The Quit India Movement followed Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia even in the years after independence. After playing an underground role in the Quit India Movement for 21 months, Lohia was arrested in Bombay on 10 May 1944. He was imprisoned first in Lahore Fort and then in Agra. After being imprisoned for two years, Lohia was released in June 1946. Meanwhile, his father passes away, but Lohia did not accept coming out of jail on parole to perform his last-rites.
Lohia writes on the 25th anniversary of the Quit India Movement, “9th of August was and will always remain a people’s event. But, as yet, 15th August is celebrated with a lot of fanfare, for on that day the British Viceroy Lord Mountbatten shook hands with the Indian Prime Minister, and gave damaged independence to a damaged country. 9th August expressed the will of the people – we want to be free and we shall be free. For the first time after a long period in our history, crores of people expressed their desire to be free. In some places it was done in great strength.”
Lohia, while quoting Russian revolutionary thinker Leon Trotsky, stated that in Russia’s revolution one percent of the population took part, while in India’s August Revolution, 20 percent of the country’s people took part. Obviously, Lohia sees the Quit India Movement directly from the perspective of the role and will of the Indian people, i.e. their outright opposition to imperialist chains. In this movement, the people themselves were their leaders. Lohia’s active role in the Quit India Movement and his views about the same can be read from this perspective. Including the long letter, which he wrote to the Viceroy of India, Lord Linlithgow, from the jail on 2 March 1946.
The letter brings out the brutal and conspiratorial character of British imperialism. The Viceroy had accused the Congress leaders of planning an armed uprising during the Quit India Movement. He also blamed that the people who took part in the movement were indulged in violent activities. In the letter, Lohia, refuting the Viceroy’s allegations, put forward the horrific atrocities of British rule on the unarmed people. He said that many Jallianwala Bagh happened in the country while suppressing the movement, but the people of India, showing divine courage, fought non-violently for their freedom. Lohia also rubbished the Viceroy’s statement in which he said that less than a thousand people were killed in the Movement. Lohia writes, “If we had planned an armed insurrection and our crowds were asked to resort to violence, believe me Linlithgow, Gandhiji would today have been securing a reprieve for you from the free people and their government.” Lohia emphatically emphasises, “The history of the unarmed common man begins from the Indian Revolution of 9 August.”
When Soviet Russia joined the Second World War, the Marxist leadership of India decided to oppose the Movement and support the British. Not only did it become the cause of bitter confrontation between the Congress Socialists and the Marxists, due to that decision the Marxist activists were confused about the definition and criteria of patriotism and sedition. In the last months of his underground life, Lohia wrote his long essay ‘Economics after Marx’. Lohia’s biographer Indumati Kelkar writes, “In spite of instability of underground life, continuous police pursuit, worry about the fate of the movement, lack of relevant literature, that thesis of Lohia has been considered a major contribution to the world on economics and to the views of Socialist movement. In his thesis he has interpreted Marxian economics in an original and novel way.”
In this essay, Lohia does not get involved in any kind of polemics. Neither with the communists, nor with other organizations and leaders who opposed the movement and sided with the British. However, he decided to take a new look at Marxism. This process of his thoughts continued further. His famous speech of Pachmarhi in 1952 could be a culmination of that thought process. Lohia writes, “In 1942-43 when the movement against the British was on, the socialists were either in jail or were being pursued by the police. That was also the time when communists, following their foreign masters, had given the slogan of ‘People’s War’. I was totally confused by the spectacle of Marxism in all its contradictions. Then I decided that I would discover the essential truth of Marxism and purge it from falsehood. Economics, politics, history and philosophy have been the four main facets of Marxism and I deemed it necessary to analyse all these. But as I was in the midst of analyzing its Economics I was arrested.”
This essay by Lohia can also be read from the point of view of the ordinary people of India struggling with imperialist oppression. In Lohia’s perception, the Quit India Movement was to give birth to a government of the free people of India based on a sustained anti-imperialist spirit.
Viewed from a distance of twenty-five years, Lohia, however, pointed to the weakness of that movement as well – the lack of consistent persistence. He writes, “But the will was short-lived, though strong. It didn’t have a lasting intensity. The day our nation acquires a tenacious will, we will be able to face the world.” He further elaborates the point, “Anyhow, this is the 25th anniversary of 9th August 1942. It should be celebrated well. Its 50th anniversary perhaps will be celebrated in such a way that 15th August will be forgotten, and even 26th January will be put into a shade, or will only equal it. 26th January and 9th August are events of the same class. One expressed the will to freedom and the other the will to fight for it.”
Lohia, as a leader and thinker, struggled all his life for a government of the free people in independent India. But neither during his lifetime nor after his death, 9th August got the status of a national day. Lohia did not live to see the 50th anniversary of the Movement. The 50th anniversary fell in 1992. This is the year when the doors of the country were opened to the loot of multinational companies while imposing New Economic Policies, and a five-hundred-year-old mosque was demolished by conducting ‘Ram Mandir Andolan’. Since then, the nexus of neo-liberalism and communal fascism has made India’s ruling-class a staunch enemy of the people who paved the way for independence through the Quit India Movement while facing brutal imperialist repression.
By Prem Singh.
(The author associated with the socialist movement is a former teacher of Delhi University and a former fellow of Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla)
