Nationalism in India .................Part III

Q17. Explain the reasons for relaunching the Civil disobedience Movement by Gandhiji.

Civil disobedience Movement was relaunched  by Gandhiji because:

1. Failure of talks at 2nd  Round Table conference and Gandhiji was disappointed.
2. Country was going through unrest. There were strikes by railway workers in 1930 and dock workers in 1932.
3. Peasants were facing high taxation and poverty.
4. The government had begun a new cycle of repression. Ghaffar Khan and Jawaharlal Nehru were both in jail, the Congress had been declared illegal, and a series of measures had been imposed to preventmeetings, demonstrations and boycotts.

Q18.Why did peasants join the Civil Disobedience Movement ?
What were their ideals? What did swaraj mean to them? 

1. In the countryside, rich peasant communities – like the Patidars of Gujarat and the Jats of Uttar Pradesh – were active in the movement.Being producers of commercial crops, they were very hard hit by the trade depression and falling prices. 
2. As their cash income disappeared, they found it impossible to pay the government’s revenue demand. 
3. The refusal of the government to reduce the revenue demand led to widespread resentment. 
4. These rich peasants became supporters of the Civil Disobedience Movement, organising their communities and even forced reluctant members, to participate in the boycott programmes.
5. For them the fight for swaraj was a struggle against high revenues. 
6. But they were deeply disappointed when the movement was called off in 1931 without the revenue rates being revised.
7. So when the movement was restarted in 1932, many of them refused to participate.

1. The poorer peasantry were not just interested in the lowering of the revenue demand. 
2. Many of them were small tenants cultivating land they had rented from landlords. 
3. As the Depression continued and with no cash incomes  the small tenants found it difficult to pay their rent. 
4. They wanted the unpaid rent to the landlord to be remitted.
   They joined a variety of radical movements led by Socialists
   and Communists.
5. Apprehensive of raising issues that might upset the rich peasants and landlords, the Congress was unwilling to support ‘no rent’ campaigns in most places. 
6. So the relationship between the poor peasants and the Congress remained uncertain.

Q19.How  was the movement seen by the business classes? How did they relate to the Civil Disobedience Movement? 

1. Indian merchants and industrialists had made huge profits during the First World War and wanted to expand their business.
2. They reacted against colonial policies that restricted business activities and wanted protection against imports of foreign goods, and a rupee-sterling foreign exchange ratio that would discourage imports.
3. They formed the Indian Industrial and Commercial Congress in 1920 and the Federation of the Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industries (FICCI) in 1927 led by prominent industrialists like Purshottamdas Thakurdas and  G. D. Birla.
4. The industrialists attacked colonial control over the Indian economy, and supported the Civil Disobedience Movement whenit was first launched.
5. They gave financial assistance and refused to buy or sell imported goods.
6. Most businessmen saw swaraj, when colonial restrictions on business would no longer exist and trade and industry would flourish without constraints.
7. But after the failure of the Round Table Conference, business groups were no longer uniformly enthusiastic. 
8. They were apprehensive of the spread of militant activities, and worried about prolonged disruption of business, as well as of the growing influence of socialism amongst the younger members of the Congress.
9. The industrial working classes did not participate in the Civil
   Disobedience Movement in large numbers, except in the Nagpur region.

Q20. Examine the role of women in the Civil Disobedience Movement.

1. The Civil Disobedience Movement saw large-scale participation of women. 
2. During Gandhiji’s salt march, thousands of women came out of their homes to listen to him. 
3. They participated in protest marches, manufactured salt and picketed foreign cloth and liquor shops. 
4. Many went to jail. In urban areas these women were from high -caste families; in rural areas they came from rich peasant households. 
5. Moved by Gandhiji’s call they gave their service to the nation as a sacred duty of women.

Q21.Discuss Gandhiji's attitude towards dalits. How did he try to integrate the Depressed Classes into society?

1. Mahatma Gandhi declared that swaraj would not come for a hundred years if untouchability was not eliminated. 
2. He called the ‘untouchables’ harijan or the children of God and organised satyagraha to secure them entry into temples, and access to public wells, tanks, roads and schools.
3. He himself cleaned toilets to dignify the work of the bhangi (the sweepers), and persuaded upper castes to change their heart and give up ‘the sin of untouchability.

Q22. How did Dr. BR Ambedkar try to improve the condition of Depressed Classes?

1. Dr B.R. Ambedkar organised the dalits into the Depressed
   Classes Association known as Schedule Castes.
2. At the  second Round Table Conference he demanded separate
   electorates for dalits.
3. When the British government conceded Ambedkar’s demand, Gandhiji began a fast unto death. 
4. He believed that separate electorates for dalits would slow down the process of their integration into society. 
5. Ambedkar  accepted Gandhiji’s position which  resulted in the Poona Pact of September 1932. It gave the Depressed Classes (later to be known as the Schedule Castes) reserved seats in provincial and central legislative councilsbut they were to be voted in by the general electorate. 

Q23.Why did the Muslims fail to respond to the call of a  united struggle during the Civil disobedience Movement?

                                                  or 

Give reason for the lukewarm response of some of the Muslim organisations to the Civil disobedience Movement.

1. Muslim political organisations in India were lukewarm in their response to the Civil Disobedience Movement.
2. After the decline of the Non-Cooperation-Khilafat movement, alarge section of Muslims felt alienated from the Congress. 
3. From the mid-1920s the Congress came to be more visibly associated withopenly Hindu religious nationalist groups like the Hindu Mahasabha.
4. As relations between Hindus and Muslims worsened, each
   community organised religious processions with militant fervour,provoking Hindu-Muslim communal clashes and riots in variouscities. Every riot deepened the distance between the two communities.
5. The Congress and the Muslim League made efforts to renegotiatean alliance, and in 1927 .
6. The  differences were over the representation in the future assemblies that were to be elected. 
7. Muhammad Ali Jinnah leaders of the Muslim League, was willing to give up the demand for separate electorates, if Muslims were assured reserved seats in the Central Assembly and representation inproportion to population in the Muslim-dominated provinces (Bengal and Punjab).
8. When the Civil Disobedience Movement started there was
   an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust between communities.
   Alienated from the Congress, large sections of Muslims could not respond to the call for a united struggle. 
9. Many Muslim leaders and intellectuals expressed their concern about the status of Muslims as a minority within India.
10. They feared that the culture and identity of minorities would be submerged under the domination of a Hindu majority.

Q24. How did cultural processes help in creating a sense of collective belngingness in India? Explain.

1. The sense of collective belonging came through the experience of united struggles and cultural processes through which nationalism captured people’s imagination. 
2. History and fiction, folklore and songs, popular prints and symbols, all played a part in the making of nationalism.
3. It was in the twentieth century, with the growth of nationalism, that the identity of India came to be visually associated with the image of Bharat Mata. The image was first created by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay.
4. In the1870s he wrote ‘Vande Mataram’ as a hymn to the motherland and later it was included in his novel Anandamath and widely sung during the Swadeshi movement in Bengal. 
5. Moved by the Swadeshi movement, Abanindranath Tagore painted his famous image of Bharat Mata  portrayed as an ascetic figure; she is calm, composed, divine and spiritual.
   In subsequent years, the image of Bharat Mata acquired many
   different forms, as it circulated in popular prints, and was painted by different artists. 
6. Devotion to this mother figure came to be seen as evidence of one’s nationalism.
7. Ideas of nationalism also developed through a movement to revive Indian folklore. 
8. In late-nineteenth-century India, nationalists began recording folk tales sung by bards and they toured villages to gather folk songs and legends. 
9. These tales  gave a true picture of traditional culture that had been corrupted and damaged by outside forces therefore it was essential to preserve this folk tradition in order to discover one’s national identity and restore a sense of pride in one’s past.
10. In Bengal, Rabindranath Tagore himself began collecting ballads, nursery rhymes and myths, and led the movement for folk revival.
11. As the national movement developed, nationalist leaders became more and more aware of such icons and symbols in unifying people and inspiring in them a feeling of nationalism. 
12. During the Swadeshi movement in Bengal, a tricolour flag (red, green and yellow) was designed. It had eight lotuses representing eight provinces of British India, and a crescent moon, representing Hindus and Muslims.
13. By1921, Gandhiji had designed the Swaraj flag. It was again a tricolour(red, green and white) and had a spinning wheel in the centre,representing the Gandhian ideal of self-help. 
14. Carrying the flag,holding it aloft, during marches became a symbol of defiance.
15. Another means of creating a feeling of nationalism was through
    reinterpretation of history. By the end of the nineteenth century
    many Indians began feeling that to instill a sense of pride in the
    nation, Indian history had to be thought about differently. The British saw Indians as backward and primitive, incapable of governing themselves. 
16. In response, Indians began looking into the past to discover India’s great achievements. 
17. They wrote about the glorious developments in ancient times when art and architecture, science and mathematics, religion and culture, law and philosophy, crafts and trade had flourished. 
18. This glorious time, in their view, was followed by a history of decline, when India was colonised. 
19. These nationalist histories urged the readers to take pride in India’s great achievements in the past and struggle to change the miserable conditions of life under British rule.