The trap of Chauri Chaura

In 1922, when a crowd in the UP town set ablaze the local police station, digressing from the peaceful character of the Non-cooperation Movement, Gandhi called it off. The storming of the Red Fort was conjured to mount moral pressure on farmer leaders to do the same

On February 4, 1922, the people of Chauri Chaura, in Gorakhpur district of Uttar Pradesh, pelted stones at the police, which opened fire to disperse them. Furious, the crowd set ablaze the local police station, charring to death 23 policemen. The violence created what can be called the Chauri Chaura moment, which signifies the moral pressure that leaders come under when their decision to protest peacefully is flouted by some of their followers. Should leaders then withdraw their nonviolent stir? Yes, Gandhi said. He called off the Non-cooperation Movement.

Gandhi’s response threw open the possibility that a cynical state could always create a Chauri Chaura moment to nix peaceful protests. Nearly a century after Chauri Chaura, on this year’s Republic Day, there was an attempt to conjure that eponymous moment for the ongoing farmer movement: TV channels bemoaned the storming of the Red Fort even as they played on loop the hoisting of the Sikh religious flag. Bharatiya Janata Party leaders and trolls were quick to frame the violence as a threat to the nation. There was consensus that the Union government now had a justifiable reason to evict farmers from the protest sites in Delhi, in case they refused to suspend their stir or retract their demand for the repeal of the three new farm laws.

Farmer leaders chose to do neither. One obvious reason was that the storming of the Red Fort was nowhere comparable to Chauri Chaura both in the scale of violence and ghastliness, although it can be argued that the Capital escaped devastation because the Delhi police did not display the kind of brutality it did during the protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act in 2019-20. This uncharacteristic restraint of the police was cited by farmer leaders as evidence of the state’s intent to allow violence to take place, and mount moral pressure on them to withdraw the stir. A trap had been laid out for them to emulate Gandhi, so to speak.

Their perception could have been dismissed as plain hypocrisy or paranoia - it has not been because of the endless speculations, over the last two months, on the modus operandi that the state might employ to subvert their protest. On top of every person’s chart was the possibility that violence would be scripted and draconian laws invoked against farmer leaders to banish them into prison. This method was tried at Bhima Koregaon in 2018, then perfected to neutralise the anti-CAA agitation in 2019-20, and has now been deployed against the farmer movement.

The predictability of this pattern suggests that the state seeks to exploit the morality inherent in the Chauri Chaura moment. Violence at the sites of peaceful protests is no longer perceived as spontaneous. It is presumed to have been scripted outside the theatres of protest, to deprive the actors of their moral claims on the state. The philosophy of nonviolence is, thus, reduced to a tactic the weak employs to neutralise the state’s might. The weak, therefore, must be made to appear strong, dangerously rebellious or violent before the state can justify their repression.

This has been the state’s strategy from the beginning of the farmers’ march to Delhi. They were dubbed Khalistanis and Maoists. They were denied entry into Delhi. When they wanted to host their tractor parade on Republic Day on the Outer Ring Road, which loops around the Capital like a necklace, they were again refused permission. Farmer leaders accepted this, in sharp contrast to having braved water cannons and police lathis on their march to Delhi in November. This contradiction is easy to explain. During the past two months, their movement had gathered tremendous momentum. They likely believed their defiance of the state’s decision on the route for the tractor parade would spark a confrontation between the police and the protesters. A nervous, cornered state would react violently to create the Chauri Chaura moment for farmer leaders.

This decision to keep away from the Outer Ring Road did breed anger among the young. Some of them chose to defy the state. Present were also elements who do harness the Sikh religious idiom for political mobilisation. They broke through barricades to reach the Red Fort. It is hard to establish whether they acted at the state’s behest, as is alleged, but this charge does not sound incredible in the backdrop of how Bhima Koregaon and anti-CAA protests ended.

Nevertheless, the transgression of the young peasantry was utilised to craft the Chauri Chaura moment with alacrity. Those TV anchors who expressed horror at the Sikh religious flag flying from the Red Fort had not shown the temerity to speak out against the bhoomi-pujan organised at the site where the new Parliament building is to be built. Nor have they been as sanctimonious in their criticism of the BJP’s style of mixing of religion with politics and violence as they were of a segment of the Sikh peasantry doing the same. With farmer leaders evading the Chauri Chaura trap, sinister attacks on their sites of protest have begun. Perhaps even the British were not as cynical and disdainful of nonviolent protests as the Indian state has become today.

The writer is a senior journalist. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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