Remembering Sadiq Ali By Anil Nauriya It is more than a year since the death of the nonagenarian Sadiq Ali

in Delhi on April 17, 2001. His death followed closely upon the departure of S Nijalingappa and C.Subramaniam, two other key figures in the events leading to and immediately following the split in the Indian National Congress in 1969. Subramaniam went on to become the interim president of Indira Gandhi's faction, to be succeeded by Jagjivan Ram. Nijalingappa, the President of the undivided party, remained president of the Congress(O) until he was succeeded by Sadiq Ali. Udaipur in Rajasthan, from where Sadiq Ali hailed, is only a few hours by bus from the Gujarati towns of Godhra and Ahmedabad. He joined the struggle for Indian freedom not in Rajasthan or Gujarat but in in the then United Provinces (UP) in the nineteen thirties and was jailed often. During the 1942 movement, he toured the country incognito, being a vital link between the provinces and the coordinators of the movement. He assumed various names - Satya Prakash, Kikaji and, in Assam, Anil Babu. He was ultimately arrested in April 1943. Except for a brief interregnum when he joined the KMPP and the Praja Socialist Party, Sadiq Ali was throughout associated with the national headquarters of the undivided Congress till the split in the party in 1969. There was a wealth of information he could have shared with researchers. But it speaks volumes about the nature of much contemporary historical research that he was seldom approached even by those who were working on the Congress and writing on issues on which he could have shed light - such as the Muslim Mass Contact Programme launched by the Congress in the late thirties. In fact the current tendency among researchers is often to make up their minds in advance about what they wish to say and then mention only those facts which they believe will support them in their opinion. Such researchers could have drawn little advantage from Sadiq Ali. Among the many significant events with which his life was interwoven, there is one that is etched in the memory of this writer for the insight it provides to the current hoodlumisation of political parties across a large section of the political spectrum. In fact this is a matter about which the Congress(I) needs to do some introspection particularly in the context of reports from Gujarat, albeit unconfirmed, about the involvement also of some Congressmen in certain recent incidents like the one

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Sabarmati

Ashram.

In the early seventies, a procession of goons of the type which had started finding a place in Mrs Gandhi's faction of the Congress arrived at 7 Jantar Mantar Road, New Delhi, the erstwhile headquarters of the undivided party, then in the possession of the Old Congress, that is, the Congress(O). The hoodlums had come forcibly to evict the Congress (O) from its Jantar Mantar headquarters. Sadiq Ali was in his office when these goons moved in. They physically lifted Sadiq Ali from his chair, and forced him from his room and from the building. A New Congress had been born. By the evening, the place was surrounded by lathi-wielding police and entry was restricted. A local Delhi politician who seemed to be connected with this incident later became a Central minister and also came to be politically associated, some 12 years later, with the anti-Sikh riots. Sadiq Ali's immediate response caught the evictionists unprepared and threw them off balance. So cut off were the evictionists from the history of the Indian National Congress! The diminutive and mild-mannered Sadiq Ali sat down on the steps in the portico of the building at Jantar Mantar Road and went on an indefinite fast. Unable to handle the negative publicity, the Congress(I) retreated after a few days. It is clear that if the Congress(I) is to be successful in its current commendable effort to rid the country of the communalist scourge, represented most vividly by the BJP government in Gujarat, the Congress (I) will also have to purge itself of the lumpen element which entered it particularly from the seventies onwards. After the Janata Party government came to power in 1977, Sadiq Ali served as governor of Maharashtra and later of Tamil Nadu. He kept a low profile. His last years were spent as the Chairman of the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi. He embodied the values of simplicity and integrity which were so characteristic of his generation of freedom fighters. Invited once to inaugurate a seminar to mark the 50th anniversary of India's independence, he stayed on till the end which was late in the evening. By the time the organisers were able to arrange some transport for him he was nowhere to be seen. He had found a three-wheeler and disappeared into the night.