According to Dr. S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru’s involvement with the kisan struggles in eastern U.P. in the early twenties had a greater impact on him than his ‘unformative years’ at Cambridge and in London when he was exposed to the influence of Fabianism. Another scholar, Dr. Gyanendra Pande, has suggested that the association of Congressmen with the 1918-22 kisan movement in U.P. gave the Congress a rural base even if it did not make it a kisan party. This reviewer has maintained for long that the Congress in U.P. acquired a distinctive character by articulating the unrest in the countryside and taking up issues which were agitating the peasantry in the Agra and, even more, Avadh regions in the early twenties and thirties. Siddiqi’s book deals with the period when the Congress had just begun going to the villages to seek electoral support as also support for its politics. After describing the agrarian conditions in U.P. in the late nineteenth century and the first two decades of the present century and analysing the emergence of tensions and their development, Siddiqi has given an account of the rise and growth of the kisan sahhas and the ekta (unity) movement.[ih`c-hide-content ihc_mb_type=”block” ihc_mb_who=”unreg” ihc_mb_template=”1″ ]
The distinctiveness of the Congress in U.P. lies in the fact that it sought to draw strength from the emerging kisan movement while trying to contain the unrest. The Congress in the Punjab and Bengal· legislative councils voted against legislative measures seeking to provide relief and some protection to the kisan from the excesses of the landlords and the moneylenders. In some other parts of the country also Congressmen were involved with kisan agitations. In Champaran, for instance, Gandhiji himself led the satyagraha against the indigo planters. But firstly Gandhiji did not allow the issues involved in the satyagraha to be mixed up with the political movement he was heading to the extent that he did not allow Home Rule meetings to be held in Champaran. Secondly, the local leadership of the Champaran movement was in the hands of rich farmers who had worked as agents of the indigo factories and were also functioning as moneylenders; their grievance against the planters was that they ‘alway stood in the way of their economic aggrandisement at the expense of the indebted raiyats’ and ‘prevented rich farmers from extending freely their money-lending activities’ (Pouchepedass: ‘Local Leaders and the Intelligentsia in the Champaran Satyagraha’ in Contributions to Indian Sociology No 8). And thirdly, the satyagraha was directed against the planters who were aliens and ‘the European planters were less effective than the indigenous elites in controlling the discontended’ and ‘suffered from many disadvantages’ (Henningham: ‘The Social Setting of the Champaran Satyagraha’ in IESHR January-March 1976). That is why such kisan movements (this applies to the Bardoli satyagraha also) could not affect the character of the Congress.
The local leaders of the kisan sabha and ekta movements in U.P., men like Ram Chandra and Madari Pasi, had no interests to promote other than those of the tenantry whose discontent they were articulating. Siddiqi mentions the fact that ‘only rarely did (such) unharnessed peasant leader(s) rise to the level of organization’ to bring out the ‘possibilities which the Indian National Congress ignored’. He has also referred to the restrictive influence of Congressmen on the kisan sabha movement. But that is one aspect of it. The other is that the U.P. Congress were the first to demand reforms in tenancy laws in the twenties which in States like Bengal and Bihar were taken up only ·after Independence; they were also the first to raise the demand for abolition of the zamindari system in the thirties despite opposition from Gandhiji (and those who raised the demand included not merely Socialists and Communists but men like Purshottamdass Tandon). U.P. was the first State to abolish zamindari after Independence while in Bihar, zamindari abolition, opposed by President Rajendra Prasad, was held up till the mid-fifties. It is true that in the twenties the Chinese leadership developed its own theory and practice of a peasantry-based revolution.
This is what Siddiqi seems to be hinting at when he refers to the ‘possibilities’ missed by U.P. Congressmen, particularly Jawaharlal Nehru; Dr. Gopal and Bipan Chandra have been more outspoken in their criticism of Nehru on this point. But Siddiqi’s account of agrarian conditions and the tensions to which they gave rise in U.P. does not bring out the existence of the objective conditions in which a peasantry-based revolutionary practices could be visualized. The kisan sabha and the ekta movements were the products of a particular form of land relations as Siddiqi has shown. But his contention that the U.P. Congress leadership regarded the kisan to be antagonistic to the interests of the movement towards freedom is not borne out by his account. The U.P. leadership and the conditions in U.P. need not be compared with the Chinese leadership or the conditions in China; what happened in U.P. has to be seen in the context of what was happening elsewhere in India. If anywhere in this country a peasant movement developed within the confines of the national movement it was in the U.P. This is what emerges from Siddiqi’s account and is borne out by the history of the U.P. Congress in the later twenties and the thirties and forties.
Siddiqi’s observation on the very last page of his book that none of the various organizations of the kisans took up the demands of the landless tenants and agricultural labourers although they did try to win over the rich peasants and smaller zamindars, represents a new line of approach to the problem he has studied. While this is a weakness shared by even the kisan organizations led by the Socialists and the Communists till now except in some pockets, this lent strength and a Left-orientation to the U.P. Congress before Independence but accounts for its kulak character in the post-Independence period. For anyone interested in the history of the Congress in U.P., Siddiqi’s book is a ‘must’, and the task he had set before· himself of studying the agrarian structure in the U.P. and the tensions it bred there, has been performed very successfully.
Girish Mathur is a Senior Journalist and Commentator.
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