Champaran
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A contribution of Mahatma Gandhi
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's struggle to bring succour to distressed peasants forced to cultivate indigo in Bihar's Champaran district happened exactly 100 years ago, but social scientists and researchers feel his methods remain relevant, even desirable, in today's fractured times.
The Champaran struggle is a very good example of a restrained moral struggle combined with social responsibility, says Salil Mishra, who teaches history at Dr B R Ambedkar University . “It shows how to mobilize opinion and support for a cause without resorting to moral hysteria,“ he says.
Sandeep Bhardwaj of Centre for Policy Research points out that there were no marches or strikes in Champaran. “Instead of defeating the opposition, Gandhi sought to win it over through the art of political persuasion. In contrast, the tendency in today's politics is often to burn down the house to light a candle achieve a political victory by any means necessary , even if it comes at the cost of larger communal harmony ,“ says Bhardwaj, who blogs at revisitingindia.com That's why , says social scientist Ashis Nandy , Gandhi's methods remain relevant. “There is an ethical component in his actions which has tremendous power and validity ,“ he says. Indigo was an important crop for European planters in India. The conditions under which the peasants worked were oppressive. In his book, Gandhi in Champa ran, D G Tendulkar quotes a former magistrate of Faridpur, Mr E De-Latour of the Bengal Civil Service saying, “Not a chest of Indigo reached England without being stained with human blood.“
Dinabandhu Mitra's play , Nil Darpan (1860), highlights the anguish of the peasant tenants (ryots).
“The story of Champaran begins in the early 19th century,“ writes Mridula Mukherjee in `India's struggle for Independence', “when European planters had involved the cultivators in agree ments that forced them to cultivate indigo on 320th of their holdings (known as the tinkathia system).“
The peasants had to pay enhanced rents over a period (sarahbeshi) or simply get out of the system paying a lump sum (tawan).
Gandhi arrived by train at Motihari in Bihar's Champaran district on April 15, 1917. He had come to the region following the request of Raj Kumar Shukla, a local cultivator. The next day, he was asked to leave.He refused, was taken into custody and summoned to court on April 18.
When Gandhi pleaded guilty, the colonial government was nonplussed. Unwilling to make him a martyr, authorities decided to withdraw the case and let him continue to gather statements of cultivators. On April 21, the case was withdrawn.
“Armed with evidence collected from 8,000 peasants, he had little difficulty in convincing the Commission that the tinkathia system needed to be abolished and that the peasants should be compensated for the illegal enhancement of their dues,“ writes Mukherjee.
Misra points out that Champaran was the first systematic effort to introduce the peasant question into the nationalist politics.
“Till then the two had proceeded apart from each other.Nationalist politics was almost `peasant neutral' and peasant protests were local and spontaneous. Gandhi, who was an outsider to Champaran, introduced satyagraha and organised politics in the rural areas. He thus combined the rural with the national,“ he says.
“It was also at Champaran that Gandhi applied his techniques of satyagraha (perfected in South Africa) in India for the first time.Champaran should be seen as the first political laboratory in India where Gandhi made his experiments in satyagraha and then replicated them in other places (polite but firm defiance of the authority , basing struggles not simply on emotions and grievances but concrete enquiry and fact-finding, among others),“ he says.
And as Mahatma Gandhi himself wrote in his autobiography , “The Champaran struggle was a proof of the fact that disinterested service of the people in any sphere ultimately helps the country politically .“
Champaran and the making of the Mahatma
Just two years after he returned from South Africa...
Gandhi visited Champaran in April 1917 after learning of how cultivators there were being forced by British colonialists to grow indigo against their will under unfair terms
His opening shot was to hold a survey
Gandhi collected testimonies and statements of thousands of farmers on the atrocities and abuses inflicted on them by the British landlords And he armed people with knowledge, awareness of rights
During his stay in Champaran, Gandhi helped open three basic schools as he felt the people needed to be literate and learn about their rights. He also organised training in farming and other skills to promote self-reliance
In six months, Gandhi had made his point
Faced with the testimonies from Gandhi, an official Champaran inquiry committee was set up of which Gandhi himself was made a member. The committee submitted its report in October 1917 with recommendations that favoured the peasants. Finally, coercive indigo cultivation ended with the passage of a law in March 1918
