By Prem Singh
The Quit India Movement continued to shape Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia’s political thought even in the years after independence. After playing an underground role in the movement for 21 months, Lohia was arrested in Bombay on 10 May 1944. He was imprisoned first in Lahore Fort and later in Agra. After spending two years in prison, Lohia was released in June 1946. During this period, his father passed away, but Lohia refused to accept parole to perform his last rites.
"The 9th of August was, and will always remain, a people’s event. But, as yet, the 15th of August is celebrated with much fanfare, for on that day the British Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, shook hands with the Indian Prime Minister and handed over damaged independence to a damaged country. The 9th of August expressed the will of the people — we want to be free and we shall be free. For the first time in a long period of our history, crores of people expressed their desire for freedom. In some places, it was expressed with great strength."
Quoting Russian revolutionary thinker Leon Trotsky, Lohia noted that in the Russian Revolution, one percent of the population took part, whereas in India’s August Revolution, 20 percent of the population participated. Lohia thus saw the Quit India Movement primarily from the perspective of the people’s will and their open defiance of imperialist chains. In this movement, the people themselves were their leaders. His active role in the Quit India Movement and his reflections on it can be understood in this light — including a long letter he wrote to the Viceroy of India, Lord Linlithgow, from prison on 2 March 1946.
In the letter, Lohia exposed the brutal and conspiratorial character of British imperialism. The Viceroy had accused Congress leaders of planning an armed uprising during the Quit India Movement and claimed that participants engaged in violent acts. Refuting these allegations, Lohia highlighted the horrific atrocities committed by the British against unarmed civilians. He said that many “Jallianwala Baghs” had taken place across the country while suppressing the movement, yet the people of India, with remarkable courage, continued their non-violent struggle for freedom. He also rejected the Viceroy’s claim that fewer than a thousand people had been killed during the movement. Lohia wrote:
"If we had planned an armed insurrection and our crowds were asked to resort to violence, believe me, Linlithgow, Gandhiji would today have been securing a reprieve for you from the free people and their government."
He asserted: "The history of the unarmed common man begins with the Indian Revolution of 9 August."
When Soviet Russia joined the Second World War, the Marxist leadership in India decided to oppose the Quit India Movement and support the British. This created not only a bitter confrontation between Congress Socialists and Marxists but also confusion among Marxist activists regarding the very meaning of patriotism and sedition. In the last months of his underground life, Lohia wrote his long essay Economics after Marx. His biographer, Indumati Kelkar, observes:
"In spite of the instability of underground life, continuous police pursuit, anxiety over the fate of the movement, and lack of relevant literature, Lohia’s thesis has been regarded as a major contribution to global economic thought and to the socialist movement. In it, he interpreted Marxian economics in an original and novel way."
In this essay, Lohia avoided polemics — whether with communists or with other organisations and leaders who opposed the movement and sided with the British. Instead, he undertook a fresh examination of Marxism, a process of reflection that continued in later years. His famous 1952 Pachmarhi speech could be seen as a culmination of that intellectual journey. He later wrote:
"In 1942–43, when the movement against the British was on, the socialists were either in jail or being hunted by the police. That was also the time when the communists, following their foreign masters, had raised the slogan of 'People’s War'. I was totally confused by the spectacle of Marxism in all its contradictions. Then I decided I would discover the essential truth of Marxism and purge it of falsehood. Economics, politics, history, and philosophy have been the four main facets of Marxism, and I deemed it necessary to analyse all of them. But as I was in the midst of analysing its economics, I was arrested."
This essay can also be read from the perspective of ordinary Indians struggling under imperialist oppression. For Lohia, the Quit India Movement was meant to give birth to a government of free people, grounded in a sustained anti-imperialist spirit.
However, looking back after twenty-five years, Lohia also pointed out the movement’s weakness — the lack of enduring persistence. He wrote:
"The will was short-lived, though strong. It didn’t have lasting intensity. The day our nation acquires a tenacious will, we will be able to face the world."
He added:
"Anyhow, this is the 25th anniversary of 9 August 1942. It should be celebrated well. Its 50th anniversary perhaps will be celebrated in such a way that 15 August will be forgotten, and even 26 January will be overshadowed — or at least equalled. The 26th of January and the 9th of August are events of the same class. One expressed the will for freedom and the other the will to fight for it."
As a leader and thinker, Lohia struggled throughout his life for a government of the free people in independent India. But neither during his lifetime nor after his death did 9 August gain the status of a national day. Lohia did not live to see the 50th anniversary of the movement, which fell in 1992 — the year India’s economy was opened to multinational corporate plunder under the New Economic Policy, and when a five-hundred-year-old mosque was demolished during the ‘Ram Mandir Andolan’. Since then, the nexus of neoliberalism and communal fascism has turned India’s ruling class into a staunch enemy of the people who, during the Quit India Movement, had faced brutal imperialist repression to pave the way for independence.
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The author, associated with the socialist movement, is a former teacher at Delhi University and a former fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla
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