Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  In his last speech in Andhra, Gandhi said that of all his many tours after returning to India in 1915, this had been ‘the longest and the most intensive…in any single province’. It had also been the most successful in terms of public subscriptions, excepting that frenzied year, 1921, when he collected as much money in a single day in Bombay as he now had in six weeks in Andhra.7

  III

  By 1929, the two Nehrus had emerged as perhaps the closest political allies of the Mahatma. Gandhi respected Motilal’s legal acumen, and was charmed by Jawaharlal’s spontaneity and zest. He looked to the elder Nehru for advice on constitutional matters, and to his son to build bridges with the younger generation, and with the world. They, in turn, treated Gandhi as a preceptor who provided them guidance on moral and even familial matters. When Motilal’s daughter Sarup fell in love with a Muslim journalist, it was Gandhi who urged her not to marry him, on the same grounds as he had once urged his son Manilal not to marry a Muslim girl. Then, when Sarup agreed to marry a Hindu scholar from Maharashtra, it was Gandhi’s wife Kasturba who wove the sari that she wore on her wedding day.8

  Motilal Nehru was now the Congress president, and Jawaharlal, the Congress secretary. Guided by Gandhi, both had crucial roles to play in a rapidly developing political situation. The Congress had given a deadline of twelve months to the government to accept the Nehru Report. The annual meeting of the Congress was to be held in December in the historic city of Lahore, on the banks of the river Ravi. Once more, among the names put forward for the presidency was that of Jawaharlal Nehru. The younger Nehru was ambivalent about succeeding his father as president. He had been the working secretary of the party for the past three years. He now wanted a break from office work, to renew his engagement with the masses. As he wrote to Gandhi, he ‘wanted to educate myself and try to get at the back of the mind of the villager’.

  Jawaharlal told Gandhi that if (as was expected) the government did not implement his father’s report, and a new round of civil disobedience was planned, the Mahatma should serve as the formal head of the party. ‘Of course you could lead, as you have done in the past, without being Congress President,’ wrote Jawaharlal. ‘But it would help matters certainly if you are also the official head of the organization. I feel that it would be a great gain if you would preside. That would strike the imagination of the country and of other countries.’9

  Gandhi had been Congress president once, in 1924. He had no wish to take up the post again, in part because he knew that he could shape and direct the party in any case. Meanwhile, he was being pushed by the younger generation of Congressmen to take a more militant stance vis-à-vis the government. Appointing Jawaharlal as president would send a positive signal to the youth; it would also be just reward for his work in making the case for Indian freedom more widely known abroad.

  In recent years, Jawaharlal Nehru had travelled extensively in the West. In February 1927, he attended a ‘Congress of Oppressed Nationalities’ in Brussels, where he interacted with anti-colonial activists from Asia, Africa and Latin America. In November of that year, he visited Soviet Russia, impressed by the absence of the extreme inequalities that he had witnessed in Western Europe. Where other Congress leaders ‘never rose above their limited national horizon’, Jawaharlal Nehru was now advocating that the party adopt ‘the most intense internationalism’.10

  In nominating the younger Nehru as the next president of the Congress, Gandhi was surely mindful of the increasing attractions of left-wing ideas among younger Indians. The glow of the Russian Revolution had not yet dimmed. There was now an active Communist Party in India that was gaining ground among the textile workers of Bombay in particular. Even further to the Left was the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army (HSRA), recently responsible for the murder of the police officer Saunders in Lahore and the spectacular bomb attack on the Central Assembly in Delhi.

  For some years now, Gandhi was being pressed by younger Congressmen to abandon Dominion Status in favour of Purna Swaraj, or complete independence. If older Congressmen did not keep pace with the young radicals in their own party, the danger was that they might move over to the communists or even the HSRA. Hence the decision to make Jawaharlal Nehru the Congress president, in the hope that (as Gandhi put it) ‘responsibility will mellow and sober the youth, and prepare them for the burden they must discharge’.

  Jawaharlal was still hesitant to accept the responsibility. Ultimately, helped no doubt by a word and a nudge from Motilal, Gandhi ‘wrung consent’ out of him.11 The presidentship of the Congress would pass from father to son for the first time in its history.

  IV

  In 1929, as in previous years, Gandhi was exercised about the place of India’s largest minority, the Muslims. A colleague from the Khilafat days wrote to him complaining that ‘nobody [in the Congress] has yet cared to give them [the Muslims] a patient hearing, but everyone dubs them as rank communalists’.12 The Muslim League was split into several sections; one section had collaborated with the Simon Commission, a second section had backed the Nehru Report, a third—led by Jinnah—had not yet revealed its hand.13

  The most prominent Muslim on the side of Gandhi was Dr M.A. Ansari. In July 1929, a meeting of pro-Congress Muslims was convened in Allahabad by Dr Ansari. In his speech to the gathering, Ansari criticized those Muslims ‘bent upon opposing the Congress’ and who had ‘taken up the profession of flattering Government’. (The Muslim League was not mentioned by name, but clearly it was the target of this criticism.) The meeting resolved to form an ‘All-India Nationalist Muslim Party’ to inspire in Muslims ‘a greater confidence in Indian national ideals’, thus to ‘take their proper share in the national struggle’.14

  Motilal Nehru was convinced that the support of Ansari and company was all that mattered. He wrote to Gandhi that ‘the only way to reach a compromise with the truly nationalist Musalmans is to ignore Mr. Jinnah and the Ali Brothers completely. All three of them are totally discredited and have no following worth the name.’15

  Gandhi received contrary advice from Sarojini Naidu. Mrs Naidu was a close friend of Jinnah’s, whom she had once hailed as the ‘ambassador of Hindu–Muslim unity’. She now arranged for Gandhi to meet him in the second week of August. ‘I go to Bombay on the 11th to meet Jinnah,’ wrote Gandhi to Jawaharlal Nehru, adding: ‘I admire Sarojini Devi’s optimism. But I am going to Bombay without much hope.’16

  When Gandhi reached Bombay, he found that the Ali Brothers were also in town. He met all three leaders, but the talks were inconclusive. In a brief public statement, Gandhi did not divulge what was (or was not) spoken about, while asking those ‘who believe in prayer [to] pray with me that there may soon be peace between Hindus, Mussalmans and all the other communities’.17

  V

  In the autumn of 1929, Gandhi undertook a long tour of the United Provinces. Before he left Ahmedabad, he issued detailed instructions for the local organizers of his tour. He asked them to ‘beware of multiplying functions or expecting long speeches from me’. He had ‘a horror of touching-the-feet-devotion….It interferes with free and easy movement, and I have been hurt by the nails of the devotees cutting into the flesh.’ They were not to construct costly platforms for his speeches, but to take his car to the centre of the meeting and use it as a platform instead. ‘This proved a most effective and expeditious method in Andhra.’18

  Gandhi’s United Provinces tour started in Agra on 11 September. He spent nearly two and a half months in the province, interspersed with brief visits to Delhi and the hill station of Mussoorie. He spent several days apiece in the province’s major cities—Agra, Lucknow, Kanpur, Allahabad, Banaras—while also calling at smaller towns such as Ghazipur, Azamgarh, Gorakhpur, Moradabad and Aligarh. He spoke at many colleges, urging students to wear khadi and join the Congress to participate in the struggle for freedom.

  With Gandhi on this trip was J.B. Kripalani, his old comrade from Champaran. Krip
alani had since set up a series of khadi centres in the United Provinces, and was extremely familiar with the terrain and its people. As Gandhi gratefully noted, Kripalani had erected a ‘wall of protection’ between the visitor and his legion of fans; he was ‘sometimes really angry and more often feigned anger when leaders of places visited wanted more time and more appointments or when people insisted on seeing me or crowding into my car’.19

  While he was in the United Provinces, Gandhi received a letter from Raihana Tyabji, the poet and singer who lived in the Sabarmati Ashram. The Tyabjis were an extremely progressive family, the first Muslim women in western India to emerge out of purdah, to travel overseas, to go to school and college, and to write at length of their experiences.20 Raihana now asked Gandhi to write a ‘strong article’ on the question of women’s rights.

  So he did. ‘I am uncompromising in the matter of women’s rights,’ he began. ‘In my opinion she should labour under no legal disability not suffered by man. I should treat the daughters and sons on a footing of perfect equality. As women begin to realize their strength, as they must in proportion to the education they receive, they will naturally resent the glaring inequalities to which they are subjected.’

  Gandhi argued, however, that to remove or amend laws that discriminated against women would be ‘a mere palliative. The root of the evil lies much deeper than most people realize. It lies in man’s greed of power and fame and deeper still in mutual lust. Man has always desired power. Ownership of property gives this power.’ While men were greedy and lustful, argued Gandhi, ‘woman is the embodiment of sacrifice and suffering, and her advent to public life should therefore result in purifying it, in restraining unbridled ambition and accumulation of property’.

  Gandhi ended by asking ‘the enlightened daughters of Bharat Mata’ to ‘not ape the manner of the West which may be suited to its environment. They must apply methods suited to the Indian genius and Indian environment. Theirs must be the strong, controlling, purifying, steadying hand, conserving what is best in our culture and unhesitatingly rejecting what is base and degrading.’21

  In the United Provinces, women were even more rigorously suppressed than in other parts of India. Purdah was de rigueur among Hindus as well as Muslims. After spending several weeks in the plains, Gandhi visited the hill station of Mussoorie, where women had gone over, it seemed to him, to the other extreme. In a letter to the women of the ashram, he described Mussoorie as ‘one of those places where pleasure-seeking abounds. There is no purdah here. Wealthy ladies spend their time in dancing at parties, paint their lips, deck themselves in all sorts of ways and blindly imitate the West in a good many ways.’

  The working women in the plains were severely exploited; the upper-class women in these hill resorts, excessively emancipated. ‘Ours is a middle path,’ Gandhi told the ashramites. ‘We do not wish to keep alive superstition and purdah nor to encourage shamelessness and self-indulgence. The middle path is straight but difficult to follow. It is our aim to seek it and follow it steadily.’22

  VI

  While Gandhi was travelling in the United Provinces, the viceroy, Lord Irwin, was in London, consulting with His Majesty’s Government. After his return, he issued a statement on 31 October, saying that a round table conference would be convened in London sometime in 1930 to discuss the ‘Indian constitutional progress’. The government would invite ‘representatives of different parties and interests in British India’, as well as representatives of the princely states, to this conference. Lord Irwin hoped that the meeting would result in the submission of ‘proposals to Parliament which may command a wide measure of general assent’.23

  In early November, Sarojini Naidu met Jinnah who offered to arrange a meeting of Congress leaders with the viceroy, to prepare the way for their participation in the conference. Sarojini was herself very keen that this came about. ‘I know that you have always the patience,’ she wrote to Gandhi, ‘to attempt till the last moment all proper and reasonable methods of preliminary discussion, argument, consultation & persuasion before you finally…close the door.’24

  Also anxious that Gandhi attend the London conference was his old friend Henry Polak, who was now based in England. The Congress still hadn’t got the guarantees from the British government with regard to Dominion Status (which the Nehru Report had asked for). However, Polak reminded Gandhi that, back in 1914, when fighting for the rights of Indians in South Africa, he had met General Smuts without any written assurances. Polak thus implored his friend ‘not to take up a position of intransigence which may result in the losing of a great opportunity for mutual understanding’.25

  There was now a Labour government in power in the United Kingdom. Polak thought this boded well for India and Indian aspirations. ‘Whatever the Conservatives may, or may not, have meant,’ he told Gandhi, ‘there is no doubt that there is a complete and fundamental change in the attitude towards the Indian problem on the part of the Labour Party. They most earnestly want a settlement in India and a very friendly one.’26

  Gandhi was prepared to keep the conversations going. On 30 November, Vithalbhai Patel (president of the Central Legislative Assembly, and very much a Moderate) and Jinnah met with Gandhi at the Sabarmati Ashram. ‘The subject of their talk is not known,’ ran a news report, ‘but it is believed that it was about the Round Table Conference.’27

  On 21 December, Gandhi took a train to Delhi, to attend the meeting with the viceroy fixed up as promised by Jinnah. Irwin was on tour, and was scheduled to return to Delhi on 23rd morning. At Nizamuddin, a few miles before the Delhi station, there was an attack on the viceroy’s special train. Two bombs had been planted on the tracks, connected by a long wire to a battery placed several hundred yards away. With the press of a button, the bombs had been activated. Two bogies were detached from the train as a result of the explosion. The viceroy fortunately escaped unhurt. It was exactly seventeen years to the day since the attack on Lord Hardinge.28

  Ironically, it was on the same day that the Irwins became the first occupants of the grand new Viceregal Palace, sited on Raisina Hill in central New Delhi. So, hours after the failed attempt on his life, Irwin convened the first formal meeting in his new home. On the afternoon of the 23rd, the viceroy conferred with Gandhi, Jinnah, Motilal Nehru and the Moderate politicians Tej Bahadur Sapru and Vithalbhai Patel. Gandhi began by expressing his ‘horror’ at the attempt on the viceroy’s train that morning. The talk then turned to the proposed Round Table Conference. Sapru saw ‘great value’ in the conference, which, even if it did not guarantee Dominion Status for India, would help in framing a policy towards that end. The viceroy added that the conference ‘would have the fullest opportunity to discuss any proposals put before it’. Canada, he pointed out, did not achieve Dominion Status ‘in a [single] jump’, but through several stages.

  Gandhi, however, was firm that unless the granting of Dominion Status was the ‘immediate objective’ of the conference, he would not himself take part in it. However, he had no objection if others did. Motilal Nehru agreed with Gandhi; he thought ‘the British people exaggerated the difficulties in the way of Dominion Status for India’.

  The conversation now got somewhat testy. The viceroy asked whether Gandhi and his colleagues believed ‘in British purpose’. Gandhi replied that he ‘doubted the sincerity of British purpose broadly, though he recognised that of individuals’. He added that while India was ‘weak and disunited’, he did not see the point of travelling to London unless on the promise of Dominion Status. He blamed British rule for this lack of unity. The viceroy sarcastically asked Gandhi, as ‘a matter of historical interest’, whether India had ever been united as it now was under British rule. To this, Sapru added the thought that ‘if India had really been united then the British would not be here at all’. Gandhi answered that in the time the British had been here, they had done little to bring about unity. Jinnah now asked Gandhi if he thought it ‘logical’ for Ind
ians to ask for Dominion Status when they were ‘thus divided’.

  The meeting ended with the viceroy saying he had ‘run no small political risk’ in calling this meeting. He contrasted the ‘stiffness of attitude’ shown by Gandhi and Motilal with the ‘generous’ approach of His Majesty’s Government.29

  VII

  On the night of 23 December, Gandhi left Delhi for Lahore, where an impressive new township had been erected for the Congress. Travelling with Gandhi were his wife Kasturba, his son Devadas, and his English disciple Mira. To avoid a large crowd, they got off at Lahore Cantonment instead of the city’s main station. Even so, Gandhi was recognized, with a group of people, including the station coolies, rushing to touch his feet. Seeing Gandhi emerge on to the platform, the crowd shouted, among other things, ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai’, ‘Vande Mataram’, and ‘Bhagat Singh Zindabad’, thus coupling the non-violent Mahatma, their national icon, with the young proponent of armed struggle who was a native of Lahore.30