Hedgewar under ‘Unfortunate Influence’

We discussed revolutionary Jogesh Chandra Chatterjee’s mention of Doctorji’s close association with Anushilan Samiti. Chatterjee also mentions freedom fighter VV Athalye who was drawn into the Anushilan Samiti fold as a student of the National Medical College in Kolkata. The Anushilan Samiti imprint was clearly visible on Athalye’s actions when he was arrested as one of the revolutionary kingpins of the Satara Conspiracy case in 1910. Rowlatt’s Sedition Committee Report of 1918, referring to the Satara Conspiracy noted that “the evidence showed the establishment of a secret society at Satara in 1907 for the purpose of effecting the liberty of the country. It was a branch of the Abhinav Bharat founded by Ganesh and Vinayak Savarkar. One of the accused was found to have been experimenting in the preparation of bombs and to be in possession of literature of a revolutionary character.”

Athalye seemed to have clearly come under the influence of the Anushilan Samiti and also the more radical Jugantar group, led by Sri Aurobindo’s younger brother Barindra Kumar Ghose, which openly advocated armed revolution against the British. In his memoirs “Atma-Vritta” (My Life Story) (1958), in Marathi, Athalye recalled attending the Hooghly district political conference [September 1909], “Some of our medical students went to the Conference. The delegates to the Conference were divided into two groups: Moderates and Extremists. The Extremist group was lodged in a bungalow called Dutch Villa. Naturally, we too stayed there. The leader of the Extremists was Aurobindo Ghose. He was given an independent room. The others occupied the open spaces in the bungalow.”

It is most likely that Hedgewar, then a medical student at the same college, imbued with revolutionary zeal, had also attended this historic conference. It would be interesting to have a brief look at the Hooghly Provincial Conference, primarily keeping in mind the young Hedgewar’s participation on the sidelines of it as a student delegate from Kolkata, who were also represented by Sri Aurobindo in the Conference.

The Hooghly Provincial Conference held at Chinsura, writes one of modern India’s foremost bilingual writer, chronicler and philosopher Manoj Das, in his voluminously authoritative account of Sri Aurobindo’s political life, “Sri Aurobindo: the Life and Times of the Mahayogi – the pre-Pondicherry Phase”, was “the last big political event in which Sri Aurobindo played a unique and foremost role.”

“Arabindo Ghose attended as the elected delegate for Uttarpara and Diamond Harbour and for the students of Hooghly and Chinsura and the senior students of Calcutta…Arabindo Ghose receiving the warmer welcome [warmer than the one accorded to Surendranath Banerjee, leader of the moderate faction who was also present at the Conference] was escorted to Chinsura by a body-guard of about a hundred youths, and he entered the pandal garlanded and escorted by his guard…” records a telegram despatched by Sir Charles Allen, “the officiating Chief Secretary of Bengal, to the Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department.” In fact, Das tells us, “To the great dismay of the Moderates, Sri Aurobindo reached Chinsura, accompanied by a trainload of delegates, on September 4, in the evening.”

The Indian Councils Act 1909, colloquially referred to as the Morley-Minto Reforms, which passed earlier in 1909, had, among other things, deliberately and with an intent of subterfuge introduced separate electorates. Referring to the infamous Morley-Minto Reforms Das writes, that “one vital fact we must bear in mind is that the stimulation and perpetuation of communal discord for which the brains behind the colonial rule would leave no stone unturned, was now receiving yet another boost through the proposed election of members to the legislative fronts on the communal basis.” The Aga Khan led Muslim League delegation, primarily put together and tutored by the colonial administration, demanded among other things, “the right of sending their own representatives through separate communal electorates”, they did not want to “place their national interest at the mercy of an unsympathetic majority.”

This was how, writes HV Seshadri, in his “Tragic Story of Partition”, “the pernicious seeds of Muslim separatism in the form of separate electorates was sown in Indian politics which was to affect Indian history for many a longer year.” This arrangement, Seshadri argues, “naturally gave a big impetus to a political movement among Muslims inspired by separatist religious consciousness. It threw up a class of communal Muslim leaders who would vie with one another in inciting and catering to the fanatic religious feelings of their co-religionists.” Seshadri marks this point as the beginning of the story of “how the poisonous seed of a two-nation theory was nurtured by both the British imperialists and Muslim communalists.”

Historian Bimal Prasad, in his “Pathway to India’s Partition”, sheds light on an interesting letter in this context. He mentions a letter by Lovat Fraser, then editor of The Times of India, to James Dunlop Smith, then private secretary to Viceroy Minto, after a conversation the former had with Aga Khan, then permanent president of the Muslim League.

Fraser writing to Smith on July 20, 1909, pointed out “that probably our greatest danger in India is the likelihood of an entente, so much desired by many of the younger and abler Muhammadan, between Hindus and Musalmans. Men like the Aga firmly feel that, in pressing for large separate treatment for Muhammadans, they are fighting our battle as much as their own. We have far more to lose than the Moslems by an entente between Islam and Hinduism.”

Prasad argues that there was no doubt that separate electorates “turned out to be an invaluable source of support to Muslim nationalism and played a crucial role in shaping its evolution in the coming years” and that they “symbolised, as nothing else did, the position of Muslims in the then Indian society – ‘a nation within a nation’ as the Aga Khan put it.” The constitutional recognition to that position, observes Prasad, “solidified it and made it difficult for the Muslims to be absorbed by the growing current of Indian nationalism.” Instead, it “provided the starting point of that politico-constitutional process which, step by step, within less than forty years, culminated in the birth of Pakistan.”

The resolution that the Moderates of the then Congress proposed for the Hooghly Provincial Political Conference was typically cautious and only demanded direct control over finances of the country. It was careful to make no mention of the cardinal point in the Reforms, that of separate electorates, meant to exacerbate communal faultlines.

The proposed resolution of the nationalist group for the Hooghly Conference, drafted by Sri Aurobindo, was unequivocal in its condemnation of the ruse and poison of separate electorates. “This Conference,” it noted, “emphatically condemns the principle of separate electorates on sectarian lines and of special privileges of one community which it is intended into the Reform Scheme and is further of the opinion that no reform will be acceptable to the country which does not concede to the people a direct and substantial control over finance and legislation.”

It is thus interesting to imagine, Doctorji, as a young revolutionary, participating in this momentous Conference, witnessing the to and fro on this crucial and defining issue, listening to Sri Aurobindo’s addresses in his final political phase, and to see him at close hand.

That Sri Aurobindo had instilled terror in the minds of the British administrator and leaders is evident from letters exchanged between Morley and Minto months after he had left Bengal. In his richly documented study, “India Under Morley and Minto: Politics Behind Revolution, Repression and Reforms”, educationist and veteran historian, MN Das, cites the dense correspondence that went on between the Secretary of State and the Viceroy, both rueing their inability to pin down and deport “Arabinda Ghose.”

Edward Baker, then Lieutenant Governor of Bengal, writing to Viceroy Minto in April 1910, observed that although Arabinda Ghose, “escaped conviction on the actual charge of conspiracy in the Alipore Bomb Case, yet it is beyond doubt that his influence has been pernicious in the extreme. He is not a mere blind and unreasoning tool, but an active generator of revolutionary sentiment. He is imbued with a semi-religious fanaticism which is a powerful factor in attracting adherents to his cause: and I attribute the spread of seditious doctrines to him personally in a greater degree than to any other single individual in Bengal, or possibly in India.”

To a Morley who had abdicated all hope of ever convicting Arabinda Ghose, an exasperated Minto wrote, “As to the celebrated Arabinda, I confess I cannot in the least understand your hope that we shall not get a conviction against him! I can only repeat…that he is the most dangerous man we now have to reckon with, he was one of the prime instigators in the Maniktollah murders and has an unfortunate influence over the student class, and Indians who know him well have told me he is quite beyond redemption. Surely you cannot hope that such a man should remain at large?”

Hedgewar, as a student in Bengal, had clearly fallen under the “unfortunate influence” of this towering and magnetic leader.

The writer is a member of the National Executive Committee (NEC), BJP, and the Chairman of Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation. Views expressed are personal