The Meerut Conspiracy Case was aimed at curbing communist influence in India. However, it fuelled nationwide sympathy, shaping the course of leftist politics in the country, writes Utkarsh Mishra.
We often hear, especially of late, that the role of non-Congress movements in the struggle for Independence has been relegated to the margins of history.
The claim holds factual validity in few cases as strongly as it does in the Meerut Conspiracy Case of 1929-1933.
On March 20, 1929, the colonial government in India arrested 32 members of the Communist Party and trade unionists, and charged them with 'conspiring to deprive the King Emperor of his sovereignty of British India'.
Among the arrested were several prominent Indian Communists and trade union leaders -- including Shripad Amrit Dange, Shantaram Savlaram Mirajkar, Sohan Singh Josh, Sachchidanand Vishnu Ghate, Puran Chand Joshi, Muzaffar Ahmad, Shaukat Usmani and others.
Some of these leaders were also arrested and jailed in the Cawnpore (Kanpur) Bolshevik Conspiracy Case in 1924.
What stood out in Meerut was the arrest of three British Communists, who were sent by the Communist Party of Great Britain to assist the party in India.
These were Phillip Spratt, B F Bradley, and H L Hutchinson.
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Spratt was the principal accused in the case, due to his credentials for 'infusing fresh life' into the Communist Party of India by 'increasing the number of unions, holding organised demonstrations, editing newspapers, instituting youth movements, initiating and conducting strikes, and using all possible methods of propaganda' to considerably increase membership of the party.
Thus, the case was listed as 'King-Emperor Vs P Spratt and Others'.
The renowned Prof Harold Laski categorises it alongside the Dreyfus Case and the Reichstag Fire Trial. It was debated in the House of Commons in London on several occasions. Yet, even in voluminous books about the freedom movement, it is mentioned only in a few paragraphs.
Prof Laski's comparison is telling, and begets the question why, for this comparison, he preferred the Meerut trial -- where most of the convicts served relatively lighter sentences -- over others which resulted in executions or deaths during life imprisonment.
The reason, perhaps, is the abundance of evidence suggesting that Meerut was a premeditated show trial where the government manoeuvered carefully to get the accused convicted, despite the defence making compelling arguments.
Moreover, it took place during some of the most eventful years of the freedom struggle, coinciding with the assembly bombing by Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt, their arrests and the Lahore Conspiracy Case, Mahatma Gandhi's Salt March in Dandi and Congress's Civil Disobedience, the hunger strike by Bhagat Singh and comrades in Lahore jail and the death of Jatin Das, the Gandhi-Irwin Pact and the martyrdom of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, and Rajguru.
Yet, it deserves its own place in history as it was the turning point for the Communist movement in India, which resulted in the party and its leaders getting widespread sympathy among the people.
Prelude to Arrests
In his memoirs Blowing Up India, Spratt recalls his arrival in India in December 1926. His visit was meant to be for six months, during which he had to prepare a report for the Communist Party of Great Britain on the possibilities of a revolution in India. The turn of events, however, stretched those six months into a lifetime and Spratt never went back to his country of birth.
During the couple of years from his arrival to his arrest, Spratt worked tirelessly to build the party organisation, which had largely remained dormant since its foundation in 1925.
Although, as mentioned above, leaders like Dange, Mirajkar, Ahmad, and Ghate were already well-known for their work among the working classes, peasants and youth. After his arrival, Spratt met Communist leaders in Bombay (now Mumbai) and Calcutta (now Kolkata) and organised strikes and protests.
The government was alarmed by labour disputes rising across the country and months-long strikes in cotton and jute mills of Bombay and Bengal respectively, and the activities of Spratt and others came under heavy surveillance.
In their memoirs, Sohan Singh Josh and H L Hutchinson have also given accounts of the increased trade union activities in India during those years.
Spratt writes that the Millowners’ Associations of Bombay and Calcutta appealed to the government to 'rid them of the nuisance'.
Josh also writes, in his book The Great Attack, that the 'Communist movement had become a great headache to British Indian government', and says that the ‘Bombay Chamber of Commerce and Bombay Indian Merchants Association were asking the Government of India to introduce immediately an emergency ordinance to deal with the strike leaders...'
The government responded by launching the Meerut Conspiracy Case.
In his book Rebels Against the Raj, historian Ramchandra Guha cites correspondence between the governor of Bombay and viceroy of India discussing ‘the increasing Communist influence on the mill workers’. The governor expresses his inability to act strictly in the absence of empowering laws, to which the Viceroy replies that the new Public Safety Act will remove this roadblock.
The Arrests
Raids were conducted in four provinces on March 20, 1929 -- Bombay, Bengal, Punjab and the United Provinces (which is now Uttar Pradesh), and 32 people were arrested.
Spratt, Ahmad, Dharani Goswami, Gopen Chakravarti, Gopal Basak, Radha Raman Mitra, Shibnath Banerji, Shamsul Huda, Kishorilal Ghose from Bengal; Bradley, Dange, Ghate, Mirajkar, K N Joglekar, R S Nimbkar, A A Awle, G R Kasle, G Thengdi, M G Desai, G Adhikari and S H Jhabvala from Bombay; P C Joshi, Ajodhya Prasad, Gauri Shanker, Bishwanath Mukherji, Dharambir Singh, L Kadam and Shaukat Sumani from UP; and Josh, Abdul Majid and Kedarnath Sehgal from Punjab. Hutchinson was also arrested from Bombay later.
They were all taken to Meerut District Jail for a conspiracy trial which the government had carefully planned, as revealed by official documents.
Why Meerut?
The government was keen to deny these leaders a jury trial, suspecting that a jury might take a sympathetic view towards their activities. In fact, Spratt was let off by a jury earlier in when he faced trial for sedition in 1927.
Since jury trials were typically conducted in the high courts of Presidency towns like Bombay and Calcutta, the government decided to conduct this trial in Meerut, which was not a presidency town and where trials were usually conducted by a sessions judge without a jury.
Josh cites official correspondence detailing the government's meticulous preparation before launching the case to ensure convictions. The government also got it confirmed from the governor of UP that an 'offence under Chapter VI of the Indian Penal Code is not triable by a jury'.
In a briefing to the prosecuting counsel Langford James, the Home Political Department said that 'we hope to be able on the result of this case to make further communist activities both difficult and dangerous for those who wish to indulge in them.'
Clearly, the government intended it to be a lesson to intimidate people from joining the communist movement. However, as we shall see, it had an opposite effect.
Josh writes that the opposition to repressive legislations like the Trade Disputes Bill and the Public Safety Bill had fomented a unity between the nationalist leaders and the communists (notwithstanding strict directions from the Comintern against it), and the government wanted to break this unity by painting the communists in a bad light.
It was for this reason, Josh believes, that Jawaharlal Nehru was not implicated in this case despite being a suitable candidate: he travelled to Soviet Union and praised it, he used to write to League Against Imperialism in Brussels, and was sympathetic to the Third International.
He also presided over the All-India Trade Union Congress the next year and initiated efforts to form a defence committee for the Meerut accused with his father. Motilal Nehru, as its chairman.
The Trial
The trial began on June 12, 1929, and charges were framed on January 11, 1930.
On January 14, the magistrate submitted the case to special sessions judge.
The government prosecutor, Langford James, was an avowed anti-communist and given his briefing to ensure conviction, he brought mammoth material on record. His opening statement continued for 10 days.
However, both Spratt and Josh commend James for his enthusiasm and acknowledge that the trial was amusing and lively until he was arguing. Although, he died months later, and certain Mr Kemp took his place, who was 'quite dull and humourless'.
Initially, all those arrested were kept in solitary confinement under harsh conditions. But after a few days, they were shifted to barracks where they could meet and discuss their defence.
Interestingly, a few of them denied being communists, which led to formation of two groups -- communists and non-communists.
Though a defence committee was constituted for them and they were also offered legal assistance by the state, the communists decided to conduct their own defence for propaganda purposes.
An interesting outcome of their decision was that they were allowed to refer to materials used by the prosecution to prepare their defence. A lot of it was banned literature and thus, they got their hands on crucial propaganda material which was not available to them outside the prison.
Their statements and publicity of the trial gave them widespread recognition and support among the people. It was also aided by the favourable attitude of the nationalist leaders of the Congress towards them, the high point of which was a visit by Mahatma Gandhi himself.
As Spratt writes: 'On the whole, the revelation of our secret methods got people to admire us; we had done what most young men wanted to do… most of what can be said in favour of Communism was said.'
The Magnitude of the Case
Despite being a show-trial that it was, the case dragged for over four years, boring even the accused.
The total number of prosecution exhibits came to 4,859 pages, while defence exhibits ran into 1,406 pages.
Josh mentions in his book, 'In the sessions court the prosecution evidence took over 13 months. The judgement delivered by the sessions judge was 676 pages in two volumes, which he took over five months to write.'
The Verdict
The sessions judge convicted 27 people.
Ahmad was sentenced to life imprisonment. Spratt, Dange, Ghate, Joglekar, Nimbkar were sentenced to 12 years in jail. Others were also given jail terms ranging 10 years to four years.
The convicts appealed to high court and, this time, decided to appoint Dr Kailash Nath Katju to represent them. He was able to get several of them acquitted while the sentences of others were reduced.
Ahmad, Dange, and Usmani had to serve three years, while Spratt’s sentence was reduced to two.
The sentences of Ghate, Joglekar, Nimbkar, Bradley, Mirajkar, Josh, Goswami and Majid were reduced to one year.
Thus ended the Meerut Conspiracy case.
Contrary to the government's intentions, the case ended up presenting a positive picture of the communist movement among the people.
However, on Spratt, it had the opposite effect.
In jail, he got to read a lot and started experiencing 'an emotional turn away from communism'.
He later wrote: 'Eventually, in fact, I abandoned communism not due to any personal experience, but because of a gradual loss of confidence in it, brought about mainly by reading.'
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