Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  the Judge walked out to show his contempt.

  If they went to a restaurant,

  the waiter refused to serve them.

  If they wanted a taxi,

  the chauffeur refused to carry them.

  Everywhere the mark of the people’s

  DISPLEASURE

  pursued them

  Baffled, humiliated, their machinations frustrated,

  they beat an inglorious retreat to their

  own country.

  Youths of Bombay!

  Who brought About

  THIS WONDERFUL AWAKENING?

  None but the

  BRAVE EGYPTIAN YOUTHS

  Therefore

  Youths of Bombay

  BE UP AND DOING

  To Break the Simonites

  Another poster listed ‘Bombay’s Blacklegs’, the politicians who were cooperating with, rather than boycotting the Simon Commission. Among the ‘Blacklegs’ mentioned by name was ‘B.R. Ambedkar, Professor of Political Mendicancy’.28

  Ambedkar had once been professor of political economy at Sydenham College. By now, he had increasingly turned from scholarship to advocacy. He saw no future for himself in the Congress, where—like everyone else in that organization—he would have to subordinate himself to Gandhi. So he decided to work outside and even in opposition to it. During the Simon Commission’s second stint, Ambedkar testified before its members in Poona. He told them that the ‘untouchable’ castes to whom he belonged were a ‘distinct minority separate from the Hindu community’. He urged that they get reservation on the same basis as the Muslims. ‘We claim reserved seats if accompanied by adult suffrage,’ stated Ambedkar, ‘but in the absence of adult suffrage we want separate electorates.’29

  From Poona, the Simon Commission proceeded northwards, to the Punjab. In the provincial capital, Lahore, they were faced with one of the largest demonstrations yet. Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs marched together through the old city, shouting slogans against the visiting Englishmen. There were clashes with the police, in which the veteran Congressman Lala Lajpat Rai was injured on the chest and shoulder. Gandhi, while deploring the assault, said it added to Lajpat Rai’s already considerable prestige as ‘one of the most beloved and esteemed leaders in all [of] India’.30

  Three weeks after this incident, Lajpat Rai died. He was sixty-three, and ailing. But it was widely believed that the injuries inflicted by the police had hastened his passing. Gandhi wrote in Young India that the best tribute to his memory would be to ‘work for swaraj and all it implies with redoubled zeal’.31 The viceroy, for his part, worried that Lajpat Rai’s death had ‘done great harm in stirring up feeling’. When the Congress was held in late December, Irwin wrote to a colleague: ‘There will be a good deal of inflammable material about in Calcutta at that time—what with Congress, Independence Leagues, Youth Leagues and another four or five whose names I cannot remember.’32

  VII

  In 1928, as in previous years, it fell to Gandhi to play a critical role in choosing the Congress president. Back in July, Motilal Nehru had written suggesting that Vallabhbhai Patel or alternatively Jawaharlal Nehru be appointed. Gandhi had a long chat with Vallabhbhai, who said that because of his immersion in the Bardoli struggle he could not serve as Congress president that year. Gandhi, however, agreed with Motilal that it was time their generation gave way to younger men. So, he assured the thrusting father, he was going to recommend Jawaharlal’s name for adoption by the provincial committees.33

  Two days after Gandhi wrote to Motilal, he received a telegram from Subhas Chandra Bose, which read: ‘Bengal unanimous in favour of Motilalji’s Presidentship. Kindly recommend him otherwise pray remain neutral.’ Gandhi replied that Motilal himself seemed ‘disinclined to accept the honour’; even so, he assured Bose that ‘I shall say nothing about the election in the pages of Young India or elsewhere unless Bengal friends would let me’.34

  The Congress was being held that year in Calcutta. The Bengal Congress was naturally keen that the president be someone it approved of. Motilal Nehru was a close associate of the great, and lately deceased, Bengal Congressman C.R. Das. These two barristers had once kept the Swaraj Party going. More recently, Motilal had overseen the drafting of a putative constitution for free India.

  Gandhi decided to honour Bengal’s wishes. In an essay in Young India, he remarked that while Vallabhbhai Patel’s name was ‘naturally on everybody’s lips’, nominating him was ‘out of the question just now’ because of his commitments in Bardoli. So the choice was between the two Nehrus, father and son. Who should it be, asked Gandhi: ‘Pandit Motilalji the weather-beaten warrior or Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the disciplined young soldier who by his sterling worth has captured the imagination of the youth of the country?’

  Gandhi told the readers of Young India that ‘Bengal wants Motilalji to guide the Congress barque through the perilous seas that threaten to overwhelm us during the coming year’. So the senior Nehru it would be, said Gandhi, advising ‘the impatient youth of the country [to] wait a while. They will be all the stronger for the waiting.’35

  Reading the article in Young India, Subhas Bose wired Gandhi saying ‘we are grateful to you for your kind help in connection with the decision regarding the Congress Presidentship’.36

  VIII

  Far more serious than factions within the Congress were the still unresolved tensions between Hindus and Muslims. As Gandhi had feared, sections of the Muslim leadership were not happy with the Nehru Report and its desire to do away with communal electorates. When he called for a renewed emphasis on religious toleration, Gandhi received a charming letter from an Indian in England which must be reproduced in full:

  Dear Mr. Gandhi,

  I am very glad to learn from the press here that you have at last decided to take the platform again to bring about the union between Hindus and Mohammadans. Since I am also deeply interested in the problem I feel I must return to India and help you in the work. On my return I shall settle down in my old town of Delhi.

  I regret however that I am unable to collect money enough to pay my passage back. I am writing this to ask you if you could assist me in the matter.

  Kindly let me hear from you since if you cannot help, I shall seriously consider walking back. It will take some time but I feel I must do my duty by my country even at some inconvenience.

  Yours fraternally

  Saiyid Haider Raza37

  Saiyid Haider Raza was an Indian patriot with an interesting past. Back in 1907–08, when Gandhi was still in South Africa, Raza had been a political militant in Delhi, urging Hindus and Muslims to unite and oppose colonial tax policies. As the police closed in on him he escaped to England.38 The records of the Middle Temple list Raza as having been admitted to their rolls in 1910.39 His letter to Gandhi, written eighteen years later, was posted from a seaside village in Sussex, so we may presume him to have now been a briefless barrister, nostalgic for his homeland and keen to contribute to its liberation. Gandhi did not, it seems, reply to Raza, perhaps because he was already engaged in conversations with a Muslim based in India and extremely active in its politics.

  This was Shaukat Ali. Since the Kohat riots of 1924, Gandhi and his erstwhile ‘blood brother’ had been drifting apart. The Nehru Report now made the split wide open. Writing to Gandhi, Shaukat Ali claimed that Motilal Nehru was following the Hindu Mahasabha’s lead in asking Muslims to give up reservation of seats, thus making ‘the position of Moslem Congressmen…most unpleasant’. He then attacked Motilal personally, writing: ‘In my opinion he ruined our non-co-operation movement, he has ruined the Swaraj Party and now he will bring disruption in the ranks of the Congress.’ Shaukat Ali complained that ‘we Moslems have given a fight all along the line to the reactionary element in our camp. I think we had a right to expect our Hindu co-workers to tackle their mischief-making mi
litant groups.’40

  Note the use of the pronoun ‘our’, denoting the joint ownership by the Ali Brothers and Gandhi of the now long dead non-cooperation movement. Gandhi disregarded the appeal to nostalgia, writing back that in his view Motilal Nehru was ‘incapable of wilfully coming to a perverse decision….He may be mistaken but he is sincere and frank.’41

  In November, reports reached Gandhi of an inflammatory speech made by Shaukat Ali at Kanpur, where he fulminated against Hindus and challenged them to a fight to the finish. Gandhi wrote a letter of complaint, but his estranged comrade was unrepentant. His speech at Kanpur had two purposes, said Shaukat Ali: ‘One to warn the Hindus and stop them from creating an atmosphere for civil war or family quarrel or any thing of that kind whatsoever we may call it. The second object was to drag out even the reactionary Mussalmans from playing into the hands of the English, and bring them more in line with ourselves. Frankly I wanted and do want Mussalmans not to depend for their future either on the English or on the Hindus. I want them to stand on their own legs and think and act for themselves, doing what was best in the interest of Islam and our Motherland.’42

  In this twin declaration of loyalty, Islam preceded the motherland. Shaukat Ali had a deep love of country, but a prior and perhaps deeper love of faith. It is also notable that his letters to Gandhi were written on the letterhead of ‘The Central Khilafat Committee (India), Khilafat House, Bombay’. Although it was now several years since the Caliphate had been abolished by Kemal Atatürk, in the minds of this Indian Muslim that idea/fantasy was still very alive.

  Replying more in sorrow than anger, Gandhi told Shaukat Ali that this was ‘not the Maulana with whom I have been so long familiar and with whom I have passed so many happy days as with a blood-brother and bosom friend’. Gandhi told the older of the Ali Brothers that he would go ‘all the way with you in accusing the Hindu of his many misdeeds; but I am unable to hold with you that he has ever been the aggressor, ever the tyrant and his Mussalman brother always the injured victim’. In his Kanpur speech, Shaukat Ali had ‘been terribly dogmatic and emphatic. The assumption of infallibility is unworthy of you.’ Gandhi now played the nostalgia card in turn, urging him to ‘recall those stirring days of our joint peregrinations from shop to shop where Hindus vied with one another to pay even to the Khilafat Fund as to the Tilak Swaraj Fund’.43

  Shaukat Ali and Gandhi had once worked shoulder to shoulder in the non-cooperation and Khilafat movements. These quarrels between them presaged deeper and more pervasive problems between India’s two major religious communities.

  IX

  Shortly before the Calcutta Congress, news reached Gandhi of the murder in Lahore of a British policeman named Saunders, apparently in revenge for the police assault on Lajpat Rai which had led to his death. Gandhi, while accepting that the provocation was ‘great’, hoped to ‘convince the hot[-headed] youth of the utter futility of such revenge’. For, as he wrote in Young India, the ‘freedom of a nation cannot be won by solitary acts of heroism’; rather, it ‘requires the patient, intelligent, and constructive effort of tens of thousands of men and women, young and old’.44

  At the Calcutta Congress, a resolution was passed urging the British government to accept the recommendations of the Nehru Report. A deadline of one year was specified; if, by 31 December 1929, the provisions of the Nehru Report were not enacted into law, the Congress would begin a countrywide campaign of non-violent non-cooperation. Addressing the delegates, Gandhi praised the Nehru Report ‘as a great contribution towards the solution of India’s political and communal problems’. Younger Congressmen such as Subhas Bose wanted to repudiate Dominion Status, which would place India on par with Canada and Australia, and push for complete independence, which would sunder the British connection completely. Gandhi, however, felt that it would be ‘a grievous blunder to pit Independence against Dominion Status or compare the two and suggest that Dominion Status carries humiliation with it and that Independence is something that is triumphant’.45

  As Gandhi once more engaged actively with politics, he came to encounter fresh problems: the disenchantment of many leading Muslims with the Congress, and of a few Depressed Classes leaders too. But he remained what he had been since 1919, the pre-eminent public figure in India. A Tamil chapbook issued in 1928, while speaking of the ubiquity of Gandhi’s name and its veneration, noted that ‘all kinds of stuff are being named for him….Gandhi hotel, Gandhi umbrella, Gandhi soda, Gandhi beedi, Gandhi cigarette, Gandhi balm, Gandhi vest, Gandhi saree, Gandhi matches…Is Mahatma Gandhi manufacturing these? Does he smoke beedis and cigarettes?…Alas, some are even selling toddy wearing a Gandhi cap!’46

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Father, Son, Holy Spirit

  I

  In April 1929, Gandhi commenced a tour of the Andhra country, the Telugu-speaking districts of the Madras Presidency, which had been active in the non-cooperation movement and in the promotion of khadi. He was in the town of Vijayawada when news reached him of a bomb thrown in the Central Assembly in Delhi on 8 April. As the assembly’s president, Vithalbhai Patel (brother of Vallabhbhai), rose to speak, there was (an eyewitness wrote) ‘suddenly a very loud “bang”, the whole assembly filled with dust and falling plaster from the dome and I saw the bomb exploding on the Government benches below our ladies gallery’. Then a second bomb was thrown, followed by two revolver shots.1

  After the bombs exploded, two young men rose from the visitors’ gallery claiming responsibility. ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ (Long Live Revolution), they shouted, as they rained pamphlets of their ‘Hindustan Socialist Republican Army’ down on the members below. The police quickly moved towards the protesters, who offered no resistance, allowing themselves to be arrested and taken away from the building.2

  No one was killed or seriously injured in the incident. But, from Gandhi’s point of view, the use or threat of violence was itself abhorrent. Speaking at a public meeting in Vijayawada, he said that ‘Swaraj has receded a step by this crime. The two youths involved in the bomb outrage have set back the progress of our national movement. The Congress members must cleanse themselves from the taint of violence.’

  The bombs were thrown on 8 April; two days earlier, a young Muslim man had knifed and killed Rajpal, the publisher of the inflammatory pamphlet ‘Rangila Rasul’. Writing in Young India, Gandhi remarked that both actions rested on a ‘mad philosophy of mad revenge and impotent rage. The bomb-throwers have discredited the cause of freedom in whose name they threw the bombs; the user of the knife has discredited Islam in whose name the perpetrator did the mad deed.’ He added that ‘Rajpal’s assassination has given him a martyrdom and a name which he did not deserve’.

  Gandhi thought that both ‘the bomb and the knife derive their lease of life from the world’s belief in violence as a remedy for securing supposed justice’. ‘We can,’ he insisted, ‘to a great extent checkmate the bomb-thrower, if we would have faith in our own programme [of non-violence] and work for it.’3

  For their part, the two bomb throwers were unrepentant. In their statement in court, Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt said they had sought by their actions to ‘draw the world’s attention to the condition in India’. The bombs were ‘necessary to wake England from her dreams’, to ‘make the deaf hear and to give the heedless a timely warning’. The assembly itself was ‘a symbol of India’s humiliation and helplessness’; for, the ‘labouring millions had nothing to expect’ from an institution ‘that stood as a menacing monument to the strangling powers of the exploiters and the serfdom of helpless labourers’.

  Singh and Dutt attacked Gandhi by implication, although not by name. Their actions, they hoped, would mark ‘the end of the era of utopian non-violence of whose futility the rising generation has been convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt’. They offered as alternative role models ‘Guru Govind Singh and Shivaji, Kemal Pasha and Riza Khan, Washington and Garibaldi, Lafayette and Lenin’, all le
aders who had used arms against their adversaries. Their statement ended with an affirmation of faith in radical socialism. ‘Revolution is the inalienable right of mankind,’ they proclaimed. ‘Freedom is the imprescriptible birthright of all.’4

  II

  Gandhi spent five weeks in the Andhra country, speaking at countless meetings, garnering contributions small and large for his khadi work. In his day by day chronology of Gandhi’s life, Chandubhai Dalal names more than two hundred villages, towns and cities visited by Gandhi between 8 April, when he arrived in Andhra, and 21 May, when he finally left, taking a train from the town of Adoni to Bombay.

  At these meetings, Gandhi spoke on the cultivation of Hindu–Muslim unity, the abolition of untouchability, the boycott of foreign cloth and the promotion of khadi. He ended his speeches by asking for contributions for khadi work. In successive issues of Young India, he itemized the takings, hamlet by hamlet. By 12 April he had collected Rs 21,570; by the 24th this had risen to Rs 111,653; by 16 May, to Rs 243,282.

  Gandhi also kept meticulous accounts of the money spent by and on him in this tour. He was driven from village to village in locally hired vehicles; these included a Ford, a Chevrolet and a Dodge. Cars and fuel accounted for some 90 per cent of his expenses; with postage and printing of handbills taking care of the rest. (He usually stayed at the home of local Congress workers.) By his estimate, his personal expenses came to a mere 5 per cent of the total funds collected on the tour.5

  By late April, the temperature in the shade was in excess of 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The weather was hot; the countryside poorly connected. And Gandhi himself was now pushing sixty. Yet, he took to the task with zest and vigour. Normally, when Gandhi was on the road, he wrote regular letters back to his disciples in the ashram; some addressed collectively, some to particular individuals. On this Andhra tour, these letters became less frequent. One who felt their lack was his devoted and dependent English ‘daughter’, Mira. When she complained of being neglected, Gandhi wrote back that it was not so much lack of love as lack of technology that explained his silence. ‘This letter,’ he remarked, ‘will be sent by a cyclist who will have to ford two streams and cover a distance of twelve miles to reach a branch line station. Whether it will catch the correct mail train I do not know. Well you cannot expect Western conveniences in typically Eastern tracts.’ Then he added: ‘I see nothing wrong in people living miles apart not corresponding with one another daily through letters or wires. It used to be enough that they corresponded through their hearts.’6