द इण्डियन स्ट्रगल / भारतीय स्वाधीनता संग्राम (नेताजी सुभाष चन्द्र बोस - ऐतिहासिक विश्लेषण)

THE ANTI-CLIMAX 93 In October there was a General Election in England. The Coalition Government broke up and the Conservatives came into power with Mr. Bonar Law at their head and with Viscount Peel and Lord Winterton as Secretary and Under- Secretary of State for India respectively. The next month, Sir Basil Blackett was sent out to India as the Finance Member to the Government of India. The current of reaction began to grow stronger and stronger in India. The Indian Liberal leaders, who under the influence of Mr. Montagu had been led to work the Constitution and to accept office as Ministers, found their position increasingly difficult. Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru had already resigned from the Viceroy's Executive Council in April, following the resignation of Mr. Montagu in March. And in March 1923, when the situation became unbearable for him, Mr. Chintamani, the Minister of Education in the United Provinces, resigned. During the whole of 1922 the only decent acts which the Government did was to concede the demands of the people in Midnapore district in Bengal and of the Akali Sikhs in Punjab. In Midnapore, the new Village Self-Government Act, as a protest against which the no-tax campaign had been started, was withdrawn, and in Punjab a new law was passed under which all the Sikh shrines were taken out of the control of the Mohants and handed over to popular committees. We must now interrupt our narrative and enquire as to what the leaders had been doing in the meantime. In the first week of December 1921, Lala Lajpat Rai and most of his principal colleagues had been rounded up by the police at a meeting of the Punjab Congress Committee. A few days later, Deshbandhu Das and most of his colleagues, including the Secretary of the Bengal Congress Committee, Mr. B. N. Sasmal and myself had been placed under arrest. Following this, Pandit Motilal Nehru and most of the important Con- gressmen in the United Provinces had been clapped into prison. According to the rules of non-co-operation, no Con- gressman could put up a defence before a British Court of Law. Consequently, everywhere the prosecution had an easy task. Most of the trials would not last more than a few minutes and the same magistrate would dispose of hundreds