Commission through the country, and consequently the opportunity
for the colonial state apparatus to be deployed with some vigour against
the population. Jawaharlal, demonstrating against the Commission at
Lucknow, had his share of being beaten up by the police, as had most
Congressmen in the process of the peculiarly Gandhian activity of using
moral force against physical violence. In a particularly brutal police lathi-
charge (a lathiis a long wooden truncheon of considerable use as a weapon
at close range, capable of causing serious injuries) on October 30 in Lahore,
the Punjab Congressman, veteran Swadeshi activist, Arya Samajist, and
Hindu Mahasabhite, Lala Lajpat Rai, was seriously injured; he died
on November 17. (Two months later, the English police officer thought
to be responsible for the attack was shot dead; not everyone believed
violence ought to be met with non-violence. This act was undertaken by
the ‘Hindustan Socialist Republican Army’, and thought to be the work
of a terrorist-turned-communist called Bhagat Singh – but they killed the
wrong policeman. For this act, Bhagat Singh was executed in 1931, on the
basis of decidedly unsound evidence; what he had indeed done was to
detonate two explosives in the Central Legislative Assembly in 1929, not
to hurt anyone – the bombs were not designed to kill – but ‘to make the
deaf hear’.^4 )
According to Motilal Nehru, Lajpat Rai’s death also wrecked the
Nehru Report. Rai was a key figure in the negotiations, and Motilal had
urged Rai to get the Mahasabha to accept the demand for one-third
Muslim representation in an eventual Central Assembly, because it would
make no difference to a Hindu majority in the House. After some hesitation,
Rai agreed – but said that it would be unwise to give in straight away as
the Muslims were making other ‘unreasonable’ demands. ‘Ultimately we
agreed that the Hindu opposition to the Muslim demands was to continue
and even be stiffened up by the time the Convention was held. The object
was to reduce the Mohammedan demands to an irreducible minimum
and then to accept it at the Convention. The death of Lalaji before the
Convention was a great blow to Hindu–Muslim unity.’^5
The details of these negotiations are in many ways not as important as
the notable continuation of a trend: Indians were now imprisoned in the
colonial numbers game, debating whether a seat here or there could be
conceded, whether a proportion of the population was to be defined as
‘Hindu’ or ‘Backward Caste’ or ‘Muslim’, in order to play the game within
a system defined by the British. Frustrated members of failed commissions
‘INEFFECTUAL ANGEL’, 1927–39 63