Why Congress

Why Congress?

Mahatma Gandhi

Smt. Indira Gandhi's Broadcast over All India Radio on Mahatma Gandhi [New Delhi, October 1, 1968]

"In the history of India, there have been occasions when a cloud, no bigger than a man’s hand, has soon covered the whole sky,” so wrote Mahatma Gandhi in 1921. He himself poured life- giving water on a land thirsting for freedom.

In just four weeks in 1919, he changed the outlook of this sub­continent. He transformed the cowed and the weak into a nation which fearlessly asserted its right to be free. He gave his people a new weapon, which ultimately delivered them from colonial rule. This weapon was Satyagraha, civil disobedience or nonviolent non- cooperation. Literally, the word means “insistence on truth.” It was a weapon that did not need physical strength. But to be effec­tive it did need the greatest self-discipline.

After Mahatma Gandhi conducted his first Satyagraha cam­paigns in the country, it took India thirty long years to wrest freedom. During this time we learnt the full meaning of freedom. He taught us that a people who permitted injustice and inequality in their own society did not deserve freedom and could not pre­serve it. Thus equality of opportunity, irrespective of birth, sex, or religion, became the objectives of our struggle for freedom.

These ideals have come down to us through the ages. Buddha, Ashoka and Akbar, to name only three of the many wise and great men who have molded our history. Mahatma Gandhi reinterpreted these old truths and applied them to our daily lives, and so made them comprehensible to the humblest of us. He forged them as instruments for a mass struggle for a peaceful polit­ical and social revolution. His stress was on reconciliation, whether amongst classes or amongst nations.

Mahatma Gandhi interpreted the yearnings of the inarticulate masses and spoke the words that they themselves were struggling to express. Wearing the loincloth, which was then all that the vast majority of our peasants could afford, he identified himself with the downtrodden and the poor. To those whom Indian society had regarded as untouchables, he gave the name "men of God,” and to the last days of his life he worked ceaselessly for their uplift and emancipation. During the communal riots, this frail and aged man walked amongst the people and, through sheer faith and force of spirit, achieved miracles of reconciliation, which peace-keeping armies could not have wrought. He met his martyrdom because he refused to compromise with hatred and intolerance.

Mahatma Gandhi relied on spiritual strength. He believed in limiting one's wants and in working with one’s hands. He modeled his life according to the ancient Hindu book, the Bhagavad-Gita or "the Lord’s song,” but he drew inspiration also from Christianity and Islam. Indeed he thought that no man could follow his own religion truly unless he equally honored other religions. Long be­fore him, in the third century B.C., the Emperor Ashoka had written, "In reverencing the faith of others, you will exalt your own faith and will get your own faith honored by others.”

Mahatma Gandhi called his life story "My Experiments with Truth." His truth was neither exclusive nor dogmatic. As he once wrote, "There are many ways to truth, and each of us sees truth in fragment.” Thus, tolerance is essential to truth; violence is incom­patible with it. Nor can peace come from violence. To him, ends and means were equally important. He believed that no worthy ob­jective could be achieved through an unworthy instrument.

Mahatma Gandhi will be remembered as a prophet and a revolu­tionary. He stood for resistance nonviolent resistance to tyranny and social injustice. He asked us to apply a test, which I quote, "Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, recall the case of the poorest and weakest man who you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him control over his own life and destiny? Will it lead to SWARAJ that is self-government, for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then, you will find your doubts and self melt­ing awaj." This, test is valid for our times, indeed for all times, it is valid for India and for the world.

As long as there is oppression and degradation of the human spirit, people will seek guidance from him to assert their dignity. The weapon of nonviolent resistance which he has given mankind is today used in other lands and other climes. The world rightly regards Gandhi as the greatest Indian since the Buddha. Like the Buddha, he will continue to inspire mankind in its progress to a higher level of civilization. In India, it is our endeavor to build a future which is worthy of him.

Mahatma Gandhi's Speech

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Pandit Jawahar Nehru

India's first and longest serving Prime Minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, was a man of vision. Having participated in the long struggle for freedom from the British, Nehru, fondly called Pandit Nehru, a reference to his Kashmiri Pandit community roots, was a firm believer in nation building, as he understood that the young Indian nation had a tryst with destiny.

A foreign-educated barrister and a close confidante of Mahatma Gandhi, he came as close as anyone has, or ever will, to becoming the People's Prince. He was Mahatma Gandhi's chosen political heir, and free India's first elected prime minister. After the death of Vallabhbhai Patel in 1950, he towered among his colleagues in the Congress. His vision of an India fired by educational institutions, steel plants and powered by dams was widely shared. 

He was seen as a brave man, who fought chauvinists; as a selfless man, who had endured years in jail to win freedom; and above all as a visionary. His appeal cut across the conventionally opposed categories of low caste and high caste and was undoubtedly the darling of the masses. 

Nehru realised that the country, cobbled together from a loose confederation of princely states, that both owed their allegiance to the British as well as opposed them, needed to work hard and unleash its potential and energy into a nationalised channel that would help build India as a truly democratic nation where every citizen matters.

Nehru's first commitment was to make India a self-sufficient economy. As a result, he set up temples of modern learning and giant public sector industries that catered to the needs of a growing nation and its people. His efforts to create a scientific temper can be seen from his zeal to establish higher centres of learning.

Many Indians believe that the credit for India being a vibrant democracy, an industrial powerhouse, a knowledge partner, its military strength, its pursuit of technology and space should go to Nehru: that he had laid strong foundations upon which the institutions built themselves with modest targets.

To understand Nehru better, one needs to see his other side where he inspires children or the future citizens as he called them. Hailed as chacha (uncle) Nehru by children, his birthday on November 14 is celebrated as Children's Day.

Looking back, we can see that Nehru was at a juncture where he fought the very people who had empowered him with education. His perfect sense of right and wrong and his Indian upbringing despite a western education gave him the opportunity to join and rise up the ranks of the Congress party in its freedom struggle. After he became Prime Minister, he maintained equal distance from both the super powers, Americans and the Russians without fear or favour even as he charted a Non-Aligned course for the country, based on the policy of Panchsheel.

A socialist at heart, he signed the Panchsheel agreement between China and India that were to serve as the five guiding principles of relationship between two sovereign nations. Not surprisingly he felt betrayed when the Chinese attacked India even as he spoke about as Hindi-Chini bhai bhai. An underprepared Indian army took on waves of Chinese soldiers, fought valiantly and paid a heavy price.

Nehru's meticulous nurturing of India's democracy during its troubled birth and childhood stands out. Scholars are convinced that democracies cannot be established at low levels of income. Thus, India's democratic longevity is unique. It is perhaps due to the country having a popular anti-colonial movement. More importantly, Nehru, though all-powerful, did not fritter away pre-independence legitimacy. In fact, he strengthened it to the last root and set the agenda for an inclusive growth. Nehru understood and practiced it. 

During the seventeen years he was the Prime Minister, Nehru strode the Indian political stage like a colossus. But he never imposed his political will and always had an ear for what others had to say. Though not in favour of linguistic states, he adhered to popular wishes. He did not choose chief ministers, but allowed the party organisation at the state-level to elect their leaders. When courts challenged his land reform programmes, instead of being critical of the judges, he chose to undertake constitutional amendments. A liberal and a true democrat at heart, Nehru wanted a healthy political debate.

In 1952, during free India's first general elections, nearly 175 million voted. As three-fourths of citizens were illiterate, candidates were given symbols such as bicycles, lanterns, lamps, animals, flowers and symbols of everyday usage. It was a six-month process where those deputed for election work rode camels, took boats and even trekked to remote corners. The general elections in 1957 and 1962 deepened the legitimacy of the electoral process on the Indian consciousness.

Crafting democracy was hard work as Sarvepalli Gopal, Nehru's foremost biographer recalls: “Receiving, throughout the years of his prime ministership, about 2,000 letters every day... Nehru spent four to five hours every night dictating replies. And "there were the years when the Prime Minister was... putting in twenty-hour days with hardly even breakfast as a private meal." Such was the commitment.

Today, citizens gleefully point to the Indian democracy's various weaknesses, but the very edifice of democracy and the freedom we enjoy as a sovereign democratic republic would not have been possible without Nehru's unwavering commitment to such institutions. It is an enduring legacy. Otherwise, power would not have touched all sections of people and made ours a broad-based democracy.

Nehru's single most contribution was the clear establishment of a vision to lift India from the 18th century towards the 21st.  It spoke of the impoverishment inflicted on India by the imperialists. So the leaders who inherited the mantle of leadership had to tackle centuries of neglect. But, aided in their leadership was a vision. For example, when Nehru was making his first trip to America as the prime minister, some members of his cabinet suggested that he ask that country for food to tackle the shortages. He refused: ``I am not making my first trip to America with a begging bowl. We have to sort this problem ourselves."

The Bhakra-Nangal multipurpose river valley project on the Sutlej, India's first and one of the biggest dams in the world is flagged off in 1954. Nehru, while inaugurating the completed project, describes it as the "greatest and holiest" of India's modern shrines.

Nehru and most of his contemporaries believed that only large-scale industrialisation could really change the economy and enable India to be a player on the world stage as well as helping its own citizens. 

In his Presidential Address at the 1951 Congress Session at New Delhi he spelt out his vision: "The only way to build for the future is to put aside or save something each year, and use this saving for some kind of progress. This may be improved agriculture, more river valley projects, more factories, more houses, more education or better health services. Our resources are limited and the most that we may hope to save has been indicated in the plan. Because of this limitation of resources, we have to make hard choices at every step and priorities become important. 

We have to choose sometimes between a river valley scheme and more housing or more schools. Unfortunately we cannot have all that we want at the same time. The plan recommends one set of priorities. This may be varied, but we cannot go beyond the limits set by our resources as well as the social and political conditions and the Constitution."

Nehru helped to ensure the deep rooting of fundamental values in the Indian polity, and tried to work out ways in which these could be expressed. His most positive influence and what he valued most of all was the attempted construction of a plural, open, and democratic polity working for change in the lives of all citizens. He used to speak of India as a composite nation, and of the ground-breaking experiment of trying to achieve socio-economic change by democratic processes and consent in contrast to state-directed revolution with its risk of profound violence.

Nehru faced the most difficult situation in Independent India, as he had to immediately quell the fires of Partition. Nehru told his home minister that it must be quelled: ``For India, if it was anything at all, was emphatically not Pakistan. Over there they might ill-treat or persecute their minorities; over here, we would protect and respect ours. There was a constant cry for retaliation and vicarious punishment of the Muslims of India, because the Pakistanis punish Hindus. That argument does not appeal to me in the slightest. For India was not a mirror image of Pakistan, a Hindu State to its Islamic State. "Our secular ideals," insisted Nehru to Patel, "impose a responsibility to our Muslim citizens in India."

There's the story of how during the 1947 riots, he was travelling in his Ambassador car as Prime Minister and he suddenly saw a Muslim tailor being attacked in Chandni Chowk. He asked the driver to stop the car and charged out of the car to save the man.

He also once refused a request to replace Muslim cooks from his kitchen because of the Partition.

He just didn't preach secularism, but practiced it to the hilt. Pandit Nehru not only imbibed democratic and secular values in every citizen, but also taught a young and independent India to be self confident and self-reliant. If Mahatma Gandhi is the father of the nation, Dr B.R. Ambedkar, the father of the constitution, then Nehru could be rightly called the father of Indian democracy.

Vallabhbhai Jhaverbhai Patel

Vallabhbhai Jhaverbhai Patel, one of the six children of Jhaverbbai Patel and Ladbai was born at Nadiad in Gujarat. There is no record of his date of birth. The generally accepted date, October 31, 1875, of which the source is his Matriculation certificate, was chosen by Vallabhbhai himself while filling in a form.

The family was an agriculturist one, of the Lewa Patidar Community and could in terms of economic status be described as lower middle-class. It was poor and had no tradition of education.

Vallabhbhai's childhood was spent away from books, in the ancestral fields at Karamsad. He was already in his late teens when he passed out from the Middle School at Karamsad and went to the High School at Nadiad from where he matriculated in 1897.

Even as a young boy Vallabhbhai displayed qualities of organization and leadership that marked him out for his future role. Once as a sixth-form boy he organized a successful strike of his classmates that lasted for three days to teach a lesson to one of the teachers who was unduly fond of the rod.

Vallabhbhai must have inherited these attributes from his father who, it is said, had fought in the Mutiny under the Rani of Jhansi and was subsequently taken prisoner by Malharrao Holkar.

Vallabhbhai was a mature young man of twenty-two when he matriculated. Owing to the impecunious circumstances of the family higher education was not within his reach. The next best thing was to take a course in law and set up as a country lawyer. This he did and established a small practice at Godhra.

But an attack of plague, which he contracted while nursing a friend, made him leave the town and after spending some time in Nadiad, he moved on to Borsad in 1902, a town in the Kheda district where at that time the largest number of criminal cases in Gujarat were recorded.

Vallabhbhai became quite popular here as a defence lawyer. Vallabhbhai now wanted to go to England and qualify as a Barrister. From his practice at Borsad he had earned enough for his expenses there but owing to certain circumstances he was not able to make the trip at once.

His brother Vithalbhai desired that he should complete education in England firm and not Vallabhbhai Vallabhbhai readily acquiesced in this. His wife, Zaverbai, died early in 1909 after an operation for some abdominal malady. When news of the bereavement reached Vallabhbhai, he was cross-examining a witness in a murder case at Anand.

With an impregnable composure for which he became known later, he did not show grief but went on with the cross-examination in hand. He finally sailed for England in 1910 joined the Middle Temple. Here he worked so hard and conscientiously that he topped in Roman Law, securing a prize, and was called to the Bar at the end of two years instead of the usual period of three years.

On his return to India in 1913, he set up practice in Ahmedabad and made a great success of it. He had ready wit, a fund of common sense and a deep sympathy for those who were the objects of the British officials' wrath and were caught in the clutches of the law, which was not the uncommon in the Kheda district. He came to enjoy a position in public life that his eminence as a Barrister.

He accepted Mahatma Gandhi's leadership, having been tremendously impressed by the fearless lead that Mahatma Gandhi gave to right public wrongs. In 1917 he was elected for the first time as a Municipal in Councillor Ahmedabad.

From 1924 to 1928 he was Chairman of the Municipal Committee. The years of his association with the, Municipal administration were marked by much meaningful work for the improvement of civic life. Work was done to improve water supply, sanitation and town planning and the Municipality came to be transformed from being a mere adjunct to the British rule into a popular body with a will of its own.

There were also calamities like plague in 1917 and famine in 1918, and on both occasions Vallabhbhai did important work to relieve distress. In 1917 he was elected Secretary of the Gujarat Sabha, a political body which was of great assistance to Gandhiji in his campaigns.

The association with Mahatma Gandhi became closer during the Kheda Satyagraha in 1918, which was launched to secure exemption from payment of the land revenue assessment since the crops had failed. It took three months of intense campaigning that was marked by arrests, seizures of goods and chattels and livestock and much official brutality before relief was secured from an unwilling Government.

Gandhiji said that if it were not for Vallabhbhai's assistance "this campaign would not have been carried through so successfully". The five years from 1917 to 1922 were years of popular agitation in India. The end of the war was followed by the Rowlatt Act and still further curtailment of individual freedom.

And then followed the Khilafat movement with massacres and terror in the Punjab. Gandhiji and the Congress decided on non-cooperation. Vallabhbhai left his practice for good and gave himself up wholly to political and constructive work, touring in villages, addressing meetings, organizing picketing of foreign cloth shops and liquor shops.

Then came the Bardoli Satyagraha. The occasion for the Satyagraha was the Government's decision to increase the assessment of land revenue from Bardoli taluka by 22 per cent and in some villages by as much as 50 to 60 per cent.

Having failed to secure redress by other means the agriculturists of the taluka decided, at a Conference on February 12, 1928, to withhold payment of land revenue under the leadership of Vallabhbhai Patel.

The struggle was grim and bitter. There were seizures of property and livestock to such an extent that for days on end, people kept themselves and their buffaloes locked in. Arrests followed and then brutalities of the police and the hired Pathans.

The struggle drew the attention of the whole country to it. Patels and Talatis resigned their jobs. Government revenues remained unrealized. The Government had ultimately to bow before popular resolve and an inquiry was instituted to find out to what extent the increase was justified and the realization of the increased revenue was postponed.

It was a triumph not only of the 80,000 peasants of Bardoli but more particularly of Vallabhbhai personally; he was given the title of "Sardar" by the nation.

About this time the political situation in the country was approaching a crisis. The Congress had accepted its goal of Purna Swaraj for the country, while the British Government through their policy of pitting one interest against another and through constitutional tricks were trying to stifle the voice of freedom and doing everything they could to perpetuate their rule.

The boycott of the Simon Commission was followed by the launching of the famous Salt Satyagraha by Gandhiji. Vallabhbhai Patel, though he had not committed any breach of the Salt Law, was the first of the national leaders to be arrested. He was in fact arrested on March 7, 1930 - some days before Gandhiji set out on the march to Dandi. He was released in June.

By then Gandhiji, Jawaharlal Nehru and other leaders were in jail and the tempo of the struggle in the country was rising. In a few months Vallabhbhai was back in prison.

In March 1931 Vallabhbhai presided over the 46th session of the Indian National Congress which was called upon to ratify the Gandhi-lrwin Pact, which had just then been concluded.

The task was not an easy one, for Bhagat Singh and a few others had been executed on the very day the Congress session opened and delegates, particularly the younger sections, were in an angry mood, while Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Bose were not happy with the terms of the Pact.

But the Congress finally put its seal on the Pact with one voice. Civil Disobedience was suspended, political prisoners were released and the Congress agreed to participate in the Round Table Conference.

The Round Table Conference failed. Gandhiji as also the other top leaders were arrested and a policy of repression followed. Vallabhbhai Patel was lodged with Gandhiji in Yeravada Jail and they were together there for sixteen months-from January 1932 to May 1933.

Vallabhbhai then spent another year in the Nasik Jail. When the Government of India Act 1935 came, the Congress, though generally critical of the Act, decided to try out those of its constitutional provisions that seemed to grant to India a measure of self-government and to take part in the elections for Provincial legislatures that were envisaged under it.

In seven of the eleven Provinces Congress majorities were returned and Congress Ministries were formed. Vallabhbhai Patel, as Chairman of the Congress Parliamentary Sub-Committee, guided and controlled the activities of these Ministries.

Not for very long, however, for, on September 3, 1939 when Britain declared war on Germany, the Viceroy without consulting either the Central or the Provincial Legislatures, proclaimed India as having entered the war as an ally of Britain.

The Congress could not accept this position and the Congress Ministries resigned. Gandhiji launched Individual Civil Disobedience opposing India's participation in the war, and the Congress leaders began to court arrest. Vallabhbhai Patel was arrested on November 17, 1940. He was released on August 20, 1941 on grounds of health.

Then the All India Congress Committee passed the famous Quit India resolution in Bombay on August 8, 1942, and Vallabhbhai, along with the other members of the Working Committee, was arrested on August 9, 1942 and detained in the Ahmednagar Fort while Gandhiji, Kasturba and Mahadev Desai were detained in the Aga Khan's Palace.

The Sardar was in jail for about three years this time. When, at the end of the war, the Congress leaders were freed and the British Government decided to find a peaceful constitutional solution to the problem of India's Independence, Vallabhbhai Patel was one of the chief negotiators of the Congress.

When India attained Independence he became the Deputy Prime Minister and was responsible for the Home, States and the Information and Broadcasting portfolios.

It was in this capacity that he was called upon to tackle the most intricate and baffling problem of the States' integration into the Union of India. And it is here that his tact, his powers of persuasion and his statesmanship came into full play.

He handled the question as only he could have handled it, managing, in less than a year's time, to reduce the Princely States from 562 to 26 administrative units and bringing democracy to nearly 80 million people of India, comprising almost 27 per cent of the country's population.

The integration of the States could certainly be termed as the crowning achievement of Vallabhbhai Patel's life. But for him, this may not have been achieved easily and quickly.

As Minister of Home Affairs, he presided over efforts to bring back order and peace to a country ravaged by communal strife unprecedented in its history. He accomplished this task with the ruthless efficiency of a great administrator.

He sorted out the problems of partition, restored law and order and dealt with the rehabilitation of thousands of refugees with great courage and foresight. He reorganised our Services which had become depleted with the departure of the British and formed a new Indian Administrative Service, to provide a stable administrative base to our new democracy.

While Gandhiji gave to the Congress a programme for a broad-based action, it was Vallabhbhai who built up the Party machine to carry out that programme. No one before Vallabhbhai had given adequate thought to the need to have an effective organisation, but Vallabhbhai realised this need during his campaigns and devoted his organisational talents and energy to the building up of the strength of the Party which could be geared to fight in an organised and effective manner.

His grip over the Party organisation was complete. Vallabhbhai Patel was thus one of the chief architects and guardians of India's freedom and his contribution towards consolidating the freedom of the country remains unrivalled.

He died on December 15, 1950, leaving behind a son, Dahyabhai Patel, and a daughter, Maniben Patel.