Gandhi
Page 49
Having decided to go alone to London, Gandhi was having some regrets. He would have done well to take Jawaharlal Nehru, who had studied in England and had many friends in London, or Rajagopalachari, who had a superb legal mind, and could have aided in the negotiations with the other parties.
In not taking anyone with him, Gandhi might have been influenced by his talks with Irwin, where the two men merely had their secretaries by their side. But this was an altogether different occasion. The ability to persuade and charm an opponent face-to-face was of little use in a ‘round table’ conference with many parties present, representing many different interest groups.
In the event, by going alone, Gandhi found there was too much for him to do: participate in the sessions of the conference; discuss contentious issues with other delegates in private; make an impression on the British public; convey his views through the British press. Even if the younger Nehru and Rajagopalachari had to remain in India, there were other Congressmen who could have accompanied him. If Gandhi had taken Dr Ansari along, his case for the Congress’s religious pluralism would have been more credible. If he had taken along a colleague from the Depressed Classes, he could have met Ambedkar’s challenge more effectively. If he had taken Sarojini Naidu, he would have impressed upon British liberals that, unlike the Muslims and the princes, the Congress placed a high priority on women’s rights too.
The failure of the Round Table Conference greatly pleased the new viceroy, Lord Willingdon. Lord Irwin had believed that ‘whether or not democracy is a good plan for India’, it is ‘inevitable that they must try it’. As he put it: ‘We encouraged them to have Western education, to send their students to England and all the rest of it; we can hardly wonder they caught the democratic infection that they found there raging.’3 His successor, however, was clear that India was not fit for democracy or self-government. Lord Willingdon thought Indians were incapable of looking after their own interests. He now decided to come down hard on the nationalists. While Gandhi was on the seas, several Congress leaders were arrested, among them Jawaharlal Nehru and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, for mobilizing peasants against exactions by officials. Gandhi sardonically remarked that ‘I take these as Christmas presents to me from Lord Willingdon’. These arrests presaged further conflict, perhaps a fresh round of mass civil disobedience. But, Gandhi added: ‘If there is any possibility of avoiding satyagraha, I shall do my utmost to prevent it…’4
The day after he landed in Bombay, Gandhi wired the viceroy, deploring the arrest of his ‘valued comrades’. He asked Willingdon to clarify whether ‘friendly relations between us are closed or whether you expect me still to see you and receive guidance…’ The viceroy sent back a stiff reply, saying that by starting a no-rent campaign in the United Provinces, the Congress had violated the terms of the Gandhi–Irwin Pact, compelling the government ‘to take measures to prevent a general state of disorder’.
Gandhi answered that he could not ‘repudiate’ his ‘valued comrades’ for seeking, non-violently, to assist a depressed and defeated peasantry. He thought ‘any government jealous of the welfare of the masses would welcome voluntary co-operation of a body like the Congress which admittedly exercises great influence over the masses…’
Gandhi now convened a meeting of the CWC, which said the arrests of their comrades ‘betray no intention on the part of the bureaucracy to hand power to the people and are calculated to demoralize the nation’. The Congress called upon the government to ‘institute a public and impartial enquiry’ into the matters under dispute, failing which a fresh round of civil disobedience would commence.5
The Congress had its quarrels with the government. And, as the failure of the Round Table Conference revealed, it also had its quarrels with other Indian organizations. Gandhi’s arguments with Ambedkar in particular made him realize that perhaps he (and the Congress) did not even represent all Hindus.
Now back in India, Gandhi sought to reach out to Ambedkar, albeit indirectly. On the evening of 2 January 1932, the spiritual leader Meher Baba came to see him in Mani Bhavan. The baba had followers among Parsis, Hindus, Muslims and even Christians. On hearing that Meher Baba was on his way to Nasik, a town that Ambedkar often visited, Gandhi asked that the two of them meet. The secretaries’ record of the meeting has Gandhi telling Meher Baba: ‘I know you can influence the Depressed Classes as you have been working for their uplift. Dr. Ambedkar personally is very considerate and reasonable, and if a personality like you can persuade him to view the question of Depressed Classes from a broader outlook of national unity and the consequent moral and spiritual strength accruing the reform, I am sure he would accept the joint electorates, and save seventy millions of our brethren from drifting away from the religious fold for paltry political gain at the cost of national disintegration. I am sure he [Ambedkar] will listen to you.’
‘I will do my best,’ answered Meher Baba. He too ‘want[ed] this stigma of untouchability not to remain attached to Depressed Classes’. But whether he met Ambedkar and presented Gandhi’s point of view to him the records do not say.6
II
In 1930, Lord Irwin had waited before arresting Gandhi. It was unlikely that his successor would repeat that mistake. Knowing this, on 3 January 1932, Gandhi issued instructions through the press as to what the public should do when he was taken into custody. They should wear khadi, boycott foreign goods, manufacture their own salt and picket liquor shops, in all of these actions ‘discard[ing] every trace of violence’.7
In Bombay, Gandhi was staying as usual at Mani Bhavan. It was his custom to sleep on the terrace, the open sky above him, his disciples on the floor around him. Early in the morning of 4 January, he was woken up by the city’s commissioner of police, who had come to arrest him. It was Gandhi’s day of silence. Asking for a pencil and piece of paper, he wrote; ‘I shall be ready to come with you in half an hour.’
Gandhi brushed his teeth, washed his face, and came back to the terrace, where his followers were waiting. They sang his favourite hymn, ‘Vaishnava Jana To’. As he walked down the stairs, Kasturba followed him, saying: ‘Can’t I come with you?’ The police gently moved her aside, although they took Mahadev, for whom too they had an arrest warrant. Later that day, they picked up Vallabhbhai Patel from another part of the city.8
From Bombay, Gandhi was conveyed by car and train to Yerwada prison, where he had spent two long spells already. He quickly settled into his jail routine: prayer, walk, breakfast, spinning, reading, lunch, nap, another walk, more spinning and reading, prayer, dinner, bed. This time, Gandhi was sharing a cell with Vallabhbhai Patel. Patel followed the same routine as Gandhi, except that he walked more (being younger) and (not being a food faddist) ate other things besides fruits, nuts and vegetables.
In the first month of this prison term, Gandhi read books on finance, Islam, the cow, Egypt and khadi. Later, he turned to fiction and drama, reading plays by Tagore, stories by Maithilisharan Gupt, and more novels by Upton Sinclair. He also brushed up on his Urdu, writing in that language to Raihana Tyabji, who offered corrections by return of post.
There were no restrictions on Gandhi writing or receiving letters so long as they were on non-political subjects. As before, he wrote often to his disciples in the ashram, offering advice or answering queries on diet, health, prayer. He was also allowed to receive and read a wide range of newspapers and periodicals.
III
Having burnt his bridges with the viceroy, from the jail Gandhi chose to write to Willingdon’s boss, Samuel Hoare, the secretary of state for India. He assured him that he had come back from London ‘with every intention of co-operating with the Government’. But, he added, ‘the events he saw in India did startle me’. He had sought an interview with the viceroy but was denied one.9
Gandhi next wrote to the man placed immediately below the viceroy, namely, the governor of Bombay, Frederick Sykes. Recalling their ‘cordial conversations’ in 1931 (
when a settlement was arrived at with the government), Gandhi told Sykes that the crackdown on the Congress was ‘a tragic blunder’. As a ‘friend wishing well to the English’, he still hoped that the fight could ‘be conducted honourably on either side so that at the end of it either party may say of the other that there was no malice behind its actions’.10
While Gandhi was confined to his cell in Yerwada, his ideas were being discussed across the world. In April 1932, a quite extraordinary advertisement appeared in the New York Times, placed by Saks, a clothing company located at the corner of 34th Street and Broadway, and covering almost a whole page of the newspaper. The ad featured an illustration of a row of four men in suits on a bench on a railway platform, all reading a newspaper.
Below this line drawing was the slogan ‘EVERYBODY BUT GANDHI’. Then followed the ad copy, which ran: ‘The Mahatma chooses to spin his own…such as it is…and that’s his business! He needn’t read this ad. But all the rest of you gentlemen prefer to wear good suits…and that’s our business. So between here and the next station, cast your eye carefully over the most satisfying news in today’s paper…7 straight facts about the SAKSTON…created and sold exclusively by Saks. 34. Street.’
Then followed seven sober sentences listing the attributes of the suits made by Saks, as in the quality of the fabric and the tailoring, the range of colours and sizes, and their affordability.11
It turns out Gandhi did not have to visit the United States to be known there. This ad in the New York Times suggests that the well-dressed man in America knew precisely what Gandhi was wearing—or not wearing.
IV
While Gandhi was in jail, he heard from his wife that his eldest son, Harilal, was drinking heavily. His behaviour was often abusive. His children were with his late wife’s sister; Harilal wished to take possession of them, but the children were scared to be with their father.
Gandhi now wrote to Harilal’s daughter to ‘tell him plainly that, as long as he does not give up drinking, he will have to assume that you do not exist. If all of us adopt such a course, Harilal might take heed. Often a drunkard gives up his evil habit when he is greatly shocked.’12
Denied access to his children, Harilal wrote to his father blaming him for the estrangement. Gandhi wrote back that he was preserving the letter ‘so that, when you have awakened, you may see the insolence of your letter and weep over it and laugh at your folly’.13
Harilal wrote his father another angry letter. This time Gandhi did not reply, for (as he told his nephew Narandas) ‘either he has written it in great excitement, or he was drunk when he wrote it. The language is all excitement and insolence. No attention is paid to ordinary syntax, words are left incomplete and even the signature is not completed. I think we shall completely forget him now.’14
In August 1932, Pranjivan Mehta passed away in Rangoon. Gandhi and Mehta first met in London in 1888, and stayed continuously in touch ever since. Mehta had funded Gandhi’s work in South Africa; had underwritten his journal Indian Opinion; and even funded the first laudatory biography of Gandhi, written by the Non-Conformist priest Joseph Doke in 1908–09.
It was also Mehta who, before anyone else, recognized his friend’s ability to move, inspire and lead people. It was Mehta who first called Gandhi a ‘Mahatma’; Mehta who had long urged that Gandhi leave South Africa to work on the bigger stage that was India; Mehta who had helped fund the Satyagraha Ashram on the banks of the Sabarmati in Ahmedabad.
Writing to Henry Polak, who had known Mehta well, Gandhi called him ‘a lifelong faithful friend’, whose death made him ‘treasure his many virtues now more than ever’. To Mehta’s nephew he wrote: ‘I had no greater friend than Doctor in this whole world, and for me he is still alive. But I am unable to do anything from here to keep his nest whole, and that makes me unhappy.’
In a tribute written in jail, but published many years later, Gandhi recalled both the depth of his friendship with Mehta and the doctor’s own virtues. ‘He had helped and supported a number of people,’ he wrote. ‘There was no ostentation in his help. He never boasted about it. It knew no limits of caste or community or province.’ The barrister, doctor and jewellery merchant ‘scrupulously followed truth both in his business and his legal practice. I know he had great hatred of falsehood and hypocrisy. His ahimsa was visible on his face and in his eyes…’15
V
In March 1932, Gandhi had read in the newspapers that the government’s proposal to create separate electorates for Depressed Classes would be announced soon. He wrote at once to the secretary of state for India, Samuel Hoare, reminding him that at the time of the Round Table Conference, he had said that he would resist this ‘with my life’. This, insisted Gandhi now, ‘was not said in the heat of the moment, nor by way of rhetoric’.
Gandhi told Hoare that ‘so far as Hinduism is concerned separate electorates would simply vivisect and disrupt it’. Moreover, separate electorates were ‘neither penance [for the caste Hindus for their past and present sins] nor any remedy [for the Depressed Classes] for the crushing degradation they have groaned under’.
Gandhi informed Hoare ‘respectfully’ that if the government went ahead with their announcement, he would fast unto death. This was ‘a call of conscience which I dare not disobey, even though it may cost whatever reputation for sanity I may possess’. He added that discharging him from jail ‘would not make the duty of fasting any the less imperative’.
Hoare answered that the matter would not be decided for at least some weeks. He added that ‘we intend to give any decision that may be necessary solely and only upon the merits of the case’, and after taking into account ‘the views that have been expressed on both sides of the controversy’.16
There it rested for some months. Then on 17 August, the British prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, formally announced that, apart from Muslims and Sikhs, Depressed Classes would be treated as a ‘minority community’ entitled to a separate electorate. Gandhi immediately wrote to MacDonald, reminding him of his letter to Samuel Hoare back in March. Now that the decision had been made, he would undergo ‘a perpetual fast unto death from food of any kind save water’. He would begin the fast on 20 September, but would call it off if ‘the British Government, of its own motion or under pressure of public opinion, revise their decision’.17
Before he sent the letter, Gandhi asked his friend and fellow prisoner, Vallabhbhai Patel, to read it. The Sardar remarked that he had made no reference to the other parts of the prime minister’s award; did that mean that he approved of them? Gandhi answered that it did not. The Muslims might combine with the British; but Gandhi felt that combination could be dealt with. When freedom came, and ‘the outsider who foments quarrels is gone, we can tackle our [Hindu–Muslim] problems with success’. On the other hand, separate electorates for the Depressed Classes would ‘create division among Hindus so much that it would lead [immediately] to bloodshed’. Hence, it had to be resisted, and at once.18
Replying to Gandhi, MacDonald said he had read the letter with ‘surprise’ and ‘regret’. He claimed the creation of separate electorates would place the representatives of the Depressed Classes ‘in a position to speak for themselves’, whereas in the case of joint electorates the members could not ‘genuinely represent’ the Depressed Classes, since ‘in practically all cases such members would be elected by a majority consisting of higher caste Hindus’. At the same time, argued MacDonald, since the Depressed Classes would also have a vote in the general Hindu constituencies, this would unite rather than separate them from the Hindus, which Gandhi had said he wanted. The British prime minister found himself ‘quite unable to understand the reason’ for Gandhi’s decision to fast.19
As the correspondence between Gandhi, Hoare and MacDonald was made public, there was a rash of commentary in the press. The Depressed Classes leader from South India, M.C. Rajah, saw separate electorates as ‘dangerous and suicidal’, throwing
lower castes into conflict with their fellow Hindus.20 The pro-Indian British journalist, B.G. Horniman, said MacDonald’s ‘Communal Award’ was ‘designed to inspire the minds of untouchables with a spirit of antagonism and hostility to their brethren of the Hindu community and petrify the sense of separation with which they now be obsessed into a perpetual phenomenon in India’s future polity’.21
The person most obsessed (to use Horniman’s phrase) with separate electorates was B.R. Ambedkar. He had made the case for them in both the Round Table Conferences; it was largely his arguments that persuaded the British to grant them. Ambedkar was convinced that upper-caste reformers such as Gandhi could not truly understand or represent the Depressed Classes. They needed their own leaders, their own representatives in legislative assemblies across India.
Madan Mohan Malaviya now called a meeting of Hindu and Depressed Classes leaders in Delhi. The hope was that a settlement would be agreed upon, allowing Gandhi to call off his fast. Ambedkar declined to attend this meeting, telling a journalist he’d rather wait for a concrete proposal from Gandhi himself. In Ambedkar’s view, ‘there was no need’ for Gandhi to ‘impose on himself the vow of fasting. ‘As soon as Mr. Gandhi’s proposals are known,’ said Ambedkar, ‘I will give my answer in fifteen minutes.’ Ambedkar added that, unlike Gandhi, ‘I am not a man who allows my conscience to dominate practicality.’ He said his ‘supreme consideration is the interests of the Depressed Classes I represent and nothing else comes in the way’.22