If you have read the 3 preceding blogs, it should give you a sense of how hunger for power can destroy visionary
ideas and ideals. Be it the British occupation of India (they posed as traders
like their predecessor European counterparts) or vilifying and destroying an honest effort of absolutely
great people to carve out a progressive township that would define the future
of India or for that matter the collusion of businessmen and politicians to
thwart the demands of the white collared labor force. If we run a time series on the
general character of human beings over the last 10k years, we will see that it
will not deviate much from the mean - we are lost in the interplay of pain and
pleasure, hungry for a slice of the power pie.
The greatness of people like Raja Joykrishna Mukherjee, Raja Peary Mohan Mukherjee, Rashbehari Mukherjee, Kumar Rajendranath Mukherjee or Raja Bhupendranath Mukherjee lie in the fact that they were not self serving. You will not find a single work of significance that bear their watermark. They all believed that naming things after oneself is the biggest disservice to philanthropy and social upliftment. No wonder when Raja Joykrishna Mukherjee passed away, it felt like it was a loss for the world at large.
Hindustan Motors was one of the
biggest factories built in pre-independent India. It was also
Asia's largest automobile factory. This was the second Hindustan Motors factory
after the one in Gujarat. B.M. Birla was a farsighted industrialist. He
understood the economics of setting up a state of the art factory in Bengal -
highly educated labor force, access to one of the world's most advanced port,
availability of raw materials brought by the East Indian Company & alignment
with the Mukherjee family's direct connection with the Queen and finally
a government (Congress) that would serve the best interest of the rich.
What they didn't factor was that the political climate had changed underneath.
The difference between State Congress leadership and Center was split wide
open. B.M. Birla set up his first makeshift office at the 1st floor of the
Joykrishna Library which incidentally had served as a refuge to some of the
world's greatest - Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Rabindranath Tagore,
Michael Madhusudan Dutta, Harish Chandra Mukherjee, Kesab Chandra Sen, Bipin
Chandra Pal, Vinoba Bhave, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Ishwar Chandra
Vidyasagar, Ramtanu Lahiri, Prince Prisdang (The Prince of IndoChina), Sir
Rashbehari Ghose, Sir R.N Mukherjee, Lord Macaulay, Lord Cunningham, Charles
Darwin, Victor Hugo, Madame Curie, Mary Carpenter, Ernest Rennan, Max Meuller,
Albert Weber, John Ruskin, Lionel Tennyson(Son of Lord Tennyson), Sir Octavion
Hume, Sir Henry Cotton & Reverend James Wood, Marquis of Dufferin, Edwin Arnold,
WW Hunter & Michael Madhusudan Dutta.
Uttarpara Joykrishna Public Library
The killing of one innocent
factory worker and a civilian at Hindustan Motors on 16th March 1951
broke the very foundation employer-employee trust. The ripple effect is seen
even today. A letter requesting for the appointment of an independent investigating
agency to look into the killing was sent from the trade union to the Congress
government at the Center. The local Congress Committee under the leadership of
Dr. Birendranath Khan and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (not the novelist) held a very
large meeting in Uttarpara as a protest against the inaction of the State and
Central government. Thousands of people joined the meeting from across Bengal. The
governments (State and Center) were requested to participate in the discussion.
There was no representation from the government. Another call for a mass
gathering and protest was called out for 12th June 1951 at G.T.
Road, Banerjee Para Street. This time Forward Block heavyweight, Satyapriya
Banerjee, was invited to garner the support of the daily wagers, farmers, white
collared working class and students. The fragile relationship between the workers and
the Birlas took a horrible turn when Hindustan Motors management allocated a
paltry Rs 5 as an annual bonus amidst the already ensuing tiff. The workers
refused to accept this bonus and stalled all work. The Hindustan Motors management
declared a lockout on 11th October. The news of this situation started
trickling across the country and trade unionism started gathering steam
everywhere with its epicenter being Bengal, Uttarpara. There was a huge
pressure on the Birlas to nip this in the bud. The business community across
India was seeing this rise of trade unionism as a threat to their business.
While the architects of Uttarpara developed the township for over 500 years to
make it a seat of education and culture, they saw her very foundation slipping
into the crevices of hoodlum. Under pressure the Birlas with the help of the
State government started specials trains to bring employees from other States
and cities to start operations at the factory. For some peculiar reason when
the first Bardhaman local train arrived at Hind Motor Station, the police, who
were hiding behind the tracks, launched a brutal attack on the workers beating
them incessantly with batons releasing 8 rounds of tear gas. The Mukherjees
called upon our then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to intervene in view of
the deteriorating law and order situation in Uttarpara. Jawaharlal Nehru
arrived sometime in November 1951 at which point Dr. Ranen Sen, Dinen
Bhattacharya and a few others met him to express their concern. Utpal Dutt's
award winning theatre performance in "Special Train" was all about
these incidents at Uttarpara.
Jawaharlal Nehru's visit and
assurance seemed mere lip services since the attacks on the workers, who had
signed up to be part of the union, kept increasing. To this, the founder of
C.I.T.U, B.T. Ranadive said "The valiant Hind Motor workers have earned
for themselves a rightful place in the trade union and democratic movement of
West Bengal". The rise of trade unionism did not bode well with the other
large companies operating in Uttarpara like SWIL Limited and Shaw Wallace. The
labor unrest naturally spilled over to the other companies. This gave impetus
to others to form their respective unions. Raja Joykrishna Library ground
became the hotbed for formation of other unions like Rickshaw Union, Bidi
Unions, Traders Union, Brickfield labour union etc. The fall of Uttarpara was
inevitable!
The left dominated United Central
Refugee Council or UCRC was the death knell for Uttarpara. The partition of
India after we earned our freedom was largest mass exodus in history and
acknowledged by United Nation High Commission for Refugees. The characteristic
of division of the division of Punjab and Bengal were different. As Mr. Basu
from Vidyasagar University recorded in his article "Although the Indian state of Punjab could somehow tackle the ‘burden of
refugees’ through a so-called ‘land-man exchange’, the new – territorially
truncated after partition – Indian state of West Bengal had to provide shelter
to millions of partition-refugees". Historian Joya Chatterjee writes,
“The exodus of Hindu refugees from East to West Bengal was massive. By
contrast, the number of Muslims who left West Bengal for eastern Pakistan after
partition were relatively small. Most of them stayed on. The 1951 census in
India (4 years after the Partition of India) also recorded 2.523 million
refugees coming from East Bengal. Among them 2.061 million settled in West
Bengal. The rest went to Assam, Tripura and other states. Estimates of the
number of refugees up to 1970 are over 5 million to West Bengal alone. Thus,
the infant state of West Bengal began its journey as a crippled toddler crowned
with problems". In 1951 the pristine town of Uttarpara was flooded with
either expats working in the massive factories or migrants who were
beneficiaries of "camps". Acres of lands belonging to the Mukherjees
were snatched overnight to give way to political ambitions of the few. The
first exclusive camp for immigrant women was set up in Bhadrakali. These camps
started breeding their own unions mostly dominated by the leftists. The ethos
of the immigrants were different from those of the architects of Uttarpara.
Differences in ideologies resulted in friction and fractured connection.
The Mukherjees slowly were finding
themselves irrelevant in this new world order where massive rigging at the
general assembly elections in 1952 were an acceptable practice. The family
members started withdrawing from the electoral process. Rigging is an accepted
protocol in the Bengal electoral process. Did you know when it first happened
in India? The first instance of rigging was recorded in the 1952 when CPI
candidate Monoranjan Hazra defeated Raja Amarnath Mukherjee of Congress. Amarnath
Mukherjee was a gentleman of the first order and realized the futility of an
appeal. The ethos and fabric of fairness and morality were torn
Jyoti Basu's claim to fame was his
arrest in 1953. In the same year The Calcutta British Tram Company increased
the tram fare by 1 paisa. Massive protests erupted across Bengal predominantly
led by Left parties led by Dr. Suresh Banerjee, Satyapriya Banerjee, Jyoti
Basu, Amarendranath Basu & Hemanta Basu. They were all arrested under the
order of the presiding Chief Minister of Bengal Bidhan Chandra Roy. For reasons
unknown to me, my research shows that the relationship between Goa and Bengal
have been historically deep. A large contingency of communist
leaders from Nadia arrived in Goa
to fight for the "Liberation of Goa". Nityananda Saha was killed in
the fight while Mohitosh Nandi from Hoogly was arrested. It is believed that it was some of these
leaders that brought Leftism to Goa which otherwise had little political
affiliation.
I wonder how many of the readers
know that there was n attempt to merge West Bengal with Bihar in 1956? The
States Reorganisation Act, 1956 was a major reform of the boundaries of India's
states and territories, organizing them along linguistic lines. The key
beneficiary would have been the then Chief Minister of Bengal, Bidhan Chandra
Roy. Uttarpara became the epicenter of protest and after a gap, the Communist
Party of India under the leadership of Chandideb Chatterjee, Kanai Das, Prabhat Banerjee and Santashri
Chatterjee witnessed support from a handful of Congress leaders whose ideological
beliefs were violated by such decision and Forward Bloc led by Gopesh Mullick,
Shambhu Ghosh and a few others. The protesters walked from Purulia to Kolkata,
a distance of more than 250 km. Bidhan Chandra Roy ordered the arrest of Chandideb
Chatterjee, Kanai Das, Prabhat Banerjee
and Santashri Chatterjee. They spent 30 days in prison. Today the left leaders in
Bengal and Kerala are willing to join forces with Congress to fight the BJP
government. They forgot that it was the same government that invoked Article
356 to dissolve the first Communist government in Kerala despite being in
majority. Again the epicenter of protest was Raja Pearymohan College.
Concurrently the left staged another protest against the rising prices across
the country. The protest was led by the General Secretary of CPI Dr.
Surendrachandra Banerjee & Jyoti Basu. Hiren Nag from Bhadrakali,
Madhusudhan Bandopadhyay and Shambhu Ghosh were arrested and detained without
access to the judicial process. Under the order of Chief Minister B.C Roy the police opened fire
severely injuring about 40 protesters. Few political parties have blood in their
hands as much as does Congress.
In 1966 under the stewardship of Prafulla Sen,
the presiding Chief Minister of Bengal, scores of leaders from CPI, CPI (M),
SUCI, Forward Bloc were arrested and detained without application of the rightful
judicial process while they were protesting against the rising pricing of food
and kerosene oil. Jyoti Basu was kept in prison for a significant time without
any access to legal recourse. The rising prices of food reached a tipping point
where poor people were dying of hunger, unable to buy basic food. Protesters
across the State were shot dead that included Narul Islam in Bashirhat, Ranjan
Banerjee and Konnagar and S.P Sinha at Hind Motors. One of the worst incidents of political
violence recorded across India (although the 2021 political violence in Bengal
is a winner that take it all) was witnessed in 1967, again under the Congress
rule and under the stewardship of Prafulla Sen again. Section 144 was imposed
across Bengal. Hundreds of students felt that the governments behavior was that
of an anarchist and they disobeyed the ban and took out a rally in Uttarpara.
The police was ordered to take any extreme measure required to thwart the
protest. It is said that the floors and corridors of Raja Pearymohan College
was witness to a river of blood. Police threw a person named Gopal from the 3rd
floor is full sight of the officer in charge. And Bengal thought that the
murder of Anis Khan on 18th February 2022 was unique? History repeats itself,
sometime unknowingly because the evil than humans breed live on an on.
In the entire scheme of things,
while meek inherited the Earth, the destitute went from rags to riches, the
beautiful town of Uttarpara was lost and the architects forgotten. The
architectural marvels that could compete with Westminster Abbey or St. Basil's Cathedral or Belem
Tower were shamelessly brought down to rubble by real estate syndicates that
understood nothing of heritage or culture.
Source/Credits:
1) Mobilising the Migrants: The
Role of the UCRC in the Indian State of West Bengal - A Critical Assessment by Sibaji
Pratim Basu
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States_Reorganisation_Act,_1956
3) Uttarsakkhar - A Commemorative
Volume (Uttarpara Koykrishna Public Library)
4) Debashish Mukherjee, resident historian for the Mukherjees of Uttarpara
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