This Is the Congress Radio
The secret Congress Radio, 42.34 metres, from somewhere in India: eleven weeks in 1942 and the four years they cost
When the Quit India leaders were jailed and the press was gagged, a twenty-two-year-old philosophy graduate named Usha Mehta put an underground transmitter on air from Bombay. The Congress Radio broadcast uncensored news on 42.34 metres from 27 August to 12 November 1942, moving between four addresses until the man who built the set led the police to the door.
Room 106, Nine O'Clock
It is Thursday, 12 November 1942, a little before nine at night. On the fifth floor of a building in Parekh Wadi, off Girgaum Back Road in Bombay, a twenty-two-year-old woman sits in front of a microphone and a gramophone. Her name is Usha Mehta. The room is small and hot. The windows are shut so the sound does not carry to the landing.
She has just finished the evening news. Now she lowers the needle on the record that closes every broadcast, Vande Mataram. The song begins.
Then someone knocks hard on the door.
Outside stand the deputy commissioner of police, a line of armed constables, and a few military technicians. With them is the station's own chief technician, the man who built the transmitter. For eleven weeks the police have hunted this room across four addresses in Bombay. Tonight they have it. What Usha Mehta does in the next few seconds is the reason we still tell this story.
Why a Radio Station
Go back three months. On 8 August 1942, at Gowalia Tank maidan in Bombay, the Congress passed the Quit India resolution. Before dawn on 9 August the British arrested Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Azad and nearly every Congress leader in the country. The movement lost its head in a single night.
It also lost its voice. Newspapers were censored or shut. All India Radio carried only what the government approved. A village in Bihar or a mill hand in Ahmedabad had no way to know whether the movement was alive or finished.
Usha Mehta was not a leader. She was a philosophy graduate of Wilson College, born in a village near Surat in 1920. She had been in this fight since she was eight. At that age she walked in a Simon Commission protest, shouting "Simon go back". On 14 August 1942 she and a few friends decided to build the thing the movement no longer had. A transmitter of their own.