Subhas Bose’s own commitment to non-violence was less than certain. In his book The Indian Struggle (first published in 1935), he had criticized Gandhi for encouraging India’s ‘inordinate belief in fate and the supernatural—her indifference to modern scientific development—her backwardness in the science of modern warfare, the peaceful contentment engendered by her latter-day philosophy and adherence to Ahimsa carried to the most absurd length’. While praising Gandhi’s purity of character and the struggles he had led, Bose was clear that he had to be superseded. As he wrote: ‘Mahatma Gandhi has rendered and will continue to render phenomenal service to his country. But India’s salvation will not be achieved under his leadership.’18
His fair-minded biographer, Leonard Gordon, writes that ‘Bose felt that in her struggle against the British, India needed a strong, vigorous, military-type leader—perhaps even himself—not a hesitating, confused, reformist guru’.19 By no means an instinctive democrat, Subhas Bose thought that ‘the next phase of world-history will produce a synthesis between Communism and Fascism’.20
Behind the ideological differences, there was also a provincial rivalry at play. A letter signed by seventy-five men from Bengal was addressed to ‘Mr Gandhi’, since the angry Bengalis ‘cannot but betray our conscience to address you as the “Mahatma” considering the inconceivable meanness and the vindictive sordidness shown by you and your followers’ (in seeking to unseat Bose). Gandhi and Patel were accused of ‘shameless hankering after power and underhand plotting’, and of a long-held prejudice against Bengal as when Gandhi ‘vehemently opposed Deshbandhu [C.R.] Das’ in 1923, and opposed Bose’s resolution for complete independence in 1928.21
The greatest Bengali of his age also chose (once more) to bat for Subhas Bose. Thus, Rabindranath Tagore telegraphed Gandhi: ‘At the last Congress session some rude hands have deeply hurt Bengal with ungracious persistence. Please apply without delay balm to the wound with your own kind hands and prevent it from festering.’ Gandhi wrote back saying that ‘the problem [was] difficult’, and he had made some suggestions to Bose to find a way out of the impasse.22
In early April, Bose wrote to Gandhi again, this time proposing a ‘composite’ working committee including members of both factions. But behind the offer of compromise a deep sense of hurt remained. ‘There is a world of difference,’ wrote Bose to Gandhi, ‘between yourself and your lieutenants, even your chosen lieutenants.’ He claimed that at the Tripuri Congress, which Gandhi had to miss, ‘the Old Guard cleverly dropped out of the picture and more cleverly pitted me against you’. Gandhi answered that Bose’s suspicions about the ‘Old Guard’ were unjustified. ‘Nobody put me up against you,’ he remarked. ‘You are wrong if you think that you have a single personal enemy among the Old Guard.’23
Apart from Subhas Bose and Gandhi, the person who read their correspondence most attentively was Mahadev Desai. He opened Bose’s letters before passing them on to Gandhi, and helped Gandhi in drafting his replies. In mid-April, after a month of these increasingly contentious exchanges, Mahadev wrote to a friend that ‘his [Bose’s] behaviour and his endless letters in which he contradicts himself are enough to try the patience of a Job’.24 One suspects that, on the other side, Subhas Bose’s own closest confidant, his elder brother Sarat, saw it quite differently. Gandhi’s stubbornness could be very trying too.
Since he came out of jail in August 1933, Gandhi’s principal concern had been with the abolition of untouchability. He paid some attention to rural renewal, some (as always) to Hindu–Muslim harmony, but from the day-to-day affairs of the Congress Party he was now somewhat removed. These were largely in the hands of his two trusted lieutenants, Nehru and Patel.
Subhas Bose’s bid for re-election brought Gandhi back into active involvement—perhaps we should say interference—in Congress politics. While Gandhi had personal affection for the Bengali leader, he was not nearly as close to him as to Patel or Nehru. Patel he could absolutely depend upon in all circumstances. Nehru and he often disagreed on political questions, but their personal ties were so close that these, in the end, overrode ideological differences. At the crunch, the younger man generally deferred to Gandhi’s judgement.
Like Nehru, Subhas Bose was on the Left in a political and economic sense. Like Nehru again, his personality and ideas greatly appealed to the young. However, while Bose admired Gandhi, he was not deferential towards him. Both Nehru and Patel would have been incapable of the direct, personal challenge that Bose had now mounted against Gandhi.
VI
On 9 April, Gandhi returned to Rajkot, spending two weeks seeking a solution to what was now a prolonged dispute. He met leaders of the Muslims and the Depressed Classes, groups somewhat distant from the Congress.
While Gandhi was in Rajkot, B.R. Ambedkar arrived in the town. He met the Thakore Saheb, representatives of the Depressed Classes, and then Gandhi himself. On coming out of their meeting, Ambedkar told a reporter that ‘Mahatma Gandhi still persists in using arguments which I am accustomed to hear from him from before the Poona Pact, namely that he or the Congress represented all’.25
A rumour was abroad that Jinnah too would soon come to Rajkot, and conduct a rival fast on behalf of the state’s Muslims. The Bombay correspondent of the Manchester Guardian even claimed that ‘a number of rich Bombay Indians have booked [hotel] rooms at Rajkot in the hope of seeing Mr. Gandhi and Mr. Jinnah, who are bitter political rivals, fasting on adjacent beds’.26
The story was without foundation. Jinnah was not a man to miss his morning or evening meal in any case. Interviewed in Sholapur, Jinnah said ‘a large body of Hindus, untutored and unsophisticated are being exploited by the Congress by giving them the impression that they are fighting for a Hindu raj’. Jinnah deplored ‘the wrongheaded policy pursued by the Congress in the last eighteen months in and outside legislatures’, a policy which, in his view, had ‘led to a complete estrangement between the two communities and created intense bitterness’. For the Muslims, said Jinnah, ‘the moral is obvious. We have to organize and when we begin to count ourselves in crores instead of lakhs the Paramount Power would be awakened to their sense of responsibilities towards the Muslims.’27
Gandhi’s own trip to Rajkot had not been a success. His conversations with Muslims and Bhaiyats were unfruitful. The former viewed the Congress with suspicion; the latter were bound to the Thakore Saheb by ties of caste and kin. Their reservations came out into the open during one of his prayer meetings, where both Muslims and Bhaiyats waved black flags at Gandhi while shouting slogans in praise of the ruler. Gandhi walked up to the demonstrators and tried to reason with them. The shouting did not stop. After the meeting ended, Gandhi silently but stoically walked back to a waiting car, abuse ringing in his ears.28
From Rajkot, Gandhi travelled across the country to Calcutta. In the last week of April, he had long conversations with Subhas Bose, with Jawaharlal Nehru sitting in. But these three days of intense discussion failed to resolve the deadlock. On 29 April, Bose announced that he was resigning from the Congress presidency. In a statement to the press, he described the various attempts at finding a meeting ground with Gandhi. These having failed, he felt his ‘presence as President may be a sort of obstacle or handicap in the path’ of the Congress as it sought to reconcile its two wings. The statement was uncharacteristically restrained, attracting a letter of praise from Tagore, who wrote to Bose that ‘the dignity and forbearance which you have shown in the midst of an aggravating situation has won my admiration and confidence in your leadership. The same perfect decorum has still to be maintained by Bengal for the sake of her own self-respect and thereby to help to turn your apparent defeat into a permanent victory.’29
On Subhas Bose’s resignation, the old Gandhi loyalist, Rajendra Prasad, was appointed interim president. Bose, writes one biographer, ‘was comprehensively outwitted and outmaneuvred by Gandhi in Congress politics during the spring of 1939’.30 The party
had returned to the control of the man who had taken it over in Nagpur two decades ago.
The Congress recaptured, Gandhi went back to the town where he had grown up, graduated from high school, and first lived as a married man. On 17 May, he issued a press statement apologizing for the fast he had undertaken back in March. That had put unfair pressure on the ruler of Rajkot, by bringing the viceroy into the picture. His fast, he said, had been tinged with himsa, coercive violence. It had also ‘become a potent cause of angering the Muslims and Bhaiyats against me’.
Gandhi now voluntarily renounced the award reached in March, by which the Chief Justice of India was to be the arbiter. He wished the dispute to be settled within the parameters of the state itself. He appealed to the Thakore Saheb and his advisers ‘to appease the people of Rajkot by fulfilling their expectations and dispelling their misgivings’.31
Why did Gandhi withdraw from the fray in Rajkot? The demonstration against him by Muslims and Bhaiyats had certainly unnerved him. Rajkot was his own state; did he want to push the confrontation further, embarrassing a House his own father had worked for?
Gandhi may have been perfectly sincere when he said that his fast in March had been coercive. He acknowledged a moral lapse. But this may also have been a tactical retreat. Did he want to stake his reputation on a dispute in what, after all, was a small princely state? Would it not adversely affect the larger struggle for self-government in British India? He had just come through an arduous battle of wits with Subhas Bose, which had dented his image among many Bengalis, and many younger Congressmen as well. It seemed unwise to risk further damage to his reputation in Rajkot.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
One Nation, or Two?
I
In March 1939, the Nazis overran what remained of Czechoslovakia. In May, they signed a pact with Italy. In between, the Spanish Civil War had come to an end, with the victory of the authoritarians in uniform.
Gandhi was following these events from afar. On 23 July, he sat down to write a letter to the man who had seeded the war clouds gathering over Europe. ‘Friends have been urging me,’ said Gandhi to Hitler, ‘to write to you for the sake of humanity.’ (The friends were unnamed, but they most likely were British pacifists.) So, he made his ‘appeal for what it is worth’, which was: ‘It is quite clear that you are today the one person in the world who can prevent a war which may reduce humanity to the savage state. Must you pay that price for an object however worthy it may appear to you to be? Will you listen to the appeal of one who has deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success?’1
The letter was withheld by the Government of India. So Hitler did not see it. Whether he would have at all taken it seriously is extremely doubtful. On 1 September, Germany invaded Poland. Two days later, Britain and France finally declared war on Germany. Immediately, the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, committed the people and resources of India to the Allied war effort.
Gandhi was now asked by the viceroy to meet him in Simla. Afterwards, Gandhi issued a statement to the press. He began by saying that he had met the viceroy as an ordinary Indian, and only the Congress could arrive at an understanding with the government as to what to do next. Gandhi added that, on his part, ‘I told His Excellency that my own sympathies were with England and France from the purely humanitarian standpoint. I told him that I could not contemplate without being stirred to the very depth the destruction of London which has hitherto been regarded as impregnable. And as I was picturing before him the Houses of Parliament and the Westminster Abbey and their possible destruction, I broke down.’2
For all his opposition to British imperialism, Gandhi was deeply attached to London. He had lived in the city for long stretches—between 1888 and 1891, in 1906, 1909, 1914, and (most recently) 1931. He had walked through most of its boroughs. He had many friends in the city, and quite a few admirers. The grief he expressed in public, about the prospect of London being bombed, was manifestly sincere. As Linlithgow’s personal secretary later recalled: ‘Mr. Gandhi came to see the Viceroy in Simla at the outbreak of war and I remember vividly how he told me of his grief at what had happened, and his sorrow at the thought of the destruction that might come to so many landmarks familiar to him…’3
Gandhi’s sympathy for the English people was not matched, at least on the viceroy’s part, with a corresponding sympathy for Indian hopes and aspirations. After their meeting, Linlithgow assured London that he had told Gandhi that ‘there was not any commitment of any sort [on Indian self-government] that I could enter into as regards the future’. Meanwhile, Linlithgow was ‘anxious to shepherd all the Muslims into the same fold so far as the prosecution of the War is concerned’, adding that ‘the Princely response has been as good as one would have expected it to be’. Clearly, the viceroy was shoring up support from quarters other than the Congress, seeking to marginalize the main party of Indian politics.4
In the second week of September, the CWC met in Wardha to consider the European war and its fallout. Its resolution, drafted by Jawaharlal Nehru, began by pointing out, first, that the viceroy and the colonial government had committed India and Indians to the war without their consent, and had also used their emergency powers to impose substantial curbs on the elected provincial governments; and, second, that the Congress had for its part ‘repeatedly declared its entire disapproval of the ideology and practice of Fascism and Nazism and their glorification of war and violence and the suppression of the human spirit’.
The resolution drafted by Nehru continued: ‘If the war is to defend the status quo—imperialist possessions, colonies, vested interests and privileges—then India can have nothing to do with it. If, however, the issue is democracy and a world order based on democracy, then India is intensely interested in it.’ If Great Britain genuinely wished to promote and protect democracy, the Congress argued, then it must end imperialism in her own possessions, and facilitate a Constituent Assembly where Indians would design their own constitution, paving the way for the establishment of full democracy in India and other colonies.
The CWC asked the British government for a clear declaration of what their war aims were. If it declared that these aims included the ‘elimination of imperialism and the treatment of India as a free nation’, then the Congress was ‘prepared to give their co-operation’.
Jawaharlal Nehru was a long-standing critic of both Fascism and Nazism. In 1933, he had written that after Mussolini came to power in Italy, ‘an extraordinary orgy of violence and terrorism took place’. There was ‘repression and arrests on a large scale’. Fascism, wrote Nehru, had ‘the unique distinction of having no fixed principles, no ideology, no philosophy behind it’; what it had instead was ‘a definite technique of violence and terrorism’.
In the same year, 1933, Nehru had observed that ‘you will find all the elements of fascism in Hitlerism’, such as ‘a savage attack on all liberal elements and especially workers’. Behind the ‘intensely nationalistic’ programme of Nazism, he continued, ‘lay an extraordinary philosophy of violence’. What was ‘unique’ about the Nazi terror, noted Nehru, was that it was ‘not an outcome of passion and fear, but a deliberate, cold-blooded, and incredibly brutal suppression of all who did not fall in line with the Nazis’. So there had been ‘savage beatings and tortures and shooting and murder on a vast scale, both men and women being victims….Enormous numbers of people have been put in gaols and concentration camps…’5
In the same year, 1933, that Nehru excoriated Fascism and Nazism, Winston Churchill described Mussolini as ‘the Roman genius…the greatest lawgiver among living men’. The two men had met several times, and considered each other friends. Churchill was convinced the Duce had restored order to an anarchic country, and brought hope to its poor and divided people.6
Churchill was, of course, less sympathetically disposed towards Hitler. Yet, many other British politicians admired Hitler for having united the Germans and given
them a sense of national purpose. The former Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George called Hitler ‘a great man’. The former Labour Foreign Secretary Arthur Henderson thought Hitler was ‘sincerely pacific’. And there was a long list of Conservative Party grandees who not only praised Hitler but rushed to Berlin to meet him after he took power. They saw him both as a friend of Britain, and as a bulwark against communism.7
On the other side, Nehru’s own views were widely shared by Congressmen. The head of the party’s foreign affairs cell, Ram Manohar Lohia, was a political scientist trained in Berlin, where he had seen the rise of the Nazis at first-hand. As a left-wing radical, he had to flee the country after Hitler took power. Other leading Congress socialists, such as Jayaprakash Narayan, were implacably opposed to both Hitler and Mussolini. So was Mahadev Desai, who kept himself up to date with international affairs.
The leaders of the Congress were, from the first, struck by the hypocrisy of the British claim that by going to war with Hitler, they were defending democracy and freedom. When the British (and the French) had denied freedom and democracy to their colonial subjects in Asia and Africa, how could they claim to be consistently in favour of these values? If they wanted credibility for their war against Hitler, said the Congress, then the British should at once commit themselves to granting full freedom to the colonies they controlled.
In a statement to the press on the working committee resolution, Gandhi pointed out that its author, Nehru, was, notwithstanding his ‘implacable opposition to imperialism in any shape or form’, a ‘friend of the English people’. He was an ‘ardent nationalist’ whose ‘nationalism is enriched by his fine internationalism’. Endorsing the resolution wholeheartedly, Gandhi hoped for ‘a mental revolution on the part of British statesmen’. Will Great Britain, he asked, ‘have an unwilling India dragged into the war or a willing ally co-operating with her in the prosecution of a defence of true democracy? The Congress support will mean the greatest moral asset in favour of England and France.’8
Gandhi Page 66
