Brutal Repression and Upswing in Worker-Peasant Action

BRITISH colonialists tried their level best to crush the post-war popular upsurge through sheer repression. The worst instance of repression in this period was the barbaric Jallianwallahbagh massacre in Amritsar on 13 April, 1919. The infamous General Dyer who executed this massacre defended it in terms of “producing a moral effect” and his only regret was that had he not run out of ammunition he could have killed many more! In the face of such acute state terror and Gandhian vacillation and dilution, if the Indian people succeeded in producing a different 'moral effect' on the British administration, it was largely due to the powerful working class initiative and wider expressions of peasant discontent.

Among the powerful peasant movements of this period, mention must be made of the popular peasant agitation in UP against the arbitrary rent collection and other coercive practices by the Avadh talukdars. This agitation which acquired a strong base in Pratapgarh, Rae Bareli, Sultanpur and Faizabad districts of UP was led by Baba Ramchandra; a one-time indentured labourer in Fiji who combined a lot of Ramayana with his calls of kisan solidarity and would even describe Lenin as the dear leader of kisans. In the Mewar region of Rajasthan, Motilal Tejawat organised a powerful movement of the Bhil tribe. In August 1921, the Malabar region of Kerala was rocked by a fresh round of the intermittent Moplah rebellion. In the early 1920s, Punjab saw a powerful upsurge of the Jat Sikh peasantry in the form of the Akali-led Curudwara reform movement aimed at liberating the Sikh shrines from the clutches of corrupt British-backed mahants. And between 1919 and 1921, Satara district of Maharashtra witnessed a powerful anti-landlord anti-mahajan peasant upsurge led by the Satyashodhak Nana Patil who would go on to emerge as a popular communist peasant leader in the state.

Parallel to this upswing in peasant movement, there was a strong strike wave sweeping across the country. The following figures quoted from a 1923 publication (cited by Sumit Sarkar in Modem India) give an idea about the depth and sweep of the strike-wave: