The Mahatma and C.R. talked ‘both seriously and lightly,’ the latter informed the Press (The Hindu, 4.3.43). On Gandhi’s request, C.R. provided an interpretation of Francis Thompson’s Hound of Heaven. But C.R. also presented to Gandhi, first verbally and then in writing, a formula for a Congress-League agreement. Gandhji said he could assent to it.
This was the much-discussed, much-reviled and prophetic Rajaji formula. It required the League to cooperate with Congress in the formation of a provisional national government if, on its part, Congress agreed to abide by a plebiscite on the question of Pakistan. As to when and where the plebiscite should take place, C.R.’s formula said that it should be held after a transfer of power from Britain — in contiguous Muslim-majority districts in the North-West and East of India. In the event of separation, mutual agreements for safeguarding defence, commerce, communications and for other essential purposes would be entered into.
In April 1943, a month after his meeting with Gandhi, C.R. met Jinnah, Without revealing the formula or Gandhi’s acceptance of it, C.R. indicated to Jinnah that Gandhi was flexible over Pakistan, whereupon Jinnah declared via Dawn, which reached Gandhi in his detention camp, that he was open to an initiative from Gandhi. The Mahatma responded by sending a letter to Jinnah proposing a meeting, but the Raj would not forward the letter.
Three different wars were being fought at this time: Britain against the Axis powers; Congress against the British; the League against Congress. None of the parties felt that its war could be postponed. In the drama of these three great and simultaneous clashes, the C.R.-Gandhi and C.R.-Congress dispute of 1942 formed an intriguing sub-plot.
If this 1942 sub-plot had been resolved differently — if Congress then had agreed to make to Jinnah the offer that C.R. had in mind — would the course of the main drama have been affected? Would there have been a Congress-League accord? If so, would the British have yielded the substance of freedom, rendering Quit India needless?
Hindsight tells us that the probability of Jinnah agreeing in 1942 to the plebiscite that C.R. had in mind was not large; we will see that such a plebiscite was later rejected by Jinnah. There is no indication, moreover, that the British would have conceded a joint Congress-League demand; in turning down such a demand, the Raj might even have cited the disadvantages to India of partition.
Finally, C.R.’s tactics reduced such chances as existed in 1942 of Congress adopting his proposal. To overcome the virtually sacred notion of Indian indivisibility, C.R. needed the assistance of his Working Committee colleagues. By springing his Madras resolutions, he alienated their sympathy. Shortly after being hopelesly outvoted at the Allahabad AICC, he claimed that his views on the Pakistan demand had been ‘known to my colleagues for some time’ (The Hindu, 5.5.42). They knew he was reflecting but not that he intended to act; the headlines regarding his resolutions shocked them.
There was thus an inevitability about the failure of C.R.’s 1942 initiative; the sub-plot and the drama had to run their courses. All the same, his bold, independent and characteristically impulsive stand was useful. It obliged a proud and powerful Congress to face what it would rather have wished away, the roadblock set up by the League.
Phillips, Johnson’s successor as Roosevelt’s personal representative in India, called on C.R. in Madras and afterwards drew a picture:
Rajagopalachari, one of the few real statesmen in India, greeted me with a warmth which touched me deeply. He led me into a room almost bare of furniture. A chair had been provided for me beside the mattress on which he seated himself. On the whitewashed walls there was only one picture, that of Gandhi.21
With the Raj in control and his colleagues and the Mahatma in prison, C.R. waited, despaired, and every now and again pushed at Britain’s closed doors to see if they would yield. Occasionally he would seek refreshment at the waterfalls of Courtallam, where T.K. Chidambaram, the literary critic, was his host.
He met Aruna Asaf Ali and some others who were underground. In ways different from his, they too were striving to maintain nationalist morale.
A drought of major proportions hit Kerala and the Rayalaseema districts, and a great famine devastated Bengal, showing the Raj in poor light. But the danger from Japan was receding, even if it never disappeared. It looked as if she had been halted east of India. The change in the fortunes of war tended to confirm the British in the wisdom of their India policy. ‘Let us face it,’ C.R. said in September, ‘India is the weaker party’ (The Hindu, 24.9.43).
As 1944 opened, Wavell, successor to Linlithgow as Viceroy, talked with C.R. in Madras. In response to a question from the latter, Wavell ‘frankly and off the record’ said that he ‘would not accept a “National Government” with so many nominees of Congress and so many of Muslim League, who took their orders from outside.’22
In February it became clear that C.R.’s Pakistan views had not’ changed. He told a public meeting (The Hindu, 29.2.44):
Remaining together might mean treachery, separation could mean peace. You can of course tie a cat and a dog together, drag them along the road and say, ‘What perfect unity!’ The way to real unity, however, was to say, ‘Go if you want. Come back if you want. Remain if you want.’
That month Kasturba died in detention, her head resting in Gandhi’s lap. C.R. had respected Kasturba from the moment he first heard of her part in her husband’s South African battles. Over the years affection had softened esteem, and Lakshmi’s marriage with Devadas had brought closeness. To Devadas he wrote:
Ba was born to be a queen and she attained that status through a toilsome part. Let us reserve our emotion for the living (The Hindu, 28.2.44).
In April 1944, C.R. felt that the moment had arrived for revealing to Jinnah the Mahatma’s acceptance of his Pakistan scheme. Calling on the League leader in Delhi, C.R. produced his surprise. ‘Gandhiji is willing,’ he said, ‘if the League and Congress fight together now for a national government — to ask Congress to accept Pakistan. Here is the formula he agrees to.’
As Jinnah studied the piece of paper, C.R. waited for a positive reaction from him. It never came. Jinnah saw at once that C.R.’s Pakistan was smaller than what League spokesmen had been claiming (Jinnah himself had never described its boundaries), and also that it was linked to a plebiscite and a treaty of separation.
‘Your scheme does not satisfy me,’ Jinnah told C.R. After their talk, G.D. Birla asked C.R., ‘How did your meeting go?’ ‘Jinnah is too old,’ replied C.R.23
Early in May, following word that Gandhi was seriously ill with malaria and dysentery, C.R. attacked the Raj for continuing to detain the Mahatma. He did not know that the decision to release Gandhi had already been taken. The gates opened on 6 May and Gandhi was let out.
15
‘Moth-eaten’
1944-46
Gandhi convalesced on the Juhu sands outside Bombay. Not everyone wished him a speedy recovery. An entry in the diary of Wavell, the Viceroy, reads: ‘Winston sent me a peevish telegram to ask why Gandhi hadn’t died yet!’1
Eight weeks after the release, Gandhi and C.R. met in Poona where the Mahatma unexpectedly attended a meeting of a women’s welfare body named after Kasturba. C.R. was there as a trustee. Playing a characteristic role, C.R. talked Gandhi out of his idea of asking Wavell to reintern him.
By this time Gandhi had announced that he was willing to meet the Viceroy for a settlement. From Poona, at the Mahatma’s instance, C.R. accompanied him to the hill town of Panchgani, where they learnt that Wavell had turned down a meeting with Gandhi. The Mahatma’s response was to explore a settlement through a letter. He proposed a national government responsible to the Central Assembly to be matched by Congress’s full cooperation with the war effort. Wavell answered that the proposal was not acceptable, not even as a basis for discussion.
There was another party to be dealt with. To Jinnah C.R. wired a message from Panchgani: he was releasing his formula to the Press and wanted to know if Jinnah would object to an annou
ncement of his having rejected it. Jinnah wired back that it was wrong to say that he had rejected the scheme. If Gandhi dealt with him direct, he would refer the formula to the League.
On 17 July Gandhi wrote to Jinnah suggesting a meeting and urging the League leader not to ‘regard me as an enemy of Islam or of Indian Muslims.’ Jinnah replied proposing a meeting in his house, 10 Mount Pleasant Road, in Bombay, but at the end of July he described the C.R. formula as ‘a parody and a negation’ of the League’s Pakistan resolution and intended ‘to torpedo’ it. Jinnah added that C.R. was offering ‘a maimed, mutilated and moth-eaten Pakistan.’2
But Gandhi was prepared to strive for Jinnah’s conversion. Fourteen times, between 9 and 27 September, the two spoke to each other tête-à -tête and recorded their conversations in a series of letters that contained more than 15,000 words. Photographs in the Press showed the two leaders smiling. Many in the land prayed. The Viceroy, on his part, felt ‘sure that the G-J meeting will result in a demand for the release of the working committee.’3 During the period of the talks, C.R. stayed with Gandhi in another Mount Pleasant Road residence, Birla House. The Mahatma gave his friend daily reports.
But the talks failed. The Pakistan that Gandhi was prepared to recommend to the Congress, based essentially on the C.R. Formula, was termed wholly unsatisfactory by Jinnah, who offered four objections. Firstly, this Pakistan was too small — leaving out the Muslim-minority districts of the Punjab and Bengal, it was only ‘a husk.’ Secondly, it was not totally delinked from India. Jinnah felt that the treaty of separation included in the Formula, or, as Gandhi put it, ‘the bonds of alliance between Hindustan and Pakistan,’ would abridge Pakistan’s sovereignty.4 Thirdly, the Pakistan of the C.R.- Gandhi conception was to come after independence — ‘as soon as possible after India is free,’ the Mahatma had said to Jinnah, whereas Jinnah wanted Pakistan before the British left and under British auspices. He did not trust a Congress-ruled India to implement a promise of division. Finally, this Pakistan was subject to a plebiscite, and one, moreover, where non-Muslims too would vote.
Gandhi did not yield on any of these points. As he saw it, every argument for the separation from India of Muslim-majority areas supported the separation from Pakistan of areas where non-Muslims were in a majority. Again, said Gandhi, while both he and Rajaji conceded self-determination ‘without the slightest hesitation,’ ‘utterly independent sovereignty, so that there is nothing in common between the two,’ seemed to him ‘an impossible proposition.’5
Where Jinnah saw two nations, one Muslim and the other Hindu, and wanted this ‘fact’ shown on the map, Gandhi could countenance nothing more than agreed separation between brothers. Since only Indians, and not the power ruling over them, could decide whether they stayed together or separated, independence had to precede separation. In C.R.’s unemotional view, however, it was ‘idle to imagine any material difference arising out of the order in which the two events, withdrawal of British domination and partition, take place.6’
On all the other points C.R. agreed with Gandhi. Thus he held that a plebiscite of all adults was a legitimate preliminary to separation; to deny a vote to some was ‘inconsistent with all modern notions of constitution-making.’7 And he reminded the League that its Pakistan resolution of 1940 claimed ‘contiguous . . . areas in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority’ — not all of Bengal and the Punjab.
‘Jinnah’s contempt for your formula and his contempt for you is staggering,’ Gandhi said to C.R. during the course of the talks8 In part at least, Jinnah’s dislike stemmed from the tendency of newspapers reporting the talks to associate C.R. with Gandhi and Jinnah. As far as the League leader was concerned, no third person qualified for mention in relation to the negotiations.
Gandhi had written to Jinnah, after the talks:
Our conversations have come about as a result of your correspondence with Rajaji in July last over his formula . . . and my own letter to you suggesting a meeting between you and me.
Jinnah replied
It is entirely incorrect and has no foundation in fact for you to say that our conversations have come about as a result of my correspondence with Rajaji in July last over his formula . . . It is entirely in response to your letter of July 17, 1944.9
Three years after the Bombay talks, Jinnah would obtain what Gandhi and C.R. were unprepared to offer — an ‘utterly independent sovereignty’ — and he obtained it 24 hours before Britain’s departure from the rest of the subcontinent. Nevertheless, the area of the Pakistan he secured was almost exactly the one offered by Gandhi and C.R. and dismissed by him as moth-eaten. It is tempting to speculate that if he had accepted this solution in 1944, the subcontinent might have had a peaceful separation rather than the 1947 Partition of killings and migrations. Questioning the wisdom of Jinnah’s 1944 rejection, the League leader Khaliquzzaman would observe in 1961, ‘The right of self-determination by Muslim votes alone . . . formed a demand without parallel in world history.’10
What emerged from the talks? One, a clearer understanding of what Jinnah wanted. Gandhi had asked him to give ‘in writing what precisely you want me to put my signature to.’ Though Jinnah refused to do this, his demands were revealed by the Gandhi-Jinnah conversations and correspondence. Two, an increase in Jinnah’s prestige. The fact that the Mahatma had sought the talks and then gone fourteen times to the League leader’s house added to Jinnah’s following, already vast, among India’s Muslims.
Congress leaders in jail reacted adversely to word reaching them of Gandhi’s bid with Jinnah. In India Wins Freedom (1959), Azad would claim that he had told Working Committee colleagues detained with him at Ahmednagar Fort that ‘Gandhiji was making a great mistake.’
But the Mahatma was unrepentant. To strive to meet Jinnah halfway was, in his view, a duty. He had intended to meet the League leader before his 1942 arrest, then tried to make contact from behind bars, and, finally, fulfilled his wish. After the breakdown he said: ‘We have parted as friends. These days have not been wasted.’11
There was no sign either that C.R. regretted the approach to Jinnah. But to Devadas he wrote (30.11.44):
My own conviction is that there can be no agreement with Jinnah under present conditions.’12
For many in Congress, it was not a new thought.
For much of the second half of 1944, C.R. gave Gandhi company — in Panchgani, during the Bombay talks, and in Sevagram.
Many disapproved of Gandhi’s talks with Jinnah, and blamed Rajaji for them; some considered C.R. a dangerous influence on the Mahatma. A conversation in Sevagram between Gandhi, who was experimenting at this juncture with a salt-free diet, and C.R., who was about to leave for the South, shows the amusement that this attitude brought to a relationship that was always merry:
C.R.: I may be able to return by the 30th.
G.: I shall look out for you.
C.R.: If you so desire.
G.: What is the meaning of ‘looking out for you’?
C.R.: One looks out for dangers, too, sometimes.
G.: (laughing) You may put it that way. I want that danger. I have to compare notes about several things.
C.R.: I hope both of us will have forgotten all our notes by then.
G.: Then we shall laugh together and fatten.
C.R.: But how can you fatten if you don’t eat salt?
G.: I have lived without salt for years in South Africa. Here I interrupted the rule but have now reverted to it.
C.R.: When people have to do without salt in their diet, they are likely to lick their walls and eat clay, like children, to satisfy their natural craving for salt.
G.: The walls will be cleaner! This is the beginning of the laugh to which we will abandon ourselves when you return.13
Resenting C.R.’s stand over Pakistan, elements from the Hindu Mahasabha tried unsuccessfully to block an address he had been invited to deliver at Nagpur University. In his speech, C.R. said:
Let me ask those who
apprehend evil from my address: is your case so weak that it can be endangered by a speech of mine? . . . Or is it your view that these graduates . . . are yet so poor of understanding that they cannot safely stand a single assault on my part?
And what is this heresy I am guilty of? I stand for a solution of the Muslim issue . . . It is not dishonour or submission to tyranny to allow the majorities in any area to be in more than subordinate charge of those areas, which is the offer we made to Mr Jinnah and with which he is not satisfied.14
In C.R.’s view, Gandhi having made his attempt with Jinnah, the ball was now in the British court. As C.R. put it, ‘A move on (by the British) and a threat to stragglers (the League) that they will be left behind are the conditions necessary to create the will to agree.’15
Wavell’s cogitations also suggested a British move. In October 1944, his Viceroyalty a year old, he informed Churchill of his assessment that the ‘present Government of India cannot continue indefinitely or even for long’ and that ‘British soldiers [would not] wish to stay [in India] in large numbers after the war to hold the country down.’ Arguing that ‘the failure of the Gandhi- Jinnah talks has created a favourable moment for a move by His Majesty’s Government,’ Wavell sought Churchill’s approval for an effort for
a provisional political Government . . . within the present constitution, coupled with an earnest but not necessarily simultaneous attempt to devise means to reach a constitutional settlement.16
After Churchill had sat on the proposal for five months, Wavell confronted him in London in the spring of 1945. As the Viceroy would record, Churchill ‘launched into a long jeremiad about India . . . for about 40 minutes’ and seemed to advocate ‘partition into Pakistan, Hindustan and Princestan etc.’17 Finally, however, Wavell extracted HMG’s clearance for the initiative he had in mind. By this time the War in Europe had ended, though fighting continued in the Pacific, and fresh British elections were announced.
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