Nehru’s Word: Jailed for joining Sikh Jatha to Jaito in Nabha 98 years ago

As we witness the continuing travails of the kisans protesting against unjust laws, we need to recall how Jawaharlal Nehru suffered the most harsh conditions in jail when he accompanied a Sikh jatha to the Jaito Morcha in Nabha state in 1923. We quote below from his Autobiography:

The Sikhs, and especially the Akalis among them, had been coming into repeated conflict with the Government in the Punjab. A revivalist movement among them had taken it upon itself to purge their Gurdwaras by driving out corrupt Mahants and taking possession of the places of worship and the property belonging to them. The Government intervened and there was conflict.

The Gurdwara movement was partly due to the general awakening caused by non-co-operation, and the methods of the Akalis were modelled on non-violent Satyagraha. Many incidents took place, but chief among them was the famous Guru-ka-Bagh struggle, where scores of Sikhs, many of them ex-soldiers, allowed themselves to be brutally beaten by the police without raising their hands or turning back from their mission.

India was startled by this amazing display of tenacity and courage. The Gurdwara Committee was declared illegal by the Government, and the struggle continued for some years and ended in the victory of the Sikhs. The Congress was naturally sympathetic, and for some time it had a special liaison officer in Amritsar to keep in close touch with the Akali movement.

The incident to which I am going to refer had little to do with this general Sikh movement, but there is no doubt that it occurred because of this Sikh upheaval. The rulers of two Sikh States in the Punjab, Patiala, and Nabha, had a bitter, personal quarrel which resulted ultimately in the deposition of the Maharaja of Nabha by the Government of India. A British Administrator was appointed to rule the Nabha State. This deposition was resented by the Sikhs, and they agitated against it both in Nabha and outside.

In the course of this agitation, a religious ceremony, at a place called Jaito in Nabha State, was stopped by the new Administrator. To protest against this, and with the declared object of continuing the interrupted ceremony, the Sikhs began sending jathas (batches of men) to Jaito. These jathas were stopped, beaten by the police, arrested, and usually carried to an out-of-the-way place in the jungle and left there.

I had been reading accounts of these beatings from time to time, and when I learnt at Delhi, immediately after the Special Congress (in autumn of 1923), that another jatha was going and I was invited to come and see what happened, I gladly accepted the invitation…. Two of my Congress colleagues — A. T. Gidwani and K. Santanum of Madras— accompanied me…. On arrival at Jaito the jatha was stopped by the police, and immediately an order was served on me, signed by the English Administrator, calling upon me not to enter Nabha territory, and if I had entered it, to leave it immediately….We were immediately arrested and taken to the lock-up….

We were kept the whole day in the lock-up and in the evening, we were marched to the station. Santanum and I were handcuffed together, his left wrist to my right one, and a chain attached to the handcuff was held by the policeman leading us. Gidwani, also handcuffed and chained, brought up the rear. This march of ours down the streets of Jaito town reminded me forcibly of a dog being led on by a chain….

In Nabha Gaol we were all three kept in a most unwholesome and insanitary cell. It was small and damp, with a low ceiling which we could almost touch. At night we slept on the floor, and I would wake up with a start, full of horror, to find that a rat or a mouse had just passed over my face.

Two or three days later we were taken to court for our case, and the most extraordinary and Gilbertian proceedings went on there from day to day….

About a fortnight after our arrest the two trials at last ended.

The judgment was not read out; we were merely told that we had been…. given in all either two years or two and a half years….

That evening in gaol the Superintendent sent for us and showed us an order of the Administrator under the Criminal Procedure Code suspending our sentences. There was no condition attached, and the legal result of that order was that the sentences ended so far as we were concerned….We were then escorted to the railway station and released there….

All three of us — Gidwani, Santanum and I — brought an unpleasant companion with us from our cell in Nabha Gaol. This was the typhus germ, and each one of us had an attack of typhoid. Mine was severe and for a while dangerous enough, but it was the lightest of the three, and I was only bed-ridden for about three or four weeks, but the other two were very seriously ill for long periods.

(Selected and edited by Mridula Mukherjee, former Professor of History at JNU and former Director of Nehru Memorial Museum and Library)