Sharma : At that time, if you remember, Kishorelalbhai had made a distinction between viclence to life and viclence to property. Did you observe such a distinction?
Chavan : I tried to. I think it is in government records. somebody who was looking into the records told me about this a few months ago. I was following this technique that sobatage yes, against govement property, not against human life. This was something which emerged as a result of our discussion with our friends. There was one comrade of mine named Dr Sohani, who was working in another district. As I was leading the district movement, I wrote a letter to him, in which I said: We will have to observe these two limitations, if sabotage will have be done first, we must not hurt any human life; secondly, we must not take any private property. We should attack public property and government property only. And Dr Sohani felt this lefter to be very important. So with that letter he was travelling at night in a train when he was arrested. So this letter is in record some where. I was consciously trying to convey this to friends. When I hear that this letter is there, I was rather pleasantly surpris and I said: My memory is still good.
Sharma : That means, people independently came to this conclusion?
Chavan : There were certain practical difficulties about it. They would say: Take private property. Then people would start stealing things from everybody. And I was afraid that if we did not take care of human life the people would start taking private issues, exploiting this for political purposes, and there would be division amongst them. This was the reality of that time. But this was changed when the Patri Sarkar movement came.
Sharma : Could you tell us whether the operations under you and your friends in Maharashtra had any revolutionary philosophy behind it or were these stray acts of violence only?
Chavan : No, it was not merely violence for violence sake. It was a revolutionary resistance movement to weaken the Government when it was engaged in war effor We wanted to weaken it and see that the administration collapsed. That was the basic political approach behind it.
