Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  In the third week of December, Gandhi travelled to Faizpur, a Marathi-speaking hamlet in the Bombay Presidency where that year’s Congress was being held. The idea to hold the annual jamboree in a village was Gandhi’s. The Congress township had been designed by a well-known (and also khadi-wearing) Bombay architect named B.K. Mhatre; the buildings and gateways embellished by drawings and sculptures provided by the Santiniketan artist Nandalal Bose.

  Gandhi was delighted that the architect–artist duo had ‘depended entirely on local material and local labour to bring all the structures here into being’. Inaugurating a khadi and village industries exhibition, he spoke of how he had forsaken political action for village renewal. ‘I am now care-free,’ he remarked, ‘having cast all my cares on the broad shoulders of Jawaharlal and Sardar.’ This was the first indication that Gandhi had in mind a succession plan, whereby the pre-eminent political role he had played for so long, would be passed on to a younger generation. It is notable that he singled out Nehru and Patel, and notable also that their names appeared in that particular order.21

  On the sidelights of the Congress session, a reporter asked Gandhi what swaraj meant to him. He answered that in his conception of free India, ‘there would be no difference between a Bhangi and a Maharaja, or between a Bhangi and a Brahmin’. ‘No wonder the Maharajas prefer the British Raj,’ wrote the journalist, adding that Gandhi’s views were ‘enough to make any honest Sanatanist turn an anti-Congressman’.22

  On Gandhi’s return to Segaon, a letter was waiting for him, from a villager in Birbhum in Bengal, which asked: ‘What is an ideal Indian village in your esteemed opinion?’ As always, when receiving an interesting query, he made his answer public through his newspaper. Thus Gandhi wrote:

  An ideal Indian village will be so constructed as to lead itself to perfect sanitation. It will have cottages with sufficient light and ventilation, built of a material obtainable within a radius of five miles of it. The cottages will have courtyards enabling householders to plant vegetables for domestic use and to house their cattle. The village lanes and streets will be free of all avoidable dust. It will have wells according to its needs and accessible to all. It will have houses of worship for all, also a common meeting place, a village common for grazing its cattle, a co–operative dairy, primary and secondary schools in which industrial [i.e. vocational] education will be the central fact, and it will have Panchayats for settling disputes. It will produce its own grains, vegetables and fruit, and its own Khadi. This is roughly my idea of a model village…23

  This description drew on two decades of travels through Indian villages, and six months as the resident of one. Note its salient features: homes with air and light, built of locally available materials; schools, shrines and meeting places to consolidate social solidarity; streets swept clean of dirt and dust; the collective management and use of those gifts of nature so necessary for rural life, water and pasture.

  VI

  In the second week of November 1936, the princely state of Travancore announced that all temples in their territory were henceforth to be open to all Hindus regardless of caste. This was the final fruit of the Vaikom satyagraha begun a decade previously by the followers of Narayana Guru, and supported by Gandhi himself. Gandhi made a public announcement congratulating the rulers of Travancore, for allowing Harijans in the state to ‘feel the glow of freedom and real oneness with their caste brethren’. He further hoped that ‘all other Hindu Princes will follow the noble example set by this far-off ancient Hindu State’, thus ‘hastening the day of the total removal of untouchability from Hinduism’.

  In early December, Gandhi received a telegram from a Harijan social worker in Trivandrum about the changes the royal proclamation had set afoot. The corridors and courtyards of Travancore’s temples were now ‘as freely used by newly admitted devotees as caste Hindus’. Of even greater significance was ‘that waters in sacred tanks attached to temples are also freely used now by Ezhavas and Harijans’. And the ‘sense of horror at [the] approach of Harijans seems completely overcome’.

  Reproducing the telegram in his newspaper, Gandhi said that ‘the enthusiasm of the Harijans, the absence of all opposition to their entrance…and the willing, nay, the hearty, co-operation of the officiating priests, show the utter genuineness of the great and sweeping reform’. Only a few years previously, remarked Gandhi, ‘the caste Hindus had threatened violence if Harijans crossed even certain roads leading to the Vaikom temple’. But now ‘that very temple has been opened to Harijans on absolutely the same terms as to any caste Hindu’.24

  Gandhi decided to visit Travancore to see these changes for himself. He spent the second half of January 1937 in the state, speaking at twenty-five different venues. He praised the ruler and congratulated the reformers, but urged them not to be complacent. The hosts for his first meeting called themselves the ‘Ezhava Temple-entry Proclamation Celebration’. The name pointedly excluded the Pulayas and Pariahs, castes even more suppressed than the Ezhavas. Gandhi recalled how, on his first visit to Kerala, he had seen an old Pulaya man ‘shaking with fear’ at having transgressed the boundaries of caste by inadvertently coming close to him, a high-caste visitor. He told the Ezhavas gathered to welcome him that ‘if this vast assembly does not represent these Pulayas, then I am certain that there is no place in your midst for me’.25

  Writing in Harijan (which he was now editing), Mahadev Desai described a visit made by Gandhi to a hostel for Harijan boys in Trivandrum. He first asked whether the (upper-caste) superintendent ate with the boys or privately with his family. The superintendent assured him that he had all his meals with his wards. Gandhi then asked whether the buttermilk they served was more water than butter or milk. This time the answer was less cheering; yes, indeed, the proportion of water to milk was somewhat on the higher side. But, said the superintendent by way of explanation, good milk was scarce everywhere in the city. Could Gandhiji send some good cows from Gujarat?

  Gandhi offered a better alternative. The priests of the great Padmanabha temple in Trivandrum were known to pour milk into gold pots for the benefit of the local Brahmins. Why not ask them, said Gandhi, to serve buttermilk to the Harijan boys, now that they had abolished untouchability?26

  Although as a boy Gandhi had often accompanied his mother to temples and shrines, he had stopped visiting them in adult life. This was in part because he followed Tolstoy in believing that the ‘Kingdom of God is Within You’, and in part because of the bar on Harijans entering temples. However, since in Travancore at any rate the bar had been lifted, on this visit Gandhi entered several temples, including Vaikom, where the struggle had first begun.

  Vaikom was very close to the border between Travancore and Cochin. While in one princely state restrictions on temple entry had been lifted, in the other they were still in place. Cochin’s many Hindu shrines, among them the famous Guruvayur temple, remained closed to ‘untouchables’. Looking across the waters to the other state, Gandhi said in Vaikom that he was ‘impatient to see that the Cochin Maharaja follows in the footsteps of the Maharaja of Travancore’.27

  This time, among the letters waiting for Gandhi on his return from his travels was one from a Muslim friend. This man, a liberal and sceptic, wondered why, when referring to the Prophet Muhammad or the Koran, Gandhi never analysed them critically. ‘I am at a loss to understand how a person like you,’ this correspondent told Gandhi, ‘with all your passion for truth and justice, who has never failed to gloss over a single fault in Hinduism or to repudiate as unauthentic the numerous corruptions that masquerade under it, can…accept all that is in the Koran. I am not aware of your ever having called into question or denounced any iniquitous injunction of Islam. Against some of these I learned to revolt when I was scarcely 18 or 20 years old and time has since only strengthened that first feeling.’

  Reproducing and then answering this letter in Harijan, Gandhi remarked that ‘I have nowhere said
that I believe literally in every word of the Koran, or for that matter of any scripture in the world. But it is no business of mine to criticize the scriptures of other faiths or to point out their defects. It should be, however, my privilege to proclaim and practise the truths that there may be in them.’

  Gandhi held the view that only adherents of a particular faith had the right to criticize its precepts or sanctions. By that token, it was both his ‘right and duty to point out the defects in Hinduism in order to purify it and to keep it pure. But when non-Hindu critics set about criticizing Hinduism and cataloguing its faults they can only blazon their own ignorance of Hinduism and their incapacity to regard it from the Hindu viewpoint….Thus my own experience of the non-Hindu critics of Hinduism brings home to me my limitations and teaches me to be wary of launching on a criticism of Islam or Christianity and their founders.’

  Critics from within had the capacity and empathy to reform and redeem their faith; critics from without the tendency to mock and caricature the other’s faith. Gandhi thus concluded that it was ‘only through a reverential approach to faiths other than mine that I can realize the principle of equality of all religions’.28

  Gandhi’s theological pluralism was also on display in a conversation he had soon afterwards, with an American clergyman named Dr Crane. The visitor asked if Gandhi accepted that ‘Jesus was the most divine’ of all the religious teachers in history. ‘No,’ answered Gandhi, ‘for the simple reason that we have no data. Historically we have more data about Mahomed than anyone else because he was more recent in time. For Jesus there are less data and still less for Buddha, Rama and Krishna; and when we know so little about them, is it not preposterous to say that one of them was more divine than another?’29

  VII

  Meanwhile, the Congress had decided to participate in the elections to provincial assemblies, notwithstanding its reservations about the limited degree of self-rule the Government of India Act had given Indians. The elections were held in February 1937, on a wider franchise than ever before. Some thirty-five million people were eligible to vote, six times as many as before. They included about four million women.

  Eleven provinces in British India went to the polls. There were 1505 seats to be contested for; of which 808 fell into the ‘general’ category, open to all, with the rest reserved for Muslims, Sikhs, Europeans and Anglo-Indians. While a party to the decision to contest the elections, Gandhi himself did not canvass for votes. Jawaharlal Nehru led the Congress campaign, travelling 50,000 miles by train, plane, car, cart and boat, addressing over ten million people.30

  While Nehru sought to garner the votes, the selection of candidates and the raising of funds was the responsibility of Vallabhbhai Patel. He liaised with the provincial Congress chiefs, matching candidates to constituencies and their likely opponents. He tapped merchants and industrialists for contributions to the Congress’s election fund. But other leaders made their own arrangements. Thus, C. Rajagopalachari asked Devadas Gandhi to pass on an ‘urgent personal call’ to his employer, the Mahatma’s loyal acolyte, Ghanshyam Das Birla, to send a ‘very liberal cheque’ to the Madras Congress. Rajaji remarked that ‘Vallabhbhai [Patel] I know has fleeced everyone and he says it is too late for Central Collections to the province’.31

  Among the main parties opposed to the Congress was the Muslim League. It was led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Gandhi’s fellow Kathiawari and one-time friend. After leaving the Congress in protest against the non-cooperation movement, Jinnah had concentrated on his law practice. Meanwhile, his marriage ran into difficulties; he and his wife became estranged, with Ruttie Jinnah dying in 1929 of cancer, aged twenty-nine.

  In the early 1930s, Jinnah attended the round table conferences, then turned his back on politics altogether, settling down in London, where his legal skills were as much in demand as in Bombay, and commanded a higher premium. In 1934, Jinnah was persuaded to come back to India and take over a languishing Muslim League. Within a year of his return, he had invigorated its provincial units, and attracted a wide array of Muslim businessmen and professionals to its flag.

  Other parties which claimed a national presence were the Hindu Mahasabha and the Liberals. Although both had formidable leaders, neither had a mass base. Some parties were strong in particular provinces. The Justice Party, based on opposition to Brahmin dominance, was powerful in Madras. The charismatic A.K. Fazlul Huq’s Krishak Praja Party commanded great support among the peasantry of Bengal. The Unionist Party, influential in the Punjab, was a cross-religious alliance of Hindu, Sikh and Muslim landlords. In Bombay, B.R. Ambedkar’s Independent Labour Party had strong support among the working class.

  When the results of the 1937 elections came in, the Congress was the major winner. It won 74 per cent of the seats in Madras, 65 per cent in Bihar, 62.5 per cent in the Central Provinces, 60 per cent in Orissa, 59 per cent in the United Provinces and 49 per cent in Bombay. The Unionists won a comfortable majority in the Punjab. Other provinces witnessed more fragmented verdicts, with no party in a position to stake a claim to form a government on its own. Taking British India as a whole, the Congress won 707 seats; with the Muslim League in a distant second place, winning 106 seats. The League performed below expectations even in constituencies reserved for Muslims. In Bengal, for example, it won just one reserved seat more (thirty-seven to thirty-six) than Fazlul Haq’s Krishak Praja Party, while in the Punjab it won a solitary seat, with the cross-religious Unionist Party led by Sikandar Hyat Khan winning most constituencies reserved for Muslims.32

  Gandhi had not campaigned at all in these elections, yet the impressive showing by the Congress owed a great deal to him, to the reputation and standing he had built up over the years. The governor of the Central Provinces spoke for several other governors when he wrote (in private, of course) that ‘the name of Gandhi is unquestionably one to conjure with among the masses in this Province—not for any particular political reason—but simply because he is Gandhi—and reports from several districts indicate that the one Congress slogan which has been universally successful is—“Put your papers in the white box and vote for Gandhi”’.33

  In the third week of March, the AICC met in Delhi to discuss the election results. Gandhi travelled from Segaon to take part. The meeting passed a resolution permitting the Congress to accept office and run the government in the provinces where it had won a majority.

  At this meeting, Jawaharlal Nehru spoke out against office acceptance. The Congress had proved its popularity at the polls; but forming ministries would mean succumbing to the less-than-satisfactory provisions of the Government of India Act. Nehru was supported by, among others, the socialist Jayaprakash Narayan and the peasant leader Swami Sahajanand, for whom accepting the perks and privileges of power meant a radical departure from the high ideals the Congress had so long professed.

  On the other side, C. Rajagopalachari was extremely keen on accepting office. Responding to the debate in the AICC, Rajaji said: ‘Let us not distrust each other. Do not think we are hankering after jobs….When they went to the Governor they had to tell him what they proposed to do and ask him if he would use his special powers….[I]f he said he would not use them, they would take his words at their face value. If later he broke those words, they could come out [i.e. resign].’34

  Gandhi had stayed away from the elections themselves. But now that the results were in, he re-entered the sphere of politics—as his friend Henry Polak had predicted. Following the AICC meeting in Delhi, Gandhi made a statement urging ‘a gentlemanly understanding between the Governors and their Congress Ministers that they would not exercise their special powers of interference so long as the Ministers acted within the Constitution’. Since the British government claimed that the 1935 Act mandated provincial autonomy, the governors should recognize that it was not they but elected ministers who were now ‘responsible for the wise administration of their Provinces’.

  Gandhi told reporters th
at, in the event of the Congress taking office, rather than interfere with day-to-day administration, the British governors should simply dismiss the ministries in case of serious differences. In agreeing to accept office albeit with safeguards, said Gandhi, ‘the Congress had gone as far as it could, consistent with self-esteem and with its avowed object [of swaraj]. The next move must come from the Government, if they really want the Congress to take office.’35

  The secretary of state for India, Lord Zetland, took a tough position. He argued that close oversight by governors was necessary for social peace; that giving in to the Congress demand would be ‘a grave breach of faith with the minorities and others in India’.36 Zetland was here suggesting that the Congress was not as representative of the national mood as it claimed to be; in particular, that it did not represent the minorities. As they had done for several decades now, British politicians claimed that only British officials had the necessary impartiality to adjudicate, and hold the balance between, competing interests in India.

  VIII

  On 7 July 1937, the CWC permitted the party to run the ministries in provinces in which they commanded a majority. Gandhi now wrote a long piece on what the Congress ministries should do. He first explained the Congress about-turn in these terms: ‘The Government of India Act is universally regarded as wholly unsatisfactory for achieving India’s freedom. But it is possible to construe it as an attempt, however limited and feeble, to replace the rule of the sword by the rule of the majority.’

  Gandhi then pressed three tasks on the Congress ministries. The first was to ‘enforce immediate prohibition by making education self-supporting instead of paying for it from the liquor revenue’. The second was for ministers to live simply, and not be a drain on the public exchequer. The English rulers in India enjoyed an extravagant standard of living; so, if Congress ministers would ‘simply refrain from copying the Governors and the secured Civil Service, they will have shown the marked contrast that exists between the Congress mentality and theirs’.