Retired Parliament officer Omar Luther King on Maulana M Tayyebulla of Assam and Quit India movement of August 1942
ON 9 August 1942, the Indian political leaders announced the Quit India Resolution, one of the most vital decisions to liberate India from British rule. India became an independent sovereign country on 15 August 1947 mainly, if not solely, because of that one wise and bold resolution. On that eventful day, the All India Congress Committee at Gowalia Tank Maidan, Mumbai, not only passed that radical resolution unanimously but also successfully created in India an ‘electrifying atmosphere’. The slogan ‘Quit India’ was suggested by Yusuf Meherally (Mayor of Bombay in 1942) and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi said in approval, ‘Amen’, and in a stirring speech, he declared: “There is a mantra, short one that I give you. You imprint it on your heart and let every breath of yours give an expression to it. The mantra is ‘do or die’”.
In the early hours of 9 August 1942, all the top leaders – Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and Abul Kalam Azad were arrested and Congress was declared an unlawful organization. With the arrest of all the national leaders, there was nobody to guide the popular agitation against the British.
The government issued an order banning public processions, meetings & assemblies. Despite the police warning large crowd had gathered at Gowalia Tank Maidan. Aruna Asaf Ali hoisted the Indian flag. Lathicharge and tear gas was used by the police to disperse the crowd which had gathered. The national flag was pulled down and volunteers who went to its rescue were beaten off.
News came over the radio that Gandhi and all the national leaders had been arrested and taken to unknown destinations. My father, Maulana M Tayyebulla, then the Assam Congress president, hurried to the Gauhati Congress office where this theory was fathered: Bapu must have left a “do or die” plan for the country. As the APCC president, my father would begin reading the Declaration of Independence, which was sure to be banned as high treason, and would hardly have read out a line or two, violating the proclamation: a bullet from the British squad would pierce his breast. After the first dictator, the second dictator, ex-president Barua and so on – bullets in succession! The reading of the Declaration would be completed in the process.
Coming home, he narrated to Begum Afroza Tayyebulla (nee Hazarika) all that transpired in the Congress House that morning. She was his dear wife Afoo and my beloved mother. When he indicated that a bullet from the British squad might end everything as he read the Declaration, teardrops accumulated in my mother’s eyes and flowed down her firm cheeks. In a determined but sobbing voice, she muttered: ‘Allah’s will be done… come.’
Just then the police van with officers and some prisoners inside arrived. The officers politely asked my mother to get my father ready for going to jail again. On being told that there would be no death squad or bullet, she beamed in picnic mood. She accompanied the ‘prisoner’ to the gate of our house and bade him ‘goodbye’.
On 13 February 1943, the government of India’s Home department published a brochure titled ‘Congress responsible for the disturbances 1942-43’. My father received a copy in prison from the government of Assam on 7 June 1943, which everybody read in the prison cells. One AICC circular was for action based on non-violence and another on violence. After heated discussion amongst the leaderless workers, the violence circular was finally adopted.
Prison walls have ears, they say. News of repressive acts of leonine violence and dismal stories from homes and tales of staggering happenings throughout the country would trickle into the high-walled prison and drown the political security prisoners in grief and sadness and despair.
In Assam, a number of people – men, women and children – gathered in front of the Congress office which was in the police possession. Some of them were singing patriotic songs. Congress flag was pitched there. All were peacefully standing when a large party of military and police arrived in a lorry and snatched away the flag from the hands of a girl. There was a scuffle. Her mother Bhogeswari, an elderly lady intervened and struck the sergeant with the end of the flagstaff in her hand. The captain shot her and she died, flag in hand. Without dispersal order or any caution, the police with the help of military instantly opened fire on the non-violent assemblage of men, women and children. More than 12 persons, including a 12-year old girl, Thuleswari were killed.
In the midst of the firing, a volunteer succeeded in hoisting the flag. Some white commanders, opened indiscriminate fire and killed another 16 and wounded hundreds. Of the killed were three women, of whom one was pregnant. Kanaklata Barua, a teenager, was also shot dead while she was leading a procession bearing the National Flag during the Quit India Movement of 1942.
My mother was in the procession that was led by Kanaklata but the icy hands of death spared her then, only to strike her in 1945 when she was giving birth to me. Before I could know what life is all about, on my birth I came to know what death is. Death separated me from the very person who breathed life into me! That’s what death does to people on this earth. It separates people from their loved ones.
In connection with the “Non-Cooperation” and “Quit India” movements, my father, who was Gandhi’s little hero or his foot soldier, had to suffer imprisonment first in 1921, then in 1931 and 1939, and finally in 1942, intermittently, for a total period of eight years and six months.
Compared to the glorious deeds of the Assamese martyrs and all the heroes of Assam, my father’s jail-going was like the pale moonlight before the blaze of the shinny orb.
Let us pay our respectful homage to the martyr-heroes of Assam, who as solders of Indian freedom movement, by their blood earned a glorious place in the non-violent revolution of India that ended with India’s independence.
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