Intensification of Radical and Revolutionary Movements & Rise of Left

The years between 1930 and 1934 was also marked by an unprecedented explosion of acts of revolutionary terrorism with its focus in Bengal and Punjab. A total of 92 incidents were reported in 1931 itself that included 9 murders.

Exemplary among them was the Chittagong Armory Raid. In Chittagong a group of revolutionaries under Surya Sen captured the local armoury, issued an Independence Proclamation in the name of Indian Republican Army and put up a brave fight with the British in the hills of the countryside for several days.

The number of terrorist cases kept rising in spite of severe repression by the colonial administration. The HSRA had also become very active in the Punjab with 26 incidents reported in 1930 alone.

The freedom struggle was never confined to the single path of Gandhian satyagraha. It contained the very violent and extremist revolutionary movement, it also comprised of the socialist ideology that came to India after the Russian Revolution, it would also include a military offensive. These different strands of the movement were by no means isolated. Most of the revolutionaries had participated in the Gandhian non-cooperation movement. In fact the Chittagong armoury was siezed amidst cries of ‘Gandhi raj has come!’ Chandrashekhar Azad and Bhagat Singh’s revolutionary groups adopted Socialism as did sections of the Congress under Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Bose.

Socialism combined the freedom struggle with a clear cut agenda of social equality through organized mass movements that helped to mobilise the working class. The initiative of working out the ideology of the communist movement in India was taken up by eminent men like MN Roy who interpreted Marxism and the ideas of Lenin to fit the Indian context. Seven Indians including Roy founded the Communist Party of India at Tashkent in October 1920. Slowly the idea of Communism found favour among many Indian intellectuals and even members of the Congress.

Subhas Chandra Bose was a unique personality influenced by a wide variety of ideologies and epitomized the spirit of the nationalist movement from non-cooperation through giving up of government posts, to the revolutionary extreme, upto the ideas of socialist thought and finally choosing the courageous option of military offensive. Bose straddle all these different strategies and proved that there was in essence no basic conflict between the different visions of freedom at work within the nationalist movement.