 40 years; it was unique in that he was immediately following his father in the presidential chair. His election was a great honour and a great responsibility for him.  He was exuberant: “The Lahore Congress remains fresh in my memory…that is natural, for I played a leading role there…I can never forget the magnificent welcome that the people of Lahore gave me, tremendous in its volume and its intensity…over flowing enthusiasm. And I felt exhilarated and lifted out of myself."

 

As the President of the Indian National Congress, Nehru moved a Resolution on Purna Swaraj-complete in dependence- at the stroke of midnight on December 31^st, as the old year yielded place to the new. The Resolution was adapted. The leadership of the Congress was now passed on to a youthful leader -an idealist intellectual, having foundation in Indian civilization and history, and who had a humane and non-sectarian vision of modern India.

 

And on 26^th January 1930 an Independence Day pledge was administered across the country.

The excerpts from the pledge:

 

“We believe that it is the inalienable right of the Indian people, to have freedom and to enjoy the fruits of their toil and have the necessities of life…The British Government in India has not only deprived the Indian people of their freedom but has based itself on the exploitation of the masses, and has ruined India economically, politically, culturally and spiritually.

 

India has been ruined economically…Village industries, such as hand-spinning, have been destroyed, leaving the peasantry idle for at least four months in the year, and dulling their intellect for want of handicrafts…British manufactured goods constitute the bulk of our imports. Politically, India’s status has never been so reduced as under the British regime...The tallest of us have to bend before foreign authority. The rights of free expression and opinion and free association have been denied to us… Culturally, the system of education has torn us from our moorings, and our training has made us hug the very chains that bind us. Spiritually, compulsory disarmament has made us unmanly and the presence of an alien army of occupation, employed with deadly effect to crush in us the spirit of resistance, and made us think that we cannot look after ourselves….

 

We hold it to be a crime against man and God to submit any longer to a rule that has caused this fourfold disaster to our country…We will therefore prepare ourselves by withdrawing, all voluntary association from the British Government, and will prepare for civil disobedience…for the purpose of establishing Purna Swaraj.”

 

Thus, Nehru had given a new impetus to the freedom movement. On April 6,1930, Gandhi broke the Salt Act at Dandi, setting the stage for the nation-wide civil disobedience movement. Thousands of people across the country were arrested and imprisoned, with the government unleashing a brutal police force to crush ruthlessly any resistance. On April 14, Nehru was arrested and sentenced to imprisonment. The Congress and all its associated bodies were declared illegal.

 

Pandit Motilal Nehru gave up his lucrative legal practice; gifted his ancestral House in Allahabad to the nation, renamed Swaraj Bhavan. He was arrested and imprisoned, joining his son in Naini Prison. Kamala Nehru- a political activist- and Nehru’s sisters and even his aged mother were arrested and imprisoned. It is a unique case of a family, giving up all its privileges and comforts; sacrificing everything and plunging into the freedom movement, lock, stock, and barrel, and receiving the police lathi blows in the process, unparalleled in the annals of history.

 

Nehru was asked to give an assurance to keep away from politics for releasing him from the prison to attend to his ailing wife. He refused. “To give an assurance! And to be disloyal to my pledges, to the cause, to my colleagues, to myself! It was an impossible condition, whatever happened. To do so meant inflicting a moral injury on the roots of my being, an almost everything I held sacred.” And when she was lying in a daze with a high temperature, and he came to see her, she told him: “What is this about your giving an assurance to Government? Do not give it.”  He was taken back to prison, condemned to lead a secluded solitary life. “In and out, and out and in; what a shuttlecock I had become! This switching on and off shook up the whole system emotionally and it was not easy to adjust oneself to repeated changes.”

 

If Gandhi provided the techniques of non-violent non-cooperation and civil disobedience movements and raised the moral bar to paralyze the British government, it was left to Nehru to provide intellectual inputs and articulate the political agenda for attaining purna swaraj. It is an amazing story how Gandhi and Nehru- a formidable combination- could succeed in securing the independence, when multiple forces- the communal organisations, the status-quoists, the feudal Indian states, the industrialists, the talukdars and the zamindars, the subservient Indian Civil Service and practically every group that mattered- were pulling in opposite direction, toeing the line with the British Government and jostling to seek its favors to protect their vested interests!