Short Essay on Growth of Militancy in India

The leadership of the Anti-Partition Movement soon passed to militant nationalists like Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal and Aurobindo Ghose. This was due to many factors.

First, the early movement of protest led by the moderates failed to yield results. Even the liberal Secretary of State John Morley, from whom much was expected by the moderate nationalists, declared the Partition to be a settled fact which would not be changed. Second, the governments of the two Bengals, particularly of East Bengal, made active efforts to divide Hindus and Muslims.

Seeds of Hindu- Muslim disunity in Bengal politics were perhaps sown at this time. This embittered the nationalists. But, most of all, it was the repressive policy of the government which led people to militant and revolutionary politics. The Government of East Bengal, in particular, tried to crush the nationalist movement.

Official attempts at preventing student participation in the Swadeshi agitation have already been mentioned above. The singing of Bande Mataram in public streets in East Bengal was banned. Public meetings were restricted and sometimes forbidden.

Laws controlling the press were enacted. Swadeshi workers were prosecuted and imprisoned for long periods. Many students were even awarded corporal punishment. From 1906 to 1909, more than 550 political cases came up before the Bengal courts.

Prosecutions against a large number of nationalist newspapers were launched and freedom of the press was completely suppressed. Military police was stationed in many towns where it clashed with the people.

One of the most notorious examples of repression was the police assault on the peaceful delegates of the Bengal Provincial Conference at Barisal in April 1906. Many of the young volunteers were severely beaten up and the Conference itself was forcibly dispersed.

In December 1908, nine Bengal leaders, ‘including the venerable Krishna Kumar Mitra and Ashwini Kumar Dutt, were deported. Earlier, in 1907, Lala Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh had been deported following riots in the canal colonies of the Punjab.

In 1908, the great Tilak was again arrested and given the savage sentence of 6 years’ imprisonment. Chidambaram Pillai in Madras and Harisarvottam Rao and others in Andhra were put behind bars.

As the militant nationalists came to the fore, they gave the call for passive resistance in addition to Swadeshi and Boycott.

They asked the people to refuse to cooperate with the government and to boycott government service, the courts, government schools and colleges, and municipalities and legislative councils, and thus, as Aurobindo Ghose put it, “to make the administration under present conditions impossible.”

The militant nationalists tried to transform the Swadeshi and Anti-Partition agitation into a mass movement and gave the slogan of independence from foreign rule.

Aurobindo Ghose openly declared: “Political freedom is the life breath of a nation.” Thus, the question of the partition of Bengal became a secondary one and the question of India’s freedom became the central question of Indian politics. The militant nationalists also gave the call for self-sacrifice without which no great aim could be achieved.

It should be remembered, however, that the militant nationalists also failed in giving a positive lead to the people. They were not able to give effective leadership or to create an effective organisation to guide their movement.

They aroused the people but did not know how to harness or utilise the newly-released energies of the people or to find new forms of political struggle. Passive resistance and non cooperation remained mere ideas. They also failed to reach the real masses of the country, the peasants.

Their movement remained confined to the urban lower and middle classes and zamindars. They had come to a political dead end by the beginning of 1908. Consequently, the government succeeded to a large extent in suppressing them.

Their movement could not survive the arrest of their main leader Tilak, and the retirement from active politics of Bipin Chandra Pal and Aurobindo Ghose.

But the upsurge of nationalist sentiments could not die. People had been aroused from their slumber of centuries; they had learned to take a bold and fearless attitude in politics.

They had acquired self- confidence and self-reliance and learnt to participate in new forms of mass mobilisation and political action. They now waited for a new movement to arise. Moreover, they were able to learn valuable lessons from their experience.

Gandhiji wrote later that “after the Partition, people saw that petitions must be backed up by force, and that they must be capable of suffering.”

The Anti-Partition agitation in fact marked a great revolutionary leap forward for Indian nationalism. The later national movement was to draw heavily on its legacy.