On another occasion he said to the Englishwoman, ‘During the last few weeks I have been reading the novels of Jane Austen.’ Felton: ‘Which?’ C.R.: ‘All of them. Northanger Abbey was the last . . . There must be at least three hundred and thirty varieties of female characters, and Jane Austen understood nearly all of them.’12
As he approached and passed his eightieth birthday, he read Lamb, Thackeray, Tolstoy, The Book of Daniel, and The Iliad. Output matched input: articles in Swarajya and Kalki, statements to the Press, letters, talks, outpourings on global wrongs, national errors, individual habits . . .
Flashes of gaiety apart, he did not exude the steady optimism that some religious men possess and others simulate; he seemed, at times, to worship the God of Anxiety; worry frequently sat on his face and frustration showed in his voice; but in the late fifties — his late seventies and early eighties — he remained true to Gandhi’s 1939 remark: ‘Rajaji is one of the most God-minded men I know.’ The Almighty, accordingly, featured regularly in Swarajya, Kalki, and his talks.
In politics, however, the old man was shifting. In August 1957 he wrote:
A strong opposition is essential for the health of democratic government . . . Since the Congress party has swung to the Left, what is wanted is a strong and articulate Right (Swarajya, 17.8.57).
Agreeing, many told C.R. that he was the one to lead a Right party. His answer was a variation of ‘Impossible — a dilapidated old fogey like me?’
The Bomb was never forgotten. And when, in 1957, it was announced that Britain would explode a device on Christmas Island in the Pacific, C.R. declared that India should protest by leaving the Commonwealth. Nehru again disagreed.
When Sputnik was launched, C.R. said to Monica Felton, ‘Now that the Russians have sent up their toy moon, nobody could accuse them of weakness . . . if they said they would stop making the Bomb.’ ‘Why don’t you write to Krushchev and say so?’ Felton asked. C.R. replied, ‘What would be the use? They would hardly listen to . . .’ Felton interrupted, ‘an old fogey like you.’
Rajaji laughed, and when Monica repeated her advice, he said no in a tone that was ‘definite, beyond argument.’ But he wrote to Krushchev all the same. The answers C.R. received were long, full of propaganda and aided by flattery: at times a Delhi-based Soviet diplomat would bring to Bazlulla Road a Krushchev letter in Russian, with an English translation.
Still, a point came in 1958 when the Soviet Union did unilaterally suspend its tests. ‘I am very glad Krushchev took your advice,’ Felton said rather coldly to C.R. Imre Nagy of Hungary had been executed by this time, and Felton, a left- leaning idealist, had turned very anti-Krushchev.
‘My advice!’ C.R. laughed sarcastically. However, he added, ‘But I suppose I had a certain responsibility.’13 He was overjoyed. Earlier he had wondered whether ‘amoral Russia’ might not prove ‘more Christian’ than the ‘Christian’ West.14 Now he wrote, ‘Russia has taken a Gandhian initiative’ (Swarajya, 19.5.58).
Soon, Soviet tests were resumed, on the ground that the West had not responded in kind. Criticized by the Indian Express for having shared an anti-Bomb platform with E.M.S. Namboodiripad, Kerala’s Communist Chief Minister, and reminded of his 1952 remark that Communists were his enemy number one, C.R. replied: ‘I am far too interested in the stopping of test explosions to be misled by such arguments’ (Indian Express, 26.6.58).
To the skilled eye, ear and pen of Monica Felton are owed a number of vivid glimpses of C.R. in the late fifties, which she incorporated in her I Meet Rajaji. Visiting India in 1956, Felton, an Englishwoman with a lame leg, who had written a novel and a travelogue, decided to get to know C.R. — she had heard adulatory as well as ‘contrary opinions’ about him, listened to a tape in which he had spoken on Suez, and been struck by his words and ‘cool, slow voice.’ Of their first meeting, in December 1956, she would recall:
His voice was young and exquisitely precise . . . He treated the English language gently, as if he loved it. He was not omniscient and self-absorbed, as the old and the famous generally are. His curiosity was fresh and searching . . . He questioned me about my life and I was astonished to find myself telling him things that I had never told to anyone.
Four weeks later, calling on C.R. in Delhi, where he was giving a talk, his ‘look of unalterable sadness’ underneath ‘the great bare dome of his head’ filled Monica with ‘pity for this aged man,’ but Rajaji surprised and nettled her by pitying her. They were meeting on the second floor, and C.R. asked her, ‘Surely you didn’t walk up all those stairs with that lame leg?’
C.R. presented her the ornate, but also functional, walking- stick that Rama Rao had given him when he became Governor- General. Over the next several years, based in Madras as a freelance writer and would-be Rajaji biographer, Monica often called on him. Illness and the chores of each day put off the biography, but she brought out I Meet Rajaji and also a book on Sister Subbalakshmi. In 1970, her main aim unrealized, she died in Madras.
Yet I Meet Rajaji is an invaluable and lively record. His probing at the first meeting had revealed Felton’s agnosticism. At their third meeting, looking straight at her, he asked, ‘Why don’t you believe?’
Some months later Monica spoke of her frustration over the biography.
C.R.: ‘Why don’t you give it up?’
Felton: ‘It is what I came here to do.’
C.R.: ‘Yes, and now it has become an attachment. When people form an attachment to an idea, they stick to it beyond reason . . . That is why our religion places so much emphasis on the need to maintain a detached attitude.’
It was quite an exhortation, but when Monica retorted, ‘And do you practise what you preach?’ all C.R. could do was grin. The grinning C.R. appears again and again in the Felton portrayal — as does, less frequently, the melancholy Rajaji. ‘I saw,’ writes Felton, ‘that his look of age was like a mask. With a grin it slipped off and he was ageless.’
Felton discovered, too, that on occasion he could be forgetful — or untrue. Once he had said to her:
I believe that humanity has lost its chance. The fun is over . . . I think God has had enough of us. I think he is going to spray the whole world with DDT.
Some weeks later Monica said to him, ‘I have been thinking about what you said to me about God and DDT.’
C.R.: ‘What did I say?’ Felton reminded him.
C.R.: ‘I could not have said that.’
Felton: ‘You did. I wrote it down.’
C.R.: ‘Long afterwards. Your memory misled you.’ ‘No,’ insisted Monica, ‘I wrote it the same day.’ Finally C.R. admitted that Felton might have been right.
At eighty his phrase-making was not bad. During a discussion with Felton and Khasa on the Gandhi assassination, he said:
Some people think that if the guard had been adequate Gandhiji would not have been killed. Others think that it was destined that he should die at that particular time, that it was the right time for him to die, the fulfilment of a pre-destined propriety.
Noticing that Felton had pulled out her notebook, Khasa said to Rajaji: ‘She is writing down what you said.’ C.R. grinned: ‘She is collecting English phrases, that’s why.’ Turning to Felton, the self-professed agnostic, he added: ‘But the phrase is not quite right. It should be “the fulfilment of an evolutionary must.” ’
In 1959, their bond having lasted 67 years, C.R. wrote to Rama Rao, ‘I hope the miracle of our love on earth will be given as long a lease of life as in His decree it is good for us.’ Their closeness is revealed in the kind of Letters they exchanged.
Rama Rao to C.R., 13.9.54: Would you read — for me — once more Shakespeare’s sonnet, ‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought’? Milton — it was some feat [your] reading Paradise Lost through. I for one found that mass of gold too heavy.
C.R. to Rama Rao, 13.11.54: Have you read Johnson’s Preface to his Dictionary in full original? I have not read a nobler piece of writing . . . Parts bring tears to the
eyes . . .
C.R. to Rama Rao who, following C.R.’s advice that India should leave the Commonwealth, had asked, ‘Why ever did you join?’ 27.11.56: The theory was that we must preserve [any] ‘areas of peace’ and the Commonwealth was such a one. My own impression is that our international caste led us to it. We knew England best and it was a good club to be in.
C.R. to Rama Rao, 27.11.56: Never let a cold keep you long in its clutches. And don’t for God’s sake precede me. It is not good protocol.
C.R. to Rama Rao, 2.3.58: You asked if Maulana (Azad, who had just died) deserved all that is being said of him. He was a good type — broadminded, scholarly and gracious and one who had a kind of hold on the Prime Minister due to much association and a common dialect and a pro-Muslim complex in the latter. He liked me and I liked him.
Rama Rao to C.R., 11.9.58: Reading Lamb from cover to cover must have been as grim a triumph of the will as the traversing of Paradise Lost and ditto Regained, great and beautiful as the Himalayas and about as easy to conquer.
Rama Rao to C.R., following a ‘Swarajya’ article by the latter on meat, alcohol and smoking, 13.9.58: Aren’t you, by implication, rather hard on people whose habits are not yours? I don’t agree either with an indiscriminate sanctification of discipline . . . Mere abstinence from what gives pleasure is a very dilute suicide — that is all.
At the end of 1958, Madeleine Slade, or Mirabehn, who had joined the Mahatma in 1925, sent C.R. a typescript of her memoirs, which she said were likely to be published in the winter of 1960-1. C.R. wrote back: ‘God bless you — angel pure — I bless you on behalf of Bapu as well as of myself . . . It is a most interesting human story. [But] winter of 1960-61 is far in God’s horizon for me.’15
22
Swatantra
1958-62
In 1959, the elderly watchdog became a greyhound! Ignoring ailments and shaking off inhibitions, Rajaji, 80, decided to challenge Jawaharlal, who seemed to embody power, fame and vitality, with a new political party.
Events and his own analysis propelled C.R. Congress, he felt, was steadily corrupting. Though committing themselves, in 1955, to ‘a socialistic pattern’ and, later, to plain ‘socialism,’ its members seemed to be getting richer rather than more caring. In 1956 C.R. had publicly asked: ‘Congressmen look so well off. Have they taken up new avocations and earned money? Then how have they made money?’ (Indian Express, 28.5.56)
‘Anyhow, somehow,’ was his answer at the time. Now, three years later, he replaced it with a phrase that would become central to Indian political debate for the rest of the century. It was the ‘permit-licence-quota’ raj, he said, that was fattening Congressmen. The socialistic pattern, where the state controlled, ‘permitted’ and farmed out business, was enriching Congressmen, officials and favoured businessmen — and harassing the rest.
A realization began to stir in him that if he wished to oppose state control of business he would have to oppose Congress itself. While he was thus cogitating, Congress came out with a new agricultural policy. It had three prongs: government takeover of the grain trade; ceilings on land holdings; and cooperative cultivation of land. Aired in 1958, the guidelines were confirmed by Congress at its Nagpur session in January 1959.
To C.R. this policy represented a wolf that needed immediate chaining, and he barked at once and loudly. ‘Violent Socialism,’ ‘Retreat from Gandhism’ and ‘Why I Show the Red Flag’ were some of his articles assailing the new policy in Swarajya, the Hindustan Times and the Indian Express.
Bureaucrats, he argued, would make incompetent traders. Land ceilings would be unconstitutional and would dry up the flow of grain into towns. And rural industrialization, the soundest route to more jobs, would suffer if the bigger farmers were squeezed out.
In the ceiling proposal C.R. saw greed for votes and exploitation of jealousy, not sympathy for the landless. Calling it ‘a child of sadism’ (The Hindu, 6.1.59), he warned: ‘The egalitarians are hovering over the land like eagles’ (Swarajya, 27.12.58).
He was scathing about the joint ownership and farming that Jawaharlal and some of his advisers were presenting as an answer to the fragmentation of India’s cropland. Common cultivation, he said, was ‘not an idea born of experience or thought’ and had only been tried in countries ‘where personal liberty is absent and forced labour is commandeered’ (The Hindu, 6.1.59). In advocating it, Congress was ‘borrowing from the Communist his brush and paint’ (Indian Express, 19.1.59).
Peasants were most efficient when they farmed their own land; ‘an unwilling people yoked to the law’ would grow the minimum. In sum, joint cultivation would be ‘as bad for the farm as polygamy is for the family’ (Swarajya, 17.12.58 & 14.2.59).
In the middle of 1958, referring to ‘the gradual collapse of independent thinking’ in Congress, he had asked: ‘Has socialism been adopted only as parrots learn to speak’ (Swarajya, 10.5.58). The manner in which Congress accepted the new agricultural policy seemed to confirm his worst fears. After a sharp rebuke from Nehru, critics of joint farming and ceilings had meekly voted for the new policy — only six hands were raised in opposition.
Calling Nehru, for the first time, ‘the Congress dictator,’ C.R. also said: ‘The single brain-activity of the people who meet in Congress is to find out what is in Jawaharlal’s mind and to anticipate it. The slightest attempt at dissent meets with stern disapproval and is nipped in the bud’ (Swarajya, 17.1. & 28.2.59).
Suddenly, at this juncture, Indira Gandhi, Jawaharlal’s daughter, was named party president. Her talents were yet a secret, and she had had no experience of party work. Several of Nehru’s colleagues were offended by the choice but said nothing. C.R. felt outraged.
Two years earlier, he had spoken somewhat academically of the role a Right party could perform. Now, perceiving a threat of joint farming and the collapse of independence in Congress, he called for a Conservative Party of India:
Men do not feel any inclination to become wage-slaves, and peasants are least inclined . . . A wide public is waiting to give support to an opposition formed on a sound basis, because the people have realised that one-footed democracy is no good and is not distinguishable from coercion and totalitarianism (The Hindu, 6.1.59).
For a year or so, he had been urged to lead an initiative against Congress socialism by men like Minoo Masani, the former socialist and now an independent MP, P.K. Deo, the Maharaja of Kalahandi in Orissa, Murarji Vaidya of the Forum of Free Enterprise and Janakinandan Singh, leader of a group of breakaway Congressmen in Bihar. So far C.R.’s reply was that he was ‘too old, too long a Congressman and too close to Nehru personally to consider an active re-entry into politics.’1
After Nagpur, the pressure was stronger. C.R. deflected it, first, towards Jayaprakash Narayan. Though a socialist himself, J.P. had spoken of the need for a conservative party and for opposing Congress. Inscribing his best wishes, J.P. tossed the ball back to C.R. This time C.R. threw it towards Chintaman Deshmukh, who had resigned a few years earlier from Nehru’s Cabinet, and whose talent and integrity C.R. esteemed:
You are aware that for a considerable time now I have been convinced of the need for an opposition party and that it should be a conservative party whatever name it may adopt.
Everyone who agreed with me, looking for a good leader, could find none and ended with asking me to do it, which I have been saying is impossible. [Then] there was a flash and I saw at once who it must be. ‘Here is the man,’ I said to myself. ‘Deshmukh fits it to a tee . . .’
If you agree to place youself at the head of this movement, it will be my duty to get young and do all in my power to make it a success. (15.4.59)2
Though touched, Deshmukh pleaded inability. Simultaneously, with Deshmukh’s reply came Nehru’s first comment on C.R.’s criticisms. At a public meeting in Madras, Jawharlal referred to his ‘affection and respect’ for Rajaji, and then said, ‘May I perhaps venture to say one word to him with great respect; and that is, a litle charity in his thinkin
g may sometimes not be out of place.’3
In the middle of May 1959, Monica Felton said to C.R.:
I have been thinking that if I were the mother of you and the Prime Minister, I would bang your two heads together and tell you to stop arguing and run things together. Each of you has qualities that the other has not. You would make a superb combination.
C.R.: It is too late. Our Prime Minister has arrived at a point at which it is impossible for him to change his views. And I have reached a detachment which makes it out of the question that I should ever return to public affairs.4
Two weeks after uttering these categorical words, C.R. addressed a Bangalore meeting convened by M.A. Sreenivasan of the Forum of Free Enterprise, where, speaking just before him, Masani had assailed Congress in scathing terms.
‘Mr Masani is a parliamentarian,’ C.R. began, ‘and he cannot use strong words. I am free to do so.’ He went on to accuse Nehru of megalomania, and the hall exploded with applause. Next morning, on 30 May, Rajaji told Masani that the time had come to start the new party.
On 4 June, the day’s engagements listed in the Madras papers included a meeting of the All India Agriculturists’ Federation (AIAF) to be addressed by Masani in the evening. When Monica Felton met C.R. in the forenoon, he told her that though Masani was ‘the real speaker,’ he too would be saying something, and that she would be welcome ‘if you have nothing better to do.’ ‘Nothing in his manner or tone [suggested] that the occasion was of the slightest importance.’
After the conversation with Felton, C.R. went to Woodlands Hotel to confer with Masani, N.G. Ranga, the Andhra MP and AIAF leader (he had protested against Congress’s land policy by resigning his post of secretary of the Congress parliamentary party), V.P. Menon, who had been a close aide of Vallabhbhai Patel, and several others.
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