The Movement Fizzles Out

By 1908, the open phase (as different from the underground revolutionary phase) of the Swadeshi and Boycott movement was almost over. This was due to many reasons—

● There was severe government repression.

● The movement failed to create an effective organisation or a party structure. It threw up an entire gamut of techniques that later came to be associated with Gandhian politics—non- cooperation, passive resistance, filling of British jails, social reform and constructive work—but failed to give these techniques a disciplined focus.

● The movement was rendered leaderless with most of the leaders either arrested or deported by 1908 and with Aurobindo Ghosh and Bipin Chandra Pal retiring from active politics.

● Internal squabbles among leaders, magnified by the Surat split (1907), did much harm to the movement.

● The movement aroused the people but did not know how to tap the newly released energy or how to find new forms to give expression to popular resentment.

● The movement largely remained confined to the upper and middle classes and zamindars, and failed to reach the masses—especially the peasantry.

● Non-cooperation and passive resistance remained mere ideas.

● It is difficult to sustain a mass-based movement at a high pitch for too long.