The capitalist class, who saw making huge profits as their dharma, were hopeful of recovering their outlays by making generous donations to the Congress party. Reports of scandals involving big industrial companies and elected representatives and rumours of a nexus between the two were circulating widely. Disgusted by such exposés, the public had begun to despise any member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) as
mailay
—tainted. No other political organization was strong enough or well enough organized to challenge the supremacy of the Congress party. The two potential rivals of the Congress, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh and the Communist Party of India, had broken out into open revolt against the government thus giving it a legal excuse to suppress them. Resigned to the fact that the Congress would win the forthcoming general election, people would say, ‘Let the Congress continue in power. It has been bleeding us dry for the last five years. It will soon have its fill. If another party comes into power it will first suck our blood as much as the Congress has done, and still not be satisfied.’
In an atmosphere of such hostility towards the Congress party and distrust of its leaders, there were a few exceptions. In case of Sood there was neither any suspicion of dishonestly making money, nor any rumours of acquiring property by graft. Even Sood’s many detractors conceded that he had no craving for the traditional lures of
zar-joru-zamin
, gold, women and land. Hundreds of people had profited through their association with Sood, hundreds more were hopeful of doing similarly. They were his rank-and-file supporters, whose dedication and loyalty were beyond question. His grip on the Punjab Parliamentary Board was firm, and now that his ministerial duties were temporarily removed from his shoulders, he had ample time and opportunity to strategize for the coming elections. Since his own election to the House was almost a certainty, the packing of the legislative assembly with as many of his candidates as possible had become his main concern.
Sood imposed that Puri should stand as a Congress candidate in the elections. Puri discussed the subject first with Kanak, and then again with her in Gill’s presence. Both of them were lukewarm about the idea of
Puri’s candidacy.
Nazir
had generally been critical of the previous Congress administration and particularly of its self-seeking members of that legislative assembly. The weekly’s editorial policy had been to emphasize Gandhiji’s ruling laid down during his last days that instead of winning elections to form the government, Congress workers should remember their own grass roots and serve the people of India. Neither Gill nor Kanak could approve of a volte-face in Puri’s thinking by contesting the election as a candidate for the Assembly. Kanak’s enthusiasm for Puri’s candidacy had dampened after she had observed the sad reality of the Congress administration in Punjab and the truly contemptible nature of its members in Lucknow.
Puri’s argument was that it would be ridiculous to allow burglars to enter one’s house and then stand outside and call for help. The appropriate course of action, therefore, was to get elected to the House and strengthen Sood’s hand rather than to oppose the government openly like the communists had unsuccessfully tried to do. Also, as an MLA, one could use democratic and constitutional means to ensure that the Congress remained true to the socialistic policies adopted at the party’s plenary session in Karachi in 1931. In Puri’s view it was imperative to check the growing pro-feudal and pro-capitalist influence on the Congress government platform. Besides, it would amount to national suicide to allow the responsibility of representing the people fall into the hands of vested interests. Masterji, Nayyar, Somraj and many others agreed with Puri. Pandit Girdharilal had written a letter to lend his support to Puri’s idea. Kanak could do nothing but hold her tongue.
Puri wanted to make full use of
Nazir
in order to boost the election campaign for Sood and himself. Rather than be accused of self-promotion, he thought it prudent to name Kanak as managing editor instead of himself, and to appoint Gill as the editor of the weekly.
Gill had decided to honour his pledge of friendship to Puri. He thought up a creative way to combine his own views with Puri’s expectation, and introduced in
Nazir
a forum for discussion and debate on the responsibilities of a citizen in a democratic society. In his editorials he would forcefully argue that any indifference to the governmental policies and the legislative process should be considered burying one’s head in sand and neglect of civic duty. He would also urge the public to consider their options carefully before finally casting their vote in the coming elections. At the same time he would warn the readers of
Nazir
to be objective rather than emotional and vote for the Congress candidates with progressive ideas and policies
rather than for a motley collection of political parties in disarray. He would remind the public that the Congress was a representative of the majority of Indians, and if the public remained watchful, the Congress would live up to people’s expectations and fulfil its promises.
Puri was greatly impressed with and appreciative of Gill’s writing skills. He would miss Gill if the latter did not come to visit Model Town in the evening.
One day in June that year when Kanak arrived at the
Nazir
office at ten in the morning, she found Gill speaking respectfully and kindly to an old, sickly-looking man. He introduced him to Kanak.
Comrade Daulatram Azad was released from prison two months ago. Since then whenever he found a job at some workshop or factory, a CID plainclothesman hovered around to keep an eye on him. Who would have wanted to hire a marked man and alienate the police? The poor soul lacked the wherewithal to start any business or trade.
Azad had studied only up to Urdu Middle School. He had been working as a lathe operator in Rawalpindi in 1930 when he joined
Atishichakkar
, an underground group that sought to free India from the British by armed insurgency, and had begun to make casings for small explosive devices for the group. He was among the suspects arrested after bombs had been exploded at several places in Punjab.
Azad was convicted for armed conspiracy and given a seven-year prison sentence. In prison he had come in close contact with some university-educated left-wing intellectuals, who had completely transformed his ideas of how India could be freed from foreign rule. Instead of sporadic individual attempts to fight the British, Azad had begun to dream of fomenting a people’s revolution that would create a proletarian state. By the time he was released, his younger brother had taken on the responsibility of supporting the family. Azad had joined the Communist Party and had begun to organize workers on the ‘party wage’ of twenty-five rupees per month. He had been thrown into jail a second time in 1940 after the Communist Party had declared its opposition to the imperialist war in Europe. He had been released in 1942 with other communist inmates when the party line was changed in support of the war, and had gone back to organizing the working classes. He was arrested again and sent to prison a third time in 1948 when the Communist Party called for open revolt against the Congress government.
The communists interned during 1948 and 1949 were acting according to the party dictate of ‘struggle from outside and struggle inside the jail’. They staged protest demonstrations in defiance of the jail regulations. They provoked the prison officers by shouting ‘Down with Congress imperialism! Down with the capitalist government! Down with the Congress party government! Give us jobs and bread, or hand over your power. Just one more push and out with this rotten government! All power to the rule of the workers!’ How could the prison officers, now loyal to the Congress government, tolerate such open defiance? Those, who had beaten up people shouting slogans such as ‘Down with British imperialists’ during the British Raj, now had to stifle slogans and chants opposing the Congress government. Azad and other communists like him, hardened from serving prison terms under the British rule, knew how to counter repressive and authoritarian measures under the Congress raj by calling the prison officers such names as ‘government dogs’ and ‘prison mongrels’!
The Congress government, in accordance with its avowed faith in non-violence and popular democracy, had introduced many revisions in correctional regulations. Under the British Raj, the meals for the inmates had been chapattis made of wheat mixed with coarse grain flour, and daal served in thalis and bowls made of tin. Under Congress rules the chapattis began to be made of wheat and the food was served in thalis and bowls of brass, and an occasional lump of sweet gur. Instead of knee-length shorts, the inmates were issued ankle-length pyjama trousers. But the shackles and truncheons wielded by the warders had remained the same, as had the cells for solitary confinement. Police intervention in the jail affairs had increased, and the prisoner’s legal rights were fewer.
Under the British Raj, Azad had been housed in the B-Class jail barracks meant for political prisoners. His rations had included bread, butter, meat and milk, and he had been allowed to borrow books from the prison library. When he had been released from the Deoli Camp after serving the two-and-a-half-year prison term for armed conspiracy, he had gained 10 pounds.
The Congress party that had once believed in facing bullets and baton charges with bowed heads and peaceful resistance when fighting the British had now adopted a different policy for communists who believed in violence. Since the government had proof that the communists were preparing for armed insurgency, the question of their legal and democratic rights and treating them with any leniency did not arise. Azad and other
communist prisoners were made to wear, for weeks at a stretch, two-foot-long shackles that kept their feet apart, and were beaten with truncheons and dragged along the ground inside the jail even when they tried to make a peaceful protest, in the Congress party’s own satyagraha style. Locked up in solitary confinement, they went on hunger strikes for weeks on end, and were fed milk forcibly through rubber tubes inserted in their nostrils. After suffering torture and humiliation for months, they were to learn one day through newspapers that the party had once again changed its line and they had been ordered to work among the masses after their release.
During the upheaval caused by sectarian riots in Rawalpindi, Azad’s younger brother had been murdered and his wife had gone missing without a trace. Azad had been barely able to escape with his aged mother, and his nephew and niece. The following year he had ended up again in jail. On being released, he had learned that his fourteen-year-old nephew was working for eight annas per day at a roadside cycle repair shop in Ambala Cantonment whose owner continually slapped the boy around. His mother, Azad discovered, had found work as a maid for a khadi-wearing lawyer, and his nine-year-old niece was taking care of the lawyer’s baby boy, in return for free meals and a total of fifteen rupees per month for both.
The Communist Party, Azad found, had been weakened considerably after its abortive attempt at the people’s revolution. Only a small number of ‘important’ comrades had been chosen to work for a party wage, and he was not among them. Besides, he now wanted to take care of his aged mother and send his nephew and niece to school. He knew how to work a lathe, but who would give him a job with the CID shadowing him. For a while he drove a cycle rickshaw, but his weak lungs could not take the strain and he soon developed a cough and began to spit blood-spotted phlegm.
Gill had got his first introduction to Marxist literature through Azad in Rawalpindi while studying for his Matric exam. When Gill entered university, Azad would join him and other politically minded young men and quietly listen as they discussed Marxist ideology. Gill’s expulsion from the party for disobeying the dictate against Sikh men cutting their long hair had infuriated Azad. Gill had continued to treat Azad with respect and later on, when working at the
Sitara
weekly, had occasionally helped Azad with money. Azad had come to Jalandhar after seeing Gill’s name as the editor of
Nazir
.
Azad’s heart-rending story deeply moved Kanak. She vented her anger on the Communist Party policy that had caused Azad so much suffering, ‘What’s wrong with the party, it changes its policy so often. First it opposed the war, and then the same war became the People’s War. In 1948 it was total revolution, in ’50 it became the bourgeois democratic revolution. No consideration for how many lives such dithering may have ruined.’
‘And what has your Congress been up to? What about Gandhiji?’ Azad replied to Kanak’s show of sympathy by glaring at her. ‘At the time of his non-cooperation movement and civil disobedience he made thousands of students leave their studies, made thousands of others give up their government jobs, millions suffered police beatings and went to jail, and then your Bapu felt that he had committed “a Himalayan blunder” and called off the movement. He told everyone to make bonfires of foreign-made cloth, and then told them to stop doing it. He went on his Dandi march to break the salt law, and then gave it up. He launched his jungle Satyagraha, and asked farmers not to pay land revenue, and let that also peter out. He called for a boycott of the legislative councils, and then accepted the existence of the same councils. He called for a boycott of the Round Table Conference, then went and took part in it. At first he renounced the boycott of the war, and then himself denounced it. He opposed the partition of India, then accepted it. There are hundreds of instances of Gandhi and the Congress changing their policies at the slightest excuse. Don’t you try to lecture me! I’ve been fighting for the country’s freedom since before you were even born. The Congress has changed its final goal so often. Sometimes it wanted dominion status, then full freedom under the Empire, then complete independence, then a republic, then the Ramrajya, then capitalism, then socialism. Our party has always had one single objective: dictatorship of the proletariat! We only changed our tactics. You congresswallahs dare to preach to us? First go and look at yourself in the mirror!’