The Kisan Sabha movement started in Bihar under the leadership of Swami Sahajanand Saraswati who had formed in 1929 theBihar Provincial Kisan Sabha (BPKS) in order to mobilise peasant grievances against the zamindari attacks on their occupancy rights, and thus sparking the Farmers' movement in India
Biography
Sahajanand Saraswati was born in Deva, Dullahpur, Ghazipur district in eastern Uttar Pradesh in 1889 to a family of Brahmins of the Bhumihar clan. He was the last of six sons and was then called Naurang Rai. His mother died when he was a child and he was raised by an aunt. His father, Beni Rai, was a cultivator and knew little about religion.
The family held a small zamindari, income but as the family grew and the land was partitioned, prosperity dwindled and tenant cultivation became their main occupation. There was sufficient income to allow the young Saraswati to be schooled: he did very well both in the primary grades and in the German Mission high school where he studied English. Even at an early age, however, Naurang showed signs of brilliance and scepticism of conventional religious practices.
Independence movement
He became involved in Indian National Congress politics, and then in the peasant movement in Patna, then Bihar and, finally, all over India.
Saraswati learned about politics in the Indian National Congress, headed by Mohandas Gandhi. He started in Congress as a devoted Gandhian, admiring Gandhi's fusion of tradition, religion and politics. By 1920, he was involved in the nationalist movement as directed by Gandhi but then became disgusted with the petty, comfort-seeking hypocrisy of the self-proclaimed Gandhians, especially in jail, and, within 15 years he was disillusioned with Gandhi's own ambiguity and devious pro-propertied attitudes.
The final break came in 1934, when Bihar suffered an earthquake. During the relief operations, in which Saraswati was involved, he came across many cases where, in spite of the destruction caused by the calamity, he found the suffering of the people to be less on account of the earthquake than as the result of the cruelty of the landlords in rent collection. When Saraswati found no way of tackling this situation, he sought advice from Gandhi, who was in Patna Saraswati later said that Gandhi told him, "the zamindars will remove the difficulties of the peasants. Their managers are Congressmen. So they will definitely help the poor".
In spite of this, the oppression of the peasantry by the zamindari machinery including Congressmen managers' continued. These platitudes of Gandhi disgusted Saraswati and he broke off his 14-year association with the Mahatma. After that, he consistently saw the Mahatma as a wily politician who, in order to defend the propertied classes, took recourse in pseudo-spiritualism, professions of non-violence and religious hocus-pocus.
After his break with Gandhi, Saraswati kept out of party politics (though he continued to be a member of the Congress) and turned his energies into mobilising the peasants. By the end of the decade, he emerged as the foremost kisan leader in India. In this task of organising the peasants, at different times his political impetuosity took him close to different individuals, parties and groups. He first joined hands with the Congress Socialists for the formation of the All India Kisan Sabha; then with Subhas Chandra Bose organised the Anti-Compromise Conference against the British and the Congress, then worked with the Communist Party of Indiaduring the Second World War [Das, 1981]; and finally broke from them, too, to form an 'independent' Kisan Sabha.
In spite of these political forays, however, Saraswati remained essentially a non-party man and his loyalty was only to the peasants for whom he was the most articulate spokesman and forthright leader. As a peasant leader, Hauser considers that "by standards of speech and action, he was unsurpassed". He achieved that status by a remarkable ability to speak to and for the peasants of Bihar; he could communicate with them and articulate their feelings in terms whose meaning neither peasant nor politicians could mistake. 'He was relentlessly determined to improve the peasants' condition and pursued that objective with such force and energy that he was almost universally loved by the peasants, and almost equally both respect and feared by the landlords, Congressmen and officials.
Saraswati was a militant agitator; he sought to expose the condition of agrarian society and to organise the peasants to achieve change. He did this through countless meetings and rallies which he organised and which he addressed. He was a powerful speaker, who used the language of the peasants.
Sahajanand was a Dandi Sanyasi and always carried a long bamboo staff (danda). In the course of the movement, this staff became the symbol of peasant resistance. They cry of "Danda Mera Zindabad" (Long live my staff), was thus taken to mean "Long live the danda (lathi) of the Kisans" and it became the watchword of the Bihar peasant movement. The inevitable response by the masses of peasants was "Swamiji ki Jai" (Victory to Swamiji). "Kaise Logey Malguzari, Latth Hamara Zindabad" (How will you collect rent as long as our sticks are powerful?) became the battle cry of the peasants.
This was the manner in which a common communication was achieved. And it was vastly enhanced by the fact that Sahajanand was a Swami, which gave him a tremendous charisma. In 1937, he was reported to have said that as religious robes had long exploited the peasants, now he would exploit those robes on behalf of the peasants'. When landlords raised the question as to how a sanyasi (mendicant) was taking part in temporal problems of the poor, Sahajanand quoted the scriptures at them:
Prayen deva munayah swavimukti kama
Maunam charanti vijane na pararthnsihthah
Naitan vihaya kripnan vimumuksha eko
Nanyattwadasya sharanam bhramato nupashye
(Mendicants are selfish, living away from society, they try for their own salvation without caring for others. I cannot do that, I do not want my own salvation apart from that of the many destitutes. I will stay with them, live with them and die with them)[Sahajanand, 1952:171].
Saraswati died on 26 June 1950.[Sudhakar, 1973:14]
The Organisation
Swami Sahajanand Saraswati was, of course, a fascinating personality but what also added immense social significance to him was the fact that he was able to found a massive organisation. This took a great deal of both imagination and effort and the fact that it has had a turbulent history is evidence of the role of the individual as well as the relevance of the political-economic context.
Although the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha was formed in 1929 and a smaller Kisan Sabha had been formed even earlier in Patna district with a formal organisational structure, it really was institutionalised only after a few years. Actually, it is correct to say that the Kisan Sabha never really became an 'organisation', but remained a movement [Hauser, 1961:87].
But if that is so for the whole of the history of the Sabha, in its first years it was even more nebulous: an idea, a forum, a propaganda platform, a lobby. Almost immediately after the formation of the Sabha Bihar was plunged, with the rest of India, into the Civil Disobedience Movement, which, although it helped in arousing the general consciousness of the masses, did not give the leaders of the Sabha the time to formalise its structure [Williams, 1933:1- 30].In fact, the experiences of theCivil Disobedience Movement both outside and inside jails created the beginnings of the rift between the Kisan Sabhaites and some of the Congress leaders [BSCRO:21/1933], and so disgusted the supreme leader of the Sabha, Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, that for several years he cut himself off from politics altogether [Sahajanand, 1952:373–381].
But while, because of these problems, the Kisan Sabha remained disorganised, the landlords recognised its potentially dangerous character. In order to meet its challenge and to consolidate their position, they organised themselves and their supporters into three main bodies. The first was a clearcut Bihar Landholders' Association which included within it all the prominent zamindars. The second was a more clever attempt to hide the organisation's basic class character; it was called the United Party and was supposed to represent the interests of various sections of the population. It even included a few Congressmen though its leadership was composed of the leading landlords, including the Maharajadhiraj of Darbhanga and the Raja of Surajpura. Having failed in their first attempt in 1928–29 to get the Tenancy Act amended, the landlords tried to do so through this United Party. Rai Bahadur Shyamnandan Sahay, one of the richest zamindars of Bihar, accordingly drew up a new tenancy bill with the obvious intention of strengthening the zamindars' position by giving them more powers. However, in order to achieve a semblance of zamindar-tenant unity in presenting the new legislation, the United Party conspired to develop a compromise measure by forming a 'Kisan Sabha' which held its meeting at Patna early in 1933 [Sankrityayana, 1943:112]. Ironically, it was this effort of the landholders which brought Sahajanand back into politics and vastly strengthened the Kisan Sabha [Sudhakar, 1973:9].
There was no unanimity among Congressmen about their approach to the United Party and its 'Kisan Sabha'. While leaders like Rajendra Prasad felt that as an election trick the United Party was doomed to failure, they also thought it might actually gain some concessions for the peasantry. Hence they felt opposition to the United Party was 'unnecessary'. Some other Congress leaders thought otherwise:
My colleagues were agitated thinking that (an amended tenancy law) would increase the new party's influence among the peasants. They wanted the move to be opposed, but most of the Congressmen were in prison and the organisation was banned and could not do anything. They thought, therefore, of reviving the dormant Kisan Sabha. Word was passed on to Swami Sahajanand to activise the Kisan Sabha and expose the United Party's move... I felt that all this was unnecessary but, as I could not oppose it, kept quiet. [Prasad, 1957:361].
Sahajanand was apprised of the 'bogus Kisan Sabha' and its proposed session at Patna by Pandit Yadunandan (Jadunandan) Sharma and induced by him to attend the meeting. After much hesitation about re-entering politics, Sahajanand agreed and made a dramatic entry in the Patna meeting which was being conducted by such well-known zamindars and their henchmen as Dr Sachidanand Sinha (the 'Founder Modern Bihar') and Guru Sahay Lal (later President of the Bihar Chamber of Commerce). The Swami's unexpected presence caused considerable embarrassment to the sponsors of the meeting and his forthright stand there condemning such devious manoeuverings marked the end of the effort by the zamindars to play politics through the use of the name of the Kisan Sabha. At the same time, this abortive attempt proved that even the zamindars had recognised the potential of an organisation like the Kisan Sabha even though until then it was no more than a name. Recognising that even the name spelled powerful magic for the Kisans, Sahajanand decided to organise the Sabha.
In spite of the efforts of Swami Sahajanand in the direction of giving the Kisan Sabha a live but formal organisational structure, it remained more a movement than an organisation. However, after 1934, the movement was, in a way, institutionalised though its primary instruments of operation continued to by numerous meetings, rallies, 'struggles' and annual conventions rather than paper-work. This was a reflection of the impatient leadership of Sahajanand which, in spite of resolutions to the contrary, was not basically concerned with the formal niceties of organisation. While the agitational character marked the movement as necessarily transitory in nature, it also provided it with an element of spontaneous strength. While the Congress relied on its organisational character for mobilising the people for its movements, the Kisan Sabha drew its organisational vitality from the different movements and struggles. And, for the time being at least, the Kisan Sabha's mode of working was more effective. Even the officials remarked that the 'Kisan Sabha touches the ryot more directly and its meetings are larger than the Congress' [BSCRO:16/1935].
But Sahajanand also recognised and emphasised the need for organisation of the peasants, except that organisation to him meant organisation of mass action rather than a fossilised hierarchy of constitutional formalities:
You must speak in great numbers. Government officials are here and when you come in tens of thousands they will listen, otherwise they will think you need nothing because you are silent. In Gaya there were 50,000 kisans and it caused a furore.... We do not teach you to assault zamindars, only to get what is your right. We do not seek to create trouble between zamindars and tenants. The Government, zamindars and capitalists are strong. I want you to be strong too and the way to do it is to hold meetings. If you do not organise and hold Kisan Sabhas, troubles will not end [BSCRO:16/1935/I].
The formal organisational structure of the movement was expressed through the Rules of 1929 and the Constitution framed in 1936. The 1936 Constitution served as the official statement of organisation form and objectives which included the winning of the 'fundamental rights' of the peasants [BPKS, 1936]. It also outlined the rules and procedures for membership and other organisational details. All peasants were admitted as members of the Kisan Sabha with a membership fee reduced from two annas (Rs. 0.12) to one price (Rs. 0.015) in 1936. The basis of organisation was the village, or gram Kisan Sabha, electing representatives to thana Kisan Sabhas, which similarly elected members to the district body which in turn elected members of the Provincial Kisan Sabha. The executive organ of each of these bodies was the Kisan Council, elected by respective memberships. In the case of the Provincial Kisan Sabha, the Kisan Council comprised 15 members including officer-bearers who were specifically designated as a president, secretary and two joint secretaries. However, in practice there was considerable variation, with an increase in the number of joint secretaries normally to cover regional areas and often there were also some vice-presidents. These offices were all held for an annual term but a treasurer was elected to serve 'until it was thought necessary to change him'. Income was derived from membership fees and from small levies on the members of various councils, with funds divided between local and provincial bodies. Provision was made for annual sammelans, or conventions of the several bodies of the Kisan Sabha with a president elected for such conferences. it was indicated that reports of the provincial sammelans were to be printed.
In practice, the formal organisation of the movement was confined to the activities of the Provincial Kisan Council and the annual provincial sammelan, though, on an irregular basis, sammelans at other levels were also held. In addition, a secretary was active for the period of 1935 to 1940 and an office was maintained at the Bihta ashram of Swami Sahajanand. In very large measure, the Swami himself co-ordinated much of the work of the Provincial Kisan Sabha when it was formed.
The membership of the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha was estimated at 80,000 in 1935 and the figure for 1938 was placed at upwards of 250,000, which made it by far the largest such provincial body in India. However, these and all other membership figures can be taken as no more than approxzimations. Verification is extremely difficult in the absence of any other data as a basis of comparison. The one possible measure of activity and an indication of participation, if not of membership, is to be derived from the press and official estimates of local meetings and provincial rallies. At the height of the agitation, Sahajanand consistently addressed local village meetings of up to 5000 peasants, and the estimates of peasant rallies in Patna were commonly as high as or even higher than 100,000.
With the formation of the All India Kisan Sabha at Lucknow in April 1936, the Bihar Kisan Sabha became one of the provincial units of that national body. The Congress Socialist Party pressed for the organisation of an all-India peasant association, and N.G. Ranga [1949:69; 1968:216] became a prime mover in the effort. While Sahajanand was named president of the first meeting at Lucknow, he had come to support the idea reluctantly, holding that a national organisation could function effectively only on the basis of a network of well-developed provincial bodies, which did not in fact exist [Sahajanand, 1952:449–453]. While Sahajanand, once involved, extended total support, and to a large extent created and maintained the organisational framework by his own efforts, the A.I.K.S. suffered from the very shortcomings he had indicated: there was insufficient local depth to sustain a national movement [Mitra, 1938:387–389].
Some of his followers and students in the spirit of serving the deprived masses were Pandit Yamuna Karjee, Pandit Karyanand Sharma, Pandit Yadunandan (Jadunandan) Sharma, Pandit Panchanan Sharma, Rahul Sankrityayan and Baba Nagarjun.
Swamiji established an ashram at Neyamatpur, Gaya (Bihar) which later became the centre of freedom struggle in bihar. All the prominent leaders of congress visited there frequently to meet Pandit Yadunandan (Jadunandan) Sharma, the leader of Kisaan Aandolan.
Few will know that it was Yadav peasants who, in 1927, pleaded with Sahajanand to aid them in their struggles against the Bhumihar Brahmin zamindars of Masaurhi, and that it was from that beginning that the most powerful peas-ant movement in India, the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha, emerged. And among the many beneficiaries of that movement were precisely those productive and upwardly mobile middle caste groups now courted so assiduously by the Janata Dal, the Samata Party, the Congress, and indeed, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose spoke of Swamiji as Swami Sahajanand Saraswati is, in the land of ours, a name to conjure with. The undisputed leader of the peasant movement in India, he is today the idol of the masses and the hero of millions. It was indeed a rare fortune to get him as the chairman of the Reception Committee of the All India Anti-Compromise Conference at Ramgarh. For the Forward Block (All India Forward Bloc) it was a privilege and an honour to get him as one of the foremost leaders of the Left movement and as a friend, philosopher and guide of the Forward Block itself. As a matter of fact, following Swamiji's lead, a large number of front-rank leaders of the peasant movement have been intimately associated with the Forward Block.
The sword of Damocles at last fell on Swamiji and he was arrested this morning at Patna under the Defence of India Act. Yesterday he was in Calcutta and we spent long hours in conversation with him. Little did we know at the time that the warrant for arrest was waiting for him at Patna. He left Calcutta last night and this morning at Patna he was placed in custody. Before he left Calcutta, we issued a joint statement under our signatures appealing for a proper observation of May Day throughout the country. On hearing of his arrest, we immediately decided to observe 28 April as an All-India Swami Sahajanand Day for the purpose of protesting against his incarceration. We earnestly hope that that day will be observed in such a manner as to give a fitting reply to the British Government.
Swamiji's quotes
The kisans are victim to a continuing series of exploitations. For example, if they were able to meet their needs of woods from the jungle, then what would be left for the forest officials, great and small to do. In fact these "rangers," "foresters," "patrolmen," and others seek out any opportunity to oppress the people, very much like beasts of prey. If they are not bribed, their sole object is to harass the poor. My blood begins to boil when I recall the many stories told to me by the Adivasi kisans of the harassment they have had to endure at the hands of forest officers.
The prime movers of these movements do not in their hearts desire that the agricultural labourers should get real relief. They seek only their own ends. Then how will the poor be benefited? They will be benefited in the long run because despite the determined efforts of dim false leaders to the contrary, this movement will gradually cause the oppressed to awaken. And when they begin to understand the reality of what is happening and who is at the root of their sorrows and sufferings, their dishonour, disgrace, hunger and disease, and when they also understand how to eradicate them, then their goals are certain to be realized. (Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, Central Jail Hazaribagh, 1941).
Gradually the peasant movement intensified and spread across the rest of India. All these radical developments on the peasant front culminated in the formation of the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) at the Lucknow session of the Indian National Congress in April 1936 with Swami Sahajanand Saraswati elected as its first President and it involved prominent leaders like N.G. Ranga, E.M.S. Namboodiripad, Pandit Karyanand Sharma, Pandit Yamuna Karjee, Pandit Yadunandan (Jadunandan) Sharma, Rahul Sankrityayan,P. Sundarayya, Ram Manohar Lohia, Jayaprakash Narayan, Acharya Narendra Dev and Bankim Mukerji. The Kisan Manifesto released in August 1936, demanded abolition of zamindari system and cancellation of rural debts, and in October 1937, it adopted red flag as its banner.[5] Soon, its leaders became increasingly distant with Congress, and repeatedly came in confrontation with Congress governments, in Bihar and United Province.
On hearing of Swami Sahajanand Saraswati's arrest during Quit India Movement, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose and All India Forward Bloc immediately decided to observe 28 April as an All-India Swami Sahajanand Day for the purpose of protesting against his incarceration as a fitting reply to the British Government.
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