Different Forms Of Defiance Adopted During Cdm

Different Forms of Defiance Adopted During Cdm

1.    Boycott of foreign goods: 

•    Gandhiji had already called for a boycott of foreign cloth and liquor stores before his arrest, and he had specifically asked women to play a leading role in this movement. 
 
•    He had said, "To call woman the weaker sex is a libel: it is man's injustice to woman," and the women of India had unquestionably demonstrated in 1930 that they were second to none in strength and tenacity of purpose.
 
•    Women who had never left their homes alone, women who had remained in purdah, young mothers, widows, and unmarried girls became a familiar sight as they stood outside liquor shops, opium dens, and stores selling foreign cloth from morning to night, quietly but firmly persuading customers and shopkeepers to change their ways.
 
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•    Students and youth, along with women, were the most vocal supporters of the boycott of foreign clothing and liquor. 
 
•    Regular Congress sentries were stationed in business districts in Bombay, for example, to ensure that merchants and dealers did not break the foreign cloth boycott. 
 
•    Traders' associations and commercial bodies, as well as many mill owners who refused to use foreign yarn and pledged not to manufacture coarse cloth that competed with khadi, were very active in enforcing the boycott.
 
•    Fines imposed by their own associations, social boycotts, Congress blacklisting, and picketing were used to bring the dissenters to heel. 
 
Defiance Adopted During Cdm

2.    Refuse to pay taxes: 

•    The refusal to pay the chowkidari tax became the focus of a new type of no-tax campaign in Eastern India. 
 
•    Chowkidars were guards who supplemented the small police force in the rural areas of this region, who were paid out of a special tax levied on the villages. They were particularly despised because they served as government spies as well as retainers for local landowners. 
 
•    The movement against the tax, which demanded the resignation of Chowkidars and the influential members of chowkidari panchayats who appointed the Chowkidars, began in Bihar in May, despite the fact that the province's landlocked nature limited the scope of the salt agitation. 
 
•    The tax was refused in the districts of Monghyr, Saran, and Bhagalpur, for example, Chowkidars were induced to resign, and a social boycott was used against those who resisted. 
 
•    The government retaliated by seizing property worth hundreds of thousands of rupees in exchange for a few rupees in tax, as well as by abusing and torturing people. 
 
•    The situation reached a head on May 31 in Bihpur, Bhagalpur, when the police, desperate to assert their rapidly eroding authority, occupied the Congress ashram, which was the epicentre of local nationalist activity. 
 
•    The onset of the monsoon in Bengal, which made it difficult to make salt, sparked anti-chowkidari and anti-Union Board agitation. Villagers faced severe repression in this area as well, losing thousands of rupees in property through confiscation and destruction, and having to hide for days in forests to avoid the police's wrath. 
 
•    In Gujarat, a determined no-tax movement was underway in Kheda district, Bardoli taluqa in Surat district, and Jambusar in Broach — the tax refused here was land revenue. Thousands of villagers crossed the border from British India into neighbouring princely states such as Baroda, where they camped for months in the open fields with their families, cattle, and household goods. Their homes were broken into, their possessions were destroyed, and their land was taken away. Vallabhbhai Patel's eighty-year-old mother, who was cooking in her village house in Karamsad, was not spared by the police; her cooking utensils were kicked around and filled with kerosene and stone. Vallabhbhai continued to provide encouragement and solace to the hard-pressed peasants of his native land during his brief sojourns out of jail throughout 1930. Despite the fact that their meagre resources were quickly depleted and exhaustion set in, they persisted in the wilderness until a truce in March 1931 allowed them to return to their homes.
 

3.    Use of forest: 

•    Defying the forest In Maharashtra, Karnataka, and the Central Provinces, Jaws took on a mass character, especially in areas with large tribal populations, who had been disproportionately affected by the colonial government's restrictions on forest use. 
 
•    The crowds that broke the forest laws swelled to 70,000 or more in some places. 
 
•    In Assam, a powerful student-led agitation against the infamous ‘Cunningham circular,' which required students and their guardians to provide assurances of good behaviour. 
 

4.    National flag as symbol of national spirit: 

•    The people seemed to have taken to heart Jawaharlal Nehru’s message when he unfurled the national flag at Lahore in December 1929: ‘Remember once again, now that this flag is unfurled, it must not be lowered as long as a single Indian, man, woman, or child lives in India.” 
 
•    Attempts to defend the honour of the national flag in the face of extreme brutality frequently resulted in spectacular acts of heroism. 
 
•    Tota Narasaiah Naidu, of Bundur on the Andhra Coast, would rather be beaten unconscious by a fifteen-member police force than give up the national flag.
 
•    P. Krishna Pillai, who later became a major Communist leader, was also subjected to lathi blows in Calicut. A group of children in Surat defied the police with their ingenuity. Frustrated by the police snatching the national flag from their hands, they came up with the idea of stitching khadi dresses in the three colours of the national flag, and then triumphantly paraded the streets with these little, "living flags," defying the police to take away the national flag!'
 
•    Even in remote villages, the national flag, a symbol of the new spirit, has become a common sight. The setting for a different kind of movement — a no-revenue, no-rent campaign — was the U.P. The no-revenue part was a call to zamindars not to pay revenue to the government, and the no-rent part was a call to tenants not to pay rent to zamindars. Because the zamindars were mostly loyal to the government, this was effectively a no-rent struggle. 
 
Defiance Adopted During Cdm

5.    Some others methods:

a.    The movement popularised a number of different forms of mobilisation. In villages and towns, prabhatpheris, in which groups of men, women, and children went around singing nationalist songs at dawn, became the norm. 
 
b.    Patrikas, or illegal newssheets, flooded the country, sometimes written by hand and sometimes cyclostyled, as part of a strategy to defy the hated Press Act. 
 
c.    The nationalist message was delivered to the villages using magical lanterns. And, as before, the movement's staples remained incessant tours by individual leaders and workers, as well as groups of men and women, and the holding of large and small public meetings. 
 
d.    Children were divided into vanar senas, or monkey armies, and the girls, at least in one place, decided they wanted their own manjari sena, or cat army!
 
The civil disobedience movement had taken root in the province in the early months, but repression had caused a lull in activity, and despite the fact that no-rent was in the air, it wasn't until October that activity picked up again when Jawaharlal Nehru, who had been released from prison for a short time, convinced the U.P. Congress Committee to sanction the no-rent campaign. The campaign was launched in December after two months of preparation and intensive propaganda; by January, severe repression had forced many peasants to flee their villages. The districts of Agra and Rae Bareli were important centres of this campaign.

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