Rajaji

by Rajmohan Gandhi

  Returning to India, Wavell declared in the middle of June that the Congress Working Committee members were being freed and that he would invite Indian leaders to Simla for talks about a new Executive Council ‘more representative of organised public opinion’ and composed, apart from the Viceroy and the C-in-C, entirely of Indians. Wavell expressed the hope that if there was agreement on a new Council, provincial ministries that had resigned in 1939 would resume office.

  Those invited to Simla included the Mahatma, Jinnah, Azad, the Congress President, all provincial Premiers and also those, including C.R., who had resigned their Premierships in 1939. Hope was in the air again — and joy over the release of Azad, Nehru, Patel and their colleagues after three years in detention.

  Wavell, urging the Congress leaders not to harbour undue fears regarding the Viceregal veto, proposed a Council with an equal number of Muslims and caste Hindus, the latter drawn from Congress as well as outside Congress, plus a Hindu from the Scheduled Castes, and possibly one or two representatives of other minorities.

  Gandhi and the Congress accepted the proposal. As C.R. would put it, ‘For the first time in Congress history, [its] leaders had thrown their whole weight into a British plan.’18

  Wavell wanted one of the Muslim seats to go to a non- League Muslim, possibly a member of the pro-War Unionist party which was in office in the Punjab. However, Jinnah insisted on the right to nominate all the Muslim members and made an additional demand. In Wavell’s words, the League leader

  refused even to discuss names unless he could be given the absolute right to select all Muslims and some guarantee that any decisions which the Muslims opposed in Council could only be passed by a two-thirds majority — a kind of communal veto. I said that these conditions were entirely unacceptable and the interview ended.19

  The Raj now — in the summer of 1945 — had two choices: to go ahead with the Congress, keeping vacant some seats for Jinnah to fill if he changed his mind; or to abandon the project of a new Council. Several Governors advised Wavell to take the first course, but that would have meant a Congress-dominated Council, to which both the Viceroy and Churchill were opposed.

  As Wavell would admit (in a 1946 letter to the King), what the Congress-led 1942 movement had done to the war effort when he was Commander-in-Chief in India was a memory ‘he could never rid his mind of.’20 Had the Raj gone ahead with Congress, Jinnah, who well knew, as C.R. had indicated, that ‘stragglers’ risked being ‘left behind,’ would perhaps have come in line.

  In the event, Wavell pronounced the Simla talks a failure and dismissed the leaders. The result was a rise in Jinnah’s prestige among the Muslims of India, and a crucial shift of ground in the Punjab from Khizr Hyat Khan, the Unionist Premier, to the League.

  While in Simla, C.R. emerged unharmed from an assault by a Hindu extremist with a lathi. The way in which the talks ended dismayed him. He had arrived on the hill with expectancy — in Wavell’s words, he was ‘the only [Indian] invitee’ to have sent ‘a cordial and unequivocal acceptance.’21 After the failure, C.R. asserted that if the Viceroy’s ‘purpose in summoning the conference’ was ‘only to get Mr Jinnah to agree . . . we could have told Lord Wavell that it would be a waste of energy.’22

  A similar comment was, however, made about C.R.’s approaches to Jinnah by some of his Congress colleagues. Wavell recorded in his journal: ‘I am told that Rajagopalachariar got properly told off by the Working Committee apparently for having instigated Gandhi to the discussions with Jinnah last autumn.’23

  In August 1945 atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan surrendered. Shortly after word came that Subhas Bose, who was guiding the Indian National Army (INA) with Japanese help, had been killed in an air crash. For some years now, he and C.R. had represented two opposing poles in Congress. To Subhas’s older brother Sarat, who was still in detention, C.R. wrote expressing

  admiration for your brother who has now attained everlasting life, released from the bondage against which his soul rebelled. Subhas knew his mind and had the courage to go along the path his reason dictated to him.24

  Soon after the dismal end of the Simla talks, Labour registered a landslide victory in Britain. The new government summoned Wavell home and authorized him to announce that elections to India’s central and provincial legislatures, long postponed owing to the War, would be held at the end of the year or early in 1946.

  These elections were vigorously contested. Not because the legislatures yet had adequate powers — they did not — but because the elections seemed likely to influence the succession to the Raj.

  C.R. was willing to enter the Madras Assembly again. Despite his 1942 resignation, he had seen himself as a Congressman at the Simla conference. In August 1945, following a letter from C.R., Azad readmitted him into the organization. Others too championed C.R.

  While claiming that ‘nobody regrets C.R.’s attitude during the last three-four years more than myself,’25 Patel was determined to enlist C.R.’s skills. His hope was that C.R. would enter the Central Assembly and lead Congress there, but he discovered that C.R.’s ‘mind was in the province.’26

  But what was the mind of the province? C.R.’s Premiership in 1937-9 had been unchallenged and indeed brilliant, but his subsequent positions over Quit India and Pakistan had isolated him. Men like the Mahatma, Azad and Patel were ready to forget the past and restore the southern province’s leadership to C.R., but Congress workers returning from two or three years in prison were not.

  Yet, it was hard to find an alternative to C.R. Prakasam’s popularity was confined to the Telugu districts. Satyamurti was dead. Kamaraj, president of the TNCC, had the advantage of a Quit India imprisonment but was largely unknown in Andhra. Inside and outside the Presidency, a move to draft C.R. gathered momentum.

  As in 1937, Patel, who was retained as chairman of Congress’s Parliamentary Board (CPB), played a key role. It was decided that C.R. would again contest from the graduates’ constituency, and that three of his nominees plus five of Kamaraj’s, including Kamaraj himself, would select Congress candidates in the Tamil districts, subject to the CPB’s approval.

  However, friction marked the C.R.-Kamaraj relationship, and a majority of the candidates selected were opponents of C.R. Still, C.R. might have completed the exercise but for a charge revolving around a visit the Mahatma had made to the South. Though planned well before Congress leaders were released or elections thought of, the visit was portrayed as part of C.R.’s strategy for installing himself as Premier. Throwing in the towel, he wrote to Gandhi (21.2.46):

  I haven’t the strength to fight any longer. I bore much all these days. I struggled hard to work without minding the calumniators but I give it up now . . . I must yield to the longing of my heart not to be misunderstood.27

  The sudden gesture shocked C.R.’s friends, but it was not out of character. He had abruptly left the field in 1923 after being accused of ambition. In 1936 he had resigned his offices in Congress because a close friend, T.S.S. Rajan, had violated party discipline. These gestures of a sensitive and impulsive individual to whom public life was fascinating but expendable hurt C.R.’s credibility as a political leader. Patel’s reaction was candid:

  This is what I was afraid of all the time. You do not know how unjust and unfair you are to others. After all this trouble, you want now to let us down! How can anybody support you if you were to act like this? You do not even consult us, but that has always been your way of life (22.4.46).28

  C.R. did not contest. But the story had not ended. As expected, Congress obtained a large majority, 165 seats out of 205, but there was no consensus regarding a leader. When Prakasam, Kamaraj and Madhava Menon — heads, respectively, of Congress’s committees in Andhra, Tamil Nadu and Malabar — sought the Congress High Command’s advice, the latter suggested C.R.’s name but clarified that its opinion was not binding.

  By 148 votes to 38, the Congress MLAs of Madras rejected the High Command’s advice. Then they spl
it ranks. In a contest between Prakasam and Muthuranga Mudaliar, who was backed by Kamaraj, the Telugu leader won by 82 votes to 69, the rest, mostly C.R. supporters, remaining neutral.

  16

  Freedom!

  1946-47

  The 1945-6 elections showed that India had been polarized. Congress won almost every general seat in the central and provincial legislatures and the League virtually every Muslim seat, except in the NWFP, where the Congress-backed Redshirts led by the Khan brothers were victorious. Eight provincial ministries were formed by the Congress, which also obtained a share in governing the Punjab. There, despite an overwhelming success in Muslim seats, the League did not win a majority in the Assembly. In Bengal and Sind the League headed coalition ministries.

  In February and March 1946, Britain’s Labour government made unprecedented declarations. First, it announced a Cabinet Mission to India for working out India’s political future, comprising three Ministers: Lord Pethick-Lawrence, Secretary of State for India, Sir Stafford Cripps, President of the Board of Trade, and A.V. Alexander, First Lord of the Admiralty. Next, Premier Attlee said in the House of Commons that if India wished she could choose to have independence.

  An exuberant C.R. exclaimed: ‘Swaraj will be a fact within six months or at the most two years’ (Hindustan Times, 18.3.46).

  The Cabinet Mission arrived in New Delhi on 24 March. Pethick-Lawrence, who led the ‘three wise men,’ was a pacifist who sympathized with Indian aspirations. The brilliant Cripps, the Mission’s dominant personality, was confident in what Wavell called his ‘ability to make both black and white appear a neutral and acceptable grey.’ Alexander was socialistic at home but, in Wavell’s words again, ‘in reality an imperialist, disliking any idea of leaving India.’1 As Viceroy, Wavell joined the British negotiating team as its fourth member.

  Azad and Nehru negotiated on Congress’s behalf, but C.R. also argued the Congress case during a three-hour talk he had with the Mission. After the meeting Pethick-Lawrence told Wavell that C.R. was ‘the biggest man in Indian politics.’2

  In his first discussion with the Mission, the Mahatma suggested the C.R. Formula as a compromise. The Mission offered Jinnah the ‘truncated’ Pakistan of this Formula and clarified that it could be entirely sovereign. But the League leader turned it down.

  The Mission then sought Jinnah’s reaction to a loose Indian Union and autonomy within it for the large Pakistan that Jinnah seemed to want — the whole of the Punjab, Sind, Baluchistan, the NWFP, the whole of Bengal and Assam. Without saying anything that might be construed as approval, Jinnah seemed ready to accept this, but he indicated also that his group of provinces would claim the right to secede after five years.

  In negotiations with the Mission, Congress made it plain that it would deny Jinnah this route to a Greater Pakistan. The principle of a group or groups within India was, however, accepted by Congress. While the League wanted all the Muslim- majority provinces plus Assam joined together in a ‘Muslim’ grouping, Congress sought a right for provinces such as Assam, the NWFP, Sind and Baluchistan to stay out of a ‘Muslim’ group in the first place, and another right to leave after joining.

  The Mission’s ‘solution’ was presented in its clever and deliberately inconsistent scheme of 16 May, designed to satisfy both Congress and the League both.

  Para 15 of the Declaration of 16 May read: ‘Provinces should be free to form groups with executives and legislatures, and each group could determine the provincial subjects to be taken in common.’ This indication of optional grouping was however contradicted by Para 19, which laid down that representatives chosen by the newly-elected provincial assemblies — to form, ostensibly, a single Constituent Assembly for India as a whole — ‘shall’, after a joint preliminary session, meet separately in three Sections, virtually as three separate Constituent Assemblies.

  Representatives from all Hindu-majority provinces except Assam were to meet in ‘Section A’ and settle a constitution for their group as well as for the provinces in the group; representatives from the Muslim provinces in the northwest of India would meet in ‘Section B’ and frame a constitution for their group and its provinces; meeting in ‘Section C,’ representatives from Bengal and Assam, including the northeastern areas, would do likewise.

  This meant that the fate of the NWFP, which had just elected a pro-Congress government and in effect rejected Pakistan, and of the Sikhs of the Punjab, would be decided by the Muslim majority in Section B; and that the Muslims of Bengal, forming a majority in Section C, would control Assam.

  A sub-clause in Para 19 no doubt said that a new provincial legislature elected under a constitution so framed could leave its group. However, Sections B and C seemed capable of preventing a province’s exit — by, for instance, laying down that ‘no unit can opt out except by a two-third majority.’3 The NWFP and Assam could thus be compelled by their Sections to remain in a ‘Pakistan’ group against their will.

  The League ‘accepted’ the 16 May plan but, reiterating its ‘unalterable goal of a complete sovereign Pakistan,’ made it clear that its assent was qualified. Congress took time to decide. Assamese leaders sent strong protests, and the Mahatma said he could not agree to Assam being overwhelmed. (‘There is no other way of fitting Assam in anywhere except in Pakistan,’ Jinnah, in contrast, had said in April.4)

  Ever ready with a solution, and eager for a settlement, C.R. proposed acceptance of 16 May, inclusive of Para 19, with the proviso that no provincial constitution drawn up by a Group would be valid until approved by the province or by the Union Constituent Assembly. To a majority of Congressmen, however, Para 15 was fair — provinces could form groups — but Para 19 was unacceptable — provinces should not be compelled.

  Their hands were forced by another British statement, that of 16 June, regarding an Interim Government. On this question, too, Congress and the League had clashed, the latter insisting on the right to select all Muslim Ministers. Congress was willing to keep out its Muslim President, Azad, against whom Jinnah seemed allergic, and proposed Zakir Hussain, as a single non- League Muslim, but Jinnah attacked Hussain as a quisling.

  Yielding to Jinnah in their 16 June statement, the three Ministers and Wavell invited to the Council six Congressmen — Nehru, Patel, C.R., Prasad, Jagjivan Ram and Hare Krushna Mahtab — five from the League, and three others — Baldev Singh, a Sikh, N.P. Engineer, a Parsi, and John Matthai, a Christian — but no non-League Muslim.

  Though, for a while, C.R. and Patel favoured acceptance — confident of the support of Singh, Engineer and Matthai, they pictured a 9-to-5 majority over the League in the Council —, the two changed their minds after The Statesman published letters exchanged between Wavell and Jinnah. In this correspondence the League leader was given three assurances: Congress could not substitute a Muslim for one of the six Congressmen invited; Jinnah would be consulted by the Viceroy if a question of substituting Singh, Engineer or Matthai arose; and the Council could not decide a communal question by simple majority vote.

  After this it was impossible for C.R. or Patel to recommend acceptance of 16 June. Cripps and Pethick-Lawrence, however, drew Patel’s attention to Clause 8 of the statement, which indicated that Congress and the League would be free to propose alternative names for their quota of Council seats, if they were ‘willing to accept the statement of May 16.’

  On 23 June, Patel, C.R., Nehru, Azad and Prasad met together, examined the opportunity offered by Clause 8 — an opportunity also available, they knew, to the League — and decided to grasp the power now within their reach.5

  Two days later, Gandhi advised the Working Committee against accepting 16 May or 16 June. Silence greeted Gandhi’s opinion. He asked if he could leave; his followers remained silent; Gandhi left. The Working Committee decided to reject 16 June but accept 16 May, with its own ‘interpretation of some of the provisions of the Statement’ — of Para 19, in particular.

  As soon as it was known that Congress had rejected 16 June but
accepted 16 May, the League, which had already consented to 16 May, informed the Viceroy that it was agreeing also to 16 June. But the possibility of a League-dominated Council had slipped out of Jinnah’s hands. Congress was back in the running, and Jinnah was furious.

  With some justification, he accused Congress of insincerity and Cripps and Pethick-Lawrence of collusion with it. In Congress’s view, which also had some basis, Wavell’s leanings were towards the League; and Congress underlined the fact that while ‘accepting’ 16 May, the League had reaffirmed its Pakistan goal.

  Gandhi commented that Jinnah, ‘a great Indian and the recognised leader of a great organisation’ should not have been dealt with ‘in a legalistic manner’6; but he chose not to stand in the way of his lieutenants — C.R., Vallabhbhai, Jawaharlal, Prasad and the rest — who wanted to secure the power they had smelt.

  Congress was invited to send its names for the Council. A League-led government, to which at least three Indians out of four were opposed, was forestalled; yet this success had been achieved through Congress’s deliberately equivocal acceptance of 16 May — a response virtually forced, it must be said, by the plan’s contradictory language.

  On returning to London, Cripps claimed before the House of Commons that the Mission had been ‘purposely vague.’7 Through ambiguity it hoped to secure the signatures of Congress and the League both. The League was allowed to feel that it could obtain both a large ‘Pakistan’ area and, before long, independence for it; and Congress that it could both concede and prevent a Muslim grouping within India.