Gandhian H.S. Doreswamy, till the very end, insisted that democratic protests have to adopt non-violent means. But, he also had a brush with radical politics for a few years during the Quit India Movement.
The freedom fighter, who passed away on Wednesday, recalls in his memoir Nenapina Suruli Teredaga his association with the Quit India Movement, when he helped organise a strike by all major cloth mills in the city - Binny Mills, Minerva Mills and Raja Mills - especially since they were stitching parachute cloth, used by the British in the Air Force during the war. “We used to hurl time bombs into government record rooms and other British targets to hit their war effort. But no one was hurt,” he wrote.
He often recounted how his brush with violence made him realise the futility of violence and he remained a Gandhian all his life.
His initiation to the fervour of freedom struggle, however, came much earlier when he was an intermediate student in the city. “Then Bombay Mayor and Congress leader K.F. Nariman was arrested on stage and students who had gathered to hear his speech were caned, including me. A student was killed in police firing. This kindled the nationalist spirit in me,” Mr. Doreswamy wrote in his memoir. The only time he met Gandhi in person was in 1936, when he came came to rest in Nandi Hills.
Though Mr. Doreswamy later went on to finish graduation in science and began working as a high school teacher, he quit his job and joined the Quit India Movement in 1942, as a 24-year-old. He was jailed for 17 months between December 1942 and May 1944.
Post his release from jail, he ran a bookshop in Mysuru and was a key leader in the “Mysore Chalo Movement” demanding formation of a democratic and responsible government post Independence. He also became editor of Poura Vani , a newspaper that was banned by the Mysore government for its forthright editorials during the movement, pushing him to publish and distribute it underground.
Interestingly, he published a report on January 17, 1948, that Nathuram Vinayak Godse had come as a guest for a State-level RSS meet and was staying at an RSS leader’s house in the city. Though the RSS continues to dispute this report, Mr. Doreswamy stood by the report he published.
Post-Independence, though initially identified with a splinter group within the Indian National Congress, he gradually disassociated himself from the party and in the later years, remained a civic activist identifying himself with all major national and regional social movements.
He was also part of movements against his former party Congress, including Jayaprakash Narayan’s Sampoorna Kranti movement in the 1970s and the more recent India Against Corruption in 2010. He was also jailed during the Emergency.
“During the Emergency, I wrote a letter to Indira Gandhi saying the British were more magnanimous than her in dealing with political prisoners. I was arrested, but the court let me off, saying as a citizen I was free to write a letter to my Prime Minister, however critical it was,” he recounted to The Hindu in March 2020, lamenting on the incumbent regime’s “suppression of dissent”.
