Exactly 101 years ago, the nationalist-revolutionary succumbed to severe bullet injuries in Balasore hospital following a gallant battle with the British-controlled police.
Indian history has discounted the significant contributions of Bagha Jatin towards the freedom movement, thanks to the Left-leaning historiographers. This, despite the fact that there is no dearth of well documented historical records available on the vast revolution the great freedom fighter had conceived!
Much before India won its independence in 1947, there was an attempt under the leadership of Jatin in 1915 to pull the country out of slavery by means of armed insurrection. Jatin’s efforts can also be taken as a precursor to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s armed struggle to throw British out of India.
From Kaya in Bangladesh to Chasakhand in Odisha’s Balasore, Jatin lives on in the hearts of millions. He was indeed an inspiration to Bangabandhu Mujibur Rahman in his fight against Pakistani army during the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971.
Born in Kaya village in Kushtia district of the undivided Bengal, part of present day Bangladesh, in 1887, Jatin kindled the flame of revolution against the colonial British rule in the Indian subcontinent. Jatin envisioned a modern India – politically free, economically prosperous and spiritually progressive. His vision was far ahead of his times.
,The epithet ‘Bagha Jatin’ was earned by young Jatindranath Mukherjee in 1904 when he fought with a Royal Bengal tiger all alone for three hours and killed it using a dagger.
Birth of Jugantar
As a college student Jatindranath joined a relief camp organised by Sister Nivedita, the Irish disciple of Swami Vivekananda. She introduced him to Vivekananda. And it was Swami Vivekananda who instructed Jatindranath to take up the mission to bring together dedicated youth with “iron muscle” and “nerves of steel” who could plunge into the service of the motherland.
Later, his meeting with Sri Aurobindo ignited his fervour for revolution against the British further. It was Sri Aurobindo who entrusted him to create a “secret society” for training dedicated youth for a revolution against the British. That secret society was known as Jugantar and Bagha Jatin became its commander-in-chief.
Bagha Jatin. Photo credit: WikiMedia Commons
The nation was seething with discontent against the British Raj. It was at that time, Jatin’s clarion call “Amra morbo, jagat jagbe” (We shall die to awaken the nation) evoked the growing currents of India nationalism. Thousands of restless youth joined Jatin’s brand of freedom movement.
Jugantar soon became a pan-India movement. The Jugantar Party successfully set up its units across India and even spread far across South-East Asia, Europe and America.
It was an era of Indian liberation movement where cultural nationalism and socialism had a rare blend in the focal point of revolution against the British.
Armed Insurrection Against British
There is no dispute that in the war of Indian independence, Jatin proudly took the path of violence and dedicated himself to the cause of Purna Swaraj (total independence) as opposed to the framework of Indian National Congress.
The year was 1914 when the First World War broke out. Believing in ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’, Jatin looked towards Germany as a land of hope. In 1912, Jatin approached the German Crown Prince for the delivery of arms for an insurrection in order to create a socialist government in India.
The task of obtaining funds and armaments were entrusted upon MN Roy, the key lieutenant of Jatin. In April, 1915, Roy left India in search of German armaments which were believed to be en route, somewhere in the Pacific. The plan was indeed fantastic. As Roy had later recounted in his posthumously published memoirs:
The plan was to use German ships interned in a port at the northern tip of Sumatra, to storm the Andaman Islands and free and arm the prisoners there, and land the army of liberation on the Orissa coast. The ships were armoured, as many big German vessels were, ready for wartime use. They also carried several guns. The crew was composed of naval ratings. They had to escape from the internment camp, seize the ships, and sail… Several hundred rifles and other small arms with an adequate supply of ammunition could be acquired through Chinese smugglers who would get then on board the ships.
Odisha’s Balasore coast was selected as the place where shipload of arms consignment from Germany was supposed to be delivered.
Battle of Balasore
Jatin, along with his followers, were sheltered in a hideout at Kaptipada village in Mayurbhanj district of Odisha – situated in the vicinity of Balasore – to receive the shipload of arms consignments from Germany.
Destiny, however, intervened. It is said that EV Voska, a Czech spy, had accessed the plan of delivering the Germany consignments at India’s east coast and sold the information to the British. Reports further suggest that the very German agent – who was tasked to oversee the arms consignment – had turned into a double agent and informed the British. Though Jatin was told that a cargo of arms and ammunition was already on its way, the consignment never reached Indian shores.
As soon as the information reached the British authorities, they swiftly swung into action. Meanwhile, Jatin and his followers reached Balasore walking through the tough terrain of Mayurbhanj for two days. They took position on a hillock at Chashakhand village in Balasore. A large contingent of British Police – headed by top European police officers from Calcutta and Balasore – and reinforced by army unit from Bhadrak’s Chandbali approached the revolutionaries in a pincers movement.
While the British side was armed with highly sophisticated rifles, Jatin and his team fought with Mauser pistols. The gunfight lasted for two hours. There were significant causalities on the British side also.
Jatin was seriously wounded in the battle and the next day he succumbed to injuries in Balasore city hospital.
Praises For The Courageous Bagha Jatin
Although the armed uprising could not take off, Jatin’s martyrdom and the battle of Balasore galvanised the fight against the British Raj.
It is pertinent to mention that Jatin’s mounting serial attacks on British Raj shook the colonial administration in London. British records suggest that Earl of Minto and Charles Hardinge – two consecutive governor-generals of India – had shown their desperate concern about the rise of Jugantar movement under the leadership of Jatin.
During the Indo-German conspiracy trail, this is what the prosecuting British official had remarked on Jatin:
Were this man living, he might lead the world.
Struck by his heroism, Charles Augustus Tegart, then top colonial police officer in India, wrote:
Bagha Jatin, the Bengali revolutionary, is one of the most selfless political workers in India. His driving power (…) immense: if an army could be raised or arms could reach an Indian port, the British would lose the war.
Augustus Tegart had once told his colleagues:
If Bagha Jatin was an Englishman, then the English people would have built his statue next to Nelson’s at Trafalgar Square.
MN Roy, the revolutionary who had worked closely with Jatin, wrote:
All dadas practised magnetism; only Jatin Mukherjee possessed it.
Historian Prithwin Mukherjee – the grandson of Jatin – who vividly chronicled the detailed vignettes of the great freedom fighter from his birth until his death wrote:
Bagha Jatin chose to suffer and taught his followers to do so in the name of a future of India where citizens would be happy and prosperous in the midst of the other free nations.
Mahatma Gandhi had described Jatin as a ‘divine personality’.
Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee wrote:
Jatindranath was the well-known and principal leader of the second episode in the history of the revolutionary movement who belonged to that band of fighters, who had written a blood-red chapter of their country’s fight for freedom. Sacrificing all they had… they rushed to the ritual call of death and, inch by inch, by shedding their lives, they had left for us the relish of a greater life.
Referring to the Battle of Balasore – where Jatin fought valourly – renowned author Hirendranath Mukherjee wrote:
The Balasore battle where Jatin, with select comrades, laid down his life remains a luminous landmark in India’s struggle for freedom from British imperialist subjugations.
Noted author Ajoy Chandra Banerjee wrote:
At a time when conventional India nationalism could not even contemplate India’s independence, Jatin was a believer of total freedom.
According to Raymond Aron, eminent French historian, Jatin embodies the “thinker in action” who furnishes the “missing link” in modern history.
“India has to rise with her own strength,” Jatin once famously declared. It was in his philosophies and thoughts that the vocabularies of revolutionary ideas were rooted.
Living for a short span of 36 years, Jatin left his footprints on the sands of time. His legacy will stay on to guide the nation, nationalism and nationhood
Recent Posts
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.