My Father, page 6
When T. Vijayaraghavacharya became the prime minister of Mewar in 1939, he decided to lift the ban on the Praja Mandal and freed all political prisoners. Soon after, in 1940, at my father’s request, Mewar Praja Mandal President Verma visited Suwana. He interacted closely with the village folk and exhorted them to join the Mewar Praja Mandal. A special relationship developed between him and the village, with the result that he maintained close contact with it till his death in 1969. The villagers, of course, adored him. My father and a number of his friends became his lifelong fans. Later, my father founded a branch of the Mewar Praja Mandal in Suwana with himself as its president.
After the release of its members from jail, the Mewar Praja Mandal resumed its activities, which culminated in its first formal session in Udaipur in 1941. Verma presided over the session. Vijaya Laxmi Pandit, the sister of Jawaharlal Nehru, gave the open inaugural address, which attracted thousands of people.
At the time of the session, my father was posted in Chittor. He came to know that the train on which Vijaya Laxmi Pandit was travelling to Udaipur would pass through Chittor and make a stop there in the early hours of morning. Keen to see someone so closely associated with the freedom movement in person, my father arrived at the station with a few of his friends at 4 a.m. As soon as the train came to a stop, he and his friends shouted repeatedly the slogan: ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!’
Despite it being very early in the morning, Vijaya Laxmi Pandit came out of her compartment with a smile on her face and thanked the group for coming to see her at the station. The group offered her tea, which she graciously accepted. Within minutes, other passengers found out about her presence and quickly gathered around her. She gave a short speech on the struggle against the British that loomed ahead. Once the speech was over, the railway staff pleaded with the passengers to return to their respective compartments. The train then left amid cries of ‘Vijaya Laxmi Pandit ki jai!’ At twenty years of age, seeing a figure so intimately linked with the freedom movement of India was a great source of inspiration for my father.
Meanwhile, the Second World War had begun in September 1939 on the world stage. Without consultations with the local leadership, the British had unilaterally announced India’s involvement in it. That did not go down well with the Congress, which immediately responded by resigning from the provincial governments it headed. Later, as the pressures of the war mounted and the Japanese army began advancing towards India through Burma, the British realized that they needed India’s military cooperation and the support of its political leadership.
Accordingly, in March 1942, they sent a Commission under Stafford Cripps with the offer of dominion status for India upon the end of the war in exchange for military cooperation. But to appease Muslim nationalism and princely aspirations, the offer left the door open for eventual secession of some provinces and princely states from the dominion. Describing the offer as a post-dated cheque written on a failed bank, Mahatma Gandhi rejected it and, on 8 August 1942, decided to launch the Quit India movement. He called upon all Indians to ‘do or die’ in the cause of the country’s freedom. The next day, all the leaders of the Congress and Gandhi himself were arrested. It was time for all Indians to rise against the alien power.
By this time, my father had been promoted and transferred from Chittor back to Bhilwara as reader in the Court of the District and Sessions Judge. He had been residing in Suwana and commuted daily to the court in Bhilwara. Here I briefly digress to narrate an incident that throws light on an interesting aspect of life in Mewar in those days.
One evening, when my father was returning from Bhilwara to Suwana by bullock cart, a gang of dacoits stopped him and his co-passengers, numbering about half a dozen. At sword-point, the gang robbed them of everything they had, including their clothes. Just as the gang was about to go away, its leader saw Father and his co-passengers shivering in the cold. He took pity on them and returned some of their clothes. Paradoxically, the robbed ended up thanking the robbers profusely for their generosity!
Father and his co-passengers decided not to report the matter to the police for fear that the gang might take revenge on them. Six months passed and they forgot all about the incident. Then, one day, Father suddenly saw the gang in the Sessions Court where he was working as a reader. Apparently, its members had been arrested and committed to the court on charges of murder and dacoity. They saw my father and recognized him. They then narrated the entire incident of how they had first robbed him and his co-passengers of everything and then had returned their clothes to save them from the severe cold. It was a story that gave the members of the bar, the judge and the entire staff a hearty laugh.
To return to the main story, soon after the arrest of Mahatma Gandhi, the top leaders of Mewar Praja Mandal were also arrested. At this juncture, my father and two of his friends from Suwana felt that they too wanted to become full participants in the freedom movement and offer themselves for arrest. They immediately communicated their wish to the district-level leadership of the Praja Mandal in Bhilwara. The latter advised my father and his friends to wait for a signal from them.
While they awaited the signal, Bhanwarlal Bhadada, a prominent worker of the Praja Mandal in Bhilwara, visited Suwana. Later, he would become a close personal friend of my father and would often visit us in Jaipur. We would come to know him as ‘Dada Bhai’. On his visit to Suwana, Dada Bhai brought my father and his friends the disappointing news that the Congress had now decided against Praja Mandal workers courting further arrest. Instead, it wanted them to engage in constructive social work. As a result, neither Dada Bhai nor my father and his friends got to court arrest.
My father was deeply disappointed that a chance to be an active participant in the national movement had been missed. Because this would turn out to be his first and last such chance, he would later write in his autobiography, ‘An opportunity to contribute our bit in the final battle for swaraj had been lost! I still regret it.’6 But all was not lost. The departure of the British would not spell full freedom for the citizens of princely states such as Mewar. That would require a separate, final battle against the Maharajas and Maharanas. My father would be able to substantively contribute to that battle.
As part of the mandate for constructive social work by Mahatma Gandhi, the following year, my father played a key role in piloting the opening of a model school in Suwana. The proposal for the school came from Dada Bhai on behalf of the Praja Mandal, and funding came from an industrial house in Bhilwara. Called Gram Vidyalaya (village school), the school came to life in July 1943 and served the children from Suwana and nearby villages till the early 1970s, when it was closed down to make way for a high school.
In addition to serving as an institution of learning, the school became a focal point of social and cultural gatherings in the village. In September 1944, it brought such literary figures of India as Makhan Lal Chaturvedi and Ramnath ‘Suman’ to Suwana. The same year, Manikya Lal Verma visited the school. His daughter, young student leader Shiv Charan Mathur, and Kamal Nayan Bajaj, son of the late Jamnalal Bajaj, accompanied him. It was during this visit that Verma announced the engagement of his daughter and Shiv Charan Mathur. Later, in the first half of the 1980s, Mathur went on to become the chief minister of the state of Rajasthan. In 1968, as the serving education minister of the state, he visited my school as the chief guest at the annual function, where I received a prize from him for my exceptional performance in the secondary school examinations. I distinctly remember him asking me if I was the son of B.L. Panagariya. My father and he had worked together in the Verma government of the United State of Rajasthan and had come to know each other well.
My father stayed in his job in Bhilwara until August 1946. During this period, he remained actively engaged with the affairs of the school in Suwana and even taught night classes in general knowledge and English. It was perhaps because of this teaching experience that when my brothers and I were growing up, he would conduct a general knowledge quiz for us in the evenings as we gathered around him. He was also quick to correct our English, especially our pronunciation. Since we had all studied in a Hindi-medium school, our English required such correction rather frequently.
At work, Father also fought for the rights of his fellow employees. One fight concerned the salaries of court employees. Bhilwara had been known for its textiles industry. Its first modern unit, known as Mewar Textile Mills, started as far back as 1938. Soon after the end of the Second World War, workers of this mill threatened to go on strike unless the mill increased their wages to compensate for war-time inflation. The threat led Prime Minister T. Vijayaraghavacharya to intervene and get the mill owners to agree to a substantial increase in wages.
The success of the workers led my father to reason with his colleagues at the Sessions Court and its subordinate courts that wartime inflation had impacted their salaries to the same extent as it had the wages of the mill workers. His colleagues concurred. My father then prepared a memorandum making a case for increase in salary for the court staff and sent a copy, duly signed by his colleagues and himself, to the prime minister of Mewar in Udaipur. Much to his surprise, the prime minister bought his argument and granted them a salary increase of 12.5 per cent.
Udaipur hosted the three-day annual session, starting on 31 December 1945, of the All India States Peoples’ Conference (AISPC), under the presidency of Jawaharlal Nehru. The conference brought together the leaders of the Praja Mandals and other popular organizations in the princely states from across the entire country. Among the prominent leaders who attended the conference were Sheikh Abdullah, a future chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir; Balwant Rai Mehta, the second chief minister of Gujarat; and Jai Narayan Vyas, the second chief minister of Rajasthan. Manikya Lal Verma, who led Mewar Praja Mandal, chaired the reception committee.
My father attended the proceedings of the AISPC and found them fascinating. The speeches by Nehru and Abdullah were the most impactful. Employees of the Mewar government chose to come to the sessions rather than attend to their duties in offices. The city of Udaipur came to a standstill during those three days. My father later wrote, ‘The session brought new awakening amongst the people of the State.’7 During the session, Manikya Lal Verma’s daughter and Shiv Charan Mathur were married at a ceremony over which Jawaharlal Nehru presided. My father was among the few who attended the wedding.
Around this time, the employees of the Mewar government began to get organized to press the government for a pay increase and for reinstatement of two colleagues who had been suspended because they had been absent during the AISPC session. They formed a union, Mewar Ahalkar Sangh, and gave an ultimatum of strike if their demands were not met by 18 April 1946. The government acted preemptively and arrested the union leaders on 12 April 1946. That led to what turned out to be the first mass strike by government employees in the history of India. Resorting to the civil disobedience tactics of Mahatma Gandhi, the employees stopped going to work and began courting arrest every day. My father was the leader of the Bhilwara district branch of the union. The local collector threatened him in various ways, though he stopped short of arresting him.
At this point, my father approached Manikya Lal Verma, Bhure Lal Baya – who was then the president of Mewar Praja Mandal – and Ramesh Chandra Vyas, who was a leading Congress figure in the labour movement. He apprised them of the repression let loose on the employees by the Mewar government and sought their intervention. Verma immediately dispatched Vyas to Delhi to seek guidance from Nehru. Nehru in turn sent a note to the Mewar government condemning its high-handed actions against the poorly paid employees. That got the attention of the government.
The state government released the arrested employees, with no questions asked about their absence from work. It also set up a high-level committee to recommend new pay scales for different categories of employees. The final result was a significant upward revision of salaries for employees at all levels.
4
The Fall of the Ancient Régime of Mewar
THOUGH HE MISSED THE opportunity to be arrested as a part of the Quit India movement, my father remained keen on contributing to the freedom struggle in some capacity. As the employees’ strike against the Mewar government came to a happy conclusion, he made up his mind to quit his job and join the Praja Mandal movement. His friends and relatives leaned heavily against his letting go of a ‘secure and respectable’ job, but his mind was made up.
This time around, he was not disappointed, and an opportunity came his way almost instantly. In August 1946, Siddharaj Dhadda, editor of a newly launched daily newspaper called Lokvani (People’s Voice), visited Dada Bhai, the leader of the Praja Mandal in Bhilwara. Published from Jaipur, Lokvani had been originally started as a weekly in 1943. My father met Dhadda at Dada Bhai’s residence. After listening to my father’s aspirations of contributing to the freedom movement, Dhadda urged him to join Lokvani. He reasoned that the objectives of the newspaper being to support the activities of the Praja Mandals, raise a voice against the excesses of the feudal lords and promote the rights of peasants, my father would be able to fulfil his aspirations by working for it. Father instantly agreed to join Lokvani. His friends and relatives remained unequivocally opposed to the move, since it risked his losing a secure job. Therefore, as a compromise, he decided to take six months of leave without pay rather than resign his position outright.
The die was cast, and at twenty-five years of age, Father arrived in Jaipur for the first time on 19 September 1946. He found the city just as Rudyard Kipling had described it in his Letters of Marque. Hardly anything seemed to have changed in nearly fifty years since. During his travels of Rajputana, Kipling had passed through Jaipur at an even younger age of twenty-two. He had written engagingly about his travels. His write-ups first appeared anonymously in the newspaper Allahabad Pioneer between December 1887 and February 1888. Later, he brought those writings together in an authored volume.
As Kipling had described it, Jaipur was a well-planned city with wide roads intersecting at right angles. Picturesque buildings painted in pink adorned both sides of the city roads. The city was peaceful, with little traffic except in Johri Bazar, the hub of business activity. As my father would later recall, there were no cars or trucks on the roads back then, just a few cycle rickshaws.
Father had no prior experience of editing a newspaper. Though he found himself on a steep learning curve, he was soon in control of his duties at the editorial desk. Once he set up his routine, he was able to find the spare time to take up some writing of his own. He began publishing articles in Lokvani, and was soon pleasantly surprised that other newspapers were reproducing some of them. Given his deep knowledge of and interest in Mewar, many of his articles focused on its government and the activities of Mewar Praja Mandal.
One of my father’s articles, entitled ‘Seven Years of Sir T. Vijay in Mewar’ contained a highly critical commentary on the policies of the Mewar government. It created a stir and left the Mewar government furious. In view of the fact that T. Vijayaraghavacharya, had been appointed at the instance of the British agent, the article must have annoyed the British government as well. The Mewar government instituted an inquiry into the affair, and finding out that the author of the article was none other than one of its own employees on a six-month sabbatical, proceeded to immediately terminate his services. That finally and formally ended Father’s tenure with the Mewar government. It was hardly unexpected. Father knew all along that this would happen; the only issue was when and on what grounds. In any case, the controversy created by the article brought him what he thought was a bigger prize: the well-known nationalist English newspaper Bombay Chronicle appointed him as their accredited correspondent in Jaipur on a part-time basis while he continued to work at Lokvani.
With India rapidly moving towards independence from the British, this was a critical period in the nation’s history. In September 1946, Nehru had formed the interim government at the Centre. Provinces directly under the British had formed governments responsible to elected legislatures. People in the princely states were also clamouring for the removal of hereditary kings and the appointment of popularly elected governments. Luckily for my father, the office of the Rajputana Regional Council of the AISPC was located in Jaipur. That brought the leaders of the Praja Mandals and Praja Parishads of Rajputana to Jaipur and gave my father the opportunity to establish close contact with them. These leaders would serve in top positions in the governments that were formed after unification of the Rajputana states into Rajasthan.
One immediate outcome of these contacts was that the Rajputana Regional Council of the AISPC asked my father to head a committee to inquire into allegations of oppression let loose by the Bharatpur government. Apparently, the Maharaja of Bharatpur had invited Viceroy Lord Wavell to his state for a game of bird hunting in the Keoladeo Bird Sanctuary (renamed Keoladeo National Park in 1982 and listed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1985). It was alleged that during the game, government authorities forced individuals from the Dalit community to recover the birds shot by the hunting party from the cold water of the lake in the sanctuary. That led the Bharatpur Praja Parishad and other peoples’ organizations in the area to organize protests against such forced labour. The protests resulted in injuries to people as well as arrests by the Bharatpur government.
