A debate has raged on many websites in relation to the death in a Cuban prison of a hunger striker on February 23^rd last. Here is one example from the website of The World Association of International Studies (WAIS).

JOHN HEELAN: The Cuban dissident Orlando Zapata Tamayo has died in hospital as a result of his 85-day hunger strike. He started his strike as a protest against Cuban prison authorities refusing to allow him to wear white–a symbol of Cuban resistance.

Nearly 30 years ago, Bobby Sands, a Republican Irish dissident and member of the IRA, died from his hunger strike. He started his strike as a protest against Northern Irish prison authorities who insisted that he and his colleagues wear prison uniforms even though the latter claimed to be political prisoners (and Sands was an elected MP until Thatcher changed the law).

In December 2001, a memorial to Bobby Sands was unveiled in Havana, Cuba by the the IRA President, Gerry Adams, who was later greeted by Fidel Castro. Can we expect to see a similar memorial in Havana to Orlando Zapata Tomayo? If not, why not?

ALAIN de BENOIST replies: If I follow John’s reasoning, the memorial to Bobby Sands having been unveiled in Havana, Orlando Zapata Tomayo’s memorial should be erected in Ireland, not in Cuba! But I am afraid the comparison is not very significant. The great Bobby Sands was jailed for political reasons (I was extremely sad when he died). But, to my best knowledge, Orlando Zapata Tomayo, while being described since 2004 as a “prisoner of conscience” by Amnesty International, never had any political activities before his arrest. He was arrested several times for crimes without any political content. He mainly started his hunger strike to obtain a television and a cellular phone in his jail.

Anyway, Zapata Tamayo’s death has been publicized all around the world as the death of a “victim of the Cuban dictatorship.” The media does not give the same publicity to everything. The murder of Claudia Larissa Brizuela, member of the National Front of People’s Resistance (FNRP), who was killed in Honduras on 24 February (one day after Zapata Tamayo’s death), has not been publicized anywhere. The discovery, in last December, in a mass grave located in La Macarena (Colombia), of 2,000 bodies of trade unionists and peasant leaders murdered by paramilitary and special forces of the Colombian army was not publicised much either.

JOHN EIPPER (editor of  WAIS) comments: Alain’s last point is unsettling for someone about to board a plane for Colombia. By the by, there won’t be many WAIS postings tomorrow morning, as we must leave for the airport at 4:30 AM. When we’re in Colombia (Cartagena, Santa Marta and Medellín), I’ll see what I can find out about the murders at La Macarena.

A study of the statistics to this site shows that from across the world it receives an average of 3,000 visitors per week. There were over 700 visitors last Monday, March 1^st, the date in 1981 when Bobby Sands commenced his hunger strike. In the last week of 2009 we had 8,457 visitors and the busiest day since the site was upgraded in September 2008 was on Wednesday, 16^th December, 2009, when we received 3,886 visitors. The busiest month was March 2009 when there were 21,407 views.

Wikepedia is the largest daily referrer and the most popular pages after the Home Page and the writings of Bobby Sands are the biographies of the hunger strikers, photographs, songs and lyrics, and book reviews.

Former republican prisoner Gerry O’Hare reviews the monumental study on Irish political prisoners (1848-1922) by Professor Sean McConville which covers the period of the imprisonment of O’Donovan Rossa, Tom Clarke and Roger Casement. McConville shows how punishment came to shape the nationalist consciousness and the part it played in the development of Anglo-Irish relations and the birth of the Free State/Republic of Ireland.

The Untameables – Gerry O’Hare

There has been a proliferation of books in recent time about prisoners and jails.  Some of the authors are ex-prisoners which lends a certain credibility to their accounts. This book, however, is by an academic.

Professor Sean McConville, who works at the Department of Law, Queen Mary College, University of London, has produced a tome of over 800 pages dating from the ‘Young Irelanders’ to the War of Independence in 1922.

Such an effort, this reviewer felt, deserved more than a fleeting read, so time was set aside to give the author, and his work, due credit.

Firstly, who is the author? McConville is a Professor of Criminal Justice and Professorial Research Fellow. He has published widely on imprisonment and related political and legal issues, including work on Britain, Europe and the United States. He also encouraged Anna Bryson to edit and publish ‘The Insider’, the story of Eamon Boyce’s diaries in Crumlin Road Jail, 1956-1962 (reviewed here).

In an introduction, McConville tells us modern Irish nationalism took form in the years 1848-1922. Campaigns ranged from the ballot box, civil disobedience and conspiracy, to ‘terrorism’, insurrection and guerilla war.

While the punishment of ‘offenders’ presented successive governments with seemingly intractable problems, imprisoned revolutionaries discovered and exploited numerous opportunities to continue and intensify their struggles. The details of their stories makes this book probably the most comprehensive and detailed study yet of the political use of imprisonment in these years.

Drawing extensively on archives and special collections in Ireland, England, the USA and Australia, many hitherto unused, McConville shows how punishment came to shape the nationalist consciousness.

Accounts of prisoners’ experiences and official reactions are given context by matching chapters, each describing the political and organisational components of successive phases in the nationalist and republican struggle. Successive governments’ responses were conditioned by legal and constitutional factors as well as attitudes and opinions in Britain, Ireland, the USA and Australia. Through considering these, as well as British and Irish party politics, McConville tries to tell the full story of the part played by political imprisonment in the development of Anglo-Irish relations and the birth of the Irish State.

The main story is told with extensive references on each page. This reviewer eventually discovered that it was easier to read the narrative - and then to go back for a second read, using the references.

The book is broken down into sections and each could have made a book in itself.

One section that I found fascinating and distressing was that which covered those who became known as the ‘Dynamitards’.  It covers a shocking period, when explosives were first used in a campaign which ended in abject failure.

In 1867, Alfred Nobel had managed to stabilise the powerful and extremely dangerous explosive, nitroglycerine, in such a fashion that it could be manufactured commercially – that is, made into dynamite.

We had read earlier that Fenianism, both in Ireland and America, was at a low ebb when in 1870 Gladstone released the Fenian leaders who were exiled to America. But there were many factions and the Fenian leaders, we learn, failed to unite the Irish in America. It was about this time that Clan na Gael came to the fore.

The Clan recognised the authority of the Irish Republican Brotherhood which was based in Ireland and Britain. It had secured its place in the leadership of militant Irish-Americans in 1876 when it brought off the rescue of six Fenians in jail in Western Australia, an operation organised by John Devoy and executed by John J. Breslin. The escape captured the admiration of Irish people at home and abroad and whetted the idea among the most militant that an operation successfully carried out half way round the world could now be replicated closer to home - in England.

But internal politics and personality problems meant it was three years before the team of volunteers actually made it to the shores of England. The campaign was a disaster and many of the team were captured and sentenced to life imprisonment. Among the prisoners was Thomas Clarke, who survived his sentence despite unbelievable treatment, whilst most of his colleagues died or went mad.

Many debates took place in the British parliament to seek amnesty before the prisoners were eventually released. The men were isolated in England and suffered the worst degradation from their jailers who we learn were ex-sailors and former British soldiers who took sadistic pleasure, approved by the governors, to break the Irish lifers.

‘Life’ in those days meant twenty years. Relatives and friends at home in Ireland only learnt of their conditions through rumour. The prisoners had to wear soiled clothes, taken from ordinary criminals.  If they complained they were forced to take a cold bath and wash the dirty clothes at the same time.

Their conditions and treatment would make your blood boil.

If Clarke managed to keep his sanity by being determined to beat the system what are we to make of Michael Davitt, according to the author? It appears that despite bad treatment he appears to have been almost a model prisoner. Reading the extensive, surviving official records, public accounts and private papers dealing with Davitt’s imprisonment (there are three in all) he emerges as a person of integrity, one who would not willfully misrepresent his experiences.

In the bibliography of prison writings, this is a rare quality and, being thus perceived by his contemporaries, it enhanced his moral and political stature, giving weight to his writings on prison matters.

We are told that he was “no turbulent Rossa” and his prison record shows only a handful of disciplinary reports, and those of the most trivial kind. McConville concludes that Davitt was a man who tried to survive in the convict system, keeping his mental and emotional balance, and limiting the damage which could undoubtedly arise from a long confinement.

The author’s view and opinions on Roger Casement may provoke controversy particularly on the subject of the ‘Black Diaries’. His lewd description of Casement’s alleged sexual exploits left me wondering why he had to go into such detail. Controversially, he states, and I quote, “Although arguments raged for many years after Casement’s death, there can now be no doubt that the diaries and ledgers are genuine”. The references, of course, that he used to ‘confirm’ such claims were the work of the secret services in Britain. Enough said.

There is extensive coverage of the hunger striker Terence McSweeney, Lord Mayor of Cork. As he lay dying, we learn of the skullduggery that went on between the prison authorities and medical officials - and the medical help, or lack of it, that McSweeney received. The question of force feeding is reminiscent of the treatment meted out to Thomas Ashe and four of the ‘Belfast Ten’, including Gerry Kelly, Hugh Feeney and the Price sisters.

A debate takes place over the state’s refusal to hand McSweeney’s body over to his relatives. I found this most interesting and ironical, considering that the foreword to the book is by former Taoiseach, Garret Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was a minister in the Fine Gael/Labour coalition government which in 1976 hijacked the remains of IRA hunger striker Frank Stagg, to prevent his family and his comrades giving him a republican funeral. Did Fitzgerald even blush as he wrote the foreword?

The last three sections deal with the handover of British power and the period up until 1922. Much of the detail will not be new to avid historians. However, as this book is about prisoners, it is significant that the author recalls the final campaign for the release of those caught on the northern side after the Treaty. After the signing of the Treaty, the Free State Government sought their release as part of a policy to ‘close the books’ and because clemency would be politically advantageous.

Two men in particular are named: John McCurtain, whose brother had been a commandant in the Free State Army killed by republicans in Tipperary, and John Flood , whose brother was shot dead by the British in March 1921. The British government, in the years immediately following, undertook to act as intermediaries with the North’s government to review the cases of prisoners who had been sentenced because of their part in the ‘invasion’. The North’s Prime Minister, James Craig, agreed to allow the British government to review these cases, and to accept the resultant recommendations. Thirty-three men were released on January 25, 1926.

With these releases Britain ended the part it had played in that Anglo-Irish war and its immediate aftermath. Though not of course, its involvement in Ireland and confrontation with Irish revolutionary politics.

New ‘cohorts’ had entered the system, and would have a presence there for most of the Twentieth Century.

For historians this book is a worthwhile and powerful work of diligent research.  I recommend it with the proviso of a health warning for republicans who would perhaps argue with some of the polemic that underlines some of its assumptions.

Irish Political Prisoners, 1848-1922, published by Routledge Taylor and Francis

London and New York

The comms of Bobby Sands and others, smuggled out of the H-Blocks of Long Kesh, particularly during the hunger strike, are now world famous, writes Gerry O’Hare.

Far less well-known is that a republican prisoner, as long ago as the 1950s, had written a prison diary, entirely in Irish, which had also been smuggled out – this time from Belfast’s Crumlin Road Jail. Here, Gerry O’Hare reviews a  book based on these diaries.

Eamon Boyce’s diary, written when he was incarcerated during the IRA’s 1956-62 ‘Operation Harvest’, has now been translated and edited by academic Anna Bryson - and belatedly published under the title, ‘The Insider’.

But better late than never …

Boyce’s story of daily life in The Crum’ was originally written into small diaries that inexplicably ‘by-passed’ the jail censor over many years. Always fearing the risk of discovery by the authorities, his story, as told, is remarkable.  He even managed to keep his diaries secret from most of his comrades and fellow prisoners.

Anna Bryson, who edited the book, is the holder of a Ph.D. in History from Trinity College, Dublin, and was also lead researcher for Professor Sean McConville’s monumental volumes on Irish political prisoners. (The volume, 1848-1922, running to 820 pages is currently available.) McConville is a professor in the Department of Law, Queen Mary, University of London. Bryson was interviewing the former republican prisoner for McConville’s project when he unexpectedly presented Bryson with his own remarkable diaries and, with the assistance of Kathleen Rigney, they have been faithfully translated from their original Irish.

Boyce learned all his Irish whilst in prison.  A Dublin-based CIE bus driver, he was the leader of a 1954 IRA attack on Omagh barracks for which he was sentenced to twelve years for Treason Felony on three counts at the Belfast Winter Assizes.

‘Operation Harvest’ had not started at the time of his imprisonment but began and continued while he was in jail. The book relates Boyce’s frustrations with that ultimately unsuccessful campaign as well as daily life behind prison bars, friendships, inevitable fall-outs, internal politics and eventual freedom in 1962.

It all began when, sitting in his cell at Christmas 1956, he received a parcel including a Gael Linn small diary which the censor had missed. Inspired by that good fortune, he began to plot how he could smuggle material out of the jail. One method was by stuffing written pages into the hollow interiors of crosses, made from matchsticks. Another five diaries were smuggled in for him and he began to fill their pages before they were duly smuggled out again.  It was Boyce’s way of ‘doing

Time’.

He also managed to smuggle in a small radio (another precursor to the later exploits in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh during the blanket protest).

And so we come to the content of these remarkable journals. But first, a note about the book as printed. It includes a detailed annotation, notes and index putting Boyce’s diary entries and comments into the context of the time including names, events and political goings-on outside the prison. The index is a book in itself and this reviewer, after some time, decided to begin by focusing, first, on the narrative given in Boyce’s own words before re-reading the book to take in the context. The index is so detailed that it is, without doubt, one of the best I have ever come across.

The diaries are, at times, depressing and at others’ joyous as he relates the daily life he faced over his years in jail.  The names flow by of past volunteers, sadly now mostly no longer with us. They include both sentenced prisoners and internees between 1956-62.

Petty incidents became huge crises for Boyce as he tried to make life as bearable as the harsh regime that existed in Crumlin Road Jail at that period would allow.

As a former Crumlin Road inhabitant, I - and others of my generation - cannot begin to realise how hard time was served back then. We had it bad, but it was infinitely worse in the 1950s.

Visits are highlighted, particular those with his mother and his brother, Sean. An example: “Saturday 5^th April 1958: My mother and Sean up. She looks well enough but she has been ill. I had a short visit and I got a great Easter parcel. Mam says she’ll visit Charlie Murphy in a while.”

Visits were severely restricted and at the whim of a screw could be terminated for the simplest of petty reasons.

Boyce’s writings are geared towards his release and his frustration shows as other members on the Omagh raid are all released ahead of him. He watches with frustration the failure of the IRA campaign to make much headway. He is both delighted and disappointed at different times

with the success and failure of Sinn Fein candidates. Another example, an entry dated Friday 9^th October, 1959: “Awful result in the election - Sinn Fein destroyed altogether - I can’t talk about it.  A nice letter from Johnny and Florrie. They were delighted with the music box.”

The refusal of chaplains to administer the sacraments at Mass pained him. The bishops of the time decreed that those involved in the IRA were to be refused the sacraments. The Prison Chaplin then was Fr. Paddy McAllister (who later taught me when I was a pupil at St Malachy’s College, next

door to Crumlin Road Jail). He forgives Fr. Paddy, though, as he states, the priest was dictated to by the bishops.

On a happier note, a friendlier chaplain ignored the bishops’ diktats and gave absolution to any prisoner who wished it.

Escape plans are a thorny issue with Boyce as they usually brought down severe searches (and posed the danger of exposure to his diaries). In December 1960 Danny Donnelly escapes. On 2^nd January, Boyce writes in his diary: “The searches are going on. I’m afraid that I’ll lose these diaries. I had to go to bed at eight o’clock with the cold. The English princess (Margaret) is in the Free State”.

As his time of release comes nearer, his frustrations mount. And his final diary note leaves one sharing his unhappiness.

Tuesday 18^th September 1962:  “A letter today. Thank God. My mother, Sean and Fr Livinus all right, but they are fed up waiting for me. Pearse (Doyle) is in Mungret College. Donal (Murphy) will be home on 2.10.62. but there’s no word of Joseph Doyle…

“This is the last part of my diary after seven years writing. With God’s help, there will be nothing important to write between this and freedom. I’m grateful to God that everything was okay from the day I came in here.

“Of course, I’m very disappointed about political maters. I was full of hope coming in, but now I don’t suppose that there’s any solution to the republican question. It’s too late, but we had our chance.

“It’s a pity that South, and the other men, died - as there won’t be any result from their sacrifice - but that’s life. I pray that God will give me luck and blessings in the life that is ahead of me”.

Finally in a ‘Question & Answer’ interview with the editor/author, he is asked was his jail life a worthwhile experience? His answer speaks volumes:

“In many ways yes. I kept my self respect and the people I met - mostly men - during the whole course of my involvement with the movement, it’s been privilege to know them and I’ve been a better person because of them. Now if I say that to somebody up north, they might laugh - but I would definitely say that”.

‘The Insider – The Prison Diaries of Eamonn Boyce 1956 – 1962’, edited by Anna Bryson. Published by the Lilliput Press, Dublin, 62-63 Sitric Road, Arbour Hill, Dublin 7. Price €40

http://www.lilliputpress.ie/

The award winning journalist, Robert Fisk, visited Belfast over the holiday period and wrote a feature for the London ‘Independent’, making historical comparisons between the Plantation of Ulster and Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinians. His article is titled: ‘Walls never work: in the Middle East or in Ireland - Israel’s illegal claim to West Bank Arab land is based on holy texts, not on a king’s fiat.’ Here is the article in full:

We were walking round Milltown Cemetery last week, me and David McKittrick – Our Man in Belfast and among my oldest friends – and the wind came biting down from Cave Hill.

“Cloaked in ice and snow,” was how the Belfast Telegraph described Northern Ireland when I took the train back to Dublin the next day, but I think the bitterness of the Ardoyne, the Falls, the Shankill, the old Markets, made up for the exaggeration. “Peace” lines they may be, but just east of Andersonstown, that frozen, implacable wall of iron, stone and wire reminded me of an even more permanent “security fence” more than 3,000km away.

In Milltown Cemetery, in the Republican “plot” – yes, Bobby Sands lies there, also memorialised, of course, in the street next to the British embassy in Tehran – was the shared grave of Maire and Jimmy Drumm of Sinn Fein. Her picture showed a younger woman than I used to know, all smiles and curled hair rather than fury and cynicism (though she’d met me cheerfully when I went to say farewell more than 34 years ago, a whiskey bottle on the table and the commanders of the IRA’s Andersonstown Brigade on the sofas around her to say goodbye to the young “fella” setting off for Beirut).

“Murdered by pro-British elements” her gravestone said – that was the nearest an Irish Catholic Republican movement might come to saying “Protestants” – and I remembered how they’d shot Maire in her bed at the Mater Hospital in 1976, how she’d fallen from the bloody sheets and tried to crawl across the floor; where they shot her again.

They could not have known that Belfast would today be a Catholic majority city. Nor could the Protestant settlers of the 16th and 17th century – the Jacobean planters and the Cromwellian veterans – have known that their lands would almost all be Catholic 400 years later. The story of the Protestant “settlements” in Ireland provides a ghostly narrative of those modern-day “settlements” in the West Bank, where the Israelis insist on fighting the world’s last colonial war with the assistance of that great anti-colonial nation known as the United States.

The differences, of course, are legion. Protestantism, in its various Irish forms, aimed to convert or ethnically cleanse the Catholic Gaels. Judaism does not attempt to proselytise – quite the contrary – and Israel’s illegal claim to West Bank Arab land is based on holy texts, not on a king’s fiat.

Robert Kee, still one of the finest popular expositors of 16th-17th Irish history, puts in concisely: “The four counties of Donegal, Tyrone, Derry and Armagh … together with the two counties of Cavan and Fermanagh became subject to the most systematic attempt yet to plant or settle in Ireland strangers from England and Scotland. This was the so-called Plantation of Ulster, worked out on a government drawing board between 1608 and 1610.”

There had been previous efforts to colonise barbarous Ireland, when Catholic sovereigns had settled families in Leix and Offaly (whose landowners found they now lived in King’s and Queen’s Counties, just as West Bank Palestinians are supposed to believe that, since 1967, they have lived in Judea and Samaria). “But all such previous plantations had in the end been failures,” writes Kee. “Collapsing for lack of human support or capital, or else being physically wiped out by the rebellion of those who had been dispossesed to make room for them.”

This remains Israel’s fear: that those Palestinians dispossesed in 1948 will return to take their former lands in what is now the State of Israel, or at least those lands stolen from them in the West Bank after 1967. The Catholic massacres of Protestants in 1641, a period of civil war vividly captured in the 20,000 pages of witness depositions now held by my own alma mater of Trinity College, Dublin, is a bleak precursor of the Hebron massacre of Jews during the Arab rebellion of 1929; albeit that up to 1,300 Protestants were hanged and put to the sword in 1641, 64 Jews in Hebron. William Baxter, a gentleman from Co. Fermanagh “swore that Ross McArt McGuire seized his lands at Rathmoran … on the grounds that they ‘belonged to his father before the said plantation,’” Trinity’s modern history professor Jane Ohlmeyer, recalled in a recent article.

But the Elizabethan settlers came as soldiers who settled. Later Scots Protestants came, like Israelis to the West Bank, as settlers prepared to be soldiers. “The idea of the settlement of underpopulated lands caught the imagination of men in both countries” – I am quoting Perceval-Maxwell’s work on Scottish migration, but “making the desert bloom” and “a land without people for a people without land” echoes in the future distance.

Cromwell was to inject a new form of violence into Ireland, whose ultimate victims can still be found in Milltown Cemetery and, just down the Falls Road, in Belfast’s largely Protestant City Cemetery. The slaughter at Drogheda and Wexford acted as a catalyst of mass fear, much as the killings at Deir Yassin and many other Arab villages in 1948 led to the abandonment or capitulation of hundreds of other Arab towns in the land that was to become Israel. Most of the best land of Ireland, at least three-quarters of it, was confiscated from its Catholic owners, its original inhabitants expelled to the cold, wild lands of Connaught. By 1688, Catholics held only 22 per cent of the original Gaelic Ireland, precisely the same percentage of mandate Palestinian land – 22 per cent – for which Yassir Arafat was required to negotiate in the hopeless Oslo “agreement”. Arab-owned land in “Palestine” is now smaller still, heading inexorably to the mere 14 per cent that the Catholics still clung on to in 1703.

Again, these are not parallel narratives; but unborn ghosts are there. English rulers in the 17th century suspected – quite rightly – that Spain was lending spiritual and material support to Irish insurgents, just as Israel today believes, correctly, that Iran is giving spiritual and material support to Hamas and, outside “Palestine”, to Hizballah. For the Pope of Rome, read Pope Khamenei of Tehran. On many occasions, acts of “terrorism” against the Protestants emerged from landless Catholic tenants who were allowed to work for those who had seized their property. So, later Protestant “settlements” were surrounded by vast defensive walls, angled with watch-towers and ramparts and gun positions. The city of Derry has walls above the Catholic Bogside every bit as ferocious as the Israeli wall that now cuts into yet more Arab land.

And, of course, Irish Catholics fled abroad – just as the Israeli foreign minister would like to “transfer” Palestinians to the east. And where did the Irish Catholics go? As many as 100,000 fled to the continent, mostly to Spanish Hapsburg territories, in many cases to the Spanish lands from which the Moriscos – the Muslims of Spain and the remainder of the nation’s Jews – had just been “cleansed” by their Catholic Christian overlords. The final crushing of the Spanish Muslims (who had failed to convert) occurred in 1609, when Philip of Spain forced 300,000 souls to leave the Iberian peninsula for Ottoman north Africa. And the very Spanish “cleansers” who had “ethnocided” the Moriscos – Garcia Sarmiento de Sotomayor and Count Caracena were among them – now advocated resources for the Irish arriving in Galicia.

Irish Catholic publications of the time – according to research undertaken by Igor Pérez Tostado – compared Irish Catholics with Spanish Muslims; “both were presented not only as disloyal but as a mortal threat to the very survival of the political community.” Both, in effect, were thrown into the sea.

Indian journalist, Bhaskar Roy, in an article published in ‘The Times Of India’ (11 December), writes about recent political disturbances over the creation of a separate Telangana state and how a hunger strike is being used to advance the cause of one side. References to ‘the Centre’ are about the national government.

“I’ve read all the papers, they’ve told me of your tears” - the line from a moving song about the brave death of Bobby Sands and nine fellow Irish activists after 66 days of hunger strike in a British prison in 1981, still reverberates.

When Telangana Rashtra Samithi leader K Chandrasekhar Rao began to sink after 11 days of fasting in a Hyderabad hospital on Wednesday, the power of hunger strike as a weapon of protest got underscored yet again.

The midnight announcement by the Centre conceding a separate Telangana state was a throwback to many intense moments of history when dour men chose to fast to bring their mighty opponents down to their knees.

Mahatma Gandhi was the first to recognise the power of fast as a political tool, and used it frequently to have his way. Protesting the ‘communal award’ of 1932 by the colonial rulers to give separate representation to the ‘untouchables’ in provincial legislatures, he undertook a fast that led to the Poona Pact by which untouchable leaders renounced separate representation. He took the same route again in 1943 and fasted for 21 days as a “penance for deadlock” between the Viceroy and Indian leaders. This was a turning point in the freedom struggle.

Lodged in Lahore jail, revolutionary Jatin Das began his hunger strike on July 13, 1929 and died on September 13. His death fired the imagination of the Indian youth, unleashing a new wave of protests.

After Independence, the first leader to succumb to hunger strike was Potti Sriramulu, a Gandhian who protested the Centre’s indifference to the demand for a separate Andhra Pradesh. He began his fast on October 19, 1952 and died on December 15. His death threw the Andhra region into turmoil, triggering off violent protests that finally led to the creation of Andhra Pradesh.

Another martyr to the cause of statehood in free India was Darshan Singh Pheruman, the Sikh leader who began his fast on August 15, 1969 on issues like Chandigarh and Bhakra Nangal water and died on October 27 — the 74th day of his hunger strike.

At the height of the movement for a separate Punjabi-speaking state, Sant Fateh Singh began his fast on December 18, 1960 and ended it on January 9, 1961 after an assurance from the Centre.

Some of the leaders were successful in getting their demands conceded while many failed. Handed down by the Mahatma, fast is still considered an effective weapon of protest by leaders of such movements.

At the height of the movement against forcible land acquisition in West Bengal, Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee was on hunger strike for 25 days. Her ‘act of courage’ radically changed the complexion of the state’s politics pushing the ruling Left to a corner.

The Connolly Foundation, Scotland’s Irish charity has just launched its new website: see here.

The site offers information about Connolly and the activities and charitable purposes of The Connolly Foundation. The republican leader and political prisoner, James Connolly, was wounded during the Easter 1916 Rising and later executed by the British. Speaking of the website’s launch The Connolly Foundation Chair, Jim Slaven, said: “This website will provide valuable information for Scotland’s Irish community. As well as offering people regular updates on The Connolly Foundation’s activities it will feature regular articles and cover relevant news and events across Scotland. The website will also be a valuable educational resource offering people the most comprehensive James Connolly archive and web access to our various research projects.”

Contact details: The Connolly Foundation, The Melting Pot, 5 Rose Street, Edinburgh
EH2 2PR