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Azad Dastas and Dacoit Gangs: The Congress and Underground Activity in Bihar, 1942–44

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Vinita Damodaran
Vinita Damodaran
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Extract

This paper attempts to examine the nature of underground activity in Bihar in the 1940s. It outlines, for the first time, the dynamics of the Congress underground movement as it emerged after the imprisonment of Gandhi and the established Congress leadership in 1942. No historian has, to my knowledge, attempted to study the nature of the underground activity and its implications for the Congress organization in Bihar, or elsewhere, in this period. Most of the studies of the Quit India movement examine only the few days in August when the mass movement erupted with full force and then neglect the more significant following period. This includes the studies of Stephen Henningham and Max Harcourt who have examined the nature of popular protest in Bihar in some detail. This neglect is surprising, for the underground movement was very active and proved to be a major ‘law and order’ problem to the British well into 1944. As an underground activist, Havildar Tripathi, told me in an interview in Patna in March 1986, ‘The mass movement lasted for only 2 weeks in August, we carried it much beyond that’.

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Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , July 1992 , pp. 417 - 450
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

1 See Henningham, S., Peasant Movements in Colonial India: North Bihar 1917–42 (Canberra, 1984)Google Scholar and Harcourt, M., ‘Kisan populism and revolution’ in Low, D.A. (ed.), Congress and the Raj (London, 1977).Google Scholar

2 Hobsbawm, E. J., Bandits (Harmondsworth, 1985), pp. 17–18.Google Scholar

3 The strategic situation, in a global sense, for the allies on the eve of Gandhi's fast seemed far more favourable than before in at least three theatres of the war. In North Africa Rommel was retreating in disarray, chased by Montgomery's forces still eager after the victory at El Alamein. On 15 January 1943 Roosevelt and Churchill met at Casablanca to plan the last stages of the North African Campaign and look forward to opening a new front in Italy. In Burma, Wavell contemplated the retaking of Burma in Operation ‘Anakim’. On 18 January the Red Army re-captured Voronezh and simultaneously began to raise the siege of Leningrad. Even though tensions between Americans/British and the Soviets date from this time and Rommel in February managed to burst through the Allied lines at Kasserine, the tide of the war had fundamentally changed. Such strategic developments, with their concurrent effects on morale, could not but affect the situation vis-à-vis Gandhi in India.Google Scholar

4 At a Cabinet meeting to discuss the threat to fast it was debated at length whether releasing Gandhi as soon as he began his fast would constitute an act of weakness. Churchill and the war cabinet were firmly of the opinion that Gandhi should not be allowed to secure release by a threat of fast unto death. Linlithgow was however aware that if he died in British hands the repercussions would be too catastrophic even to envisage, both in terms of a nationwide mass upheaval, and world public opinion. By February, however, the war cabinet had backed down and immediately offered Gandhi a release for the duration of the fast. For details of this episode see, V. Damodaran, ‘“A fraudulent fast”: Gandhi's fast of 1943’ unpublished paper.Google Scholar

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6 Fortnightly Report, (hereafter FR) March (1) 1943.Google Scholar

7 For details of the food crisis in 1943 see Prasad, K.The Economics of a Backward Region in a Backward Economy vol 1 (Calcutta, 1967), pp. 246–8.Google Scholar

8 See Fantine Enquiry Commission: Report on Bengal, Calcutta, 1945. See also FR 03 (I) 1943.Google Scholar

9 Unfortunately I have been unable to obtain the exact figures for the amount of foodgrains which Bihar supplied to the army.Google Scholar

10 The issue was first raised at the national level in 1942, by Gandhi who in a letter to Linlithgow condemned the slaughter of ‘numberless’ cattle for British and American troops in Bihar. See Gandhi, to Linlithgow, , Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (hereafter CWMG), lxxvi, pp. 265–6.Google Scholar

11 Report of the Famine Commission, Part 1, p. 476.Google Scholar

12 FR April (1) 1943.Google Scholar

13 The Famine Commission noted in perplexity that the shortage of the previously reaped aman crop in Bengal was comparable to that which occurred in 1928, 1936 and in 1941 and was in fact less serious than the 1941 shortage. However a phenomenal rise in prices occurred in 1943 making the situation different from that which had prevailed during the earlier shortages. The Commission concluded that the acute scarcity in Bengal was due to breakdowns in distribution rather than insufficient supply. Amartya Sen's entitlement theory in also based on the premise that the famine in 1943 was not due to an absolute decline in food availability but due to a difference in entitlements to it.Google Scholar

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16 FR (1) March 1943.Google Scholar

17 FR June (2) 1943.Google Scholar

18 The headlines in a leading provincial daily, the Searchlight, on 14 February 1943 proclaimed the ‘country wide consternation due to scarcity of food grains. Grain Shops have been looted and there has been a lathi charge on a procession of starving people’.Google Scholar

19 FR May (1) 1943.Google Scholar

20 It has been found in recent studies that, with the onset of a famine, most men are driven to migrate to cities in search of food. As a consequence women were often left in the village to fend for children and the old. As famine conditions increase further it is the women who suffer the most. In Bengal in 1943 they were sold or exchanged for food. An overwhelming number of starvation deaths were found to be women, as they have always borne the brunt of poverty and malnutrition. See Kishwar, M. and Vanita, R., In Search of Answers (London, 1984), p. 260.Google Scholar See also Arnold, David, Famine, Social Crisis and Historical Change (Oxford, 1988), p. 89.Google Scholar

21 FR June (1) & (2) 1943.Google Scholar

22 FR (1) May 1943.Google Scholar

23 However, by and large, cattle theft continued to be under-reported.Google Scholar

24 There was probably an under-reporting of all these crime figures as the police administration, especially in the countryside, was quite weak. The figures refer to the years 1935–44 and it can be argued that the extent of under-reporting did not undergo a marked change in this period. Thus, even thought the exact figures may not be very reliable, the underlying trend reflects a rising crime rate.Google Scholar

25 Arnold, David, ‘Crime and Crime Control in Madras, 1858–1947’ in Anand, Yang (ed.), Crime and Criminality in British India (Tucson, 1985), pp. 70, 74. Arnold tends to argue that the activities of professional dacoits was effectively suppressed by the twentieth century, at least in the province of Madras. However, the situation was clearly different in northern India as my evidence for rural Bihar shows that professional banditry continued to be a problem well into the 1940s and even until today. In Banka sub-division the activities of these dacoits was a nagging irritant to the local police administration in the countryside.Google Scholar

26 See FRs December (1) 1942, January (1) 1942.Google Scholar

27 FR December (1) 1942.Google Scholar

28 FR May (1) 1943, June (2) 1943.Google Scholar

29 FR June (1) 1943.Google Scholar

30 FR August (2) 1943.Google Scholar

31 Bihar State Archives (hereafter BSA) (Political Special) 6 (vii)/47.Google Scholar

32 FR May (2) 1943, Interview with Azad Dasta activist, Havildar Tripathi in Patna, February 1986. His escape was a cause of much worry for the district and provincial administration at the time for he had a reputation of being an expert ‘fish plate and explosive man’ specializing in sabotaging troop trains. See A. Flact papers, CSAS, Cambridge.Google Scholar

33 Home political file on Socialist Plans, National Archives of India (hereafter NAI) file 5/64/43.Google Scholar

34 Ibid.

35 In reality the gangs did not have any contact with Bose's INA. Many Forward Bloc members, however, also joined this underground organization and distributed pamphlets to the effect that Bose would soon arrive in India to save it. This fact was recorded at a personal interview with Forward Bloc activist Ramayan Singh in Patna, February 1986.Google Scholar

36 FR (1) July 1943.Google Scholar

37 FR (1) March 1944.Google Scholar

38 BSA (political special) 95/45. The persons who paid up in Budhuchak village were the following; Tulsi Kumar—500Rs, Buli Kumar—500Rs, Gobind Chaudhuri—500Rs, Ram Prasad Chaudhuri—500Rs, Budhu Bhagat—200Rs. They were all either petty zamindars or rich peasants. Elsewhere in Bhagalpur the villagers of Khartik and Telgi were also paying Siaram Singh money and sheltering him from the law.Google Scholar

39 Ibid.

40 Central Intelligence Department (hereafter CID) file no 107/44. See also BSA (political Special) 6/vii/47.Google Scholar

41 FR March (1) 1944.Google Scholar

42 Interview with Azad Dasta activist, Havildar Tripathi, Patna, February 1987. This fact was also corroborated by another underground Azad Dasta worker, Maheshwar Gope, interviewed in Patna in February 1987.Google Scholar

43 Haviladar Tripathi in his interview revealed that he had often sought shelter in his underground days at the house of the zamindar of Surajpura, Uday Raj Sinha.Google Scholar

44 Interview with Havildar Tripathi. He records that often the villagers would keep watch over their hiding places, to warn the activists in case of a police raid. See also FR (1) September 1943 and BSA Home Political File no 143(340)44 and 143(350)44.Google Scholar

45 Report for Bhagalpur district 8 May to 23 May 1943, CID file 22/43.Google Scholar

46 CID file no 107/44.Google Scholar

47 BSA (political special) file no 331/1943.Google Scholar

48 CID file no 107/44. These leaflets were also important vehicles of propaganda. Leaflets issued by the local Azad Dastas in 1944 gave credence to wild rumours and claimed that Bose was about to enter India at the head of a victorious Indian National Army.Google Scholar

49 Ibid.

50 See section on the ecological basis of peasant protest in Damodaran, V., ‘Unfulfilled promises: Popular Protest, the Congress and the National Movement in Bihar, 1937–46’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1990).Google Scholar

51 FR January (1) 1944.Google Scholar

52 Ibid.

53 FR July (2) 1945.Google Scholar

54 See Arnold, , ‘Crime in Madras’, and Maclane, John R. ‘Bengali Bandits, Police and Landlords after the Permanent Settlement’ in Yang, (ed.) Crime and Criminality in British India pp. 71 and 44.Google Scholar

55 First in his book on Primitive Rebels and subsequently in his analysis of Bandits Hobsbawm has brought ‘social bandits’ to the attention of social historians.Google Scholar

56 Again, as Hobsbawm notes, Movements of tribal of national resistance may develop a characteristic interplay between bandit guerrillas and populist or millennial sectarianism. In 1929 Mao's red army seems to have been composed of such elements. The communist peasant guerrillas of Columbia also contained many fighters who had formerly been freebooting brigands. See Hobsbawm, Bandits p. 106.Google Scholar

57 FR June (1) 1945. When Rajendra Prasad was released in 1945, he was quick to distance the Congress from Gope's activities. At one stage he made the extraordinary allegation that 30–40 dacoits from Banka had been released by the SDO without justification in September 1942 deliberately to besmirch the Congress. See BSA Political Special File no 589/45.Google Scholar

58 Yang has pointed out that, though banditry was a ubiquitous phenomenon in many parts of South Asia, little firm evidence has been mobilized to confirm the presence or absence of social banditry. The problem arises because the activities of ‘criminals’ and their ties to social movements are not readily discernable to the historian.´ Yang (ed.), Crime and Criminality, p. 22. In the case of the Azad Dasta movement, however, such links can be clearly established and the presence of social banditry confirmed.Google Scholar

59 BSA Political Special File 39/45 and 42/45.Google Scholar

60 Ibid.

61 Hobsbawm, E.J., Bandits, p. 18.Google Scholar

62 Maheshwar Gope recorded in his interview with me that in south Bihar the activities of these gangs were completely out of control and many landlords in Bhagalpur were looted.Google Scholar

63 BSA file 95/43–45.Google Scholar

64 The concept of a ‘criminal tribe’ was fully institutionalized in India by the the end of the nineteenth century and the Criminal Tribes Act 1871 empowered local governments of designate any tribe, gang or class of persons a criminal tribe for ‘the systematic commission of a non-bailable offence’. Once designated a criminal tribe, such groups had their place of abode and occupation defined and systematic efforts were made to ‘reform’ them by educating their children. The implementation of the act also provided the justification for far-reaching and stringent police measures to control such ‘criminal’ elements. See A. Yang, ‘Dangerous Castes and Tribes: The Criminal Tribes Act and the Magahiya Doma of North East india’ in Yang (ed.), Crime and Criminality in British India, p. 109. This article is a useful study of the working of the act in nineteenth century Bihar.Google Scholar

65 Bihar Police Administration Report, 1944. Patna, 1946.Google Scholar

66 See Rutherford to Linlithgow, 5 March 1943 in Linlithgow papers Mss Eur F 125/4 and BSA file no 95/43.Google Scholar

67 Bihar Police Administration Report, 1944, p. 7.Google Scholar

68 Oral interview with Havildar Tripathi.Google Scholar

69 Interview with Havildar Tripathi. He records that there were many cases of gang warfare in 1944 and killings of opposed gang members.Google Scholar

70 CID File no 107/44Google Scholar

71 Hobsbawm has noted that the use of the term ‘expropriation’ as a tactful name for robberies designed to supply the revolutionary movement with funds. In Russia, Lenin did his best to fence off expropriations from unorganized freebooting with an elaborate system of regulations. They were to be conducted only under organized party auspices and in a framework of socialist ideology, in order not to degenerate into ordinary crime. See Bandits, p. 110.Google Scholar

72 See Hardiman, David, ‘The Quit India movement in Gujarat’ in Gyan, Pandey (ed.), The Indian Nation in 1942 (Calcutta, 1988), pp. 102–3.Google Scholar

73 In Maharashtra the movement followed a different course. Omvedt describes how, in Satara, the prati sarkar acted against the dacoit gangs infesting the rugged mountainous terrain. This situation was quite unlike that which prevailed in Bihar where, as we have seen, the Azad Dasta forged links with the local dacoits. One reason for this difference may have been the greater degree of control exercised over the underground movement in Satara by the underground Congress leadership. See Omvedt, Gail, ‘The Satara prati sarkar’ in Pandey, (ed.), The Indian Nation in 1942, p. 224.Google Scholar

74 CWMG, lxxvii, p. 208.Google Scholar

75 See Wavell, , The Viceroy's Journal (Oxford, 1973), p. 33. Linlithgow's political acumen was in distinct contrast to that of Wavell's, who clearly saw the writing on the wall. When Wavell met him in 10 1943 on the eve of taking over as Viceroy, Linlithgow told Wavell to proceed cautiously as he was quite certain that Britain would continue to have responsibility for India for at least another thirty years.Google Scholar Wavell on other hand was more sympathetic to nationalist aspirations. See also, Low, D. A., Lion Rampant: Essays in the Study of British Imperialism (London, 1973), p. 149.Google Scholar

76 Wavell to the Secretary of State, IOL file L/PO/6/108B. Wavell was also exceedingly critical of the way in which the Home government had dealt with his demands for food during the Bengal famine.Google Scholar In a firm letter to Churchill he wrote ‘I feel that the vital problems of India are being treated by His Majesty's govenment with neglect, even sometimes with hostility and contempt.’ See Wavell, , The Viceroy's Journal, p. 95.Google Scholar

77 See CWMG, lxxvii, p. 262.Google Scholar

78 Transfer of Power, vol iv, pp. 1138, 1191.Google Scholar

79 This marked a real change in his policy since August 1942, when he had implicitly sanctioned all forms of mass action, including general strikes, stoppages of railways and granted the possibility of civil war.Google Scholar

80 Out of deference to Gandhi, Achyut Patwardhan decided to withdraw from underground activity. But Aruna preferred to stay underground and emerged only when the warrant against her was cancelled in 1946. CWMG, lxxvii. See appendix xiv, p. 468.Google Scholar

81 CWMG, lxxvii, p. 350.Google Scholar