Bhupendra Kumar Datta - The Jugantar and Gandhi

The Jugantar and Gandhi

Released in 1920, sensing that Gandhi rode the revolutionary tide, as a mouthpiece of the Jugantar, Bhupen wanted to expedite the tempo of the non-cooperation movement and met Gandhi at the Nagpur session of the Congress Party. Having the latter’s promise that, if the people responded well, he would convert the Party into free India’s Republican Parliament, Bhupen went to Pondicherry to consult Sri Aurobindo about the future of the Jugantar. Diffident about Gandhi’s expectation to win freedom within one year, Sri Aurobindo recognised that Gandhi represented a tremendous force and it would be unwise to resist him; the former advised the revolutionaries to collaborate without, however, making of non-violence a fetish, sticking to their own ethics. After Gandhi’s failure, the Jugantar sided Deshabandhu Chittaranjan Das in his Swarajya programme as an antidote: by observing overtly, all over India, the eighth anniversary of Bagha Jatin’s death, on 9 September 1923, they intimated their intention to follow their own conviction. Deshabandhu proposed to visit the spot where Bagha Jatin fought and to raise there a memorial. Arrested again on 23 September 1923, Bhupen was deported to Mandalay in Burma, where Subhash Bose was to join him soon after and offer him Memories of a Revolutionist by Kropotkin that he had smuggled for Bhupen during his last trip to Europe. Even inside his solitary prison cell, Bhupen was contacted by some Burmese as well as a few Bengali revolutionaries absconding in Burma and, thanks to his guidance, they formed an important organisation with branches all over the country; they, along with their leader Jiten Ghosh, were arrested only in 1931, during the Burmese revolt. Released in 1928, Bhupen resumed his usual multifarious role of maintaining contacts with various Jugantar leaders from Surya Sen in Chittagong to Bhagat Singh in Punjab (who had been in constant touch with Bhupen since 1923), editing the party organ Swadhinata, making bombs, collecting arms and distributing them, looking after the volunteer movement. Busy sheltering the absconding revolutionaries of the Chittagong Armoury Raid, Bhupen was arrested again in 1930, for a period of eight years. During 1938-41 and 1946-51 he edited the weekly Forward : his editorials were read with interest by patriots of all political trends. In 1946 his collection of essays, Indian Revolution and the Constructive Programme appeared with a foreword by Dr Rajendra Prasad, the first president of future independent India. In the meantime, in 1941, Bhupen was again detained till 1946.