Rajaji

by Rajmohan Gandhi

  One indication of Swatantra’s impact was the frequency of Nehru’s criticisms. Another was Congress’s anxiety to placate Swatantra’s likely supporters. The princes were intimidated or cajoled — and peasants were regularly assured, often by Nehru himself, that joint farming would not be forced on them. This was as much a retreat as a clarification, and though it removed a key issue favouring Swatantra, the abandonment of cooperative farming should be regarded, wholly or in pan, as a Swatantra achievement.

  There were other results. When the party was a year old, C.R. claimed with truth that

  We have released the spirit of criticism. We have hit and wounded, though we have not yet slain, the fear that held the people in its grasp (Swarajya, 30.7.60).

  Not having become anti-Communist, pro-American or anti- Nehru in any neat or consistent sense, he continued to attack the Americans over the Bomb. And when it became known in November 1959 that China had occupied much of Aksai Chin in Ladakh and cut a road across the territory, and most opposition MPs accused Nehru of serious negligence, C.R. seemed to exonerate Nehru:

  China’s misconduct should not be laid on his shoulders . . . It was a pure case of betrayal of him by the leaders of China whom he had trusted, and no fault on his part (Swarajya, 5.12.59).

  While urging Indians to see China as a long-term threat, C.R. acknowledged China’s right to join the UN. Membership there, he explained, was ‘a status attached to the actuality of established government, . . . not a prize for good conduct’ (Swarajya, 28.11.59).

  Positions of this kind could be disconcerting for both colleagues and adversaries. Krishna Menon, India’s Defence Minister at this time and a favourite of the Indian Left, was right in remarking later that ‘the residuum of Rajaji’s impact on those who have known him is his uniqueness.’16 Menon himself, or rather C.R.’s attitude to him, was a perfect instance of this uniqueness. While his Swatantra colleagues disliked Menon intensely, C.R. was often willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  An Indo-Pak pact offered at this juncture by General Ayub Khan, the Pakistan President, appealed to C.R. ‘Pakistan’s offer is worth serious consideration,’ he wrote, adding, ‘There is cause for all the nations south of Chinese borders to be brought together’ (Swarajya, 5.12.59). He also advocated a more positive attitude towards the USA, which, he thought, might also ‘activate Russia’ to move in a direction friendly to India (Swarajya, 7.5.60). Neither plea was acceptable to Nehru.

  A fresh honour had greeted C.R. before he launched Swatantra. His Ramayana earned him a Rs 5,000 award from the Sahitya Akademi for ‘the best work in Tamil in 1955-7.’ He waded through illnesses, toured, pacified dissatisfied partymen, and encouraged personalities offering their support.

  Premnath, the film actor, was one such. Arriving for a dinner given by the actor in Bombay, Rajaji was welcomed at the door by Premnath’s wife, the actress Bina Rai. ‘She is a famous star,’ Rajaji’s aide S.V. Subramaniam informed him. After studying his hostess for a long moment, Rajaji asked, ‘Do you mean to say she is a film actress?’ ‘Yes, she is,’ confirmed Subramaniam. ‘Really?’ Rajaji asked again, adding, ‘Surely so much beauty is not required for film acting.’17

  His boylike curiosity was well-preserved. Thomas Simons, the new American Consul-General, noticed, in 1961, ‘the zest and youthful excitement [C.R.] displayed’ while showing ‘the new car he had just taken possession of.’18 To John Thompson an Australian poet who had called on C.R. and later sent him a book of poems, C.R. wrote:

  I was amazed at the volume of courageous poetry that has issued from Australia. Keep your souls God-hungry and you will be blessed (7.9.61).

  Lengthening shadows, and the cutting of links with the past . . . C.R. sold the land and house he had acquired in Salem forty or so years earlier to a doctor wanting to build a hospital, for a sum ‘far below the market value,’ in the doctor’s phrase.19

  Lengthening shadows, and the inevitable quota of tombstones . . . Vedaratnam, the host of the 1930 Vedaranyam battle against the Raj, passed away. C.R. had called him ‘a blood brother in political life as far as dear Tamilnad was concerned’ (Swarajya, 2.9.61).

  Three months earlier, Khasa had gone. His lucid, enthusiastic, faith-filled backing, offered without a break for five years, had meant a great deal to C.R. ‘Bereaved’ was the heading C.R. gave to his note about Khasa:

  The world of journalism in India has lost one of its bravest and best veterans . . . I have lost one who bathed me with his affection and rejuvenated me when I felt weary. He was beloved of all, because he overflowed with love and forgiveness for all . . . My bereavement is great and I am unable to suppress my self-pity (Swarajya, 24.6.61).

  Lengthening shadows, and growing grandchildren. A 16-year-old grandson was advised thus:

  You should read at least a dozen of Shakespeare’s plays if not all of them. Read books for pleasure . . . Never mind if parts go ununderstood.20

  Lengthening shadows, and a dinner at Raj Bhavan with Queen Elizabeth, of whose forebears C.R. had been a guest in many a prison and who toured India in 1961 with her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh.

  Pothan Joseph replaced Khasa as the Swarajya editor. Each issue carried a lead article by C.R. as well as a ‘Dear Reader’ column in which C.R. commented on sundry national, international and theological subjects.

  On South Africa and apartheid, 14.5.60: If they want apartheid, the Boers should carry it forward to its logical end . . . The country should be partitioned off on the basis of the population ratio and white South Africans may have apartheid to their hearts’ content. If this division be not possible, then the policy of apartheid must be given up.

  On a proposal for banning communal parties, 8.4.61: Now is a trade union . . . [or] an association of cotton merchants less offensive than an association of Jains or Catholics or Muslims or Kayasthas or Brahmins (or Negroes or men of Indian origin in South Africa or of Tamils in Ceylon)? I warn my friends against this foolish and unconstitutional enterprise.

  In December 1961, with general elections round the corner, Indian troops entered Goa. The liberation of the enclave the Portuguese had held for centuries was a lucrative election-eve stroke. One of the few Indians to object to the move, C.R. commented that after Goa India had ‘totally lost the moral power to raise her voice against militarism’ (Swarajya, 27.12.61).

  Many letters coming to him were destined to be crushed into a ball and flung into the w.p.b. by a practised if slowly weakening hand, but most were dealt with. C.R. would scribble his answer on blank spaces in the letter received; his typist would reproduce it. Even single-sentence replies had a distinctive twist. With some correspondents he was uninhibited or playful. One of them was the English pioneer of All India Radio, Lionel Fielden, a bachelor who had met C.R. often in the thirties and forties and later settled in Italy.

  C.R. to Fielden about the latter’s memoirs, 4.1.61: What charming poetry have you filled your childhood story with. I am absolutely in love with your grandmother. And then, when the stepmother enters the scene, how delightful! You are a born writer . . . I wish you had not advertised your ‘homosexuality’. I am a heterosexual. I wish your grandmother were alive and I could court her.

  When Fielden wrote that he saw C.R. as ‘a humanitarian who doesn’t believe in egalitarianism,’ a delighted C.R. replied:

  22.1.61: You are ‘cent per cent’ right . . . Strength and energy flow from difference in level . . . Egalitarianism is a fallacy and a fraud. The doctrine of compassion preached by Jesus and the Upanishads of India is the true doctrine of life, not the illusion of egalitarianism or its monster children, envy, hatred and violence . . . Am I getting to be a priest?

  Fielden to C.R., 14.8.62: Thank you for your kindness in seeing my cousins when they were in Madras. They were thrilled to meet you and — like me — thought you by far the most interesting and lively man in all India. They found Jawaharlal dull by comparison with you . . .

  C.R. to Fielden, 24.8.62: I am glad to be told
that your cousins . . . found me worthy of the time they gave . . . The trouble with J.N. is that he won’t take any risk. So he appears dull. He is big and too conscious and anxious about it. I. . . don’t care and let go. Anyway I am grateful to your cousins for their partiality.

  Ten or so MPs had formed a Swatantra contingent in the existing Lok Sabha, and similar units had emerged in the Bihar, Orissa, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Andhra assemblies. Across India, membership was increasing, but there were some problems. Chatterjee, leading the West Bengal unit, resigned after being told that in the coming elections Bombay would finance only one Lok Sabha seat from West Bengal. The Raja of Ramgarh, who controlled a vote bank in Bihar, clashed with the party’s central executive.

  As elections drew nearer, the desire to defeat Congress and win some seats through electoral adjustments with non- Communist opposition parties tended to eclipse the anti-statist cause. Resenting a newcomer’s intrusion, the Jan Sangh was reluctant to leave seats for Swatantra. However, in Rajasthan, Madras and the Punjab, Swatantra reached constituency-level agreements with, respectively, the Jan Sangh, the DMK, and the Akali Dal.

  C.R.’s wooing of C.N. Annadurai, the DMK leader, or Anna, as he was increasingly called, who had courted arrest in defiance of the Rajaji-led ministries of 1937-9 and 1952-4, merits attention. In Annadurai’s eyes, C.R. had been an Aryan secretly striving to maintain Brahmin domination over the Dravidians. On his part C.R. had accused the DMK and its parent, the DK, of ‘openly preaching a creed of hatred based on ethnological conjectures and unrecorded and unproved historical conflicts.’21

  Now, however, defeating Congress was the primary aim of both. As C.R. saw it, the DMK had to be assisted, enlisted and if possible moderated; it could not be alienated. In extending his hand to the DMK, C.R. was encouraged by the personality of Annadurai, who possessed mass appeal and a mind seemingly open to new ideas. Though Swatantra and DMK failed to reach a full electoral agreement, Rajaji and Anna hit it off with each other.

  Privately and publicly, C.R. urged Anna to abandon the independent Dravidaland that the DK and the DMK had earlier demanded; and with the nationalists in the South and elsewhere he argued that the DMK was not in fact the secessionist demon they feared. He is entitled to his share of the credit for the DMK’s formal abandonment of the secessionist aim, which was announced at the end of 1962, following India’s conflict with China.

  An 83-year-old C.R. threw himself into the election campaign. As thousands seated on the ground would chant ‘Rajaji! Rajaji!’, ‘a patriarch wreathed in white and carrying his famous cane like some Old Testament prophet’ would ‘pick his way among them to deliver a delightful drumfire attack.’22 Congress socialism ‘was grinding the individual,’ a Congress- Communist contest was no more than ‘an Oxford boat race,’ and ‘the pernicious system of permits, licences, quotas and controls made the Congress party’s rich friends richer and the poor poorer.’23

  He complained about two wrongs. One was the permission, grossly unfair to the other parties, for a Congress flag which was virtually the same as the Indian tricolour. Two, ‘the collection of funds for the ruling party’s chest [by] prominent ministers’ who held the power to promote or ruin industrialists (Swarajya, 17.6.61).

  Receiving money in Kanpur, Nehru confessed that he was ‘a little ashamed,’ but, as C.R. pointed out, the Prime Minister ‘pocketed the purses given!’ (Swarajya, 7.10.61).

  Two suggestions for the longer term were made by C.R. One was state funding of elections, which would help eliminate ‘the overwhelming advantages of money-power.’ Added C.R.: ‘Elections now are private enterprise, whereas this is the first thing to be nationalised’ (Illustrated Weekly, 13.8.61).

  His second suggestion was that for six months prior to a general election, the President should rule directly, through officials, thereby reducing the capacity of Ministers to influence voting. But fair elections were hardly the ruling party’s first concern. C.R.’s complaints and suggestions fell on deaf ears.

  ‘Humble the Congress. Pluck its feathers. Maul its strength.’ This was C.R.’s election-eve message to his public. He and others speaking like him were not heeded. In 1957 Congress had polled 46 per cent of the nation’s votes; now it secured 44.5 per cent. In the Lok Sabha and most state assemblies it secured comfortable majorities. Swatantra’s share of the Lok Sabha vote was 8 per cent, that of the Jan Sangh 7 per cent, of the Communists roughly ten per cent.

  In the Lok Sabha, Congress won 361 seats (a loss of ten); the Communists 29, Swatantra 25, the Jan Sangh and allies 18, and different Socialist factions 18. In 1963, Ranga and Masani would enter the Lok Sabha through by-elections. Until then Deo, the Maharaja of Kalahandi, led the Swatantra MPs.

  Swatantra secured a total of 207 seats in the different state assemblies, as against 153 for the Communists, 149 for the Socialists, and 115 for the Jan Sangh. In Madras, the DMK obtained 50 seats and Swatantra 9.

  The new party had 50 MLAs in Bihar — Ramgarh had done his bit; 36 in Rajasthan; 26 in Gujarat; 19 in Andhra; and 15 in U.P.

  Held earlier, the Orissa Assembly elections had given Swatantra 37 seats out of 140. There, and in Rajasthan, Gujarat and Bihar, Swatantra was now Congress’s leading opposition. All in all, while the Congress fortress was not breached, the new challenger had not done too badly.

  To an American reporter, C.R. said: ‘I will carry on. I will work for a strong opposition in the next general elections.’ Meredith Brown of the Louisville Courier-Journal noted that these would take place in 1967, when ‘the remarkable Mr Rajagopalachari will be 89 years old.

  23

  Kennedy

  1961-63

  In the autumn of 1961, the Soviet Union broke a worldwide pause in nuclear testing by exploding a 50-megaton bomb. C.R. demanded that India ‘ostracize’ the USSR, but Nehru was unresponsive. He was equally cool a few months later when Bertrand Russell urged him to send, as a gesture of protest, an Indian ship to the Pacific zone where America had scheduled ‘retaliatory’ blasts.

  Russell’s idea clicked with C.R., who told Jawaharlal that he would like to go to the testing area himself on any ship India might send!

  C.R. to Nehru, 22.4.62: If you are responding positively to Bertrand Russell’s appeal . . . do register me as a civilian going with the ‘resisters.’ I do wish the appeal is accepted.

  Nehru to C.R., 23.4.62: I admire the crusading enthusiasm of Bertrand Russell, but I do not see how I can order one of our warships to go to this place. That would be almost a hostile act against the United States and might have far-reaching consequences.

  C.R. to Nehru, 25.4.62: Our civil resistance cannot be possibly treated as an unfriendly gesture . . . We can explain fully our motive and our friendly attitude. Our opposition would be only to the tests and not to the government.

  Nehru to C.R., 5.5.62: I am afraid I have not yet been convinced by what you have written about sending a ship to Christmas Island . . . Any step of this kind that we take would be considered a hostile act against the United States.

  C.R. to Nehru, 8.5.62: I regret to note that I have not been able to persuade you that governments too can offer civil resistance to more powerful governments who seek to act Contrary to international law . . .

  If we exclude two brief visits to Ceylon and another to Burma when the British ruled it as part of India, C.R. had never travelled abroad. To leave his neighbourhood for the first time at the age of eighty-three and a half, and that too as a civil resister, would have been intriguing. Though that journey did not come about, C.R. soon crossed the oceans — to fight the Bomb.

  The journey was a follow-up to a disarmament conference in Delhi which was attended by Indian eminence virtually in its entirety. Nehru, C.R., Prasad, who had just retired as President, Radhakrishnan, who had succeeded Prasad, Jayaprakash Narayan, Zakir Husain, the Vice-President — all took part.

  When his turn to speak came, C.R. said he was sorry that Russell’s appeal had gone unheeded and added that an Indian i
nitiative was called for. R.R. Diwakar, chairman of the Gandhi Peace Foundation and the conference convener, responded by asking C.R. whether he would be willing, with perhaps one or two others, to visit the leaders of the Big Powers on behalf of the Foundation.

  Yes, said C.R., if the Indian government would support such a mission and if he was not expected to respond with silence or evasion to questions about India that might be put to him abroad. If Nehru was uneasy on this score, he would rather not go.

  When C.R.’s queries were put to Nehru by Diwakar and Shiva Rao, journalist and former parliamentarian, Jawaharlal expressed willingness to satisfy C.R. on both points. However, he proposed a division of labour, with C.R. calling on the Western leaders, and U.N. Dhebar, a recent president of Congress, visiting Moscow.

  Nehru’s view prevailed, but C.R., who obtained the Foundation’s sanction for visiting Moscow after America if that proved necessary, warned Krushchev in a letter that he might suddenly turn up at the Kremlin.

  He had his overcoat, last used twelve years earlier in Delhi, some pairs of socks and a couple of woollen kurtas pulled out and dry-cleaned, and knee-length semi-woollen pants stitched into his dhotis. The obligatory shots were reluctantly taken. In deference to his age and condition, it was decided that Dr C. Satyanarayana of Madras’s General Hospital would accompany C.R.