MUNDO LABORAL 16.2. Empresas de trabajo temporal

Gandhi returned from South Africa in 1915 having won a partial victory there. Smuts' Indian Relief Act of June 1914 abolished the £ 3 tax and recognized Indian marriages, though discrimination certainly did not end and the broader question of white racist exploitation of Africans and Indian alike had hardly been touched upon as yet. During the next three years, Gandhi acquired the reputation of a man who would take up local wrongs (of Champaran indigo cultivators, Ahmedabad textile workers, and Kheda peasants) and usually manage to do

something concrete about them—a political style in sharp contrast to the established Congress (and Home Rule League) pattern of starting with somewhat abstract all-India issues or

programmes and proceeding from top downwards. Judith Brown has argued that the main

importance of these early movements lay in the recruitment of 'sub-contractors' who would serve as his life-long lieutenants—like Rajendra Prasad, Anugraha Narayan Sinha and J.B. Kripalani in Champaran, or Vallabhbhai Patel, Mahadev Desai, Indulal Yajnik and Shankarlal Banker in the two Gujarat movements. But her own and other available accounts reveal other important dimensions, too: the existence in every case of pressures from below, a note of millenarian appeal at times, and the first indications also of a restraining role.

Champaran, as we have seen, had a long history of anti-planter discontent and agitation. Jacques Pouchepadass's detailed analysis makes clear that the crucial mediating role in peasant

mobilization was played not so much by Gandhian converts from the small-town intelligentsia (vakils like Rajendra Prasad, A.N. Sinha, or Braj Kishore Prasad, or the Muzaffarpur College

teacher J.B. Kripalani—the 'subcontractors' of Judith Brown) but by a somewhat lower stratum of rich and middle peasants (Rajkumar Shukla who had gone to Lucknow to invite Gandhi, Sant Raut, Khendar Rai), local mahajans and traders who resented

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planter competition in moneylending and trade, and a few village mukhtars (attorneys) and school-teachers (Pir Muhammad, Harbans Sahai). Gandhi's own role was at first sight confined to instituting an open enquiry in July 1917 (after a local ban on his entry had been rescinded by higher authorities in face of a satyagraha threat), and giving all-India publicity to the grievances of the Champaran indigo cultivators—an enquiry and a publicity which led to the abolition of tinkathia. Yet the psychological impact far surpassed the concrete activities: Gandhi 'is daily transfiguring the imaginations of masses of ignorant men with visions of an early millenium', reported the Bettiah S.D.O. on 29 April 1917. A raiyat compared Gandhi to Ramchandra, and declared before the enquiry committee that 'tenants would not fear the Rakhshasa— planters now that Gandhi was there'. Rumours were current that Gandhi had been sent by the Viceroy or the King to overrule all local officials and planters; and even that the British would leave Champaran in a few months. There were some signs of militancy going beyond Gandhian limits—a few attacks on indigo factories and cases of incendiarism, for instance. By late 1917, peasants were at times refusing to pay even the reduced sharahbeshi which had been accepted by the Gandhian settlement. Gandhi left behind him a group of fifteen volunteers who tried to start constructive village work, and told Rajendra Prasad that the only real solution 'was the education of raiyats and a constant process of mediation between them and the planters'—but such efforts do not seem to have been particularly successful at Champaran, where only three village-level workers were still active by May 1918.

The Gandhian intervention proved much more of a permanent success at Kheda district of Gujarat, a land of relatively prosperous Kanbi-Patidar peasant proprietors producing foodgrains, cotton and tobacco for nearby Ahmedabad (and not of big zamindars, planters, and extremely impoverished petty tenants, as Champaran was). Many Patidars had gone to South Africa as traders, and primary education was fairly widespread among them. As David Hardiman has pointed out in a recent micro-study of Kheda, a late-nineteenth century 'golden age' here was succeeded by repeated famine and plague after 1899, making revenue payments (which were seldom reduced) very difficult. The 'lesser Patidars', living in villages occupying a lower position 185

in the marriage network within the caste, were the worst affected, for the superior Patidars could accumulate extra wealth through dowries and often got employment also in the civil service of nearby Baroda state—and it was the former group which was to provide the most permanent support to Gandhian nationalism. In 1917-18, a poor harvest coincided with high prices of kerosene, ironware, cloth, and salt, while the low-caste Baraiyas whom the Kheda Patidars employed as farm labour had successfully forced up wages. 'We have to pay six annas for labour which we used to get for three', a Patidar complained in April 1918. The initiative for no-revenue (to press the case for remissions in the context of the poor harvest) really came not from Gandhi or Ahmedabad politicians, but from local village leaders like Mohanlal Pandya of Kapadvanj

taluka in Kheda in November 1917; it was taken up by Gandhi after a lot of hesitation only on 22 March 1918. The delay proved unwise, as by that time the poorer peasants had already been coerced to pay up revenue, and a good rabi crop had weakened the case for remissions. Kheda, the first real Gandhian peasant satyagraha in India, consequently proved a rather patchy affair, affecting only 70 villages out of 559, and having to be called off in June after no more than a token concession. But sustained village work would build up over the years a solid Gandhian base in Gujarat, particularly in the Anand and Borsad talukas of the rich tobacco and dairy- farming Charotar tract of Kheda, and Bardoli taluka of Surat (where Gandhians linked up with the constructive work already started by Kunvarji Mehta's Patidar Yuvak Mandal). The deep Patidar faith in Gandhian non-violence followed not just from traditional Vaishnava-bhakti influences, but from the fact that 'as property-owners they did not want violent revolution'. The Kheda satyagraha has been followed in fact by a spate of dacoities in Patidar houses by Baraiyas who apparently felt that British law and order was collapsing. That the Gujarat peasants had a mind of their own, and were not simply responding to strings pulled by Gandhi's 'sub-

contractors' as Judith Brown likes to assume, is proved by the extremely poor response that Gandhi and his followers obtained in Kheda for their war recruitment campaign in the summer of 1918—'villagers who had met them previously with garlands, now refused them food',

(quotations 186

from Hardiman, Peasant Agitations in Kheda District, Gujarat, 1917-1934, Sussex thesis, 1975, pp. 113, 158, 151).

Unlike the Champaran and Kheda movements against white planters and revenue authorities, Gandhi's intervention in Ahmedabad in February-March 1918 was in a situation of purely internal conflict between Gujarat mill-owners and their workers. The textile magnate Ambalal Sarabhai had been an early contributor to the Sabarmati Asrama finances, while his sister Anasuya Behn had become a Gandhian disciple, visiting Kheda during the satyagraha and starting nightschools among mill-workers. The mill-owners' attempt to end the 'plague bonus' of 1917 in a period of rising prices led to a confrontation despite Gandhi's mediation attempts, with the workers demanding a 50% wage-hike in lieu of the plague bonus (later reduced under

Gandhi's advice to 35%) and the owners offering only 20%. The Ahmedabad strike of March 1918 under Gandhi's leadership was notable for the Mahatma's first use of the weapon of the hunger-strike (from 15 March). Conventionally this is described as a successful attempt to rally the flagging spirit of the workers, an alternative to militant picketing which Gandhi strictly forbade. The District Magistrate's report quoted by Judith Brown gives an interestingly different version: the workers, we are told, had 'assailed him (Gandhi) bitterly for being a friend of the mill-owners, riding in their motorcars and eating sumptuously with them, while the weavers were starving', and Gandhi allegedly began his fast 'stung by these taunts'. Whatever its motives, the hunger-strike successfully won for the workers a 35% wage-increase. The Gandhian hold on the Ahmedabad workers was consolidated through the Textile Labour Association of 1920, grounded on the philosophy of peaceful arbitration of disputes, interdependence of capital and labour, and the concept of owners being 'trustees' for the workers. Gandhi's excellent personal contacts with Ahmedabad mill-owners and workers alike made such methods a success here. It is significant, however, that this Gandhian model, which rejected not only politicization along

'class-war' line but also militant economic struggles, never spread beyond Ahmedabad. Gandhi himself, unlike many other nationalist leaders, kept strictly aloof from the AITUC right from the beginning, long before the Communists became important within it. The message of class peace and mutual adjustment had

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much greater success among the peasantry than with the proletariat, for in the countryside exploitation at times took on a 'paternalistic' colour and issues like land revenue or the salt tax provided unifying grievances.

Down to early 1919, Gandhi's interventions in matters of all-India politics had been relatively minimal, being mainly confined to protests against the internment of Annie Besant and repeated pleas for the release of the Ali brothers (through which he had already started developing

important contacts with Muslim religious leaders like Abdul Ban of Lucknow). He showed little interest in the Reform proposals, which were engrossing the attention of most other politicians. The provocative enactment of the Rowlatt Act in February 1919 made him turn to an all-India satyagraha campaign for the first time.