Poetry was neither a gift C.R. was born with nor a skill he strove to master. Nonetheless, he affected sensitive persons with his rendering in English verse of portions of Kamban’s Ramayana. The reaction of the Communist parliamentarian, Hiren Mukerjee, is of interest: ‘Much before I had any personal contact with him, I had chanced upon his English translation . . . of Kamba Ramayana. It stirred me and I took an instant liking to one with whom I had little rapport.’30
C.R.’s assertion that he was not a man of letters must therefore be rejected. If they had known and read him for any length of time, lovers of the art of writing could not easily dismiss him from their thoughts. ‘His voice, his smile are there whenever I put pen to paper with the desire to fit words well to my thoughts,’ observes Albert Franklin, an American who had often called on C.R. and followed Swarajya.
But the fates denied, or spared, Rajaji a life where he could put all his soul into writing or wit. Action, struggle in fact, was as much, or more, his breath than art; and his art was influenced by his struggles. The people he portrayed in his stories were kin to those he cared and fought for in real life; and while the flesh, blood and heartbeat of his Ramayana and Mahabharata owe a very great deal to Valmiki, Kamban and Vyasa and to his own artistic gifts, they owe something too to the battles C.R. had fought.
Was he then, in essence, a warrior? Or a teacher? A rebel? A statesman? A politician? A sage? All these things and more: this man in a million was at least six men in one. And yet in all his different roles there was something common: a flow of words. Fox (as he was supposed by some to be) or watchdog, farseeing eagle or wise owl, sitting on a throne or pushed (mostly by himself) to a desert, whether standing on a peak or a valley of his undulating life — Rajaji was in each instance a man of words, wise or defiant words, a lawyer’s words and those of a patriot, words that provoked and words that consoled, words uttered and words written, prophetic words, sparkling words, indiscreet words, unceasing words . . .
Of course Rajaji was a man of deeds too (and also, despite his disclaimer, a man of letters), but words were very often his deeds and in some ways greater than his deeds. They were his arrows (his quiver was always full), his food, his gifts, his companions.
25
Sparkle
1969-72
When President Zakir Husain died in May 1969, a coterie of provincial bosses — Kamaraj, Nijalingappa of Karnataka, Sanjiva Reddy of Andhra, Atulya Ghosh of West Bengal and S.K. Patil of Bombay — sponsored Reddy for the Rashtrapati Bhavan vacancy. Indira disliked the choice, but Morarji Desai and Y.B. Chavan, boss of the Maharashtra Congress, threw their weight behind Reddy, who, despite Mrs Gandhi’s opposition, was named the Congress candidate.
A rebuffed Indira threatened ‘consequences.’ Writing to her, C.R. asked, ‘Why don’t you become President yourself, letting Desai take up the Premiership?’1 Dismissing the gratuitous advice, she loyally put her signature on one of Reddy’s nomination papers — and proceeded to work for the success of Vice President V.V. Giri, who had entered the race, and whose fortunes Rajaji had uncannily foreseen and mentioned in a letter to Masani.
The Congress party will finally be forced to plump for Giri. He would be a good rubber-stamp President.2 (17.5.69).
Swatantra, the Jan Sangh and Charan Singh’s Kranti Dal persuaded Chintaman Deshmukh, whom C.R. had approached a decade earlier for leading Swatantra, to be their joint candidate, and instructed their MPs and MLAs to give their second preferences to Reddy. The Left and socialist parties were for Giri, who projected himself as left-of-centre. On Indira’s behalf, Congress legislators were urged to vote ‘according to their consciences,’ i.e. for Giri and not for the Congress candidate, Reddy.
Indira acted boldly. Stripping Desai of the Finance portfolio, she also, in a swift stroke, nationalized the country’s top fourteen banks. Overnight, and well before the presidential polling, she became the Left’s heroine. Crowds brought to her residence lauded Indira as the saviour of the downtrodden.
In a tantalizingly close finish, Giri edged out Reddy. Deshmukh came a respectable third.
Congress now split, and opposition parties had to decide whether they were against both Congress factions or only one of them. Sensing votes in leftism and strength in Indira, the DMK, which had supported Giri, allied with her.
In the Swarajya columns, C.R. was scathing about Indira. Her charge of ‘vested interests’ opposing her was ‘nonsense’. ‘Shouts of zindabad raised by admiring crowds’ could not ‘alter economic laws.’ She was guilty of ‘socialistic exhibitionism.’ Her mind ‘had a dictator’s bent’ — no one else had said that so far about Indira — and she nursed illusions. ‘She should not imagine that she alone is modern . . . Outdated socialism is not modernism.’3
Chavan switched in Indira’s favour and so did Charan Singh, who thereby became Chief Minister of UP. ‘To put it mildly,’ commented C.R., ‘Charan Singh’s politics are curious’ (Swarajya, 21.2.70). Some months later, however, Singh was removed by Mrs Gandhi, who imposed President’s rule in UP. Papers to accomplish her ends were flown to Moscow for the signature of Giri, who was on a visit to the Soviet Union. C.R. underlined the fact that Giri ‘had put his signature at the point marked in the document sent to him from India without making any enquiry about the other side of the case, and without even caring to go to the [Indian Embassy] to affix his signature’ (Swarajya, 17.10.70).
When Indira announced a move to amend the Constitution in order to abolish privy purses, C.R. wrote (Swarajya, 27.12.69):
Pledging themselves to break a pledge! Gandhiji would have shut his ears in shame. Sardar would be as angry as he could ever be, and Jawaharlalji would be horrified and shout, ‘Such a thing is not done!’
The Lok Sabha sanctioned the amendment but the Rajya Sabha did not. Indira’s response was to ‘derecognize’ all rulers under a provision that in the past had enabled a Viceroy to ‘derecognize’ a pretender to the throne of a princely state. Giri duly signed a proclamation and all princely rights at once vanished!
‘The Union government has gone berserk,’ C.R. cried (Swarajya, 12.9.70). But the Supreme Court declared the order illegal. Rajaji’s comment was, ‘The Court has saved India’s honour’ (Swarajya, 26.12.70).
At the end of 1969, when he turned 91, Rajaji commenced what was destined to be his last great effort, a bid for ‘a genuine and strong democratic front’ (Swarajya, 6.12.69) to check the Indira Congress. First, he pressed Ranga and Masani, who succeeded Ranga as Swatantra president in 1970, to produce a democratic bloc in Parliament. Then, in March 1970, he publicly proposed a ‘grand coalition’ of Swatantra, the Old Congress and the Jan Sangh, drawing attention to what he perceived as a change in the Jan Sangh away from its ‘old anti-Gandhian attitude.’
Rajaji had an encouraging talk with Morarji, Kamaraj too seemed willing to cooperate, and the Old Congress called for ‘the consolidation of national democratic forces.’ The ancient campaigner in Madras greeted the appeal with the Swarajya headline, ‘My Congratulations to the Old Congress’ (11.7.70).
But the Old Congress was neither clear nor united. Ram Subhag Singh, leader of its group in the Lok Sabha, obstructed the formation of a three-party bloc in the House. A deeply disappointed Rajaji wrote to Masani:
I submit to the decree of Providence . . . I have done my utmost and what else is there but to submit to misfortune.4
Soon it was a year since he had urged a front. It was nowhere to be seen. ‘Battles are not won riding on snails,’ he wrote. (Swarajya, 7.11.70). When Nijalingappa, heading the Old Congress, expressed the hope that something would ‘evolve,’ C.R. observed:
If he asked fellow Darwinians they would tell him how long it took for man to evolve out of the ape (Swarajya, 28.11.70).
Indira now charged. At the end of December, she announced the dissolution of Parliament and fresh elections. The opposition had no front, no common programme, no common leader and no funds. In vain had the old campaigner shouted and coaxed. T
hough angry with those who should have come together, he blamed Indira: it was unscrupulous of her to order elections ‘a year in advance’ to suit her strategy.
Asking Indians to decide ‘the single question,’ whether they approved of ‘Smt. Indira Gandhi’s plan to tear up the Constitution and replace democracy by totalitarianism,’ he urged her opponents to ‘Unite! Unite!’ even at the last minute (Swarajya, 9.1.71).
To Masani, who was negotiating in Delhi with Nijalingappa and with Atal Behari Vajpayee of the Jan Sangh, C.R. wrote (2.1.71): ‘You must bring about agreement on a joint appeal to defeat Indira Gandhi.’
After several hiccups, a Grand Alliance of Swatantra, the Old Congress, the Jan Sangh and the Socialists was announced, but the slogan of Indira Hatao could not hide Swatantra’s differences with the Socialists or with the Jan Sangh. To reassure those troubled by an alliance with the Jan Sangh, Rajaji said, ‘The Swatantra party and the Old Congress will keep the Jan Sangh in order.’5
C.R.’s attempts to raise funds from the Rajas came to nothing. Over the vigorous protests of C.R., Indira secured for her party the constitutionally questionable symbol of a cow and a calf, calculated to appeal to the Hindu vote. Ridiculing the Grand Alliance’s inconsistencies, Mrs Gandhi also hit upon the slogan of Garibi Hatao, and coasted to an easy victory.
Though not polling more than 43.64 per cent of the votes, her party won 350 Lok Sabha seats. Swatantra went down from 44 seats to 8 and from 8.68 per cent to 3.08 per cent. Masani and Ranga both lost, as did Sanjiva Reddy, S.K. Patil and Ram Subhag Singh of the Old Congress, and the Socialists Madhu Limaye and Raj Narain. The Jan Sangh was humbled as well. Contesting on the Swatantra ticket from a Madras seat, Narasimhan, too, lost.
In simultaneous elections to the Tamil Nadu Assembly, the DMK, now an Indira Congress ally, routed the Rajaji-Kamaraj alliance. Swatantra and Old Congress circles had expected the opposite, and Kamaraj had joked, ‘Rajaji, you had better be ready to become Chief Minister again.’ In fact the two had thought of R. Venkataraman, a future President of India, as the Chief Minister.
When he heard over a borrowed radio that the DMK had won 183 seats as against 21 secured by the Old Congress and Swatantra, Rajaji’s first reaction was to attack ‘the money power of the Indira Congress and the DMK’ and ‘the stinking permit- licence raj.’ Later, he underlined the fact that Swatantra and the Old Congress had polled 59 lakh votes as against 76 lakh votes for the DMK and supporting parties.
‘The teacher must go on teaching, whatever may be the difficulties,’ he said to the Press. And two days after the results, in a letter to Nijalingappa, he showed an unbelievable willingness to face another long struggle:
We must organise young men and women as when the Gandhian Congress began . . . The enemy now is totalitarianism and we have to fight it as we fought the British.
He attacked an apparent bid by one of Indira’s sons for a licence to make an ‘Indian’ car:
When Volkswagen of Germany is ready to give small and cheap and, what is most important, good cars to those who want them in India, why should our Government not accept the proposal? . . . Adventures in the manufacture of small or big cars are not what tax-payers’ money should be spent on. I shall not believe the story about the Prime Minister’s son and the small car . . . until it is confirmed (Swarajya, 25.4. & 5.9.70).
He was equally clear about the proposed cancellation of a cricket series in England against a South African team:
I do not see why the British people should be deprived of seeing good cricket . . . Shall we succeed in improving the minds and doctrines of people by outcasting them? (Swarajya, 6.6.70)
Also in 1970 he relived earlier times when old Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan of the Northwest Frontier, who was visiting India, called on him. Pothan Joseph retired from Swarajya in January 1970 and was succeeded as editor by Philip Spratt, the British-born former Communist with a Tamil wife. Fifteen months later, to C.R.’s grief, Spratt died, and K. Santhanam became editor.
Friends were dying in a ceaseless sequence. And C.R.’s obits were more frequent than ever. That perceptive portrayer, unawed admirer and skilful questioner, Monica Felton died in March 1970 in Madras. Needing an immediate income, she had been free-lancing for a while. In one of her last letters to Rajaji she had said that she hoped ‘to write a novel which may possibly make enough money to enable me to try to be a biographer again.’6 C.R. spoke feelingly if compactly of ‘my loss through death of my British author friend Dr Monica Felton to whom I owe so much’ (Swarajya, 14.3.70).
East Pakistan, meanwhile, was aflame. Though Sheikh Mujib’s Awami League had won a majority (160 seats) in the 300- member Pakistan Assembly, General Yahya Khan, the President, refused to install Mujib as Prime Minister. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, whose party had won 83 seats in Pakistan’s west wing, backed Yahya’s refusal. In reaction all of East Pakistan seemed to take to nonviolent civil disobedience. When Mujib and several of his colleagues were seized, the population of East Bengal exploded. Suppression followed but some East Bengalis announced an independent Bangladesh.
J.P. asked Indira to recognize the new nation but C.R.’s advice was to wait a while. He informed Swarajya’s readers truthfully that in a 1948 conversation with Mountbatten he had predicted that Pakistan would split in 25 years or so; yet India should not invite the charge of promoting the dismemberment.
He worried about a possible tie-up between Mujib and China. Though he once brought to the notice of his readers ‘a rather favourable British appraisal of Chinese Communism,’ as he put it (Swarajya, 24.1.70), China remained for him the ‘crocodile’ or ‘alligator’ that India had to watch.
This assessment, combined with a view that, abandoning Asia, ‘America has gone on sick leave,’ led C.R. first to urge (in a Swarajya piece and in a letter to Premier Kosygin) Soviet arbitration between Yahya and Mujib, and then unreservedly to defend the treaty with the Soviet Union that Indira concluded in August 1971.
The treaty found Swatantra’s founder at complete variance with his party, which opposed it. C.R. wrote:
At one end official America has proved to be a broken reed. At the other end the Chinese menace is growing dangerously. There was, therefore, no alternative for India but to enter into a defensive treaty with the Soviet Union (Swarajya, 21.8.71). It was wise to prefer dealing with the Devil to being drowned in the deep sea (Swarajya, 4.9.71).
The carnage in East Pakistan was terrible. ‘What has happened to General Yahya Khan and his colleagues and rivals?’ demanded an outraged C.R. ‘Have they lost all adherence to the religion that Arabia gave them? Have they indeed lost all commonsense?’ (Swarajya, 8.5.71)
Repression caused a vast exodus. By the end of September, nine million refugees had entered India, at the rate of 30,000 a day. Finally, in December 1971, Bangladeshi and Indian forces clashed with Pakistan. Liberation came in days; before long Mujib returned to an unprecedented welcome. The star of Indira soared. Her objective in the East realized, she instructed, at a moment when India held every advantage, a unilateral cease-fire on the western front. Rajaji lauded ‘the cease-fire boldly ordered by Smt. Indira Gandhi’ and wrote:
Our Generals and the army, navy and the air force have scored a brilliant triumph . . . Let us be humble in this hour of victory . . . Let us pray that the grace of God may continue to bless the Prime Minister of India (Swarajya, 1.1.72).
The 1971 electoral setback led to depletion in Swatantra’s ranks and the resignation of Masani from the presidentship. Valuing Masani’s keen mind and debating and organizing skills, Rajaji tried hard to retain him in the chair:
I beg of you to give up your plan to spend your time and energy in cultivating contacts in Europe and writing memoirs . . . There is no one but you to save the party from extinction . . . Give your energy and devotion for one more year and then leave things to God (19.5.71).
However, Masani felt that after the debacle he had no choice except to hand over. Dandeker took over for a while, followed by H.
M. Patel; in June 1972, at a General Council meeting that Rajaji attended, Piloo Mody was elected President.
Calling on the old man in Madras, Dandeker suggested a change in the party’s name as a means of overcoming the rich- man’s-party smear. But the smear would have shifted to any new name; though tempted by it, Rajaji rejected the proposal, which was indicative of the party’s sagging morale.
The hardest blow was a change in Ranga’s stand. Soon after Indira’s Bangladesh triumph, Ranga, one of C.R.’s oldest friends and president of the party for ten years, advocated acceptance by Swatantra of her leadership. Some months later he actually joined the Indira Congress! This was the way to influence Indira, he claimed.
Privately and in Swarajya, C.R. contested the reasoning, but he was deeply hurt. Dejectedly, he wrote: ‘For a time let religion be our only politics . . . We leave a town when it is infected by plague. So must we vacate politics now’ (Swarajya, 22.1.72).
But the notion was foreign to his nature. Within days he was commenting on Bhutto, Mujib and Indira, and stoutly proclaiming the Swatantra philosophy. When Ranga formally crossed over, C.R. wrote:
The people of India cannot continue to give him the respect which he has hitherto enjoyed at their hands. He cannot command the confidence of Smt. Indira Gandhi . . . His defection will not serve him personally [nor] in any way serve the national interest (Swarajya, 12.8.72).
A year earlier — six weeks after the poll humiliation — he had countered defeatist currents with a prophecy that would be fulfilled. The policies of Swatantra, he said, were bound to become the Government’s policies and programmes, if not now, some years hence (Swarajya, 1.5.71). Added C.R.:
I wish I were young and able to go round all parts of this great and dear land of ours to explain that the Swatantra’s is the only true and efficacious programme for driving out squalor and disease.
Rajaji Page 47
