Eka movement

The Eka (Unity) Movement was a peasant agitation that erupted in late 1921 in the northern districts of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh — chiefly Hardoi, Bahraich, Barabanki and Sitapur — as a sequel to the larger Awadh (Oudh) Kisan movement led by Baba Ramchandra and the Oudh Kisan Sabha. The word eka means "unity," and the movement took its name from the ritual covenant in which assembled peasants gathered around a heap of earth, a leaf-plate of water and a pandit or maulvi, and swore by the Ganga to pay only the recorded rent, to resist eviction, to refuse forced labour (begar), to decline to assist criminals and to abide by the panchayat's verdict. The grievances were concrete: rents in many areas had been pushed forty to fifty per cent above the recorded rates, nazrana (illegal cesses) was extorted, share-rents were exacted by oppressive thikadars (rent contractors), and tenants-at-will faced arbitrary ejection.

The movement's distinctive feature was its grassroots, oath-bound organisation that cut across Hindu–Muslim lines and drew in low-caste cultivators. Although Congress and Khilafat leaders such as Hasrat Mohani had initially given it impetus during the Non-Cooperation period, leadership soon passed to local men, most prominently Madari Pasi, a low-caste leader who had little patience for the strict non-violence prescribed by Mahatma Gandhi. As control devolved to the peasants themselves, the agitation acquired a militant edge that placed it outside the disciplined Congress programme, and grain-merchants and small zamindars with their own grievances against the larger talukdars also joined. This divergence from Gandhian discipline, combined with severe government repression by the colonial authorities, brought the movement to an end by March 1922 — coinciding with the broader collapse of Non-Cooperation after the Chauri Chaura incident of 5 February 1922.

In the wider chronology of agrarian unrest in colonial India, the Eka Movement stands alongside the Awadh Kisan Sabha agitation (1920), the Champaran satyagraha (1917), the Kheda satyagraha (1918), the Moplah rebellion (1921) and the later Bardoli Satyagraha (1928) and Bardoli's Vallabhbhai Patel. It also illustrates the tension between Congress nationalism and autonomous peasant radicalism that historians such as Gyanendra Pandey and the Subaltern Studies school have emphasised. The reforms that followed, including amendments to the Oudh Rent Act, were partly a response to such sustained tenant pressure.

For the UPSC Civil Services examination, the Eka Movement is tested in General Studies Paper I (Modern Indian History, the freedom struggle) and in the History optional. Prelims questions typically ask candidates to associate the movement with Madari Pasi, with the Hardoi–Bahraich–Sitapur belt, with the year 1921–22, and to distinguish it from the Awadh Kisan Sabha. Mains and optional answers should locate it within the spectrum of Non-Cooperation-era peasant movements, analyse why it slipped from Congress control, and use it to argue the broader thesis about subaltern autonomy versus elite nationalist leadership in the freedom struggle.