Gandhi had had his reasons for his unilateral declaration of retreat.
On February 5, at Chauri Chaura in the United Provinces, a crowd of
people, infuriated at being beaten up by a group of policemen who they
greatly outnumbered, and tired of refraining from retaliation as required
of satyagrahis, had ceased to be non-violent and had chased the police-
men back into their police station. When the police barricaded themselves
in, the crowd set fire to the building and the policemen were burnt
alive. Gandhi was greatly troubled by the ‘Chauri Chaura incident’, and
concluded that the people were not yet morally developed enough to
practise non-violence. There had, he explained, been a few earlier incidents
of violence that had concerned him, but this was the last straw. If swaraj
were to be achieved by violence, then that swaraj, according to Gandhi,
was not worth having, for the people would not be worthy of it.
Amazingly, the movement died down quickly, perhaps demonstrating
that for all the autonomy of meanings Gandhi’s call to action might have
had, it was Gandhi who had to a large extent been the legitimating
authority behind its spread: once he explicitly withdrew support, popular
initiative seemed to lose its legitimacy. At the end of the movement,
then, a number of larger questions had emerged. Was there to be a set
of emergency brakes that the Congress leadership had to hold in reserve
against the tendency towards autonomous action among its followers?
Could the agenda for national struggle only be set by representatives
of the national elite – an intelligentsia, a rising national bourgeoisie or
a class of professional political activists? Why did so many people join a
movement called by a self-appointed elite? Could the strength of numbers
have been the result of a conjuncture of diverse desires that the leadership
was unable to comprehend or appreciate? These questions remained
unanswered.
Imprisonment was the beginning of a pattern that would be recurrent
for Jawaharlal for the rest of his political career under British rule: being
in and out of jail at His Majesty’s pleasure. So would it be for his father,
whose early life and later physical condition did not equip him as well for
the experience as his son. These imprisonments could do much to damage
the elite lawyer’s faith in the due process of law, as the legal grounds for
the imprisonments could be quite dubious. Motilal, Jawaharlal averred,
had been jailed on a perjurer’s evidence – he was tried as a member of an
illegal organisation, the Congress Volunteers, to prove his membership of
which a form with his signature on it in Hindi was produced. But since50 THE YOUNG GANDHIAN