Dreams of Youth 75Hooghly district students’ conference in July 1929, he argued that both
individual and national fulfillment should be achieved through the in-
nate diversity of human life and by striking a balance between “the
one” and “the many.” He reminded the students that Deshbandhu C. R.
Das had been a staunch believer in a “federation of cultures,” and “in
the realm of politics, he liked a federal state for India better than a cen-
tralized state.” He exhorted the young to call the disadvantaged and
downtrodden social groups to their side: “In our country, three large
communities are lying absolutely dormant; these are the women, the
so- called depressed classes and the laboring masses. Let us go to them
and say: ‘You also are human beings and shall obtain the fullest rights
of men. So arise, awake, shed your attitude of inactivity and seize your
legitimate rights.’”^61
These social groups, especially the working class, had indeed arisen
in 1929 to demand their rights through a wave of strikes. Seething la-
bor unrest in Bombay and elsewhere was one of the reasons that Gan-
dhi wished to postpone a confrontation with the colonial government.
A staunch believer in class conciliation, he was not inclined to launch
an anticolonial mass movement while class- based radicalism was at its
peak. Subhas Chandra Bose, by contrast, provided leadership to the
workers in an industrial action against the owners of the Tata iron and
steel company in Jamshedpur, and aided the legal defense of Bombay-
based labor activists charged in the Meerut conspiracy case.
Gandhi’s decision to mark time during 1929 in the face of British
repression had another consequence: it created po lit i cal space for the
recrudescence of revolutionary terrorism, especially in the province
of Punjab. On October 30, 1928, Lala Lajpat Rai had been severely
beaten by the police during a peaceful protest against the arrival of the
Simon Commission in Lahore. On November 17, this veteran national-
ist leader of Punjab died. To avenge his death a twenty- year- old Sikh
named Bhagat Singh shot dead a British police of fi cer in the streets
of Lahore exactly a month later, on December 17. On April 8, 1929,
Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt hurled a couple of small bombs
and flung a few leaflets inside the central legislature in Delhi, claiming
that it took “a loud voice to make the deaf hear.” The government re-
sponded by arresting a large number of young men in different parts of