Book Review: The Communal Problem, Report of the Kanpur Riots Enquiry Committee

Deccan Herald
May 21, 2006

Book Reviews

Mediating communalism

by Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr

A rare indictment of the Congress by Congressmen.

The Communal Problem, Report of the Kanpur Riots Enquiry Committee
National Book Trust, pp , Rs 85, pp 211

It is curious that Left historian — though Leftists no longer consider him to be sufficiently Leftist — Bipin Chandra, who is now chairman, National Book Trust, should have decided to issue in a book-form parts of the report of the committee appointed by the Indian National Congress Karachi Session of 1931 to enquire into the Kanpur riots of March, 1931.

There are two important aspects of this Kanpur riot. It comes at the end of a series of communal riots that had started in Malabar in 1921, and continued sporadically through the 1920s in different parts of India. Also, the then United Provinces Congress Committee chairman, Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi is killed in the riots, and in the depositions before the committee, witnesses acknowledge him as the only non-communal Congressman in the province.

The committee comprised Bhagwan Das, who was the chairman, Sunderlal, secretary, Purushottam Das Tandon, Manzar Ali Sokhta, Abdul Latif Bijnori and Zafarul-Mulk. It is interesting that none of them represent the socialist or communist view of communalism. Bhagwan Das, Sunderlal and Purshottma Das Tandon are more to the centre and right, especially Tandon. And of the six, three added supplements — Bhagwan Das and Sunderlal wrote one, Tandon the second. Zafarul-Mulk wrote a dissenting note.

The communal problem still haunts us, and the analysis has not moved forward a whit in the last 75 years. There is rare honesty and passion, and there was a willingness to listen to each other even when they differed with each other. Zafar-ul Mulk not only wrote a dissent note, but he also provided dissent footnotes to the report. And they were carried scrupulously. There was no false consensus. There was also the fact that members of the committee displayed a high intellectual calibre that does not exist in the Congress of today.

Bipin Chandra has reproduced only the historical analysis and the remedies suggested by the committee and omitted the details of the riot. Perhaps he is right. The arguments still remain relevant in many ways.

It is difficult to sympathise with the historical analysis of the communal problem completely. The committee members have tried to overcome the communal issue by showing that the colonial historiography has misrepresented facts and issues. And they tried to provide an idealistic-spiritual nationalist mission as a solution that will make India a moral super-power, where the four-caste system is revamped into a guild framework based on aptitude rather than on birth. But the committee is not steeped in mere woolly-headed idealism. They said in the section on remedies that there should be no ban on cow slaughter in the absence of similar provisions for other animals. Most importantly, they said that the district magistrate and the police superintendent should be held responsible if a riot breaks out as they ought to know the mischievous elements behind the violence.

The committee has summed up brilliantly the weakness of the Congress Party’s approach to the communal issue: “The position which the Congress occupied in these efforts was that of an intermediary, and by implication it accepted the extreme communalists of both sides as true representatives of the interests of their respective communities. The more it clung to them for settlement, the more it abdicated its own undoubted right to arrive at final conclusion... The result was that the Congress... invested communalists with greater importance and prestige.” This indictment of the Congress Party holds good today as it did in 1931.