The permanent president of the Muslim League was M.A. Jinnah. This year, the session began with a poem in praise of Jinnah, which, recalled an adoring eyewitness, ‘sent the audience into rapturous ecstasies’. Then the leader himself rose to speak. He was dressed in ‘an immaculate white achkan and churidar pyjama’, a dress more suited to the crowd and occasion than the European clothes he normally wore. He began in Urdu, but then quickly changed to a language he was more comfortable in, telling the audience that ‘the world is watching us, so let me have your permission to have my say in English’.35 In his address, Jinnah noted with satisfaction that, when war broke out in Europe, the viceroy called both Gandhi and him for talks. This, claimed Jinnah, ‘was the worst shock that the Congress High Command received, because it challenged their sole authority to speak on behalf of India. And it is quite clear from the attitude of Mr. Gandhi and the High Command that they have not yet recovered from the shock.’
Jinnah urged that this symbolic victory be consolidated by hard organization on the ground. He then explained that the idea of a Constituent Assembly, promoted by the Congress was not suitable because in this body Muslims would be outnumbered three to one.
What then was the solution? Jinnah argued that ‘the problem in India is not of an inter-communal character, but manifestly of an international one…So long as this basic and fundamental truth is not realised, any constitution that may be built will result in disaster…’ The British government, urged Jinnah, must realize that ‘the only course open to us all is to allow the major nations separate homelands by dividing India into “autonomous national states”’.
Why were two nations needed, why were they necessary? This was because, in Jinnah’s view, Hindus and Muslims could not live together peaceably in a single state. His understanding of how the two communities had related to one another down the centuries was radically opposed to Maulana Azad’s. Islam and Hinduism, argued Jinnah,
are not religions in the strict sense of the word, but are, in fact, different and distinct social orders; and it is a dream that the Hindus and Muslims can ever evolve a common nationality; and this misconception of one Indian nation has gone far beyond the limits and is the cause of more of our troubles and will lead India to destruction if we fail to revise our notions in time. The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs, and literature[s]. They neither intermarry nor interdine together, and indeed they belong to two different civilisations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions. Their aspects on life, and of life, are different. It is quite clear that Hindus and Mussalmans derive their inspiration from different sources of history. They have different epics, their heroes are different…Very often the hero of one is a foe of the other, and likewise their victories and defeats overlap. To yoke together two such nations under a single state, one as a numerical minority and the other as a majority, must lead to growing discontent, and final destruction of any fabric that may be so built up for the government of such a state.36
The next day, the 23rd, the League met in open session, with Jinnah presiding. In the afternoon, the prime minister of Bengal, A.K. Fazlul Haq, arrived to resounding cheers of ‘Sher-e-Bangla Zindabad’. This Tiger of Bengal had a complicated relationship with the Muslim League. Fazlul Haq had once been a member of the Muslim League, then left to start his own Krishak Praja Party, which in March 1940 was in a coalition government with Jinnah’s party in Bengal.
Fazlul Haq was not formally a member of the Muslim League. But his party was in partnership with the League in an important, heavily populated province where he was the most powerful leader. Now, in another brilliant tactical move, Jinnah got Fazlul Haq to propose the main resolution of the day. This asked that ‘geographically contiguous units are demarcated into regions which should be constituted with such territorial readjustments as may be necessary that the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority, as in the North-western and eastern zones of India should be grouped to constitute “independent states” in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign’.
In his own speech, Fazlul Haq said that if a unitary constitution was proposed, the Muslims must make it ‘absolutely unworkable’. He dismissed Maulana Azad’s Congress speech advocating a single nation as ‘unIslamic’. And he appealed to Muslims across India ‘to remain united and…remember that we have to stand on our own feet and cannot rely on anybody’.37
The resolution proposed by Fazlul Haq at Jinnah’s instance was passed by a show of hands. It soon became known as the ‘Pakistan Resolution’, although in fact that term had not actually been used in the discussion. A significant feature of the resolution was that it spoke of Muslim states, in the plural, one in the north-west, the other in the east. What relation these states would have towards one another was not specified. Fazlul Haq himself may have believed that they would be separate and distinct, and that he might, in time, become the first prime minister of an independent, sovereign, Muslim-majority nation of Bengal.38
Though Jinnah had asked Fazlul Haq to move the key resolution, the Lahore meeting of the Muslim League was from first to last his own show. Before and after the League met, Jinnah addressed other public meetings in Lahore, where his words visibly moved and impressed the Muslims of Punjab’s premier city. As an activist visiting from Bombay later recalled: ‘This was the time when Jinnah, perhaps, gauged his strength for the first time. This was the time when he realised how much devotion he had earned from his followers by sheer service. This was the time when he felt how much confidence Musalmans of India had already reposed in him.’39
Back in 1929, Lahore had been the venue for the Congress session which proposed ‘Purna Swaraj’, Complete or Full Independence (that is, not mere ‘Dominion Status’). That resolution envisaged the creation of a single, free, united Republic of India, for which a flag had already been prepared. Gandhi had led his Salt March hoping to bring that republic into being. From 1930, every 26 January had been celebrated by Congressmen as ‘Independence Day’, with the ‘national’ flag hoisted, khadi spun and patriotic songs sung.
Now, eleven years later, it was Lahore, again, which saw the anticipatory announcement by a political party of a free India; this, however, to be not one indivisible unit, but two or perhaps three separate, sovereign nations, each defined by religion.40
IX
Observing the Lahore session of the Muslim League with keen interest was Penderel Moon, a scholar of All Souls College, Oxford, a senior member of the Punjab cadre of the Indian Civil Service, and one of the most astute British observers of Indian politics. In March 1940, Moon was serving as private secretary to the governor of Punjab. He prepared a note for his boss, this passed on in turn to the viceroy.
For Penderel Moon, the three main lessons of the recently concluded Muslim session in Lahore were: ‘(a) The importance of the League as the real representative Muslim organisation has been immensely enhanced; (b) Jinnah’s own personal prestige has greatly risen. His position as the one all-India Muslim leader is now unchallenged; (c) Muslim opinion is now, outwardly at least, unanimous in favour of the partition of India. Only a very courageous Muslim leader would now come forward openly to oppose or even criticise it.’
Moon thought that the League’s Partition resolution ‘has completely torpedoed the Congress’ claim to speak for India as a whole’. That said, ‘was it also meant as a serious solution of India’s difficulties’? Moon wrote that the ‘unthinking rank and file [Muslim] may so regard it. But I find difficulty in believing that the responsible Muslim leaders regard it—at present at any rate—as a constructive proposal.’ The scholar-civil servant concluded that, as things stood, in 1940, ‘Muslims will accept something less than partition, but the longer time that elapses, without any concrete alternative being put forward, the more the support and favour partition proposals are likely to gain.’41
What
did Jinnah’s main political rival think of the Muslim League meeting and its Pakistan resolution? Writing in Harijan, Gandhi admitted that the developments in Lahore had created ‘a baffling situation’. But he himself did not believe ‘that Muslims, when it comes to a matter of actual decision, will ever want vivisection. Their good sense will prevent them.’ For Gandhi the two-nation theory was an ‘untruth’, neglecting as it did the shared culture of Hindus and Muslims, as well as more recent examples of political partnership. Was Islam ‘such an exclusive religion’ as Jinnah claimed? Was there, asked Gandhi, ‘nothing in common between Islam and Hinduism or any other religion? Or is Islam merely an enemy of Hinduism?’42
Gandhi’s response to the Muslim League’s proclamation of the two-nation theory was intense and heartfelt. Meanwhile, Mahadev Desai had penned a more detached analysis of why things had come to such a pass. In Mahadev’s view: ‘the principal authors of the two nations theory were the Empire builders of Britain.’ He quoted various British politicians and officials such as Lord Dufferin, John Morley and Malcolm Hailey, who had emphasized the divisions between Hindus and Muslims and worked to cast them in stone. Thus, remarked Mahadev: ‘We cannot fix the guilt either of the monstrosity or the originality of the suggestion of Jinnah Saheb. It was conceived and defined by the “rulers”.’43
X
On 5 April 1940, Charlie Andrews died in Calcutta. He was buried not in the grand European cemetery in Park Street, where generals and civil servants were laid to rest, but across the street in the more modest Lower Circular Road cemetery, amidst Indian members of his faith, the workers, artisans and middle-class professionals of Calcutta who had converted to Christianity. In death, as in life, he had chosen to identify with the humble and the lowly.
In a brief statement issued the next day, Gandhi called Andrews ‘one of the greatest and best of Englishmen’. Later, in a quite wonderful tribute in Harijan, Gandhi wrote of how, at their last meeting in a Calcutta hospital, Andrews had told him, ‘Mohan, swaraj is coming.’ He could have shared other such memories from their twenty-five years of intimate friendship, but Gandhi chose instead to reflect on what Andrews’s life and legacy meant for Indians and Englishmen. ‘At the present moment,’ wrote Gandhi,
I do not wish to think of English misdeeds [in India]. They will be forgotten, but not one of the heroic deeds of Andrews will be forgotten as long as England and India live. If we really love Andrews’ memory, we may not have hate in us for Englishmen, of whom Andrews was among the best and noblest. It is possible, quite possible, for the best Englishmen and the best Indians to meet together and never to separate till they have evolved a formula acceptable to both.44
In the last week of April, a British friend of Charlie Andrews named R.O. Hicks came to see Gandhi in Sevagram. He spent a couple of weeks in the ashram, observing how its founder lived and worked. Gandhi’s room was tiny, with just enough space for his cot and for a few people to sit on the floor. Above the cot was a punkah, pulled by a rope. Gandhi himself sometimes looped the rope around his big toe and pulled the fan. There was a single shelf, with some books and a pen. Papers needing attention were kept on the floor, with stones acting as paperweights. On the wall was a motto, which said: ‘If you are in the right you can afford to keep your temper; if you are in the wrong you cannot afford to lose it.’
Since Andrews had just died, Hicks asked Gandhi ‘what a lot of little Charlies could do in his place’. Gandhi answered that they must have ‘the very broad love he had for India, born out of his love for humanity’. He added: ‘And on that account, Charlie’s love for England burned all the brighter instead of growing dim.’
Gandhi also reported to the visiting Englishman his several, invariably dispiriting talks with Lord Linlithgow. In one meeting the viceroy had told him: ‘In spite of everything we may say, we shall be in India a long time, a very long time.’ Gandhi’s impression of the most powerful person in India was that he was hostage to ‘an invincible stupidity’.45
XI
As Gandhi and Jinnah, the Congress and the Muslim League, jostled for space in India, the war further intensified in Europe. In April 1940, the Nazis invaded Norway and Denmark. In early May, they invaded France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
These dramatic advances left the British as the only major country in the fight against the Nazis. Drastic measures were called for, and they were taken. On 14 May, Winston Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as prime minister. Despite his rather wayward political career, Churchill had a reputation as a fighter. He had once been a soldier himself, and had written many works of military history. He was much admired in the United States (a country thus far neutral in the war) on account of his writings and his familial connections (his mother was American).
Within Britain itself, Churchill’s appointment led immediately to a rise in morale. Meanwhile, the main opposition party, Labour, decided to join the Cabinet. So did some independent MPs, making this a truly national government.
Three days after Churchill took over as prime minister, Lord Linlithgow wrote a note entitled ‘The Congress position on 13/5/40’, reproduced below in toto:
It is important to note that the position of Congress is weakening very rapidly, and the risk of c[ivil] d[isobedience] receding at the same pace.
Since Friday [10 May], Congress is the weaker—
(a) By the immense sympathy now felt for the Allied cause by the whole population in North America.
(b) By the virtual cancellation of the nuisance value of German propaganda about India. No American will now listen to German chatter about India, and no newspaper will print such.
(c) By the inclusion of Liberals and Labour in the Cabinet, and by the focusing of all public opinion in Great Britain upon the war. The press will be equally bored with India, the more so as they are cut off their newsprint.
(d) By the tremendous (and vocal) movement of sympathy for the Allied cause, and the fear of a new and very different master, enabled by the war crisis.
So Congress has in fact lost the whole of what remained of the ‘claque’, during the past 3 days. [The Quaker] Agatha Harrison and her friends, [the writer] Edward Thompson and a few besides are what is left of the old man [Gandhi]’s fans in three continents.
We can do what we wish.
L. 13/5/40.46
Always suspicious of the Congress, the viceroy now saw an opportunity to marginalize it altogether. The note of triumphalism was marked, and unfortunate. That the main representative of the British Empire in India had such hatred for the main political party in India sat oddly with the claim that this war against Hitler was being fought to preserve democracy and freedom. Gandhi’s characterization seemed right; Linlithgow was not particularly quick-witted; and he thought his Raj was immortal and invincible.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Pilgrimages to Gandhi
I
The preceding chapters have inevitably been intensely political, since these were the years when the Congress formed ministries for the first time; when it was bitterly opposed by a resurgent Muslim League; when the Nazis rose in Germany to the alarm and consternation of other nations in Europe; when the Second World War broke out; when the Congress and Gandhi tried unavailingly to come to an agreement with the Raj that would allow them to aid the war effort on terms they considered honourable.
This chapter is more personal in character. It recounts visits made by curious travellers to Gandhi’s home in central India, and the conversations, often illuminating and sometimes eccentric, they had with him.
In December 1935, the American feminist Margaret Sanger came to Wardha to meet Gandhi. She was on an extended trip to India, travelling 10,000 miles and visiting eighteen cities, speaking with doctors and social activists on birth control and the emancipation of women.
Mrs Sanger arrived at the ashram on 3 December, a ton
ga sent by Gandhi meeting her at the railway station. It was her host’s day of silence, so the visitor was taken by Mahadev Desai to see the village industries coming up in Wardha—the oil presses, the handmade paper machines, the spinning wheels.1
The next morning Mrs Sanger accompanied Gandhi on his morning walk, and also spent the afternoon with him.
They had long conversations, the details noted down by Mahadev Desai, as well as by the visitor’s secretary. Mahadev remarked that ‘both seemed to be agreed that woman should be emancipated, that woman should be the arbiter of her destiny’. But whereas Mrs Sanger believed that contraceptives were the safest route to emancipation, Gandhi argued that women should resist their husbands, while men for their part should seek to curb ‘animal passion’.
Gandhi had always opposed artificial methods of birth control. Back in December 1934, a women’s rights activist from Kerala had asked him: ‘May not birth-control through contraceptives be resorted to, as the next best thing to self-control, which is too high an ideal for the ordinary man or woman?’
Gandhi answered: ‘Do you think that the freedom of the body is obtained by resorting to contraceptives? Women should learn to resist their husbands. If contraceptives are resorted to as in the West, frightful results will follow. Men and women will be living for sex alone. They will become soft-brained, unhinged, in fact mental and moral wrecks…’ Gandhi, however, added that ‘though I am against the use of contraceptives in the case of women, I do not mind voluntary sterilisation in the case of man, since he is the aggressor’.2
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