भा रा तांबे :
"वाटले नाथ हो! तुम्ही उतरला खाली
दे असहकरिता हाक तुम्हा ज्या काळी ।।धृ ।।
हंबरडा फोडी आर्त महात्मा जेव्हां
त्या यज्ञे द्रवुनी गमे धावला देवा!
फोडिली आर्त किंकाळी ।।१।।
गरिबास्तव धरली तुम्ही कांबळी काठी
गुरगुरला होउनि पशुहि संकटापाठीं
ती वेळ वाटली आली ।।२।।"
(माधव जूलियन यांच्या पत्नी श्री लीलाबाई पटवर्धन लिखित 'आमची अकरा वर्षे', १९४५ ह्या पुस्तकाच्या १९९४ सालच्या दुसऱ्या आवृत्तीच्या प्रस्तावनेंत गोपीनाथ तळवलकरांनी ही कविता चौरीचौराला १९२२ सालच्या घटनेबद्दल लिहली आहे असा उल्लेख केला आहे.)
Joseph Lelyveld, 'Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India', 2011:
"...What happened in Chauri Chaura on February 5, 1922, fulfilled his worst fears. An angry crowd of roughly two thousand surrounded a small rural police station after having been fired on by a police detachment, which had then withdrawn and taken cover inside the building. The frustrated crowd, now a mob, soon set it ablaze. Driven out, policemen were hacked to death or thrown back into the flames; in all, twenty-two of them had been slaughtered with their assailants, so it was later said, shouting noncooperation catch-cries, including “Mahatma Gandhi ki jai”—“Glory to Mahatma Gandhi.”
By Gandhi’s standards, which derived from the Hindu value of ahimsa, or nonviolence, Chauri Chaura stood out as an abysmal, even frightening defeat. In his eyes, it showed that the country at large and the national movement in particular had never truly grasped the values of satyagraha. So, with more than fifteen thousand followers already in jail, he abruptly called a halt to civil disobedience, suspending it for more than ten months, until the end of 1922. It was only because he insisted on suspending the campaign that Congress leaders who’d not yet gone to jail went along with his decision. “I got the votes because I was Gandhi and not because people were convinced,” he wrote with the self-lacerating candor he could be relied on to display in his lowest moments. As “penance” for the fact that “murders were committed in my name,” he then fasted for five days.
Among those who expressed disappointment over the retreat were some, both Muslim and Hindu, who well understood that Gandhi was responding to what he deemed a moral imperative. If only they had a less exemplary, less principled leader, they seemed to say. “Our defeat is in proportion to the greatness of our leader” was the way Lajpat Rai, a Hindu and former Congress president, wryly put it. “To me,” said Maulana Abdul Bari, the leading Muslim in the North Indian center of Lucknow, “Gandhi is like a paralytic whose limbs are not in his control but whose mind is still active.” Neither statement was without a tinge of admiration, but each was more disillusioned than admiring. Gandhi had offered them satyagraha as a weapon; now, as the “expert in the satyagraha business,” he was yanking it back.
With his usual industriousness, Gandhi churned out a series
of letters and articles explaining his stand to key followers and the nation at
large, promising that the suspension would not be permanent, that civil
disobedience would eventually be resumed and swaraj achieved, if not in a year.
The clearest statement of his position turned into a prophecy. No one, Gandhi
included, could have realized that what he had to say in 1922 would accurately
depict the circumstances of India’s independence, still a quarter of a century
in the future, or his own ambivalent reaction to its achievement. “I personally
can never be a party to a movement half-violent and half non-violent,” he said,
“even though it may result in the attainment of so-called swaraj, for it will
not be real swaraj as I have conceived it.”..."
courtesy: The Hindu
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