To bring down the completely insensitive Goa Govt. CHAPATI MOVEMENTNT
The freckled, round and harmless looking chapatis had British officials in quite a tizzy and terrified In 1857, tensions in British occupied India were at an all-time high. Discontented Indians, sick and tired of an exploitative British rule, were quietly planning a rebellion. In February of that year, a strange thing began to occur. Thousands of unmarked chapatis were distributed to homes and police outposts throughout India by runners at night, and the people who accepted the offerings would quietly make more batches and pass them on. The chapatis were real but no one, not even the runners, knew for sure what they were for. The police chowkidars would bake and hand over the chapatis, to their colleagues. The colleagues would, in turn, make some more and pass them on to their counterparts in neighbouring villages. Panic spread among British officers when they found that the chapatis had made their way into every police station in the area and that around 90,000 policemen were participating in the activity. The fact that the chapatis were moving more swiftly than the fastest British mail was particularly disconcerting to them. Rare documents of the revolt of 1857 indicate that by March 5, 1857, the chapatis had reached far and wide – from Avadh and Rohilkhand to Delhi. All in all, the entire chapati ‘movement’ left the British Empire shaken to the core. The British controlled India with a relatively small number of men (100,000 in all), subjugating a huge population of 250 million, so they were well aware of just how inadequate these numbers would be in the event of a serious rebellion. Perpetually on the edge as a result, they regarded any type of communication by the locals they could not understand with deep suspicion, bordering on paranoia. The mysterious chapati deliveries of 1857 that put the British into such a tizzy turned out to be an effective weapon of psychological warfare against colonial rule. In 1857. When the revolt broke out that year, with the first armed rebellion at Meerut on May 10, it was widely believed that the circulation of the chapatis had been planned by an underground movement that had put it into motion. (From Facebook) Roland. Toronto.
