Modern India · Topic 14 of 20
Wartime politics, Home Rule Leagues and Gandhi's first campaigns in India
The Basics
By 1914 India was a loyal but restless colony. Swadeshi had subsided and Bengal was reunited. The capital had moved to Delhi. Yet demands for self-government had not gone away.
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Since 1904, large numbers of Punjabi peasants and ex-soldiers from districts like Jullundur and Hoshiarpur migrated to the west coast of the United States and Canada seeking a better life. They faced racial discrimination, restrictive immigration laws and hostility from white labour unions. This discrimination created anger and a sense of shared Indian identity among them. Early papers such as Tarak Nath Das's Free Hindustan and G.D. Kumar's Swadesh Sevak Home in Vancouver spread this nationalist feeling even before the Ghadar Party was founded.
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Tilak was released on 16 June 1914 after six years in Mandalay jail, Burma, to find the Indian National Congress inactive since the 1907 Surat split, and Moderates disillusioned with the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909. Annie Besant, a Theosophist who had come to India in 1893 and based herself at Adyar near Madras, decided around the same time to build an Indian movement for Home Rule modelled on the Irish Home Rule League.
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By December 1916, both wings of the Congress realised the Surat split had only caused political inactivity. Tilak's Extremists were readmitted at the Lucknow session. The session was presided over by the Moderate leader Ambika Charan Majumdar.
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By mid-1917, the British government in India was facing growing unrest. The Home Rule Leagues of Tilak and Besant had spread the demand for self-government across the country. The Lucknow Pact of 1916 had united Congress and the Muslim League behind joint constitutional demands. The government had responded mainly with repression, jailing many radical nationalists under the Defence of India Act and interning Annie Besant herself.
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Gandhi first tried petitions and memorials to the Natal government, the Colonial Secretary in London, and the British Parliament. He trusted that British justice would respond once informed of the facts. To unite Indians across class and religion he founded the Natal Indian Congress and started the paper Indian Opinion. By 1906 these methods had achieved little, and Gandhi concluded moderate persuasion alone would not work.
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Gandhi returned to India in January 1915, at the age of 46. His work in South Africa was already known among the educated and ordinary people. On the advice of his political mentor Gokhale, and because he preferred to study a situation before acting, Gandhi decided not to take any public political stand for at least a year.
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By late 1916, Gandhi had toured India for a year and avoided joining existing parties, keeping his own approach open. He attended the annual Indian National Congress session at Lucknow in December 1916, where a peasant named Raj Kumar Shukla approached him with complaints about the harsh treatment of indigo cultivators in Champaran, Bihar.
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In 1918, Gandhi moved from rural Bihar to industrial Ahmedabad in Gujarat, where cotton mill workers and mill owners were quarrelling over a plague bonus. During an epidemic, mill owners had given workers an extra allowance, but once the plague passed, they wanted to withdraw it. Workers resisted, since wartime inflation, caused by the First World War, had already doubled the price of food grains and cloth. The workers demanded a fifty per cent wage increase, but the mill owners offered only twenty per cent.
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By 1918, drought caused crop failure in Kheda district, Gujarat. Peasants were also hit by plague and high prices. Under the Revenue Code, farmers were entitled to full remission if the yield fell below one-fourth of normal produce. The government refused to accept the crop failure as sufficient. It insisted that revenue for 1919 be paid in full. It threatened to seize the property of defaulters.
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