Lajpat Rai

My friends, I must tell you that henceforth we should recognize it as a fundamental doctrine that the unity of the Hindus and Mohammedans will be a great asset to our political future.

—Lajpat Rai

The order of the judge was that the prisoner be kept in total isolation. Even when he went for a walk around the prison compound he had to stay within sight of the guards. No one was allowed to talk to him and in six months not a single visitor had come to meet him. To make this solitude even more severe, he was not allowed any newspapers and his letters were heavily censored. The guards would have been very surprised to discover that the quiet, lonely man in fact had many friends at the jail in Mandalay in Burma.

Every morning before he came to shave the prisoner, a Bengali barber would memorize the headlines from the day’s papers and give a quick report while he soaped and scraped the man’s face. Later in the day when the water carrier came to replenish the drinking water, he would pull out a newspaper from the mouth of the water pot and the prisoner would take a quick look at the news from his homeland. The guards could keep him away from people but not companions. Lajpat Rai had a pair of kittens, a puppy and a family of mynahs to keep him entertained. The six months of solitary confinement were soon over.

Lajpat Rai was born in the village of Dhudike in the Ferozepur District of Punjab on 28 January 1865. His father Munshi Radha Kishan Azad was a schoolteacher and a widely read man who was interested in many religions. Lajpat Rai’s love of books and interest in education can be traced back to his admiration for his father. He said about his father, ‘In India, I have never come across a better teacher. He never taught, but helped the students to learn in their own way.’ Throughout his life he was involved in founding schools and colleges and at times even donated his savings to them.

Educated in Ludhiana and Lahore, like his contemporaries Tilak and Gokhale, Lajpat Rai qualified as a lawyer. He practised law at Hissar and Ludhiana, but he was always more interested in education, social reform and the freedom movement. He had an open, liberal mind, so even though he was proud of India’s culture, he did not think everything in Indian society was worth admiring. He knew that the caste system, the state of the untouchables and condition of women, all needed improvement and for him the answer lay in education. If one was illiterate, one accepted whatever the priests and upper castes said, but education gave one the confidence to question and fight for one’s rights. He said pragmatically, ‘Everything ancient was not perfect or ideal. We do not want to be mere copies of our ancestors. We wish to be better.’

So in the schools he founded, education was a blend of the ancient and modern. He was keen to revive good traditions like the guru-shishya parampara where the teacher took personal care of his pupils and students were taught about Indian culture. At the same time subjects like science, technology and economics were also in the curriculum. He was a founder of the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic schools, the Punjab National Bank and an insurance company.

It is this spirit of enquiry that drew Lajpat Rai to the Arya Samaj Movement of Swami Dayanand Saraswati that was trying to reform society and remove superstitious religious practices. At this time there was a wave of such progressive reform movements led by enlightened and courageous men like Rammohan Roy in Bengal and G.R. Ranade in Maharashtra. Dayanand wanted to modernize society and preached the equality of all; he fought the domination of priests, was against expensive religious rituals and completely rejected the caste system. He wanted women to be educated and approved of the marriage of widows. Within the Arya Samaj there was no worship of idols, all religious rituals were simplified and worship did not need the intervention of priests. Lajpat Rai was still in college when he joined the Arya Samaj and it became a lifelong passion.

Many years before Gandhi began his work among the Harijans, Lajpat Rai was at work among the Dalits, running schools for their children, visiting their homes and sharing their meals as he tried to understand their problems. He was always ready to go to the rescue of people facing a crisis. He worked in the villages during the famine of 1896 when government measures failed to help the peasants. During a terrible earthquake in Punjab he was up in the hills of Kangra, rescuing people buried under rocks. He founded the Servants of the People Society in 1921 to gather a team of young people who took social work seriously. His popularity soared and soon people were calling him ‘Punjab Kesari’ and ‘Sher-e-Punjab’—the Lion of Punjab.

Lajpat Rai joined the Congress party when he was twenty-three and soon was one of its most powerful orators, travelling all across north India, addressing public rallies. He made sure his voice was heard loud and clear. In 1897, at a time when famine was ravaging villages, the Lahore administration planned to install a statue of Queen Victoria to celebrate the golden anniversary of her reign. Lajpat Rai caustically commented that the Queen would be remembered with more love and loyalty if the money were used to help children orphaned by the famine. His sway over public opinion was so strong that the administration became unnerved and the proposal was quietly abandoned.

Lajpat Rai was the ‘Lal’ of the ‘Lal-Bal-Pal’ trio with ‘Bal’ Gangadhar Tilak and Bipin Chandra ‘Pal’. They were dubbed the Extremists within the Congress party as they were in favour of a more aggressive form of protest against the government. He agreed with Tilak that the time had come to take the freedom movement to the people and start an India-wide campaign of boycott and Swadeshi. His reply to all talk about slow, quiet, constitutional protests was an impatient comment: ‘No nation was worthy of any political status if it could not distinguish between begging political rights and claiming them.’ However, in spite of being called an Extremist, he was never keen on extreme measures, always preferring dialogue and compromise.

Just after the partition of Bengal, he proposed a giant demonstration of a lakh people at the Benaras session of the Congress saying that it ‘will carry more weight and will impress the people in England more than any number of congresses’. Lajpat Rai wanted action, but he was not keen on a split between the Moderates and the Extremists in the party, and worked hard to avoid it at the Surat session in 1907. Like Tilak he knew that a divided party would only play into the hands of the government, but others did not listen to his sensible advice. He was deeply disappointed when all his efforts at mediation failed and the session had to be abandoned after unruly scenes. He knew such a break would only weaken the nationalist movement and he was right, as for nearly a decade the party went into decline. It would take the public outrage at the Jallian walla Bagh massacre and the appearance of Gandhi to revive it.

Right after Surat, Lajpat Rai was arrested for leading a revolt by farmers in Punjab against the raising of water taxes and land revenue. He spent six months in solitary confinement at the jail in Mandalay in Burma, where later Tilak would spend six years. He kept a diary that he later published as The Story of My Deportation. On being released he went to England in 1914 as a representative of the Congress and was planning to tour Europe when the First World War broke out. So he left for the United States where he carried on his propaganda work to make people aware of the nationalist movement in India. Working with great energy he founded the Indian Home Rule League of America, wrote in newspapers and started a journal Young India. At that time Lala Hardayal had started the Ghadar party in America with Punjabi immigrants and Lajpat Rai also worked with him.

When Lajpat Rai returned to India in February 1920, he found Punjab traumatized by the massacre at Jallianwalla Bagh and a country in an uproar of protest. He was soon at the centre of the struggle and was elected the president of the Congress at Calcutta. After Tilak died in August, Lajpat Rai began to tour the country to raise money for the Tilak Swaraj Fund. When the Non-cooperation agitation was started by Gandhi, Lajpat Rai joined it and Punjab was next only to Bengal in its Swadeshi spirit and the effectiveness of its well-organized demonstrations. However, Lajpat Rai was not totally convinced by Gandhi’s philosophy of ahimsa and was a bit wary of the cult of adoration and obedience that the members of the Congress were building around Gandhi.

He was arrested again and the following two years of imprisonment badly affected his health. While he was in prison, some Congress leaders like Motilal Nehru and C.R. Das had formed the Swaraj party as they wanted to stand for elections to the Legislative Assembly. The Congress had decided to boycott the elections. Lajpat Rai came out and joined them and was elected unopposed. He was also involved in the campaign for the rights of factory workers; in 1920 he was elected the first president of the All India Trade Union Congress and said at the conference, ‘The greatest need in this country is to organize, agitate and educate.’

In 1928 the Simon Commission, with Sir John Simon as its head, came to India to discuss India’s future. The Indian leaders were furious at discovering that the Commission did not have a single Indian member. The Congress decided to welcome the Commission with hartals and black-flag processions with people shouting indignantly, ‘Simon, Go Back!’ On 30 October 1928 the Commission was to arrive at Lahore and Lajpat Rai was leading a procession towards the railway station. In spite of the fact that it was a peaceful march, the police began to beat them up, and even though people tried to shield him, Lajpat Rai was hit on the chest by the lathis.

He was already unwell and the beating made him seriously ill. Lajpat Rai died on 17 November 1928 and many believed it was because of his injuries. Punjab did not forget their lion and a month later a young revolutionary named Bhagat Singh shot dead the police officer named Saunders who was responsible for ordering the attack on the procession. Bhagat Singh and his friends were hanged in 1931. Jawaharlal Nehru wrote, ‘Bhagat Singh … did not become popular because of his act of terrorism, but because he seemed to vindicate … the honour of Lala Lajpat Rai, and through him of the nation.’

Lala Lajpat Rai was a true man of action who soldiered on through many adversities, bad health and imprisonment. He was impatient with the slow pace of constitutional protests and believed that people just had to rise up and demand their rights. Tough-talking and practical, he had radical views about religion and society, and worked to make a difference in the lives of people. He had the courage and charisma to inspire and lead people to change their lives and his work still survives in all the schools and colleges he opened in north India. The Lion of Punjab knew how to lead by example and the people followed with absolute faith, knowing that he would never let them down.