August 15, 1947, was a day of both joy and grief. With the end of British colonial rule came a tragic Partition along religious lines that took a hefty toll in human life and suffering. Mahatma Gandhi spent the day in Calcutta, refusing to join the festivities in New Delhi. My grandfather Sarat Chandra Bose and father Sisir Kumar Bose, both of whom had fought for freedom and spent long years in British prisons, remained at home mourning the vivisection of their motherland.
In addition to acquiescing to Partition, the Congress high command made a second compromise with its long-held principles. The historic resolution of ‘Purna Swaraj’, adopted in 1929, was not realised on August 15, 1947. In pursuit of centralised State power created by the British Raj, the then Congress leadership including Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel demanded Partition of the provinces of Bengal and Punjab and settled for dominion status under the British Crown. Sovereignty came only in 1950.
Today’s younger generation have much to learn from the ideals of the powerful students and youth movement between 1927 and 1929 that compelled the older leaders to accept the Purna Swaraj resolution for a fully independent and united India. The movement was led by a young man who had excelled in the competitive examination for the Indian Civil Service. Refusing to wear the emblem of servitude, he resigned from the “heaven-born” service to plunge into the non-cooperation movement in 1921. From October 1924 to May 1927, he was in prison, mostly in the Mandalay jail.
Just before his release, Subhas Chandra Bose wrote to his elder brother Sarat on May 6, 1927, invoking St Paul’s famous words: “We wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” As soon as he was out of prison, he urged the youth to join him in that struggle.
Between late 1927 and 1929, students and youth conferences were held in every province and many districts of British India over which Subhas was called upon to preside. At the All-Bengal Youth Conference at the University Institute Hall in Calcutta, he emphasised the need to form a ‘League of Young Intellectuals’.
Among the many speeches he gave in 1928, the most insightful was his presidential address at the Maharashtra provincial conference in Pune, where he outlined the lineaments of Indian democracy. India, he believed, should become “an independent federal republic”. He warned Indian nationalists not to become “a queer mixture of political democrats and social conservatives”. He regretted that the different communities inhabiting India were “too exclusive” and urged the fostering of “cultural intimacy” among India’s diverse religious communities.
At the open session of the Calcutta Congress in December 1928, Subhas sponsored an amendment demanding Purna Swaraj instead of dominion status in opposition to Mahatma Gandhi and Motilal Nehru. More important than respect for elders, Bose believed was “respect for principle”. His amendment was defeated by 1,350 votes to 973 because Gandhi promised that if the year 1929 did not bring dominion home rule, he would himself become an “independence-wallah”.
During 1929, Subhas preached the ideal of all-round freedom for the individual and the nation to enthusiastic audiences of students and youth. Speaking to the Hooghly district students’ conference in July 1929, he reminded the students that Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das had been a staunch believer in a “federation of cultures” and “in the realm of politics, he liked a federal State for India better than a centralised State”. He exhorted the young to call three large communities —women, the so-called ‘depressed’ classes and labouring masses to their side.
Meanwhile, on April 8, 1929, Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt had hurled a couple of small bombs and flung a few leaflets inside the central legislature in Delhi. The government responded by arresting young revolutionaries in different parts of the country and initiating the Lahore conspiracy case against them in mid-1929. Several of the accused began a hunger strike in Lahore jail.
A few elders in the central Legislative Assembly including M A Jinnah, Motilal Nehru and M R Jayakar spoke in support of the young prisoners. “The man who goes on hunger-strike has a soul,” Jinnah said. “He is moved by that soul and he believes in the justice of his cause.”
Jatindranath Das of Bengal continued his fast resolutely for 63 days. When life finally ebbed away from him on September 13, 1929, he was not yet 25 years old. On receiving the heart-rending news, Rabindranath Tagore composed one of his finest Bengali songs ‘Sarba kharbatare dohe, taba krodhadaha’ (All meanness is devoured by the fire of your anger / O lord, give us strength, have mercy on your devotees).
Jatin Das had been a follower of Subhas Bose, who led a massive funeral procession in Calcutta and took charge of the funeral rites. Subhas returned home with a small packet and stood sombre-faced like a marble statue on the marble stairs of 1, Woodburn Park. “I have brought a little bit of the remains of Jatindranath Das,” he said to his sister-in-law Bivabati, “please preserve them with care.”
In October 1929, Subhas made the journey from Calcutta to Lahore and delivered his message of complete emancipation to the Punjabi students’ conference. Jatin lives up in the heavens as a star “of purest ray serene”, he said quoting Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy’, to serve as a beacon light to posterity. Bose saw the students’ movement as a school for “the training of the future citizen”, and felt that the Congress “should depend, for its strength, influence and power on such movements as the labor movement, youth movement, peasant movement, women’s movement, students’ movement”. “To be free or at least to die in the pursuit of freedom,” was the motto he gave to the students.
At the Lahore session of the Congress in December 1929, Mahatma Gandhi redeemed the promise he had made in Calcutta by moving Purna Swaraj resolution. That same month, Subhas Bose, in his presidential address at the Medinipur youth conference, proposed the ideal of Purna Samyavada or complete egalitarianism as the foundation on which to build a new society that would destroy the caste system, establish absolute equality between men and women, sweep away disparities of wealth and ensure equal access to education for all.
Inequality along lines of gender, caste, class and religious community has reached monstrous proportions in today’s India. The time has come for our youth to take the pledge of Purna Samyavada.
Sugata Bose | Gardiner Professor of History, Harvard University
(Views are personal)