Amritsar : is the site bestowed on the 4th Guru Ramdas in 1677 by Akbar that grew into the holiest city of the Sikhs. The Montague-Chelmsford (Montford) Reforms of 1918 which included the Lucknow Pact en bloc to exacerbate the Hindu-Muslim divide created by Morley-Minto’s Act of 1909 became Govt. of India Act on 24 Dec. 1919. In spite of the winter rains & cold, Amritsar was chosen by the Congress as that year’s Annual Session as a supreme gesture of defiance against this Act. That session resulted in the crucial-most turning point in Congress history: It rejected nationalist Tilak, till then its most popular leader who preferred the constitutional path to freedom, & accepted as its sole supreme leader Gandhi whose chosen path was dictated by his own doctrines of the moment on every issue – political, social or religious, personal, national or international. Motilal Nehru presided over the session & Arya Samajist leader Swami Shraddhānanda chaired the Reception Committee; 50,000 delegates, guests, visitors & newsmen were packed in the Pandal. Gandhi having made Khilafat one of his twin battle cries, his close associate Shaukat Ali & his brother Mohammed Ali were special invitees. Tilak recognised that the Punjab disturbances, the martial law regime & the Jāllianwāla massacre, which have made men like Sir Sankaran Nair & poet Tagore throw up their jobs & honours, had charged the political atmosphere with a spirit of revolt, but knew that by British bureaucracy, which had already undone the good achieved by the Lucknow Pact by this new Act would intensify its efforts to separate the Muslims & the backward classes from the main current of the national movement. He confided, prophetically, to the journalist Durga Das, that none of the leaders of the time had Gandhi’s mass & leaders liker Motilal Nehru & C.R. Das who sided with Gandhi at the session will rue the day they took up an extreme position to defeat my resolution. They will retrace their steps one day, but by then Gandhi would have grown too powerful for them. He had hoped that in spite of the set back the freedom struggle would have gone faster through responsive cooperation with the Govt. & could have obtained self-government in fifteen years.” [S. Bhattacharya; Durga Das, India from Curzon to Nehru & After, Collins, 1969] After the Amritsar Congress, Gandhi invited Sri Aurobindo to “come over & help”. But, confided Sri Aurobindo to Motilal Roy in his letter on 2nd Jan.20, “I had to say that I was not ready to join in the old politics & had no new programme formed for a more spiritual line of work, & it would be no use my going out till I saw my way.” [CWSA 36:234-5]
... get into the mind of the people a settled will for freedom and the necessity of a struggle to achieve it in place of the futile ambling Congress methods till then in vogue. That is now done and the Amritsar Congress is the seal upon it ........* What preoccupies me now is the question what [the country] is going to do with its self-determination, how will it use its freedom, on what lines is it going... European kind, however great an improvement it may be on the past. I hold that India having a spirit of her own and a governing temperament proper to her own ________________ * The 1919 Amritsar session declared Swaraj to be the aim of the Congress, as did the following 1920 Nagpur session; but this demand was soon eclipsed by the Khilafat movement (for the continuance of the Sultan of ...
... aim had largely been achieved already. Moderatism had first been forced into the defensive, and was now no more a force in politics. In the wake of the Rowlatt Act and the Jallianwalla atrocity, the Amritsar Congress of December 1919 (under Motilal Nehru's presidentship) had "set the seal" upon Sri Aurobindo's revolutionary ideology of "a settled will for freedom" and his programme of self-help, passive... had led to the surviving Moderates finally seceding from the Congress and forming a Liberal Party of their own. The Jallianwalla massacre in April 1919 had queered the political pitch, and at the Amritsar Congress in December 1919 feelings had run high, and Gandhiji - with the halo of his South African victories and the more recent crown of the Champaran struggle - had suddenly emerged as a formidable ...
... the people a settled Page 255 will for freedom and the necessity of a struggle to achieve it in place of the futile ambling Congress methods till then in vogue. That is now done and the Amritsar Congress is the seal upon it. The will is not as practical and compact nor by any means as organised and sustained in action as it should be, but there is the will and plenty of strong and able leaders ...
... into the mind of the people a settled will for freedom and the necessity of a struggle to achieve it, in place of the futile, ambling Congress methods till then in vogue. _That is now done and the Amritsar Congress is the seal upon it. The 117 This was the King's Proclamation of pardon granted to all political prisoners just before the visit of the British King to India in the thirties ...
... and the second is therefore our only course. As regards the developing situation in the Punjab, Sri Aurobindo's pen-picture in the issue of 6 May projects almost a foreshadowing of the Amritsar atrocities of twelve years later: Britain, the benevolent, Britain, the mother of Parliament, Britain, the champion of liberty, Britain, the deliverer of the slave, - such was the sanctified ...
... The Spirit of Auroville Once more she wrote to me in answer to my letter: In flight Delhi-Amritsar June 23, 1984 Dear Huta, I think you have written several letters but looking at my file I see one of 4th May. Do write whenever you feel like it. It does seem true that we are walking in the darkest night when the dawn seems far away. ...
... gave way to renewed distrust and acrimony, which seized on issues such as Hindu processions playing music before mosques, killing of cows in public during Id, etc.; early in 1923 clashes broke out in Amritsar and Multan, now in Pakistan, and were going to recur with increasing frequency till the Partition—and after.) Page 165 (A disciple:) Did you read [Pandit Madan Mohan] ...
... League decided upon capturing power by waging a war on the minorities in the Punjab; (e) For this purpose, the Riots of March 1947 were started, and they occurred simultaneously in Lahore, Amritsar, Jullundur, Multan, Rawalpindi, Campbellpur and other districts, the aggressors in all places being Muslims; (f) These riots were no ordinary riots, but were a war of subjugation and conquest ...
... Aurobindo Sri Aurobindo -dom and the necessity of a struggle to achieve it in place of the futile ambling Congress methods till then in vogue. That is now done and the Amritsar Congress is the seal upon it. The will is not as practical and compact nor by any means as organised and sustained in action as it should be, but there is the will and plenty of strong and able leaders ...
... and the benumbing sense of fatality. The butcher's knife of vivisection let loose unimaginable horrors and the desecration of cherished national and all humane values. Lahore, Multan, Rawalpindi, Amritsar, Gujranwala, Sheikhpura... almost everywhere the coming of freedom meant, for hundreds of thousands, a death-trap fashioned by the inscrutable working of the Time Spirit. 1 The violence and humiliation ...
... get into the mind of the people a settled will for freedom and the necessity of a struggle to achieve it in place of the futile ambling Congress methods till then in vogue. That is now done and the Amritsar Congress is the seal upon it. The will is not as practical and compact nor by any means as organised and sustained in action as it should be, but there is the will and plenty of strong and able leaders ...
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