ISSUR, is a hamlet in the Western Ghats in Shikaripura taluk of Shivamogga district of Karnataka, was the first village in pre-independence India to declare itself free from the colonial yoke.
In September 1942, that is, 79 years ago, Issur’s people raised a banner of revolt against the British Raj and declared “azadi”.
Issur’s rebellion caught the national attention. Subhas Chandra Bose, the leader of Azad Hind Fauj (Indian National Army), in a radio address from Berlin in 1942, saluted the people of Issur.
As in the Chittagong uprising (where a group of boys and girls, many of them in their teens, took part in the action of capturing a British armoury in April 1930), the rebellion in Issur saw youngsters run a parallel government for more than a month.
Forces of the Raj tried to reclaim the village, and in the riot that ensued two British officials were killed. The police troops dealt with the unarmed revolutionaries of Issur brutally. Five Issur residents were hanged in March 1943 and several of them were imprisoned.
Mahatma Gandhi seized on the failure of the Cripps Mission to secure Indian support for the British war effort and gave a call for “Do or Die” in a speech delivered in Bombay (now Mumbai) on August 8, 1942, which marked the start of the Quit India Movement.
The All India Congress Committee (AICC) launched a mass protest demanding that the British quit India. The entire leadership of the Indian National Congress (INC) was imprisoned within hours of Gandhi’s call.
Inspired by Gandhi’s clarion call, and on the direction of freedom fighters of the Mysore princely state such as T. Siddalingaiah, Dr Hanumanthappa and Kalli Tippanna Shastri, the people of Issur decided to take the lead in the Quit India Movement by declaring their village independent.
They set up their own prati sarkar (parallel government) and resolved against paying taxes to the imperial government. They hoisted the tricolour at the taluk headquarters in Shikaripura.
The spacious courtyard of the Veerabhadreshwara temple in Shikaripura became the venue of the activities of Issur’s freedom fighters. Sahukar Basannappa, a philanthropist and landlord, assumed the leadership in the village.
Village leaders appointed children below the age of 16 as ‘tahsildars’ and ‘police inspectors’ of the prati sarkar in order to circumvent prosecution by the colonial forces. They even came up with a set of rules and regulations for the revolutionary government of Issur.
As such, Veerabhadraswamy, the presiding deity of the temple, was named Deputy Commissioner of the parallel government. The freedom fighters would ring the temple bell as a warning signal whenever outsiders entered the village.
R.S. Basavaraj, grandson of Basannappa, said: “With the freedom movement at its peak in various villages, cities and towns of the then Mysore region, the police were extra vigilant. To avoid drawing the attention of the police to their activities, senior leaders would ring the temple bell to signal the convening of meetings.”
Recollections
They got a signboard that proclaimed ‘Swaraj Sarkar of Issur’ lettered by local artist Vitobha Rao. The board had a tagline which said officials representing the British government were prohibited from entering the village and cautioned trespassers that they would be prosecuted under the rules of the ‘new’ government. This signboard remained at the entrance to the village for 47 days.
Before hoisting the Indian tricolour at the taluk office, the freedom fighters cut the telephone wires and demolished the bridges that connected the village to Shikaripura to prevent the entry of the police force. The problem started when shanbhog (the village accountant) Ranga Rao, who was responsible for the collection of taxes, came for tax collection.
The villagers snatched the records from him. Similar treatment was meted out to Patel Chennabasappa who was the revenue head of the village. Both officials were fined Rs.10 each. When the officials refused to pay the fine, they were asked to stand on one leg for over three hours before they were let off.
Villagers made them sign an undertaking stating that they would abide by the rules and regulations of ‘Swaraj Sarkar of Issur’. The two officials immediately complained to Chennakrishnappa, who was the amaldar (revenue collector) of Shikaripura.”
Following a directive from the colonial authorities, a large team of senior revenue and police officials descended on Issur on September 28, 1942. They tore down the signboard that challenged the Raj.
The villagers were angered as the board was a proud symbol of their independence.
The freedom fighters considered the entry of officials as ‘trespassing’. After stopping them at the village entrance, they forced them to wear khadi caps. Understanding the gravity of the situation, the amaldar wore the cap without any objection. However, sub-inspector Kenche Gowda regarded the defiance of the villagers as an obstruction in the discharge of his official duty.
The freedom fighters knocked his police cap off with a stick. Offended by this, Kenche Gowda ordered a lathi charge on the villagers. It was the children of the village who initially faced the wrath of police brutality.
At that time the temple bell began to ring, and people from every household rushed out to assemble at the temple. Taken aback by this show of brotherhood, Kenche Gowda fired in the air despite being cautioned by Chennakrishnappa.
The villagers retaliated forcefully. In the melee, bullets fired by Kenche Gowda, pierced through the left arm of Phaniyappachar and the right cheek of Gurushanthappa. Infuriated by the firing, women, children and the aged, armed with clubs and pestles, attacked Chennakrishnappa and Kenche Gowda. In the violence that ensued, Chennakrishnappa and Kenche Gowda died on the spot while hundreds of villagers were injured.
Black chapter
The incident came as a brazen challenge to the domination of the British government. An order was issued to the military unit stationed in Haveri to march towards Issur. Aware of the consequences of the entry of armed soldiers, the freedom fighters took shelter in a nearby forest, leaving only children, women and the aged in the village. But what happened later is a black chapter in the history of Karnataka.
Empty streets greeted the British forces when they reached Issur. In a week-long operation, the frustrated soldiers unleashed violence on whoever remained in the village. The atrocities meted out by them were heart-wrenching.
The soldiers raided houses and seized money and gold and set houses on fire. Several villagers were arrested.
The colonial authorities registered a criminal case against the freedom fighters for the “murder” of the two government officials. Huchurayappa recalled the court proceedings with tremendous clarity:
Issur’s violence was the 123rd criminal case for 1942-43 in the newly opened Special Magistrate Court in Sagar. It was Judge Sundar Rajaram who heard the case on December 5, 1942.
Well-known advocates of Shimoga appeared on behalf of the villagers. The court finally sentenced nine freedom fighters to death and 32 people to life imprisonment. The higher courts, hearing an appeal against the verdict, confirmed the death sentence of Gurappa Kammar, Jinahalli Mallappa, Suryanarayanachar, Badekalli Halappa and Shankarappa Gowda. Even the mercy petition filed with Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar, the Maharaja of Mysore, was rejected.
All the five freedom fighters were hanged to death between March 8 and 10, 1943, at Bangalore Jail. The revolutionaries who took shelter in the dense forest area of the Malnad region continued their struggle until the country got its freedom.
When India became independent on August 15, 1947, the jailed revolutionaries of Issur were released. They were given a rousing reception by the people of Shimoga.
Decades have passed since the revolt but tales of Issur’s bravehearts live on. Stories of their fearless sacrifice are proudly shared by their second and third generation descendants. Issur Lakshminarayana wrote and directed a 120-minute play titled Issurina Ee Shooraru (These Heroes of Issur) with a cast of 100 artistes while K. Virupakshappa narrated the story of the Issur freedom struggle in his PhD thesis titled “Freedom Struggle in Malnad region of old Mysore region from 1920-1947”.
IIn the history of the freedom struggle of Mysore region, it was only in Issur that five revolutionaries were hanged by the colonial forces. The Issur uprising is the only incident of the kind where the British government unleashed violence on helpless residents who remained in the village [while the freedom fighters went into the forest].
People still remember the radio address of Subhas Chandra Bose, who saluted the martyrs of Issur from Berlin on Azad Hind Radio in 1942. Both Nehru and Gandhi mentioned the Issur rebellion in their public addresses and the same was reported elaborately in the widely read Kannada daily, Vishwa Karnataka, at the time.
The wheels of time have turned. India is in its 75th year of Independence on August 15. But the incidents at Issur have largely been forgotten by everyone except the residents of the village who have ensured that the glorious stories of their forebears are passed on to their descendants.
Souce:- Source
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.