Böcker av Subhash Chandra Kushwaha

The peasant revolt of Awadh (earlier spelt as Oudh) was the first rural school for the first prime minister of independent India, and brought him face to face with the hunger, poverty and misery prevailing here. It gave him a chance to understand India and convey this understanding to others. Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru got from the peasant movement of Awadh much, much more than he gave it back. He strengthened his political grasp thereby and took himself to the position of an ideologically oriented prime minister. It is because of that first encounter that the Rae Bareli Lok Sabha constituency is still attached to the Nehru family.The First World War badly drained India's wealth as well as Indian blood. Ignoring the horrors of this war, the future Father of the Nation extended total cooperation to the colonial British rule and also appealed to the country's people to cooperate. The poor youth of the country were dispatched to the war fronts in France and Germany without any specific and adequate training. Those who survived the war were unceremoniously ousted from the army, as one throws a fly out of a glass of milk, and were sent back home. They were thus divested of their employment on the one hand and, on the other hand, talukdars and zamindars were allowed a free hand to suck, in the name of a 'War Fund, ' whatever blood was left in their or their family members' bodies. While natural disasters did continue unabated, the extraction of revenue by the colonial government through talukdars, bedakhli (eviction) of the common people from their lands, and from them the repeated demands of 'nazrana' (obligatory 'presents') which were nothing but bribes, had closed all the doors upon them for redressal. It was in such a situation that the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the growing awareness of those coming back from the overseas fronts made the rural atmosphere charged for revolt. They thought the age of the peasant had finally arrived and therefore injustice had to be resisted. For those dying of hunger, was it any worse if they died while fighting?The spontaneous peasant revolt, that broke out simultaneously in all the districts of Awadh during 1920-22, stoked the spark that had been smouldering unobserved for years. The dying desires of the people were inflames at once. Bazaars were looted. Talukdars' and zamindars' houses were attacked. Police stations were put afire, and soviet-type Kisan Sabhas were organised.At a time when Awadh was in flames, the heat of revolts was felt all over the country. Workers, peasants, tribals --- all raised the banner of revolt. At such a time, in order to save itself from being pushed into irrelevance, the existing national politics felt compelled to create an illusion that it stood by the people.The peasant revolt that broke out in Awadh deeply impacted the social, economic and political scenarios in the whole country. That the former soldiers, sadhus and lower class people commanded this struggle was something unprecedented. A sociological analysis of this phenomenon as a factor of the success or failure of popular movements is yet to be done

THE Chauri Chaura revolt is an extraordinary episode of India's freedom struggle which brought to the fore the revolutionary aspect of peasant revolts in the second stage of the Non-Cooperation Movement and exposed, during the liberation struggle for attainment of Swaraj, the sham that only had twists in it. If the first phase of the Satyagraha was wrapped after stigmatising the workers' revolt at Bombay, the second phase was withdrawn after tarnishing the image of the Chauri Chaura revolt. The principles of the forces, which have been defaming these revolts in history, have no place for figures like M N Roy, Deshbandhu Chitaranjan Das and Subhash Chandra Bose, down to Bhagat Singh. The umbilical cord of these forces was also connected with the cunningness about grabbing the leadership of the peasantry while being in league with the feudal class. In history, generally, such instances of cunningness have also been a tool of the elite sections to keep a check on the restlessness among the marginalised people and to discourage their attempts at revolt.Whenever the revolt of Chauri Chaura flashed in my mind, I thought whether the neglect instead of a glorification of this lone act that devastated the British rule during our freedom struggle, was not a part of the class character of the Indian feudal society where the poor peasants, Muslims and the so called lower castes have always been neglected and despised. I also thought about how much the struggle being led by the Congress for liberation from the British thraldom was against the exploiters and how much it was in favour of the poor, illiterate and toiling people. Or, to what extent it was a real struggle for freedom and how much it had a hidden agenda of cunningness.The tide of popular revolts during the Non-Cooperation Movement rose with the idea and conception of national volunteers instead of the Khilafat and Congress volunteers. Subsequently, the bourgeois leadership, frightened by the intensity of the revolts which this idea gave rise to, makes a retreat, and then not only the Muslim leadership is gripped by apprehensions; the feudal lords too come to believe that the forest fire of popular revolts in the face of repression could also scorch them along with the British power. As such, they start thinking about how to control them. For this purpose, they use the unfailing weapon of non-violence --- the weapon which took the religious-minded masses to the fantasies of 'past glory' or a 'golden age.' It got them entangled in the saintly sermons about braving the pain, not hating the oppressor, and not resorting to violence in response to atrocities.The forces which moulded the history according to the viewpoints of kings and emperors, tarnished the history of people's struggles, what to talk of moulding history from the people's viewpoint, in order to add lustre to their own colour with the help of miracles and supra-human forces. In order to exploit the situation, they always used the trick of dangling dreams before the poor majorities. Their class base rested on the principle of deceiving many for the sake of a few and protecting the interests of a few at the cost of many. It is obvious that, for such people, the peasant revolt at Chauri Chaura could only be an obnoxious and criminal act. They have no reply to the question about which issues the Non-Cooperation Movement raised for the benefit of the peasantry. Was the demand of zamindari abolition or of no-rent payment ever raised at the time in a forceful and effective manner, in the interest of the poor? From the ranks of the then existing leadership, was a single comment or voice of opposition ever heard against the zamindars' atrocities? However, when the people moved forward on their own the challenge the zamindars and the colonial power, obstacles were created again and again to stem their tide.