Usha Mehta, a 22-Year-Old Student, Put the Underground Congress Radio on Air From Hidden Bombay Flats in 1942, Was Arrested on 12 November, and Received the Padma Vibhushan in 1998

Every Congress Radio broadcast from Bombay in 1942 opened with the same line: “This is Congress Radio calling on 42.34 meters from somewhere in India.” A recording of Muhammad Iqbal’s “Sare Jahan Se Achcha” followed, and the programme closed with “Vande Mataram”. Usha Mehta, a 22-year-old student, was one of the four organisers and one of the voices on air, and the Government of India conferred the Padma Vibhushan on her in 1998.

What follows leans on the one peer-reviewed study that works from the police and court papers, Isabel Huacuja Alonso’s 2023 paper in Modern Asian Studies, and checks it against the BBC, The Indian Express, the Gazette of India and Mani Bhavan, the Gandhi museum in Mumbai. Sources differ on the date of the first broadcast, and each date is given with the name of the source that states it.

Four organisers and a technician

The court record names four leading organisers: Usha Mehta, Vithaldas Madhavji Khakar, Vithaldas Kanthadabhai Jhaveri and Chandrakant Babubhai Jhaveri. Huacuja Alonso writes that all four were in their twenties, that none held a leading post in the Indian National Congress, and that none had worked in broadcasting. Other accounts spell the names differently (“Babubhai Khakar”, “Vithalbhai Jhaveri”); the forms here follow the court documents as she quotes them.

Mehta was born on 25 March 1920 at Saras in Gujarat, the daughter of a district judge, according to the Mumbai Legacy Project of the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai. In an interview quoted by the BBC, she recalled shouting “Simon Go Back” at the age of eight. In August 1942 she was in the audience at Gowalia Tank when the All-India Congress Committee passed the Quit India resolution, and the Congress leaders were arrested the next morning. The press was already working under the Defence of India Rules, and the wider Quit India movement has its own account on tuput.

According to the Indian Express, Mehta later told the historian Usha Thakkar that she had studied revolutions in other countries and suggested a station of their own, because “When the press is gagged and news banned” a transmitter can tell the public what is happening.

A transmitter built from a banned amateur set

They needed someone who could build one. After war began in 1939, the Government of India had cancelled all amateur transmitting licences and ordered owners to hand in their equipment. Nariman Abarbad Printer, a trained technician and the former principal of the Bombay Technical Institute in Byculla, had studied radio engineering in England two years before the war. He took his own transmitter apart, kept the parts at home, and used them to build the station’s set. The court found that he joined for money, not for the cause.

Nanik Motwane, director of Chicago Radio and Telephone Company, then Bombay’s largest wireless dealer, supplied parts. He also arranged the filming of the Congress Committee’s Quit India declaration, which was later transferred to records and played on the station. Khakar raised the money and made the first contact with the senior Congress leaders who were underground. Ram Manohar Lohia, who had gone underground after his release from prison in 1941, gave financial and practical help. Achyut Patwardhan wrote some of the talks, and Sucheta Kripalani helped prepare news bulletins.

Flats changed several times. To avoid suspicion, the group carried the equipment in suitcases and played a family changing house. In her own account, Mehta says she stopped wearing khadi saris during this period, to avoid attention.

What went out on air

Huacuja Alonso sorts the programming into three kinds. First came recordings and readings of Congress Committee speeches, including a Gandhi appeal to Indian soldiers, a speech by Vallabhbhai Patel and a recording of Maulana Azad. Second were original talks, many of them written by Lohia, on workers and peasants. Third were news bulletins on risings in different cities. Hindustani was the main language, and English translations were added in later months.

Mehta said the station was the first to report the Chittagong bomb raid, the Jamshedpur strike and the violence at Ashti and Chimur. In the Indian Express’s quotation of her interview with Thakkar, newspapers dared not touch these subjects. One broadcaster told listeners that radio “is the only place where you can find uncensored news”.

Reach was small. Huacuja Alonso reports that it could be heard only within a small radius of Bombay, and the police transcripts of the broadcasts are full of notes such as “Voice indistinct”. Announcers asked listeners to tune between 39 and 43 meters and to keep trying. One survey she cites counted 160,000 registered radio licences in all of India in 1943, for about 300 million people. The station told listeners to pass on what they heard and, in its own words, “Never talk of the persons behind the stations.” The police transcripts note “female voice” wherever Mehta read the news.

Three dates for the first broadcast

Sources do not agree on when Congress Radio first went on air. The BBC gives 14 August 1942 for the first broadcast, and the Tribune says the group set the station up on 14 August. Live History India and The Better India give 27 August. The Indian Express gives 3 September at 8.45 pm, and the Mumbai Legacy Project repeats that date with the Indian Express as its reference. Huacuja Alonso gives no date for the first broadcast. She records that the Congress Committee’s bulletin announced the station about two weeks after it went on air, that readers probably took this as Congress endorsement, and that the police began monitoring the broadcasts straight after that announcement.

All the sources agree on the end. Mehta and her colleagues were taken on 12 November 1942.

The raid of 12 November 1942

Huacuja Alonso’s account, based on the police report and the judgment, names Inspector Fergusson as the officer supervising the case and an officer called Kokje as the one in the field. Kokje watched the radio shops of Bombay, questioned an attendant about a recent sale of transmitter parts, and traced Printer. Printer agreed to cooperate, probably in exchange for immunity.

On 12 November Printer went with the police to the flat in Parekh Wadi where the station was then working. They arrested Chandrakant Jhaveri and Mehta, who were at the transmitter, and took the equipment. Khakar, Vithaldas Jhaveri and Motwane were arrested at their homes and offices the next day. Mehta recalled that policemen stood on every step of the stairs and told a colleague that they were getting “a Guard of Honour”.

She later said that published stories claiming the police had tortured her were false, according to Huacuja Alonso. In her BBC interview she described the months of questioning as “real mental torture”.

The trial: April 1943 and the sentences

A Special Criminal Court set up under a 1942 ordinance tried the five accused as Case No. 7 of 1943, and the trial opened on 8 April 1943. Charges cited section 120B of the Indian Penal Code, section 20 of the Telegraph Act of 1885 and several rules under the Defence of India Rules.

Three of the accused, all men, denied any link with the station. Mehta pleaded not guilty but would not deny her part, and the judge wrote that she “deserves all the credit for refusing to state a falsehood to save herself”. In the same judgment she was described as “a lieutenant” of the men, a description Huacuja Alonso reads as a slight.

Axis radio came up in court. The judge concluded that the Axis governments had not supported the station and that no pro-Axis views had been broadcast, relying on a Bombay government officer who compared the broadcasts with Tokyo and Saigon radio. Huacuja Alonso adds two cautions. A British investigator thought some bulletins came from Axis stations, while Mehta said Lohia received news from Quit India organisers, and she finds the evidence on news sources too thin to decide. Mehta also called All India Radio “Anti-India Radio”, a phrase Subhas Chandra Bose used in his broadcasts, and Huacuja Alonso reads that as an echo of Axis radio’s themes, although the station never voiced support for the Axis. The Azad Hind Fauj article covers Bose.

One detail divided the defendants and the judge. Mehta said the “Vande Mataram” record was still playing when the police came in and that she refused to stand until it ended. Relying on the police report that Printer had cut the transmitter’s fuse, and on photographs showing the gramophone needle off the record, the judge rejected her account. For the song itself, see the Vande Mataram article.

The judge found Mehta, Khakar and Chandrakant Jhaveri guilty of “conspiracy to establish, maintain and work an unauthorized wireless transmitter”. Khakar received five years, Mehta four and Chandrakant Jhaveri one, because the police could not show he had helped plan the station. Motwane was cleared because the police could not prove he knew his staff had sold parts to Printer. Vithaldas Jhaveri was cleared on a technical point: his lawyer argued that gramophone records were not “documents” under the legal definition, so the records bearing his handwriting could not be used against him.

Why this station is the one remembered

Congress Radio was not the only underground station of the Quit India months. Huacuja Alonso notes evidence of at least three others, in Calcutta, Ahmedabad and Pune, and says none became as well known, partly because of the raid and the trial. She writes that the station’s influence came less from what it said than from the fact that a small group of young, unknown Indians had put a transmitter on the air against the Raj, and that this news spread by word of mouth even after the police shut it down. The same line of argument appears in her essay in The India Forum.

Huacuja Alonso writes that the evidence shows Mehta’s part was central, not a lieutenant’s, and that as one of very few Indian women on the airwaves during the war she drew attention to the station.

After prison

The Indian Express says Mehta was released from Yerawada jail in Pune in March 1946 and that the nationalist press called her “Radio-ben”; the BBC gives April 1946. After independence she took a PhD and became a university teacher in Bombay, as the BBC and Huacuja Alonso describe it. Mani Bhavan Gandhi Sangrahalaya records her as its chairman and as chairman of the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi, and the Mumbai Legacy Project says she gave her time to both after retiring.

A notification of 26 January 1998, printed in the Gazette of India Extraordinary of 17 April 1998, conferred the Padma Vibhushan on “Dr. (Miss) Usha H. Mehta (Social Work), Mumbai”. Lakshmi Sahgal, Nani Palkhivala and Walter Sisulu were the other three names on that year’s list. The Tribune describes the Padma Vibhushan as India’s second-highest civilian award. Mehta died on 11 August 2000.