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Mainstream, VOL XLIX, No 42, October 8, 2011

Imperatives for United Action

Saturday 8 October 2011, by Nikhil Chakravartty

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FROM N.C.’S WRITINGS

The earthquake that has devastated large parts of northern Bihar and adjoining areas of neighbouring States has been characterised as the second worst in the century.

That actually takes us back to the first one, the one in 1934, in which, as far as this writer can recall, more than a thousand lost their lives and lakhs were rendered homeless. Roads were destroyed, railway lines uprooted, bridges demolished. Many areas were cut off and marooned in utter isolation. One does not know as yet the toll of this week’s earthquake. It might take weeks before one would get the full picture of the devastation, particularly because of the inaccessibility into the interior of Nepal which has been severely devastated.

What has remained intact about the 1934 earthquake in the memory of many of us who were students in the university at that time, was not only its devastation but the massive relief operation undertaken on a totally non-official basis. If the hapless victim of that earthquake was the large number of people in Bihar, the hero of relief campaign was the great leader of Bihar, Rajendra Prasad. By that time, Rajen Babu had already been known as the leader of the Congress party in Bihar. But his magnificent work in organising earthquake relief in the months following the devastation in 1934 made him a leader of outstanding national eminence.

By present-day standards, this may sound rather strange that a political leader could gain in stature through sheer relief work. In current political parlance, such relief work is listed as a low-priority “non-political” activity, left to be undertaken by so-called social workers and do-gooders. But the tradition built up by the freedom struggle, particularly after Gandhiji’s advent, was that there must be a close linkage between direct political action and wide-ranging day-to-day activity touching the life and living of the millions in our society. It is fashionable nowadays to talk about “grassroots activity”. But the tradition of grassroots activity was all-pervasive in our war of independence. It needs to be understood that our national struggle for freedom was based primarily on mobilising the masses and not on engineering a revolt in the armed forces or armed clashes. Gandhiji’s strategy—put into effect by the entire national movement—was to activate the dumb, driven millions—as they used to be looked down upon by the alien rulers and their henchmen—and to enable them to shed fear and gain self-confidence so that they could stand up to the Raj. This task of activating the masses involved sustained activity by the Congress and its leadership on all issues of concern affecting the millions. Whether it was fight against epidemic, asserting the Harijan’s right to enter temples, emancipating the womanhood, rescue work in fire or flood, or bringing succour in all forms of distress—the Congress emerged as the guiding force.

When Rajen Babu promptly took up relief work immediately after the great earthquake in 1934, the Congress had been facing the brunt of repression in the aftermath of the civil disobedience movement and the confrontation with the British Raj that inexorably followed the breakdown of the Round Table. In fact, Rajen Babu came out of the prison to face the grim havoc of the earthquake. He did not wait for relief to arrive from the government side. He chalked out a multi-pronged campaign: first, he arranged for the collection of whatever was available in Bihar itself both in terms of material and manpower. This was done on a massive scale and attracted thousands to come from outside the orbit of the Congress. Secondly, a nationwide campaign for collecting cash, relief material and volunteers. This was not only meant to rouse the conscience of the entire nation but the Congress party was largely reactivated and once again sucked up into such relief activity lakhs of people who might otherwise have fought shy of getting involved with anything that the Congress undertook. Thirdly, apart from immediate succour for survival, Rajen Babu’s relief operation included rebuilding of demolished structures, revival of destroyed villages—in short, reconstruction of the economy itself within the limited compass of the earthquake-devastated zone.

On the face of it, all this may on paper appear to be non-political activity. But as the results showed, it activated the entire Bihar Congress, helped towards activating the Congress on a national scale, and reinforced the living links between the common millions and the leadership of the national movement. As an individual leader, this remarkable excursion into relief work made Rajen Babu a widely respected leader much beyond the pale of the Congress membership. In a couple of years, this brought tremendous political dividends for the Congress when it swept the poll called after the Government of India Act in 1935 that led to the formation of elected Ministries under provincial autonomy in 1937.

Do all these have any lesson for us today? No doubt, a democratically elected government in independent India would come forward, as it is doing, with a massive relief programme. At the same time, its weakness would be that it would have to depend in its transmission and enforce-ment on the bureaucratic machinery. It is here that the political parties could be motivated. The Prime Minister has engaged himself in on-the-spot survey and directing different arms of the administration, both Central and at the State level, to rush relief to the victims. At the same time, he could, as the Congress-I President, put his entire party membership on the relief work—not just those belonging to the affected areas but the entire party on a nationwide basis as was done in 1934. This, however, has to be done by making serious efforts at bringing in other political parties in a combined effort, irrespective of their affiliations and approaches. No relief work worth the name can tackle a catastrophe of the magnitude of a devastating earthquake without the support and active involvement of a wider spectrum of political activists than what a single party can provide. This is often forgotten by parties in office, wherever they may be. But experience of the past has shown that no party loses and every party gains in political terms by cooperating with each other in the face of a national disaster. If relief to the distressed and rehabilitation of the devastated area are to be lifted to the level of an all-out national endeavour, the Prime Minister must seek the active cooperation of all political parties, and these parties in their turn must not only respond to such a call but get themselves totally involved in it.

One sometimes has the uneasy feeling that harking back to the past may not appeal to the present generation of leaders with their heady iconoclasm towards whatever has been done in the past: the mod in politics tends to dismiss the old as being out of date. What is to be realised is that while every new approach is to be welcomed, the wisdom distilled from the experience of the past is a reliable standby for any leadership especially when it has been bequeathed with a heritage as rich as the many-splendoured endeavour connected with our freedom struggle.

(Mainstream, August 27, 1988)

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