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Disciplining Sholapur: the industrial city and its workers in the period of the Congress ministry, 1937–1939*

Abstract The Congress, which had launched a satyagraha in 1930 to defy the Martial Law at Sholapur, had swept to power in the Bombay Presidency after the 1937 elections. However, once in power it started using a vocabulary of discipline in the industrial city. Its acceptance of power was greeted with a surge in labour activism led by the communists. The Congress initially relaxed many of the restrictions imposed by the earlier British administration and followed a strategy of accommodation. In a city like Sholapur, where government surveillance had increased following the violent popular unrest of 1930 in response to Mahatma Gandhi's call for Civil Disobedience, such temperate policies encouraged the articulation of submerged tensions, especially as the formation of a Congress government had raised expectations. Yet a combination of factors forced the ministry to adopt an uncompromising stance towards the labour activism of this period. Sholapur's turbulent record of unrest, the constraints imposed by class alliances, the trappings of labour recruitment from the criminal tribes settlement, the increasing influence of the communists, coupled with the bureaucracy and millowners' shared aversion to unbridled trade union activity, forced the ministry to adopt tougher disciplinary measures in the city. Therefore, when the labour agitation in Sholapur threatened to disrupt law and order, it brought about a shift in the government's response and the bureaucracy reasserted its power by reverting to repressive measures in the new Congress Raj.