{"id":2837,"date":"2007-09-06T13:56:53","date_gmt":"2007-09-06T08:26:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200709\/getting-free-earlier\/"},"modified":"2007-09-06T13:56:53","modified_gmt":"2007-09-06T08:26:53","slug":"getting-free-earlier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200709\/getting-free-earlier\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting Free Earlier"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ramachandra Guha<\/a> (via<\/a>) writes that the Indian public opinion has is changing its preference for icons from Gandhi and Nehru to supporters of violent revolution like Savarkar, Bhagat Singh and Bose. I disagree with the notion that any real change in attitude has occurred. It is more likely that those attitudes have come to the fore among English speakers. We are also much less polite to national icons than our parents were, so instead of saying “Gandhi was a great man, though he had some flaws”, it is much more acceptable to say “Gandhi was an idiot”. But there was always a substantial faction that preferred violent revolution to the non-violent movement that took place. <\/p>\n

Was that faction right? Would we have gained independence faster if our great-grand parents had staged a violent revolution? I think that the answer to that is yes, but no, there was no chance at all that a violent revolution could have taken place on a scale that would have forced the British to leave. <\/p>\n

I don’t want to minimize the suffering and sacrifices that the freedom fighters went through – enduring prison and lathi charges, staying away from their families, not being able to complete their education – all these were no jokes. But I doubt if a sufficient number would have been motivated to take the far greater risks that an insurgent or a terrorist movement would have entailed. Bad as the British rule was, the things they did were not so bad that it generated the level of outrage required, especially among the educated, who would be the leaders of the revolution. <\/p>\n

There were some exceptions of course – the most significant one was Jalianwala bagh – I don’t think that it is a coincidence that Punjab gave birth to the most number of violent revolutionaries. <\/p>\n

Secondly, a violent movement would probably have alienated the people. Even with the best care the revolutionaries could take to avoid targeting “civilians”, if the movement had reached a large scale, causing difficulties to the uninvolved population would have been unavoidable. Also, the revolutionaries would be mostly fighting other Indians – they would have lost public sympathy quite soon, just as the Punjab terrorists started losing sympathy when the dead bodies of policemen returned to their villages. Again, this has to do with the nature of the British rule. If the British had been really brutal rulers, ordinary Indians would have put up with considerable amount of difficulties. But they weren’t that brutal. <\/p>\n

Finally, any violent movement that goes on for long runs the risk of going out of control. If you have a gun, the temptation to turn it on your own people, or to turn it on your comrades for trivial reasons, is huge. Witness the Naxalites, the LTTE or any movement that started with understandable intentions. <\/p>\n

So notwithstanding my contempt for the rest of Gandhiji’s views, I must say that keeping the freedom movement as a non-violent mass movement was a masterstroke. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ramachandra Guha (via) writes that the Indian public opinion has is changing its preference for icons from Gandhi and Nehru to supporters of violent revolution like Savarkar, Bhagat Singh and Bose. I disagree with the notion that any real change in attitude has occurred. It is more likely that those attitudes have come to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2837"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2837\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}