Work in Progress : 3

Rajendra Prasad : A Political Biography

By Dr BSM Murty

The book is divided into seven parts. Part I covers the first 30 years of Rajendra Prasad’s life from early childhood till completion of education and beginning of his law practice at Patna. With Part II begins his political life with Gandhi’s Champaran Satyagraha. Part III takes the story upto the Lahore Congress (1929) where ‘Poorna Swaraj’ was declared as the ultimate objective of the freedom movement.Part IV covers the ‘Strife and Tumult’ of the 30s. Part V takes the story through the Second World War till the tragedy of India’s partition. Part VI brings the narrative from independence right upto 1952 when the first General elections were held. Part VII deals with the decade-long period of Rajendra Prasad’s two consecutive presidencies. The final Chapter ‘Conclusion’ brings the story to a close with Prasad’s death at Sadaqat Ashram, Patna from where his political career had started. Three earlier extracts from Part II (‘The Indigo Story’ and ‘A Planter’s Murder’) and Part III (‘The Butcher of Amritsar)  are already available earlier on this blog. The following 4 extracts are from:  1. Part V, Ch.3 ‘Quit India’; 2 & 3. Ch. 4 ‘Freedom Divided’; 4. Part VI, Ch. 1 ‘The Midnight Saga’. Part VII is now being written.

The first extract deals with the firing near the Patna Assembly gate on 11 August, 1942. A seven-statue Memorial stands today where the seven students had fallen to the British bullets. The plaque on the memorial has an inscription which was drafted by Acharya Shivapujan Sahay. Both can be seen in the photographs.

3.1 The Seven Martyrs

Matters reached a flash-point the very next day, on 11 August, when the Patna District Magistrate, Archer, ordered a totally indefensible firing near the Legislative Assembly building killing seven teenaged school students and grievously injuring another two dozen protesters. The crowd of protesters had assembled there in the late afternoon, after marching for hours peacefully through the main thoroughfares of the town, with the singular intent of hoisting the national flag on the Assembly building. It was essentially a crowd of peaceful protesters out to demonstrate their anger and resentment against the wholesale arrest of their leaders and the stubborn repressive attitude of a hostile government.

In a public meeting held in Patna Lawn on the previous evening, it had been decided to march in a procession the next day with the intent of hoisting the Congress flag on the Legislative Assembly building. Demonstrators had started gathering in different areas of the town since early in the forenoon of 11 August, but the main body of the procession had reached around the Secretariat premises where the Legislative Assembly is located by around 2 p.m.. Apprehending breach of law and order, all the top officers, including the D.M., I.G., D.I.G., A.S.P.,S.D.O. and others, with regular constabulary, Mounted Military Police and armed Gurkha Military force were already there near the south east gate of the Assembly building, by around 2.30 p.m. The crowd had gradually swelled to about 5000. The events as they unfolded there during the next three hours can best be reconstructed from the official reports of the local administration.

It was at the main east gate of the Assembly building where the centre of the mob was collected. Some of the protesters had succeeded in sticking up a Congress flag on this gate which had subsequently been removed. The DM was parleying there with such of the demonstrators who appeared to be leaders. Most of the men in the front of the crowd at this place appeared to be students who had worked themselves up into a state of frenzy shouting Congress and anti-Government slogans. There was also much shouting of slogans of Europeans to quit India and police to be disloyal to Government. The crowd was too dense to be cleared by foot police… The rioters wanted to stick the Congress flag up on some building within the Secretariat grounds. They made it clear to the DM that they intended to hoist a Congress flag over the Assembly building.

The DM tried to reach a compromise by asking the students in the front to march forward in pairs with their flags and offer themselves for arrest. Six students with flags were thus arrested, but this solution did not satisfy the agitated crowd. Next it was noticed that a flag, or kurta as some believed, had been stuck up on the lightning conductor of the Legislative building at the north wing. From where the officers were standing the flag appeared to be a Congress one and it was interpreted as being one both by the DM, other oficers and the crowd. It was not known how the flag had been hoisted but it was assumed that some persons had filtered into the compound, gained access to the Secretariat and had thus been able to hoist it. Suspecting this to be a clever trick, the crowd did not break up. It appeared to have had some doubt about the flag and a great deal of rowdyism occurred at this period. The demonstrators were adamant about hoisting the Congress flag on the Assembly building, and with the repeated charges by the lathi-wielding constabulary and the Mounted Police, brickbatting started from different sections of the crowd in the rear.

   

The I.G. then himself led a charge against those most of whom did not look like students. ..It was then decided to open fire and 7 Gurkha Military Police were drawn up with their rifles ready. The DM and the SDO then again went ahead to give warnings about a possible firing if the crowd did not disperse immediately…Still they did not leave and two in the front lifted their shirts so as to bare their chests at the same time shouting an invitation to firing. One of them in a sort of khaki coloured shirt came into the centre of the road to do this. It was obvious that the rioters knew they were to be fired on. The firing was then first directed towards the left. Two or three men were seen to fall on the left and 4 were killed outright on the right, and some 25 were injured of whom 3 subsequently died in hospital… The rioters scattered for a moment and then returned to pick up the wounded whom they carried away. Firing was commenced about 3 minutes to 5.00 P.M. and 13 rounds ball were fired...It is to be noted that while the firing was in progress, a Congress flag was hoisted on the central flag staff of the Assembly building, obviously by someone who had obtained access to the roof and who has not been identified... He lowered the flag after the firing had ceased and took it away.

It was indeed the most inapt handling of an extremely sensitive situation in which, most certainly, some unscrupulous officers were involved, particularly in view of the stratagem of the suddenly hoisted counterfeit flag! Also, a crowd which had stayed peacefully assembled near the Assembly gate for more than two hours was unwisely provoked repeatedly by charges by the lathi-wielding constabulary and the Mounted Police into retaliatory brick-batting from scattered elements in the crowd, precipitating the firing. And there could be absolutely no justification for targeted shooting of emotionally worked up school-students standing in front of the crowd when the brickbats were being thrown from distant corners in the crowd. If firing took place at 5 p.m., after the crowd had stayed there relatively peacefully for more than three hours, by which time it had got restive and violent following the repeated charges by the police, the authorities could certainly have exercised more patience and better judgment by waiting for some more time for the crowd to slowly disperse, as it had been doing already, and then making arrests of the more persistent in the crowd.

The inevitable turbulence that spread like wild prairie fire throughout the province in the coming days was mainly sparked off by this brutal killing of innocent youth by the military police. The baring of the chests of the youth to the bullets luridly epitomized the highest ideals of non-violence and exemplary patriotism pitted against brutal imperial military violence. It was indeed the same monstrous war machine operating on the one side against the mighty Nazi military power and on the other against a totally unarmed, helpless people whom ‘the Government [had] goaded…to the point of madness’, as Gandhi put it.^Wolpert/53

Patna had thus become the epicenter of the turbulence with a ripple effect throughout the whole province. As the authorities reported -

 On the 12^th [August] there was complete hartal…There were processions in different parts of the town. In the evening a very crowded meeting was held in the Kadamkuan Congress Maidan…The audience was openly incited to bring the Government to knees by cutting all means of communications and by other acts of sabotage paralyzing the war efforts….It had instantaneous effect and a police lorry parking nearby was set on fire and the mob spread in all directions of the town…cutting wires, blocking the roads by felling trees…breaking open the culverts, knocking down the letter boxes and by removing the rails…Cutting of telephone and telegraph wires began all over the district. All important roads were blocked…railway tracks were removed. Railway stations began to be burnt and looted and trains held up. A mob at Fatwah near Patna… dragged two Canadian officers out of a train, murdered them and threw the bodies in the Ganges….Such chaotic conditions continued in and around Patna till a military contingent arrived from Ranchi on the 14^th. The saboteurs then retired to villages and the interiors.

Work in Progress : 3

Extract from ‘Rajendra Prasad: A Political Biography’

The story of India’s freedom struggle is like a five-act Shakespearean play complete with its tragic hero Gandhi. Independence, however, came in the Last Act with all the blood and gore of the ‘vivisection’ of India. And the villain was not difficult to identify…

3.2 The Last Act

The last Act of the great tragedy had thus begun with the coming of the new Viceroy Mountbatten, a ‘favourite cousin’ of the King George VI, ‘a toy for Jawaharlal to play with’ as Patel had tartly remarked. Wavell’s opinion of his successor was still more disparaging, describing Mountbatten as ‘a little cock-sparrow who would like to be a peacock… without much ability or character but a very exaggerated idea of his own talents’. [PF/279] The Congress now wanted a swift transfer of power and Wavell was proving rather intractable and somewhat partial towards the Muslim League. Hence, Congress leadership had ‘discreetly conveyed to Whitehall the need for Wavell’s recall’. [DD234] Further, as Wolpert observes, “Krishna Menon, Nehru’s closest comrade, had tirelessly urged Atlee to send Mountbatten out to India to replace Wavell as Britain’s last Viceroy”. [SW1/129]. And Mountbatten did arrive on 22 March as the new Viceroy, barely five months before the hastily rescheduled date of India’s independence, 15 August, 1947.

The change over had become inevitable. The past four months had shown that the Congress-League coalition was not only hopelessly incompatible but positively dysfunctional. The total boycott of the Constituent Assembly by the Muslim League had further precipitated the crisis. The situation had become so critical that both Nehru and Patel had issued the ultimatum that ‘the Congress members would withdraw from the Cabinet if the representatives of the League did not quit forthwith’. [DD234]. At that critical juncture, as if to defuse the crisis, Atlee announced on 20 February, 1947, Britain’s firm resolve to leave India by June, 1948. And simultaneously he also announced Mountbatten’s appointment as the new Viceroy. Both moves were clearly intended to inveigle the two wrangling parties to reconcile to the fast developing political situation. To both parties, it was a warning signal as well as a clever snare: to accept a regional semi-autonomous Pakistan under a federal constitution of a united India or to face a bloody civil war ending in a limbo. The worst and the covert aspect of the plan was partition of Bengal and Punjab to create the two wings of Pakistan; a sinister plan that was certain to lead to unprecedented bloodshed and human suffering. And Britain could have hardly chosen a better protagonist to effectuate such a perilous plan than Mountbatten.

The time frame also had been unequivocally delineated. The ‘royal cousin’ had been empowered to do a smart job and do it swiftly. As Wolpert puts it, Mountbatten was ‘launched on the fastest mission of major political surgery ever performed by one nation on the pregnant body politic of another’, [SW2/311] and Mountbatten knew how to wield his scalpel adroitly. He was sworn in as India’s nineteenth and last Viceroy on 24 March, 1947, and thenceforward it was Mountbatten all the way, right up to the ‘tryst with destiny’. Atlee’s Labour government had sent Mountbatten with the clear mandate, ‘to obtain a unitary government for British India…through the medium of a Constituent Assembly’; and if that seemed impracticable, he was to report ‘to His Majesty’s Government on the steps which you consider should be taken for the handing over of power on the  due date’. [SW2/314] Read between the lines, the directive meant that the ‘option of unity’ being virtually impossible in the circumstances, the ‘option of division’ must be exercised even earlier, if necessary.

It was clearly an open-ended mandate and Mountbatten had a further advantage: ‘his innocence of Indian politics’. [SW2/313] Still more, his unusual affability and rapport with Nehru, Gandhi’s ‘anointed’ successor, and the most domineering face of the Congress. It mattered little – in fact, it helped – that Gandhi had been slowly sidelined. As Wolpert observes, Nehru no longer believed in Gandhi’s ‘going round with ointment trying to heal one sore spot after another on the body of India, instead of diagnosing the cause of this eruption of sores and participating in the treatment of the body as a whole’. [SW1/138] There was, however, an obvious fallacy in Nehru’s logic. No one had ever diagnosed the persistent malaise better than Gandhi. Gandhi did suggest the cure in absolute terms to Mountbatten when he met him in late March. But it was too radical and went against the grain of Nehru’s haste for power. His other Cabinet colleagues too had been cosily ensconced in the seats of power. They were no less in a hurry to enjoy absolute power than the British were anxious to relinquish it.

The Noakhali riots in Bengal had led to a terrible backlash in Bihar and Gandhi had rushed to Patna in early March after four month’s of an intensive peace march in Noakhali. It was in Patna that he learnt of the CWC’s resolution accepting partition, the only time when such a momentous decision – totally contrary to Gandhi’s fundamental objection to the ‘vivisection’ – was taken in his absence. The Bihar massacre of Muslims under the nose of a Congress government was too horrendous a tragedy for Gandhi to bear with or ignore. He would rather prefer in those difficult times to camp in Patna and tour around in the riot-affected countryside to admonish and persuade Hindus against their inhuman acts and assuage the pain and anguish of the devastated Muslims. He had even threatened a fast which he refrained from only when the riots braked to a halt after the threat. He met Mountbatten (once again, ironically, on 1 April, 1947) with the ultimate ‘solution’ he had already made a year before, ‘to invite Jinnah to form a new central  interim government with Muslim League members, [now] replacing the current one led by Nehru’. [ SW1/137]

The radical solution naturally shocked both Mountbatten and Nehru out of their wits, the latter even more; ‘to learn that his Mahatma was quite ready to replace him as premier with the quaid-i-Azam’. [SW2/316] A chagrined Nehru could only conceal his annoyance by saying that Gandhi ‘had been away for four months and was rapidly getting out of touch with events at the Centre’. Yet, perhaps, it was ‘a King Solomon solution’, according to Wolpert. “But Nehru had tasted the cup of power too long to offer its nectar to anyone else – least of all to that ‘mediocre lawyer’ [Jinnah]”.[SW2/317 ] When Mountbatten tried to sound Maulana Azad on Gandhi’s solution the next day, “[h]e staggered me by saying that in his opinion it was perfectly feasible of being carried out, since Gandhi could unquestionably influence the whole of Congress to accept it and work it loyally….he thought that such a plan would be the quickest way to stop bloodshed, and the simplest way of turning over power”. [SW1/139]

 

The plan may have been too quixotic, and, may possibly be, even unacceptable to Jinnah, but there was more to it than was apparent. It was a daring move to reverse the entire chessboard to a fresh configuration. It would have put not only Jinnah but also Nehru and all his senior colleagues now craving for a piece of the power-cake to a rigorous test of political commitment. It was also likely to have halted the bloodshed substantially, and taken the wind out of the sail of Muslim League’s demand for a sovereign Pakistan. As Azad believed, Gandhi’s strong moral hold over the Congress and the masses and the clear message of peace and harmony would have served a twofold purpose: to bring sanity to the centre-stage as well as make the process of power transfer smoother. Azad’s endorsement of Gandhi’s radical plan (particularly in view of the insults heaped upon Azad by Jinnah during his Congress presidentship) was in itself a ‘golden tribute to Azad’s integrity and selflessness’. As Wolpert says, “Azad neither loved nor admired Pandit Nehru any the less than he had before, but he was old enough and wise enough to know that Mahatma Gandhi’s solution was the one and only chance to save India, and Maulana Azad, like Mahatma Gandhi, loved India and its people far more than he craved political power for himself or his dynastic heirs”. [SW1/140]