Erskine warned C.R. that using the penal law might prove ‘undesirable from his party’s point of view.’ (He told the Viceroy, however, that it was ‘no business of mine to keep the Congress party popular.’)37 Indian Express and Swadesamitran, both friendly to Congress, urged a repeal of the Act, and in a Harijan article the Mahatma suggested that C.R. remove the ‘obnoxious’ features of the controversial law. But C.R. was not willing to yield.
The leader of the Muslim League group moved a resolution asking the Ministry ‘to stop its policy of repression’ against the demonstrators. Supporting the resolution, Pannirselvam claimed that for the Tamilian Hindi was ‘a foreign language, foreign in words, script, culture and tradition’ and recalled that the Criminal Law Act had once been ‘an anathema’ to C.R.
The opposition, replied C.R., was ‘grievously disappointed’ that ‘this inconsistent Prime Minister says that he will use this Act, this repression, and will hinder the course of defiance [conducted] in parrot-like copy of Congress methods.’ Added C.R.: ‘This disappointment, I say, they deserve.’ He went on:
Repression is the word used. Congressmen used the word not . . . when people were prosecuted or tried or arrested but [when they] were beaten and bones were broken. Even then not we but others used it.
Not even the vilest abuse that I have read with these eyes, printed in literature, multiplied by the tens of thousands, has been made the subject-matter of prosecution. Has a single procession been stopped? Has a single demonstration been ordered not to be conducted?38
Yet Section 7 continued to be applied, and C.R.’s foes were strengthened, as Erskine had foreseen.
By the end of January 1939, 683 persons in all, of whom 36 were women, had been convicted, for terms ranging from six weeks to a year, as a result of the anti-Hindustani agitation, including 173 prosecuted for their activity in front of the Premier’s house. One of those arrested was a young man called C.N. Annadurai, destined to become one of the South’s most popular leaders.
Satyamurti and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the philosopher- educator, urged C.R. to make Hindustani an optional subject or to provide a conscience clause giving parents the right to withdraw their children from Hindustani classes, and Gandhi supported the suggestion. Claiming, however, that no parent had asked for such a right, C.R. turned down the idea. To the Mahatma he wrote: ‘My objection is not pride or prestige. I do not wish to yield to the misuse of satyagraha. Bear with me.’39
Bombay followed the southern lead and introduced Hindustani, and Vallabhbhai Patel came out with support for C.R.’s policy, but E.V.R. registered at least partial success: in elections to the Madras municipality in October 1938, Congress lost several seats.
When the demonstrations began, C.R. had thought that ‘it would be unnecessary in all probability to proceed against others if we book E.V.R. Naicker.’40 But he changed his mind, and for five months no action was taken against Naicker. In November 1938, however, he was prosecuted.
By this time plans had been made to install E.V.R. as the president of the Justice Party. His arrest, and the one-year sentence he received, made him a martyr to his followers. Every morning the newspaper edited by his brother announced in big type the number of days their leader had passed in prison; E.V.R. became Periyar; and a fiery address sent from jail was read out at the Justice convention.
Calling Brahmins ‘mosquitos,’ ‘bugs’ and ‘Jews,’ the Periyar said that abolition of the reign of priests was more urgent than abolition of zamindari. Kumararajah Muthiah Chettiar, leader of the opposition, claimed at the rally that E.V.R.’s arrest had awakened the masses; separating Brahmins from Tamils, Pannirselvam called the former interlopers in the Tamil land. The Hindu’s report of the rally referred to a ‘hymn of hate’ (29.12.38).
When questions were raised in the Assembly about the Periyar’s detention in Bellary, C.R. said:
It is a good jail. I claim to be a personal friend of Mr Naicker, though a very bitter political opponent. He knows that I am, as far as I can be, kind and considerate to him.41
In May 1939, when he was released on medical grounds, E.V.R. said: ‘I have received exceptionally kind treatment.’ (The Hindu, 23.5.39). By this time, however, the anti-Hindi movement had lost its intensity.
The Justice Party prized a 1935 decision to increase progressively the proportion of non-Brahmins in government services. Soon after assuming office, C.R. pledged that this policy would not be altered. His Ministry extended concessions to applicants from educationally or socially backward groups, Muslims included: they qualified with lower marks, paid a smaller fee, and could enter at a higher age.
While defending the concessions, which did not, however, satisfy the Justice group in the Assembly, C.R. asked members to ‘remember how hard it was for them in school to get a few marks’ and ‘to enter the skin of those young men who have come out with brilliant records from the university and professional colleges and are sent away because a man of a particular community who has passed the age limit and is inferior perhaps in qualification gets the job.’ And he warned against allowing ‘this communal talk to become the daily pabulum in this House.’42
Subhas Bose was the Mahatma’s choice for Congress President in 1938-9, succeeding Jawaharlal. The selection did not thrill C.R., who would have preferred someone less radical in this phase of an understanding with the Raj. When Bose suggested that the Premiers meet with him, and Kher of Bombay sought C.R.’s advice, the latter wrote: ‘I should myself prefer to be left alone . . . If called, however, I fear I must go and cannot decline the invitation.’43
Among other issues which engaged C.R. were corruption and censorship of literature preaching violence.
Finding that legal proof of corruption was difficult to obtain, C.R. came up with the formulation that
a corrupt official will be dismissed or removed without definite proof of a specific act of corruption if there is cumulative evidence that he was suspected in a number of instances to be corrupt.44
After Viduthalai, an E.V.R. mouthpiece, alleged that proceedings against certain butter manufacturers for adulteration were being withdrawn because they were Congress supporters, C.R. found that while there had been no withdrawal, frequent postponements had taken place. Ordering expedition, C.R. minuted: ‘The case should not end in smoke or a nominal fine.’45
While lifting many of the restrictions imposed by the Raj on books and journals — among the beneficiaries was E.V.R.’s brother Krishnaswami, editor of Viduthalai —, C.R. retained curbs on literature preaching violence. Told in the Assembly that some volumes proscribed in Madras were circulating legally in the UP, he observed: ‘Thank you. I will get in touch with the U.P. Government.’
Madras Customs detained a copy of ‘Soviet Communism’ by Sidney and Beatrice Webb and sent it to Fort St. George for instructions. A Home Department official suggested confiscation but his senior disagreed, terming the book ‘a serious study, not mere propaganda.’ It went up to the Chief Secretary, Sir Brackenbury who minuted: ‘It is a good book. If we have not got it in the Secretariat Library, we might get it.’46
Sir Cecil Fabian Brackenbury was the son of a vicar and three years younger than C.R. In the future C.R. would warmly recall this gaunt, lean and idealistic man, a hard-working teetotaller who was loyal to the Raj but believed in Indian self-government. Candid in his advice to the Premier, which was often turned down, Brackenbury was faithful in implementing C.R.’s instructions.
‘Exactly at eleven in the morning, Brackenbury would walk into C.R.’s office, take instructions and have them carried out.’47 On his part, C.R. did not think it below his dignity to take a few steps to the Chief Secretary’s room if he had something to discuss.
Shortly before Brackenbury retired in the middle of 1938, C.R. tried to obtain the acting Governorship of Orissa for him, but Erskine informed C.R. that the Viceroy disapproved of the idea. ‘It is rather unfair to Brackenbury and a mistake,’ C.R. commented.48
The Cabinet gave B
rackenbury a farewell party; at C.R.’s instance, the Governor had the Brackenburys stay in Government House for a few days after they had wound up their house; and, to Erskine’s surprise, C.R. said that the government would bear part of the cost of a reserved compartment that took the Brackenburys to Bombay.
In June 1938, All India Radio opened a station in Madras. In an inaugural talk, C.R. explained the radio to his unseen audience. As was his style, he painted pictures with words:
You can [now] hear a joke cracked in London and laugh in response here . . . The air carries sound like a bullock cart; the Akash — the sky and ether — carries it across enormous distances like a steamship or train. (The Hindu, 16.6.38)
The Premier added, however, that ‘the braying of distant donkeys is not much better than of neighbourhood donkeys.’
Prakasam presented a Bill to safeguard the rights of peasants and tenant-farmers, the fruit of an eighteen-month effort by a committee he had chaired. Congress MLAs gave Prakasam an ovation; landlords and European members opposed the Bill as expropriatory. Langley said it had been begotten in envy, conceived in hatred and delivered in malice.
The idea of compensating zamindars at market prices was firmly rejected by C.R.:
In the other hemisphere, they once had very valuable properties. Slaves they had. Was compensation paid when slavery was abolished?
Krishnamachari made the valid observation that the Bill gave no benefits to the actual tiller. ‘While [the reforms] destroy the zamindar, they bring no relief to the worker,’ he said. Conceding the point, C.R. said: ‘We may have other duties to cultivators . . . and to everybody else; but to each in its own time.’49
Seeking to transfer resources from the zamindar to the tenant-peasant though not to the landless labourer, the Bill was radical for its time. The Raj conveyed word that it stood little chance of receiving assent.
Fort St. George and the Assembly did not use up all of C.R. On evenings he was likely to go to a friend — perhaps to T.K. Chidambaranatha Mudaliar (T.K.C.), the literary critic and Kamban scholar, with whom he would discuss the Ramayana or the Tamil language — or to mount a platform and talk on any one of a wide assortment of topics.
The Raj’s chief guardians, Zetland and Linlithgow, both of them Scots, were, in Zetland’s phrase, ‘enormously tickled’ on hearing that C.R. — ‘the leading protagonist in the cause of teetotalism’ (Zetland) — had accepted an invitation to the St. Andrew’s Dinner of the Caledonian Society of Madras. They were aware, as Linlithgow put it, ‘that perfect sobriety on such occasions is not always observed.’
Happily, the Caledonians stayed sober, and the Premier was in merry form. He referred to the Scottish words on the menu — ‘the funny spelling mistakes’ — asked, ‘Why do you not correct the proofs?’ and added:
I was a little pleased, let me confess, to hear what was said in dispraise of the Englishman and in praise of the Scot. We would like at least to imagine that you are quarrelling among yourselves. (Laughter) . . . But your island is too small for you to quarrel, and your people too great to commit that mistake. (Cheers)
I have nothing to complain, as Prime Minister, with regard to the manner in which I have been served by you who still thought it worthwhile to carry on here in spite of the horrible changes that have taken place, and the more horrible changes that may take place.50
This period of Congress’s compact with the Raj saw nervousness among Muslims in Hindu-majority provinces. Pointing to the mostly Hindu Congress Ministers, the Muslim League, led single-mindedly by Jinnah, told the Muslim public that white rule was being followed by Hindu rule. The explanation of Congress that it was an Indian and not a Hindu body, offered with sincerity and repeated from a thousand platforms, could not convince the bulk of the Muslim qaum.
Despite sedulous efforts, C.R. was unable to convince Madras’s Muslim MLAs that the Hindi introduced in 125 schools had nothing to do with Hinduism He argued that it was not a Sanskrit but a Persian word, that it merely meant the language of Hind, and that in any case his Ministry preferred the term Hindustani which, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, had ‘an opulent vocabulary of words understood everywhere by both Mussulmans and Hindus.’
He had no effect on Jinnah, who ‘complained bitterly’ to the Mahatma that the Hindi pushed by the Madras Ministry was a burden on the Muslims.51 The League leader’s bigger grouse, however, made in relation to all the Congress Ministries, was that Muslims were losing out in the scramble for government jobs. A committee set up by the League, headed by the ruler of Pirpur, formally made the charge; a Congress offer to have it examined by the Chief Justice of India, Sir Maurice Gwyer, was rejected by the League.
A volley of figures unloosed in the Assembly by C.R. demolished the charge. Out of a total of 85,352 government jobs in the province, Muslims, he said, held 12,525, or 14.7 percent, as against a 6 to 7 per cent share in population. In eighteen months of Congress rule, the provincial Public Service Commission had selected 261 Muslim officers compared with 168 in the preceding eighteen months.
Some other Muslim percentages in Madras were: High Court judges, 7; district judges, 15 1/2; Madras city judges, 35; deputy superintendents of police, 18; police inspectors, 19; sub- inspectors, 14; constables, 22.
During the War, the Viceroy asked for a study of the Congress Ministries’ record on minorities. The report on Madras, drawn up largely by British officers, gave the C.R. Ministry, in the words of Peter Crombie, its coordinator, ‘a remarkably clean bill.’52
Early in the legislature’s life, a Member asked for ‘two Harijans in the cabinet.’ ‘There are two already,’ C.R. at once replied, ‘Muniswami Pillai and me.’ Combining conviction for his people with a disarming gentleness, Pillai was a fine representative. Out of the House of 215, thirty were Harijans; separate Harijan electorates, withdrawn because of the Gandhi fast of 1932 and the subsequent pact between caste Hindus and Harijans, would have resulted only in 18 Harijan members.
In August 1938, when M.C. Rajah, one of the South’s leading Harijan figures, moved a Bill for removing the social disabilities of Harijans, C.R. gave it the Ministry’s backing. As his Bill was being passed, Rajah said that C.R. had helped draft it some years earlier. It made discrimination in jobs, wells, public conveniences, roads, transport, schools and colleges an offence.
In its first eighteen months, the C.R. administration took in 55 Harijans in first-grade government jobs, as against 25 in the previous year and a half. Out of 907 constables appointed between July 1937 and August 1939, 137 were from the scheduled castes, an impressive proportion for the time.
For years it had been C.R.’s ambition to open the great temples of the South to the Harijan. Power enabled him to realize it in large measure. But his path to the goal was neither smooth nor straight: opponents tried to impede him, and he himself chose a winding route.
To begin with, in January 1938, he promised Rajah support for a measure that would give worshippers the right by majority vote to open a temple to Harijans; this again was a piece of legislation that C.R. had helped draft in 1933. Later C.R. turned cautious and decided that the measure should apply only to the district of Malabar.
Why the caution? Perhaps C.R. did not want the guns of orthodoxy booming at him when he faced steady fire over Hindi. Why Malabar? This was chosen because it was adjacent, and in C.R.’s phrase ‘first cousin,’ to Travancore,53 where by a proclamation the young Maharaja had already opened public temples to Harijans.
At this compromise, Rajah declared, ‘I have been deceived’.54 However, he declared his support for the Malabar Temple Entry Bill, which was passed despite strong criticism in September 1938.
An event in Madura sparked C.R. to do more. A majority of the trustees and priests of the famed Meenakshi temple declared that they wanted to let the Harijans in but feared proceedings for ‘offence to religious sentiment.’ C.R. promised them protective legislation ‘in eight days’ if they took the lead. On 8 July 1939 C.R.’s old friend V
aidyanatha Iyer took a group of Harijans to the temple; the authorities allowed them in.
Receiving the news in Madras, C.R. was ‘beside himself with delight’; he did not sleep that night (The Hindu, 10.7.39). Others reacted differently to the Madura explosion. A criminal case was initiated against the temple’s executive officer, and a purification ceremony was demanded.
On 11 July a draft of a Temple Entry Indemnity Bill was published, followed six days later by an ordinance incorporating its features. The ordinance and the Bill indemnified temple officials who had opened or might open temples with the permission of government.
By this time Tanjore had thrown open all its 90 temples. The Courtallam temple had also fallen. However, a pandit at Srirangam, the renowned Vaishnava temple, told the Vaishnavite Premier that there was ‘a rub’: ‘the shastras do not permit [temple entry].’ C.R. replied that the shastras were ‘like the infinite ocean from which . . . one can draw pearls and coral as well as mire and shark.’55
With its unconcealed signal to temple officials to be bold, the indemnity measure was fiercely criticized. Krishnamachari likened it to Ghazni’s temple violations in a distant era, and predicted bloodshed. ‘The blood will be on your head,’ he told the Premier. C.R.’s reply was that there was ‘no use my being a Minister if I cannot protect the people who brought this about.’56
Tirupati did not open its doors, but ancient barriers all over the province were collapsing, and there was no bloodshed. And while some leaders of the Depressed Classes pointed out that economic and political power mattered more than temples, many in the communities excluded for centuries witnessed history, and triumph, before their eyes.
Rajaji Page 21
