Sixty-Three Days

Jatindra Nath Das, the chemist who starved for one word, and the funeral train that answered him

On 13 September 1929, on the sixty-third day of a hunger strike in the jail at Lahore, a twenty-four-year-old bomb-maker named Jatindra Nath Das died rather than accept the bail that would have saved him. He had asked only that Indian political prisoners be classified as political prisoners. The Central Legislative Assembly carried a censure the next day, and several lakh people walked behind his coffin in Calcutta.

One O'Clock in the Afternoon

It is Friday, 13 September 1929, a little after one in the afternoon, in a cell in the jail at Lahore. A young man lies with his head in his brother's lap. He weighs almost nothing. He has not eaten since 13 July. This is the sixty-third day.

His name is Jatindra Nath Das. He is twenty-four years old. Outside the cell the Punjab is in its last hot weeks before the rains. The whole of India is reading the daily medical bulletin on him the way people read a war report. The day before, the jail doctors had written down his pulse: one hundred and thirty a minute, in a body that had not taken food for two months.

He is not asking for freedom. He is not asking for a pardon. He is asking to be called what he is, a political prisoner and not a common thief. The government will not say that word. It is refusing while knowing exactly what the refusal costs. A jail committee has already recommended that he be let go. The government has answered that he may leave on bail instead.

Bail means he walks out as an accused man, on the government's terms, with the question unanswered. He says no. Three days later, several lakh people will walk behind his coffin in Calcutta.

The Boy from South Calcutta

Jatindra Nath Das was born in Calcutta on 27 October 1904. He passed his matriculation in the first division in 1921, and then did what a great many bright students of that year did. He walked out of his studies and into Gandhi's Non-Cooperation Movement.

He was arrested for picketing shops that sold foreign cloth in Burrabazar, and served his first jail term as a teenager. That is worth sitting with. The man who became the HSRA's bomb-maker began in the Congress, on a picket line, doing what Gandhi asked. He did not start as anybody's enemy.