Thread by @Anuraag_Shukla

The leaders of HSRA circulated a manifesto at the Lahore Congress session in December 1929. The manifesto contained blistering attacks against the 'compromising policy' of Gandhi and the Congress leadership.

"Mahatma Gandhi is great and we mean no disrespect to him if we express our emphatic disapproval of the methods advocated by him for our country's emancipation. To us, the Mahatma is an impossible visionary."

"Non-violence may be a noble ideal, but it is a thing of the morrow. We can be situated as we are, never hope to win freedom by mere non-violence.

All talk of peace may be sincere, but we, of the slave nation, cannot, and must not, be led away by such false ideology."

HSRA declared that it aimed at preventing a meeting between the Viceroy and the Congress leaders, "whose attitude was described as one of begging".

Gandhi, in his response, denounced the revolutionaries and their creed in an article "The Cult of the Bomb".

Then a revolutionary, Bhagwati Charan, hit back saying: " the British Government threw reforms like the Morley Minto, Montague, etc, before the constitutional agitators to lure them away from the right path. This was a bribe paid them for their support to the government."

"These 'reforms' were sent to India for the benefit of those who, from time to time, raised the cry of 'Home Rule', 'Self-Government', 'Responsible Government', 'Full Responsible Government', 'Dominion Status' and such other names for slavery."

It further held Gandhi and his creed responsible for the failure of the movement. They said that "it was mainly the mania for non-violence and Gandhi's compromise mentality that brought about the disruption of the forces that had come together at the call of Mass Action."

Source:

~ The Congress and the Revolutionaries in the 1920s

Author(s): S. K. Mittal and Irfan Habib, Social Scientist, June 1982, Vol. 10, No. 6, pp. 20-37