Lala Lajpat Rai

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Lala Lajpat Rai

Lala Lajpat Rai (born January 28, 1865 in Dhudi Ke , Punjab , India ; † November 17, 1928 ) was an Indian politician who took part in the struggle for Indian independence and was known as Sher-e-Punjab or Punjab Kesari (Eng . Lion of Punjab) became known.

Childhood and youth

Lajpat Rai was born as the eldest son of Munshi Radha Kishan Azad and Gulab Devi in ​​a Banias (merchant) family. His father converted from Hinduism to Islam , fasted and prayed like a Muslim, only to later convert back to Hinduism, which had a lasting impact on Lajpat Rai's attitude towards religions other than Hinduism. His mother was a very religious woman from a Sikh family who shared her religious beliefs with her children.

From 1880 studied Lajpat Rai at Government College in Lahore Jura . After he had passed his first exam (Mukhtiarship), he moved to Jagraon , where he went through his “legal traineeship”. Back at Government College, he passed his second exam (Vakilship) in 1885 before moving to Hissor , where he successfully practiced as a lawyer together with fellow students and temporarily took over functions there on the city council. In 1892 he nevertheless returned to Lahore.

Political career

He was one of the three most prominent Hindu nationalists of the Indian National Congress who fought for the Indian independence movement and who dedicated their lives to this goal in the first half of the 20th century. The other two were Bal Gangadhar Tilak from Maharashtra and Bipin Chandra Pal from Bengal . Together the trio became known as Lal-Bal-Pal and together with Aurobindo Ghose they formed the "extremist" Hindu faction of the Congress Party in contrast to the moderate faction, which was initially represented by Gopal Krishna Gokhale and later by Mahatma Gandhi . Lajpat Rai was also a member of the Hindu Maha Sabha , a forerunner of today's Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party .

In August and September 1905, Lajpat Rai traveled to England with Gopal Krishna Gokhale to attend a congress and to inform the British public about the Indian situation. They received widespread support from the democratic and socialist parties such as the Labor Party .

The partition of Bengal by Viceroy Lord Curzon in 1905 aroused their nationalism and led them to take part in the struggle for freedom. The repressive measures taken by the British government against the growing national movement inspired them to anchor greater national pride and self-respect in the population. The trio required a level of self-government that was considered radical at the time. They were the first Indian politicians to demand complete political independence. At the Congress Party's conference in December 1905 in Benares , they called for a boycott of British clothing. The powerful movement he founded in Punjab had an impact.

When Lajpat Rai learned that five prominent Indian lawyers in Rawalpindi had received their dismissal from the deputy commissioner, he wanted to protest against this by means of a public speech. However, the magistrate forbade any gathering and unceremoniously declared Lajpat Rai's speech to be subversive. He then returned to Lahore to move the Chief Court to bail out the lawyers. But the colonial government was informed that he was responsible for the riot in Rawalpindi and had him arrested on May 3, 1907. He was deported to Burma and served six months in Fort Mandalay . He then went to England for a year, where he taught students and agitated on the Indian situation .

To gain support for the Indian cause abroad, he traveled again to England in April 1914. When the First World War broke out shortly afterwards , he could no longer return to India. So he tried to get into the USA , where he founded the Indian Home League Society of America , gave countless lectures and wrote articles as well as a book entitled " Young India " on Colonel Josiah Clement Wedgwood, 1st Baron Wedgwood as a member of the House of Commons, wrote a foreword that was banned in Great Britain and India before it appeared. Lajpat Rai was only able to return to India after the war, not without visiting Japan .

Lajpat Rai led the Punjab protests against the Amritsar massacre of 1919 and participated in Gandhi's campaign of non-cooperation from 1919 to 1922, which was proposed at the 1920 Calcutta Convention of the Congress Party , although he was skeptical about whether it would involve itself hold out on educational institutions , courts , labor and foreign goods . The Congress Party set up a fund to finance the campaign. Within two weeks he had raised over 900,000 rupees for this fund. In the same year Lajpat Rai chaired the first session of the All India Trade Union Congress . In 1921 he was arrested again and sentenced to one and a half years in prison for his activities in the non-cooperation campaign. But the campaign was beginning to have an impact as the colonial bureaucracy slowly came to a standstill. The "half-naked fakir" (quote: Winston Churchill ) Gandhi was invited to London by the Governor General for talks at the round table . Lajpat Rai, however, objected to the suspension of the campaign made by Mahatma Gandhi due to the incident in Chauri Chaura and in 1921 split off the exclusively Hindu Swarajya or Congress Independence Party together with Chittaranjan Das and Motilal Nehru .

In 1926 he went to Geneva as a representative of the Indian workers to take part in the eighth International Labor Conference. He had the opportunity to study the labor movement in the US and England when he had to extend his stay for political reasons.

As well as being a good speaker, he was a prolific and skilled writer. His newspaper Arya Gazette primarily focused on topics related to the Arya Samaj . The Bengali newspaper Bande Mataram and the English-speaking People contained his rousing speeches calling for an end to the oppression of foreign rule. He founded the Servants of the People Society , which advocated both the independence movement and social reform in the country. He wrote an autobiography called The Story of My Life.

Aray Samaj and the Hindi Campaign

At fourteen he came into contact with the dynamic Hindu reformer Dayananda Saraswati , the founder of Arya Samaj. Along with people like Mahatma Hans Raj and Lala Sain Das , he was instrumental in establishing a strong Arya Samaj in the urban Hindu population of the Punjab. This was complemented by the creation of a network of schools and colleges (the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic (DAV) educational institutes ) that met the expectations of the urban Hindu merchant class ( Khatris , Aroras, and Banias , etc.) for an English upbringing imbued with Hindu thought was fair. These confessional institutions also served to spread the reform message of the Arya Samaj.

When Lajpat Rai returned to Lahore, the Arya Samaj was threatened to split into two groups, the College and the Gurukul Party . While the College Party wanted to continue teaching in English and Sanskrit , the Gurukul Party intended to completely remove English from the curriculum. Lajpat Rai stood up for the college party and managed to maintain the unity of the Arya Samaj. He founded a high school for English and Sanskrit in Jalandhar , got involved in the establishment of the first Hindu orphanage in Ferozepur and refused state aid for the DAV facilities. During the famine of 1897 and 1899, he went to great lengths to provide for the hungry and orphans because he believed that "a nation that does not protect its own orphans cannot expect respect from other nations . "

Lajpat Rai stood in sharp contrast to the official education policy , which based on the recommendations of the University Education Commission, only called for state educational institutions and the closure of private institutes. He was of the opinion that without a private initiative, first-rate educational institutions such as the Metropolitan College in Calcutta, the Fergusson College in Poona and the DAV College would not have been founded at all. State policy follows the logic that the population should not do anything about education except give the state money in order to wait until it at some point makes the comfort of creating the necessary educational institutions, which could have fatal consequences for the respective generation .

At that time, in the late 19th century, fierce competition in the neighboring Northwestern Provinces (NWP, later renamed United Provinces of Agra and Awadh [UP], now the state of Uttar Pradesh ) between the rebellious Hindi and Urdu- speaking populations over When the supremacy broke out as the second official language after English , the debate spilled over to the Punjab, with Lajpat Rai and the Arya Samaj playing an important role. Before the departure of the Arya Samaj in Punjab, the urban Hindu communities of the Khatri and Arora enjoyed very warm relationships with the Sikh communities. Dayananda Saraswati's rampant attacks on Sikh gurus and Lajpat Rai's campaign for Hindi caused a rift between communities that continues to this day.

Protests against the Simon Commission

Disgusted by British arrogance, because of which the Simon Commission consisted entirely of British , he refused to work with her. First of all, on February 16, 1928, he delivered a rousing speech that led to the adoption of a resolution against the Simon Commission in the Central Legislative Assembly . Convinced that he was leading by example, he led a demonstration together with Madan Mohan Malaviya on October 30, 1928 against the Simon Commission, which he wanted to ensure peacefulness, but which turned out to be fatal for him. He was hit in the head and chest by a lathi , an iron-studded club used by a British Indian police officer , and seriously injured. A meeting was held that evening at which he said with vitality, "Every blow that hits me is a nail in the coffin of British imperialism." Although he recovered from the fever and pain within three days, his found out Health is still a permanent setback. He was very upset about the brutality of the "civilized" British who had cobbled together a peaceful protest. On November 17, 1928 he succumbed to his serious injuries.

Inspiration and memory

Lajpat Rai was one of the most important nationalists of the Punjab, where the memory of him is reverently kept alive by Hindu nationalists to this day. He was the mentor of Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad nationalists .

Lajpat Nagar and the Lajpat Nagar Central Market in New Delhi , the Lala Lajpat Rai Hall of Residence in the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur and the Lala Lajpat Rai Institute of Engineering and Technology in Moga are named in his honor.

Works

  • Young India
  • England's Debt to India
  • The Political Future of India
  • Unhappy India
  • The Story of My Life - Autobiography

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Rai, Lala Lajpat
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Indian politician
DATE OF BIRTH January 28, 1865
PLACE OF BIRTH Dhudi Ke , Punjab, India
DATE OF DEATH November 17, 1928
Place of death India