Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  In this second meeting, Gandhi found the viceroy ‘more cautious’. He thought ‘the Viceroy was convinced of the justice of all our demands, but he talked of administrative difficulties’. One exchange recounted by Gandhi was particularly revealing. The viceroy anxiously asked: ‘Now tell me whether I did not do well in arresting you in your Ashram?’ Gandhi answered that the night before the march began he expected to be arrested on the morrow, but as an experienced jailbird he ‘peacefully went to sleep’. Thereupon the viceroy said: ‘You planned a fine strategy round the issue of salt.’

  In their final interview, Irwin asked Gandhi to stay on in Delhi for some time, while he conferred with members of his executive council, spoke with provincial governors, and reported back to London on their discussions. He also asked Gandhi to consult with the CWC.12

  In the first week of March, various drafts of an agreement between Gandhi and Irwin passed between the Government of India and the CWC. On 5 March, the Gazette of India published the terms of what became known as the ‘Gandhi–Irwin Pact’. This stated, to begin with, that civil disobedience had been suspended, with the Congress to participate in the next Round Table Conference to discuss India’s constitutional future.

  The settlement made no promise about ‘Dominion Status’, still less ‘Purna Swaraj’. This represented a climbdown from the stated position of the Congress. On the other hand, the government would allow picketing of liquor stalls and shops selling foreign goods, on the condition that it was ‘unaggressive’ and did not involve ‘coercion, intimidation, restraint, hostile demonstration, [or] obstruction to the public’. Convicted satyagrahis would be released, and pending prosecutions withdrawn. Finally, while the government could not ‘in the present financial conditions of the country, make substantial modifications in the Salt Act’, it would permit villagers to collect salt for domestic consumption.

  In a statement released the day the settlement was made public, Gandhi called it one which had left both parties victorious. He thanked the viceroy for his ‘inexhaustible patience and equally inexhaustible industry and unfailing courtesy’. He then reiterated the Congress’s and India’s commitment to swaraj, deploring the fact that ‘throughout the settlement one misses that enchanting word. The clause which carefully hides that word is capable, and intentionally capable, of a double meaning.’

  Gandhi’s statement ended with three appeals, to three sets of people. He asked the police and civil service to act as servants, not masters, of the citizens they were supposed to serve but often tended to lord over. He appealed to those who sought India’s liberty through armed struggle to desist from violence, ‘if not yet out of conviction, then out of expedience’. And he appealed ‘to the people of the great American Republic and the other nations of the earth. I know that this struggle based as it is on truth and non-violence from which, alas, we the votaries have on occasion undoubtedly strayed, has fired their imagination and excited their curiosity. From curiosity they, and specially America, has progressed to tangible help in the way of sympathy.’

  Gandhi hoped that in the days to come, the Congress would retain this sympathy. If ‘India reaches her destiny through truth and non-violence’, he remarked, ‘she will have made no small contribution to the world peace for which all the nations of the earth are thirsting and she would also have, in that case, made some slight return for the help that those nations have been freely giving to her’.13

  III

  Following his settlement with Irwin, Gandhi received a spate of congratulatory messages from across India. A Hindu priest in Thiruttani said he was praying ‘for your long life as you are Kaliyug Rama’. S.A. Brelvi, editor of the Bombay Chronicle, told Gandhi that this was ‘your greatest triumph’. Long-time colleagues like A.V. Thakkar and Asaf Ali also sent congratulatory messages. And then there was one from his closest English friend, sent from Cape Town, reading, simply, ‘Thank God. Charlie’.14

  There was praise unqualified, and there was advice on how to proceed further. A wire from Madras told Gandhi that the Depressed Classes ‘expects much from you for its amelioration requests you to advocate separate electorates special privileges at Round Table Conference’. It added: ‘Please stay in Depressed Classes Quarters when you visit Madras to know about them.’15

  Muslim scholars wrote to Gandhi urging that the rights of minorities be protected in any future constitution for a free India. A maulana in Delhi wanted assurances that (1) Muslim places of worship and religious practice would be absolutely free of government interference; (2) the Government would not interfere with Muslim Personal Law which should, as before, be based on the principles of the Sharia; (3) the government should appoint Muslim judges in civil courts, to preside over cases involving Muslims or where Islamic law had a bearing.16

  Some Muslims asked Gandhi not to encourage minority separatism. The rising Bombay lawyer M.C. Chagla urged him to ‘remain strong on the question of joint electorates’. The national interest was not being served by separate electorates; in fact, said Chagla, these were ‘harmful to Muslims themselves’.17

  Gandhi received many messages urging him to persuade the viceroy not to execute Bhagat Singh. He was asked by Hindus, Sikhs, and even the odd Muslim to help save the revolutionary’s life. Some letters from admirers of Bhagat Singh were humanitarian in nature; others, strongly ideological. A letter signed ‘A Revolutionary’ charged Gandhi with having betrayed the masses by his settlement with the viceroy. The radical set out his group’s differences with the Congress:

  Hollow high sounding Government privileges do not make us dance with ecstasy. We are common human beings. We are not Christs or Chaitanyas. And we know that murder only of oppressors can give our Motherland a bit of relief, which no amount of boycott threats or civil disobedience can do. Disobedience to law…can never unnerve our enemy…Hence indiscriminate murder of Europeans is the only panacea for the malady which is eating away the very vitality of our nation everyday.

  The most poignant mail, however, was this one:

  ‘Just received viceroy’s order relations mercy appeal rejected last interview bhagat singh twenty third’. It was signed: ‘Kishan Singh, Father of Bhagat Singh’.18

  IV

  Gandhi’s march, arrest and release had attracted wide attention in the United States. In the first months of 1931 he received dozens of letters conveying the admiration of Americans for his struggle. A man from Montana wrote saying ‘your leadership in a movement which frowns on bloodshed, is to me one of the finest projects in the annals of a race of people striving for liberty’. The Young Men’s Christian Association of Springfield invited Gandhi to speak in their town, assuring him of the presence of ‘the leaders of a score of the principal Universities of New England’. Chicago’s Fellowship of Faith hoped that Gandhi would come, if not now, at least in 1933, to take part with ‘other Spiritual Leaders of the world’ in a Parliament of Religions planned for that year.19

  A particularly moving letter came from a resident of Chicago named Arthur Sewell. The ‘Negroes of America’, it said, were ‘keenly and sympathetically’ following Gandhi’s movement against white racism. The blacks ‘sympathize and suffer’ with India and Indians, ‘for here, in America, they [the white racists] not only rob us of our possessions and hurdle us into the prisons unjustly, but they mob, lynch and burn us up with fire…’ But this oppression would not last forever; for, just as the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia rang out for American whites colonized by England, so ‘will the “Liberty Bell” toll sooner or later somewhere in notification of the independence of all the dark peoples of the world’. ‘May God Bless you,’ this African American said to Gandhi, ‘and enable you to carry on the great battle for righteous adjustment until you win a glorious victory for the common cause of the lowly; that is the prayer of fourteen millions of Negroes of America.’20

  Among the more curious letters Gandhi received, one came from a certain James B. Pond of
New York’s Pond Bureau, a self-professed ‘Managers of American Tours for World Celebrities’. Writing to Gandhi on 8 April, Pond offered as his testimonials the fact that he had previously organized one tour for Annie Besant and two tours for Rabindranath Tagore. Thus, he had ‘some understanding of Indian affairs and a tremendous sympathy [for] Indian aspirations’.

  ‘When you visit this country,’ said Pond to Gandhi, ‘you will receive a welcome such as no man has ever had and it is going to require the utmost knowledge, the utmost sympathy, and utmost tact on the part of a manager to meet the situation.’ He offered himself as one who was ‘sympathetic as well as skilled’, experienced in the business of hiring halls, distributing tickets and organizing a travel itinerary. Pond understood that the idea of a commercial lecture tour might be ‘repugnant’ to Gandhi. But, he pointed out, ‘in this country people do not value what they get free’. Pond said he was willing to travel to India to discuss with Gandhi the details of an American tour.21

  With his own letter, Pond attached one from S.N. Ghose, the president of the American branch of the Indian National Congress. ‘If and when you come’, said Ghose to Gandhi, his programme should be in the hands of ‘one who is a technical expert in the management of big tours’. He recommended James Pond, whom he described as ‘the most reliable, the most experienced and the most sympathetic lecture manager of the country’. Ghose said Pond was soon to leave for a vacation in the Mediterranean—could Gandhi cable as to whether he should carry on to India to meet him?22

  Pond’s letter was followed a week later by one from the New York pastor John Haynes Holmes, strongly advising Gandhi against coming to America. Holmes told Gandhi that if he did come, he should take two precautions: ‘First, you should place yourself absolutely in the hands of some people who can control your movements on the highest level of dignity and honor—the Quakers, for example. Secondly, there should be no preliminary trumpeting of your coming, no announcements and long preparations, but rather you should come suddenly, so to speak, and with the utmost quiet and reserve.’23

  On receiving this letter, Gandhi cabled Holmes that he had decided not to come to America before or after London.24 Gandhi wrote to S.N. Ghose, the eager diasporic promoter of the tour manager James B. Pond that ‘as for my rumoured visit, there is nothing in it and therefore we need not discuss it any further. I must not visit America till the experiment here has become a proved success.’25 In what was a rare departure from his usual practice, Gandhi chose not to reply to the pushy Pond himself.

  V

  The reactions to Gandhi in Britain were more ambivalent than in the United States. The viceroy’s settlement with Gandhi had enraged some British Conservatives. Leading the charge was Winston Churchill, seeking to revive what then seemed to be a rapidly fading political career.

  Back in October 1929, when Lord Irwin had suggested Dominion Status for India, Churchill called the idea ‘criminally mischievous’. He thought it necessary to marshal ‘the sober and resolute forces of the British Empire’ against the granting of self-government to India.26

  Over the next two years, Churchill delivered dozens of speeches where he worked up, in most unsober form, forces hostile to the Indian independence movement. Thus, speaking to an audience at the city of London in December 1930, Churchill claimed that if the British left the subcontinent, then ‘an army of white janissaries, officered if necessary from Germany, will be hired to secure the armed ascendancy of the Hindu’.

  In the last week of January 1931, Churchill made two major speeches demanding the Raj stand firm against the nationalists. First, in the House of Commons, he expressed his confidence that even if British politicians conceded ground, ‘I do not believe our people will consent to be edged, pushed, talked and cozened out of India’. Then, at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, he urged his fellow Tory, Viceroy Lord Irwin, to resist the pressures of the Labour government and see that British rule in India ‘shall not be interrupted or destroyed’.

  Irwin’s release of, and settlement with, Gandhi enraged Churchill, for whom it seemed to signal a prelude to a larger retreat of Britain from its imperial possessions. Speaking at the Albert Hall on 18 March, he claimed that ‘to abandon India to the rule of the Brahmins [who in his view dominated the Congress party] would be an act of cruel and wicked negligence’. If the British left, said Churchill, ‘India will fall back quite rapidly through the centuries into the barbarism and privations of the Middle Ages’.

  Churchill targeted Gandhi personally. ‘I am against these conversations and agreements between Lord Irwin and Mr. Gandhi,’ he thundered. ‘Gandhi stands for the expulsion of Britain from India. Gandhi stands for the permanent exclusion of British trade from India. Gandhi stands for the substitution of Brahmin domination for British rule in India. You will never be able to come to terms with Gandhi.’27

  Churchill’s most famous remarks about Gandhi, however, were made a month later, to the West Essex Conservative Association. Here, he spoke with disgust of how it was ‘alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple Lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace…to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor’. In words as telling (if less quoted) he described his revulsion at the prospect of ‘heart-to-heart discussions…between this malignant subversive fanatic and the Viceroy of India’.28

  Churchill and Gandhi had met once, in November 1906. The Englishman was then undersecretary of state for the colonies; the Indian, a spokesman for the rights of his countrymen in South Africa.29 Back then, Gandhi wore a suit and tie, as befitting a lawyer trained in London. It is not clear whether Churchill remembered their meeting, but he certainly understood the symbolism behind his adversary’s new mode of dress. A week before he met the Essex Tories, Churchill told London’s Constitutional Club that ‘Gandhi, with deep knowledge of the Indian peoples, by the dress he wore—or did not wear, by the way in which his food was brought to him at the Viceregal Palace, deliberately insulted, in a manner which he knew everyone in India would appreciate, the majesty of the King’s representative. These are not trifles in the East.’30

  The views of Churchill, the arch-reactionary in Britain, make for an intriguing comparison with the views of arch-revolutionaries in India. Here, the fledgling Communist Party termed the Gandhi–Irwin Pact ‘a stab in the back of the toiling masses’. A pamphlet issued by it spoke of the popular upsurge that the civil disobedience movement had sparked—the boycott of foreign goods, non-payment of taxes in the countryside, strikes in factories. And yet, ‘at the moment when British Rule in India had already begun to crack under the pressure of the masses, the National Congress definitely disarms the movement and surrenders it to the British exploiters’. By settling with the viceroy, claimed the communists, Gandhi had ‘betrayed to the British imperialists thousands of workers, peasants, and revolutionary youth’.

  The Churchillian and communist views of the Gandhi–Irwin Pact were a mirror image of one another. Churchill claimed Irwin had ‘surrendered’ to Gandhi; the communists insisted that Gandhi had ‘surrendered’ to Irwin.31

  VI

  After his talks with Irwin in early March, Gandhi returned to Gujarat. Two weeks later, he was back in Delhi. He met the viceroy, who told him that local governments were ‘playing the game very fairly’, and had released some 14,000 prisoners in a week. The viceroy then complained about the tone of Jawaharlal Nehru’s speeches, which had ‘no spirit of peace’ and treated the settlement merely as ‘an uneasy truce’.

  For his part, Gandhi once more raised the question of Bhagat Singh’s execution. Could not the sentence be commuted or postponed? The execution had been fixed for 24 March, the day the Karachi Congress would begin. If it was carried out as planned, said Gandhi, ‘there would be much popular excitement’. Irwin answered that he had ‘considered the case with most anxious care’, and conc
luded that he could neither commute nor postpone the sentence.

  On the night of the 23rd, Gandhi was scheduled to leave for Karachi to attend the annual meeting of the Congress. Before he boarded the train, he wrote to Irwin once more urging him to stay Bhagat Singh’s execution. ‘Popular opinion,’ he remarked, ‘rightly or wrongly demands commutation. When there is no principle at stake, it is often a duty to respect it.’ Gandhi had been assured by the ‘revolutionary party’ that if the lives of Singh and his colleagues were spared, it would stay its hand. Execution was ‘an irretrievable act’, Gandhi told the viceroy. Therefore, if he thought there was ‘the slightest chance of error of judgment’, he should ‘suspend for further review an act that is beyond recall’.32

  While Gandhi was on the train, Bhagat Singh and his comrades were hanged in Lahore. They went to the gallows shouting ‘Inquilab Zindabad’, Long Live Revolution. Earlier, Bhagat Singh had written to the Punjab governor asking that, since the court said they had waged war against the State, they should be treated as war prisoners, and consequently shot dead rather than hanged. They asked the governor to ‘kindly order the Military Department or send a detachment or shooting party to perform our executions’.33

  On 24 March, there was a complete hartal in Lahore, Amritsar, Sialkot, Lyallpur, Ferozepur and other towns in the Punjab to protest the executions. In Lahore’s Minto Park, some 40,000 men, women and children gathered to offer prayers for the souls of the martyred men. Many of the women were dressed in black saris. Shops and schools shut down in distant Bombay too. And in towns in the United Provinces and Bengal as well.34