So who won? Reading, the Viceroy, said to Peel, Secretary of State, that the terms seemed to provide ‘evidence that persistent pressure on Government is not devoid of results.’7
Stimulated by the response to the flag satyagraha, C.R. thought of defensive disobedience by 10,000 Congress volunteers, but the ingredients for success were absent. Congress was to wait until 1928 before reapplying the pressure of disobedience.
Meanwhile, the Hindu-Muslim relationship was souring. Campaigns of conversion and reconversion had divided the communities, especially in the Punjab. C.R. noted that Hinduism, ‘a non-proselytising religion, is flapping its wings in Punjab and has frightened Islam.’ ‘ “If you may fly, why not I,” says she.’ Cautioning Hindus against inviting Muslim ill-will, he said that as a Hindu he had a ‘birthright to speak harshly to my Hindu brethren’ (Young India, 5.4. & 3.5.23).
C.R. was missing the Mahatma. In April 1923 he went to Poona’s prison gates to welcome Shankerlal Banker, Gandhi’s fellow-prisoner, who had been released after a year. Though Banker brought no advice from the Mahatma, who was against counselling from jail, meeting him cheered C.R. He felt that Banker’s soul had been ‘polished by a masterhand’ during his 13- month obligatory retreat in Gandhi’s company (Young India, 31.5.23).
In July C.R. learnt that because of his 1921 conviction he had been expelled from the Masonic Lodge by its District Grandmaster, who happened to be one of the Raj’s senior officers. Some Lodge members in Salem resigned in protest, and a bitter C.R. retorted in Young India that he had been freed from one of ‘the governing caste’s many instruments for political domination’ (12.7.23). Five years earlier, serving as a Lodge Master, he had thought differently.
The Swarajists gained new support during Congress’s internal truce. At a Bombay meeting in May, the AICC passed a resolution disallowing propaganda against councils. This was a violation of Gaya and produced a strong reaction from C.R.:
We cannot submit. All Congressmen and Committees have to decide whether they will accept the AICC’s decision or the Congress resolution. (Young India, 31.5.23)
He, Vallabhbhai, Prasad and three others resigned from the Working Committee. Categorically, he declared in Young India (7.6.23):
We have worked this policy (constitutionalism) for forty years, and at no time did it seriously threaten the life of the Bureaucracy. The only policy and the only programme that frightened the British lion are the policy and the programme that we adopted at Calcutta in 1920 . . .
If we have not yet succeeded in getting up the requisite capacity to carry it out . . . it is a problem of work and time. It is not for us to throw away the new weapons and take to bows and arrows again.
Defying the Bombay resolution, C.R. began the 28 June issue of Young India with the words, ‘Don’t Vote.’ The Swarajists, meanwhile, were placarding the country with calls to vote for them in the November elections. Das and C.R. embraced each other when Das visited Salem, but the exchange of fire did not cease.
C.R.’s fightback had some effect. When it met again in July in Nagpur, the AICC refused, after a speech by him, to censure the provincial Congress committees of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Gujarat for criticizing the May decision. This led to the resignation from the Working Committee of Jawaharlal Nehru, who had asked for the censure.
The Congress was now speaking with two voices. To end the confusion, some of C.R.’s friends asked at Nagpur for a special plenary. Despite Swarajist opposition, the proposal was carried. Abul Kalam Azad was chosen as the President.
Das, however, indicated that he would not accept an adverse verdict. This ruled out a reaffirmation of the Gaya decisions, for few in Congress were ready to lose Das and Motilal Nehru. Even C.R. was not.
He hoped that Muhammad Ali, who was about to emerge from prison, would influence Das and Nehru against councils, and other no-changers hoped that an Ali-C.R. combination would preserve non-cooperation.
C.R. shattered the second hope by announcing that he would not attend the special session! He claimed he was exhausted: ‘I have been putting my feeble frame to a great strain. I have kept the flag flying only until stronger hands could reach and hold it aloft and firm . . .’
But apparently a bigger factor was an insinuation (we do not know by whom) that he desired power. ‘My struggle with talented and powerful opponents is given the name . . . of low intrigue,’ he complained. He would ‘quietly withdraw . . . from places and positions of seeming power,’ including the Young India editorship, if only to prove to himself that he did not care for power (Young India, 16.8.23).
His colleagues protested. By retiring, said one of them, C.R., who had ‘dared to fight for Bapu’s flag against the concentrated onslaughts of erstwhile friends and open foes,’ would weaken Gandhi’s cause (Young India, 6.9.23).
Ali delivered the second blow. He advocated a compromise whereby Congress in Delhi repeated its dislike of councils but permitted council entry to those desiring it. ‘Life is all through one second best,’ Ali told Mahadev Desai (Young India, 4.10.23).
Wiring C.R. for advice, Desai had informed him of Ali’s stand. C.R., in his own words, ‘threw up the sponge at once.’ In a telegram he said:
When Maulana Muhammad Ali, who holds stronger views than myself regarding councils, who holds in his broad chest the heart of Islam in India — when even he . . . gave up the fight, it was final.
C.R.’s telegram reached Delhi just before Vallabhbhai was to commence a speech. Patel told the session:
We are all soldiers. There is no leader. But there is one man with a clear head and clear thinking who has sent this message which I will read to you.
After reading C.R.’s telegram, Patel added, ‘I have nothing more to say,’ and sat down.
Abandonment of council-boycott produced a deep grief in believers in non-cooperation. ‘Remembering the hope of the dawn and the power of the day,’ and ‘now fated to watch the last dipping of the sun,’ they were mournful, as George Joseph, an ardent no-changer who had given up his law practice in Madura and was on the Working Committee, admitted. Joseph, who was asked by C.R. to take over the Young India editorship, added:
Since the days of the Calcutta Special Congress, Gandhism has won all along the line . . . It is good for everybody to be beaten.
What concerned C.R. as much as the Delhi compromise was a call by the session for a boycott of all British goods. This rejection of the Gaya line was, in his view, a repudiation of Gandhi. According to C.R., the ‘easy’ doctrine now being preached was ‘not love, but hatred . . . not self-suffering but cleverly-organized embarrassment of the enemy.’
Recalling a Bengal leader’s words in November 1922 that ‘our national work cannot be based on love but must be built on hatred,’ C.R. spelt out what he thought Gandhi had prescribed:
. . . suffering, maximum; love of the enemy, true and genuine, the love and pity that filled Christ’s eyes with tears as he was led to Golgotha, not suppressed hatred finding legal and constitutional shape.8
C.R.’s acceptance of the Delhi compromise contributed to the estrangement of two of his close colleagues, E.V.Ramaswami Naicker and S. Ramanathan, from him and the Congress. The former, spoken of as E.V.R. and, later, Periyar, would head a militant anti-Congress and anti-Brahmin movement in the South.
The Congress met in Cocanada (Kakinada) in December 1923 for its annual session. In November, the Swarajists had secured several seats in provincial councils and in the Central Assembly.
On his way to the session, C.R. was joined in his second- class compartment at Bezwada (Vijaywada) station by P.C. Ray, the distinguished scientist who was to open a khadi exhibition at Cocanada. After studying C.R. for a few moments, Ray said, ‘Frail, fragile, frame.’ ‘Yes,’ C.R. at once agreed, ‘and there is a fourth “f” — a failure.’9
Cocanada, presided over by Ali, reaffirmed the Delhi compromise. Embittered men on both sides needed calming, and C.R. averted an unpleasant incident by leading an angry Motilal Nehru
off the dais.
There was talk of a Das-C.R. pact. C.R. moved and Das seconded a resolution declaring that non-cooperation remained the Congress policy. That was the theory. In practice, the Swarajists were permitted council entry, though as Swarajists rather than as Congressmen.
On occasion C.R.’s mind would leave the heated controversy and dwell on pleasanter scenes. On 22 November he wrote in Young India:
Have you seen a little white child smiling and opening its blue eyes wide with pleasure when the ayah’s dark baby comes to join it in play? . . . I never could tire of looking at the beautiful frontispiece in an edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that was with me — little Eva hanging a wreath of roses round the good Negro’s neck and sitting down on his knees, laughing.
C.R. was conferring in Salem with four visitors when, in the second week of January 1924, he heard that the Mahatma had been operated for acute appendicitis. Such operations were not, at the time, routinely successful. A worrier at the best of times, C.R. was anxious when he and his visitors — Jamnalal Bajaj, Shankerlal Banker, Maganlal Gandhi, the Mahatma’s ‘right hand’ at his Sabarmati Ashram, and Mathuradas Tricumji of Bombay — began a tour of the province to promote khadi.
Their first call was at the village of Pudupalayam, south- west of Salem, where they were welcomed by Ratnasabhapati Gounder, a landlord whose late father had been C.R.’s friend and client. ‘If you teach my sons English,’ the father had once said to C.R., ‘I shall present you a village.’ The offer was not taken up, but under C.R.’s influence Gounder had become a Congress supporter, a teetotaller and a khadi wearer.
Listening to the visitors’ hopes about khadi, Gounder said he could put a four-acre coconut grove at C.R.’s disposal. The travellers looked at the grove and moved on.
In Poona, meanwhile, though the electricity failed and he had to work by torchlight, Maddock, the Raj’s Surgeon-General for Bombay, had successfully removed the prisoner Gandhi’s appendix. ‘Too happy for words,’ C.R. wired Devadas.10
On 27 January C.R. called on Gandhi, their first meeting in two years. The reunion must have been touching. In his diary, Mahadev Desai, who was present, would only write, ‘There are things of the heart too sacred for disclosure.’11
Finding the Mahatma reduced to almost half his size, C.R. was struck dumb. Gandhi, lying on his bed, went on the attack, charging C.R. with indifference to his health. He should learn, Gandhi told C.R., from the British: had not Asquith gone on a Mediterranean cruise soon after the War began? In obedience to Government and Gandhian rules, politics was not discussed.
On 5 February, Gandhi was unconditionally released because of his health. ‘We are now in a changed world of gladness and hope,’ C.R. said in a telegram to the Mahatma, who went to Juhu-on-the-sea near Bombay to recuperate.
Narasimhan, 14, and Lakshmi, 11, were being coached at Salem Extension by a pair of tutors, with C.R. also helping when he could. Krishnaswami, C.R.’s oldest boy, was now a journalist on Swarajya, a Madras daily started by T. Prakasam; Ramaswami had found a place in the National Medical College of Bombay, which trained students like him who had left Government colleges.
Ramaswami met Gandhi in Juhu. Thereafter the Mahatma wrote to C.R.:
It is now 3.30 a.m. I have hardly slept during the night after 12.00. You are one of the reasons.
I had a chat with your son last night. Incidentally I asked him whether he wrote to you and you to him in English or Tamil. When he told me it was English, the information cut me to pieces . . .
You are my greatest hope. Why this, as it seems to me, grave defect? If the salt loses its savour, etc. What are the Tamil masses to do if her best sons neglect her? . . . With deepest love, M.K. Gandhi.12
After thus chastizing C.R., the Mahatma had Ramaswami write a letter to his father in Tamil. Attached to the letter was a note from Gandhi:
The son has begun before the father. That is as it should be. You can see how the discovery has preyed on my mind . . .13
To C.R. the castigation was ‘hardly distinguishable from supreme happiness.’ He wrote to Devadas:
I have written to Bapu . . . that he saw but one fault. What shall he or I do about the hundred other[s]? What have I that I may offer to my beloved master, except a hundred faults?14
As for Tamil, C.R. was to produce, in course of time, works both popular and literary in it. Gandhi intervened, too, in the matter of C.R.’s health. His asthma, C.R. had written to Devadas, was giving him ‘unsleepable nights’; it was ‘like an occupancy tenant who won’t be evicted.’
Gandhi sent two Ashram members, one after the other, to nurse C.R. — Shivaji Bhave, brother of the scholar-ascetic, Vinoba Bhave, and Surendra Gupta. Though C.R. was embarrassed at having ‘to keep young and good souls for serving me physically,’15 Shivaji and Surendra — massaging, fetching and carrying — restored their patient’s health.
The health of Congress concerned both the Mahatma and C.R. In 1920 Congress had been converted from a talking shop into a fighting body. Now it seemed to be reverting to speech- making. To restore rigour to Congress, C.R. and Gandhi came up with the novel idea of replacing the four-anna fee for Congress membership with a levy of self-spun yarn.
Under the title, ‘A Condition of Congress Membership,’ C.R. aired the idea in March 1924; Gandhi fully backed it. What drill was to the soldier, and churchgoing to the Christian, C.R. and Gandhi wanted spinning to be to a Congressman.
Assailed as queer and undemocratic, the ‘spinning franchise’ was proposed by Gandhi in June, adopted with alterations in December, and made optional in September 1925.
A Gandhi proposal that the no-changers should fill party posts while the Swarajists concentrated on the councils was shelved under fierce Swarajist opposition when the AICC met in Ahmedabad in June 1924. Another Gandhi resolution condemning the murder of an Englishman in Calcutta narrowly escaped defeat.
In Gandhi’s words, Ahmedabad ‘defeated and humbled him.’ He decided to yield what he had thought crucial, the council-boycott, for something more precious, tolerance among Congressmen. He would stoop in order to conquer the Swarajists, and let them control Congress.
C.R. saw the rationale. In March he had written, ‘The best and only course open is to let the Swarajists work their dear plan to the full . . . and then discover the blind alley they are in.’16 But he was not as ungrudging while stooping as his chief, and was disappointed that the Mahatma had not crushed the Swarajist revolt.
While expecting the Swarajists ‘to retrace their steps when experience has disillusioned them,’ Gandhi recognized nonetheless, as he wrote to C.R., that they supplied ‘a felt want’ and represented ‘a large section of people who want petty relief.’17
Asking Gandhi to shoulder the Congress Presidency, C.R. had written him in July 1924: ‘The masses still feel that you alone must lead.’18 With the Swarajists saying the same thing, Gandhi agreed to preside at the December session.
At the end of September, Gandhi announced that he would fast for 21 days as penance for the Hindu-Muslim violence of 1924. To be at Gandhi’s side, C.R. went to Delhi. Gandhi was staying at the home of Muhammad Ali for the period of the fast. C.R. had questioned Gandhi’s capacity to survive the self-inflicted ordeal, but found, as he wrote to Devadas, that ‘the Mahatma smiled and talked as if he had been taking his milk and fruits every meal every day.’19
Delhi’s disturbed climate improved as a result of the fast, but C.R. had noticed a hardening in senior Muslim leaders. To Devadas he added:
I am afraid I am a changed man as regards the Mussalman leaders . . . I see no change of heart in them. They have not realised the least bit the psychology of the fast — that Bapu is in deepest grief over the ingratitude of the Mussalmans and the sufferings of the Hindus . . .
I shall return, I fear, from Delhi with altered mind in regard to the most essential things . . . A long period of suspension of all Swaraj activities is before us.
Hindu-Muslim trust, a jewel mined in 1919-2
0, was cracking.
Despite Gandhi’s efforts to calm him, C.R. was not at peace about the Swarajist ascendancy. They wanted, he thought, ‘all the prestige of the Congress to be theirs, unshared by others . . . [and] they want Bapu, of course, for without him what prestige is there for the Congress?’20
As for Gandhi, however, his fight was with the Raj, not with the Swarajists. When some Bengal Swarajists were arrested, including young Subhas Bose, Gandhi not only protested strongly; he resolved to strengthen the Swarajists.
He would suspend non-cooperation and agree that the Swaraj party was in the councils ‘on behalf of the Congress.’ The concession was spelt out in a pact he signed with Das and Motilal Nehru. On their part the Swarajists accepted the ‘spinning franchise,’ while Gandhi agreed that the yarn earning membership of Congress did not have to be self-spun.
Gandhi’s pact with Nehru and Das grated on C.R., who told the Mahatma that the saving clause made ‘a mockery’ of the spinning franchise.21 Answering that the pact was ‘a bold experiment in nonviolence,’ the Mahatma added: ‘Cheer, boys, cheer. No more of idle sorrow.’22
At Belgaum in December 1924, when Gandhi took the Congress chair for the first and last time, it was C.R. who moved, despite all his grievance, the resolution in favour of the amended spinning franchise. ‘I depend on the judgment of the Guru . . . and I feel at ease,’ he explained (Young India, 15.1.25).
To the Mahatma his surrender to the Swarajists was also useful for testing the no-changers. If they really believed in constructive work, they would gladly yield their Congress positions to the Swarajists. Their duty was ‘self-effacing, silent and sustained service, without grumbling and without the expectation of reward’ (Young India, 17.11.24).
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