I give extracts from the book. “Politics and Social Conflict in South India (The Non-Brahman Movement and Tamil Separatism, 1916-1929)”: Sponsored by the Center for South and Southeast Asia Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Page numbers furnished refer to this publication.In order to shorten the posts, I am condensing some portions; these condensed portions are in italics. My own comments are given in blue.
“Increasingly after 1925, the Justice Party came to be more and more on the defensive — always aware that it was losing the initiative of articulating non-Brahminism and that the new leaders were the Tamil non-Brahmans who had been trained in the arts of political agitation while in the ranks of Congress.” p. 264
(It thus becomes clear that the anti-Brahman sentiment started raising its head long before EVR came to the Justice Party, which he later converted to DK. In 1925 EVR in Congress, solidly siding with Rajaji.—sangom)
Communalism and Congress
Gandhiji who had successfully mobilized the uneducated masses and made them politically aware of the need for independence from the British rule, had, as a consequence, made the Home Rule League of Annie Besant irrelevant to India. However, the fact that many Brahmans in Madras had been associating with Besant either in the Home Rule League or in the Theosophical Society, had made the Home Rule League a suspect in the eyes of the Tamil non-Brahmans. Theosophical literature upheld the caste system and placed Brahmans, as the most spiritually evolved souls, at the apex of the social ladder, only added to this distrust.
Khadar (khadi) was a very important ingredient of Gandhiji’s struggle for independence, non-cooperation being the other, during the period 1925 and around. The response to khadi in the then Madras Presidency was not successful because the people in general were not enthusiastic about spinning. S. srinivasa Iyengar stated at a Congress meeting in Madras in June, 1924: “Mahatmaji’s lesson was perfectly simple but the truth was that everybody did not use the charka and spin. when people did not do it, what was the use of again and again saying ‘Spin, Spin.’ ”
“Gandhi was released from prison in early 1924 because of ill-health. One of his first public utterances was a demand that all members of the A.I.C.C, should be committed noncooperators eligible for office only on the basis of tha amount that they spun. The crisis began to deepen. The Hindu (June 20, 1924) condemned the move in a long editorial entitled “The Mahatma’s Ultimatum,” which questioned the capacity of anyone, at that particular time, to move into the Indian political scene and to dismiss the activity of the Swaraj Party and the notion of Council entry. “The Swarajists are there and too substantially there,” it wrote, “to be cursed or elbowed out of existence merely because they offend the no-changers’ sense of proprieties.” The only question, therefore, was “whether this kind of cleansing contemplated by the Mahatmaji is politically wise or — a belittling mundane word—expedient. In other words could the purging of the Congress—for the Congress executives are to a large extent synonymous with the Congress—leave in it sufficient prestige to continue to command the respect in which it is now held.” pp. 265-266
[FONT="](The Swaraj Party was formed by Indian politicians and members of the Indian National Congress who had opposed Mahatma Gandhi's suspension of all civil resistance in 1922—months after it was started at the initiative of Gandhi— in response to the Chauri Chaura tragedy, where policemen were killed by a mob of protestors. He went on a fast-unto-death to convince all Indians to stop civil resistance. The Congress and other nationalist groups disavowed all activities of disobedience.[/FONT]
[FONT="]But many Indians including Congress leaders felt that the Non-Cooperation Movement should not have been suspended over an isolated incident of violence, and that its astonishing success was actually close to breaking the back of British rule in India. These people became disillusioned with Gandhi's political judgments and instincts.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Gandhi and most of the Congress party rejected the provincial and central legislative councils created by the British to offer some participation for Indians. They argued that the councils were rigged with un-elected allies of the British, and too un-democratic and simply "rubber stamps" of the Viceroy.[/FONT]
[FONT="]In December 1922, Chittaranjan Das, N.C. Kelkar and Motilal Nehru formed the Congress-Khilafat Swarajaya Party with Das as the president and Nehru as one of the secretaries. Other prominent leaders included Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy and Subhas Chandra Bose of Bengal, Vithalbhai Patel and other Congress leaders who were becoming dissatisfied with the Congress. The other group was the 'No-Changers', who had accepted Gandhi's decision to withdraw the non-cooperation movement.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Both the Swarajists and the No-Changers were engaged in a fierce political struggle, but both were determined to avoid the disastrous experience of the 1907 split at Surat. (The Congress session became violent because of the extreme enmity between the extremists and moderates and had to function as “convention” instead of the original name of Congress.) On the advice of Gandhi, the two groups decided to remain in the Congress but to work in their separate ways. There was no basic difference between the two.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Swarajist members were elected to the councils. Vithalbhai Patel became the president of the Central Legislative Assembly. However, the legislatures had very limited powers, and apart from some heated parliamentary debates, and procedural stand-offs with the British authorities, the core mission of obstructing British rule failed.—extracted from Wikipedia.)[/FONT]
[FONT="]“By November, Gandhi, realizing that what the Hindu called his “ritualistic intolerance” was inappropriate to the changed circumstances of the India of 1924, had backed down. … And at the 1924 Belgaum Congress the following month, at which he presided, he explained that he had entered into an agreement with the Swarajists because he recognized the value of the Councils for the attainment of Swaraj.109 ”p.266[/FONT]
[FONT="](With the death of Chittaranjan Das in 1925, and with Motilal Nehru's return to the Congress the following year, the Swaraj party was greatly weakened.—sangom)[/FONT]
[FONT="]“Gandhi’s vacillations on the question of Council boycott were awkward for the No-Changers in the Tamil Nad Congress, men like Rajagopalachariar and three former members of the M.P.A., (Madras Provincial Association) Tiru. Vi. Kaliyanasundaram Mudaliar, E.V. Ramaswami Naicker, and P. Varadarajulu Naidu.” p. 266 [/FONT]
[FONT="](It will be seen that even when the Justice Party with its avowed anti-Brahman stance was at its zenith, EVR was solidly behind the Rajai faction in the Congress—sangom.)[/FONT]
[FONT="]All the while there remained the same difficulty in the No-changer ranks (within the Congress—sangom) that had originally provoked Dr. Nair and Tyagaraja Chetti to peotest the Home Rule movement and Congress in 1916—namely, the resentment felt by many non-Brahmans toward what they considered excessive Brahman power within the Congress organization. Non-Brahman hostility toward Brahmans within the Tamil Nad Congress remained, despite the dissolution of the M.P.A. in mid-1920. How strong the hostility had become was only too apparent, first at a meeting of the Madras Provincial Congress Committee at Tinnevelly on June 24, 1920. At that meeting V.O. Chidambaram Pillai, a Tamil Vellala who was well known for his swadeshi activities earlier in the century, submitted a resolution proposing that Congress should adopt as a central axiom the need to obtain proportional representation for non-Brahmans in the public services and representative bodies of the presidency.112 The resolution was in fact adopted, but only after it had been hedged about with a number of qualifications and after many reservations had been voiced as to its relevance. Shortly after this meeting a letter to the Madras Mail (June 30, 1920) from a reader who called himself a “non-Brahmin delegate” complained of the ways in which the resolution had been handled by Brahmans at the conference: “The ‘Nationalist’ Brahmin may deem it devilishly clever of him to have postponed ‘the evil day’ when he will have to find his level in politics (as in everything else). but he is too clever by half. Keen and plastic as his intellect is, he is as foolish as an ostrich in some matters. the demoralization of Indian politics is only a matter of time. If it has not come this year it will come the next year or the next.” p.267[/FONT]
[FONT="](It will be evident from the above that strong anti-Brahman sentiment had been existing in TN even much before EVR left the Congress or his Brahman friends therein. Hence it cannot be said that EVR or DK originated the anti-Brahman sentiment.—sangom)[/FONT]
[FONT="]109[/FONT][FONT="] The story of these negotiations and their outcome is succinctly set out in B. R. Nanda, Mahatma Gandhi : A Biography (London, 1959), pp. 251-255[/FONT]
[FONT="]112[/FONT][FONT="] Madras Mail, June 26, 1920.
[/FONT]To be continued…
What I meant was, give all the assistance to the disadvantaged kids financially and otherwise (coaching etc.) when they are at the secondary school / high school. And then let them compete at the college level and beyond.
