‘I personally think we have just overdone it,’ continued Gandhi’s Nazi visitor. ‘That’s the mistake revolutions always do,’ he added. ‘Oh, there is such a lot of hate in Europe,’ said Captain Strunk. ‘And it has reached its climax in Spain. It is cruel, heartless, stupid, inhuman—this Spanish War. It can’t be compared with any other war.’18
V
Many of the visitors to Sevagram were, of course, ordinary Indians rather than exotic foreigners, come to have a darshan of their most famous countryman. In the winter of 1938 a young Punjabi named Bhisham Sahni arrived at Wardha station. He was a writer-in-the-making, whose elder brother Balraj (an aspiring actor) had based himself in Sevagram, and wished to introduce Bhisham to the ashram and what it meant. They accompanied Gandhi on his morning walk, where Bhisham marvelled at the number of people who clustered around the leader, peppering him with questions. ‘Anyone can join in,’ said Balraj to his brother, adding: ‘There is a dark-skinned fellow, an “Ashramite”, who accompanies Gandhiji everyday. He smells awfully. Whenever he finds anyone sticking too long to Gandhiji, he quietly starts walking by his side and the fellow falls back within seconds. That is Gandhiji’s non-violent method of regulating interviews.’
‘Doesn’t Gandhiji feel his smell?’ asked Bhisham. ‘Gandhiji has no sense of smell,’ answered Balraj. Recounting this incident many years later, Bhisham said he still didn’t know whether his brother was pulling his leg or not.19
In the first week of December 1938, a Japanese member of Parliament came to Sevagram to meet Gandhi. He asked how Japan and India could develop friendly relations. Gandhi answered that ‘it can be possible if Japan ceases to throw its greedy eyes on India’. He complained that the Japanese ‘flood India with your goods which are often flimsy’. Nor was he much enthused about Japan’s call for Asian solidarity under its leadership. ‘I do not subscribe,’ remarked Gandhi, ‘to the doctrine of Asia for the Asiatics, if it is meant as an anti-European combination.’20
A month later, the participants in an economists’ conference in Nagpur visited Gandhi. When they asked if he was against large-scale production, he said not always, only where the goods in question could be made in villages. Asked whether cottage and big industries could be nationalized, Gandhi answered: ‘Yes, if they are planned so as to help the villages. Key industries, industries which the nation needs, may be centralized.’ But in Gandhi’s scheme, ‘nothing will be allowed to be produced by cities which can equally well be produced by the villagers’.21
In February 1939, a certain S.S. Tema came calling. A Johannesburg pastor and a member of the African National Congress (ANC), Tema had come to India to attend a World Missionary Conference in Tambaram. The first question he asked Gandhi was what the ANC could learn from the Indian National Congress. Gandhi thought that the leaders of the ANC were excessively Europeanized, wearing Western dress and professing the Christian faith, in both respects standing apart from the majority of Africans. ‘You must become Africans once more,’ he told the visitor.
Tema then asked Gandhi about his opinion on a future Indo-African front in South Africa. Gandhi thought it would be a mistake, as the two groups faced very different problems. ‘The Indians are a microscopic minority,’ he told the African. ‘You, on the other hand, are the sons of the soil who are being robbed of your inheritance….Yours is a far bigger issue.’ That said, keeping the movements separate did not ‘preclude the establishment of the friendliest relations between the two races’.
Gandhi believed that the best way Indians could help the Africans was ‘by always acting on the square towards you. They may not put themselves in opposition to your legitimate aspirations, or run you down as “savages” while exalting themselves as “cultured” people in order to secure concessions for themselves at your expense.’
Finally, the visitor asked if Christianity could bring ‘salvation to Africa’. Gandhi’s answer is worth quoting in full:
Christianity, as it is known and practised today, cannot bring salvation to your people. It is my conviction that those who today call themselves Christian do not know the true message of Jesus. I witnessed some of the horrors that were perpetrated on the Zulus during the Zulu rebellion. Because one man, Bambatta, their chief, had refused to pay his tax, the whole race was made to suffer. I was in charge of an ambulance corps. I shall never forget the lacerated backs of Zulus who had received stripes and were brought to us for nursing because no white nurse was prepared to look after them. And yet those who perpetrated all those cruelties called themselves Christians. They were ‘educated’, better dressed than the Zulus, but not their moral superiors.22
These remarks were a decisive advance on, and in some respects, a clear repudiation of, Gandhi’s older views on Africans. When, in the 1890s, he had first gone to South Africa, he was quite strongly prejudiced against Africans. In petitions to the colonial authorities, he had asked for Indians to be better treated than (what in his opinion were) the less civilized natives. However, over the two decades he lived in South Africa, Gandhi steadily shed these racist views. His journal, Indian Opinion, regularly carried reports about discrimination against Africans.23
Now, two decades after he had left Africa, Gandhi had deepened his understanding of Africans and their predicament. He no longer believed in a hierarchy of civilizations where Christians and Hindus were at the top and animists at the bottom. He had long since rejected his once benign view of imperialism; Europeans were not morally superior to Zulus; in pursuit of wealth and power, professedly ‘Christian’ nations could be entirely barbaric.
The most interesting aspect of Gandhi’s remarks was the clear recognition that, in South Africa, Indians were less exploited than Africans. Theirs was a ‘far bigger issue’. He knew Indians had a reputation for being collaborators, for cosying up to the whites in order to extract concessions for themselves. Indeed, his own early efforts in the 1890s had been of this nature. But over time, he came to reject such self-serving behaviour. He now argued that Indians should not seek to extract concessions from the rulers at the expense of Africans.
That Gandhi now wanted the ‘friendliest relations’ between Indians and Africans was a refreshing departure from his own practice. In his time in South Africa, the two communities had tended to stay apart. Within the Indian community, Gandhi himself had friends who were Tamil and Gujarati, Hindu, Muslim and Parsi, workers, hawkers and prosperous merchants. He had many European friends, these Christian, Jewish and Theosophist. But he had not a single African friend. However, since his return, and especially after the Salt March, people of colour had come to seek him out. At his ashram in Sevagram, he had entertained several African Americans, and now this black pastor from Johannesburg. In what he said to them, and how he received them, he demonstrated that he had comprehensively transcended the prejudices of his youth.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Somewhere between Conflict and Cooperation
I
In the summer of 1940, the Hindu–Muslim question was much on Gandhi’s mind. From the letters he was receiving, and the press cuttings he was reading, Gandhi had reached the melancholy conclusion ‘that I am believed to be the arch enemy of Islam and Indian Muslims’. He insisted that ‘in nothing that I am doing, saying or thinking, I am their enemy. They are blood-brothers and will remain so, though they may disown me for ever.’1
Pursuing the path of reconciliation, Maulana Azad had, as Congress president, written to Jinnah saying that his party was in favour of a national, multiparty government for the duration of the Second World War. He asked whether Jinnah would be open to the idea, or whether the Muslim League’s participation was conditional on the acceptance of their two-nation theory. Instead of clarifying the point, Jinnah wrote a vicious and hurtful reply which he then released to the press. ‘I refuse to discuss with you,’ said Jinnah to Azad,
by correspondence or otherwise, as you have compl
etely forfeited the confidence of Muslim India. Can’t you realise you are made a ‘Muslim showboy’ Congress President to give it colour that it is national and [thus] deceive foreign countries. You represent neither Muslims nor Hindus. The Congress is a Hindu body. If you have self-respect resign at once. You have done your worst against the League so far. You know you have hopelessly failed. Give it up.2
Jinnah was accusing Maulana Azad of being a traitor to his community, of siding with the rival community for his own personal gain. Such an accusation was damaging in normal circumstances; and its power was heightened further during this World War, when Pétain, in France, and Quisling, in Norway, had (so to say) abandoned their countrymen by making peace with the enemy.
Jinnah’s astonishing arrogance was noted by Srinivasa Sastri. ‘Nobody can gauge the precise extent of Jinnah’s influence,’ wrote Sastri to Gandhi. ‘As a man [and] as a politician, he has developed unexpectedly. It is no violence to truth to describe him today as a monster of personal arrogance and political charlatanry. Nevertheless Congress is unable to ignore or neglect him; how can the British Government do so?’
Sastri saw clearly that, for the British, ‘Muslim displeasure is [now] a greater minus than Congress adhesion is a plus’. So, he told Gandhi that ‘it profits little now to blame the Hindu–Muslim tension on Britain….We can’t abolish Jinnah, any more, than we can abolish Britons.’3
Although they had long since gone their separate ways, Sastri, Gandhi and Jinnah had all at one stage been groomed and mentored by Gopal Krishna Gokhale. Now, one Gokhale disciple, Sastri, was suggesting to a second, Gandhi, how to deal with a third, Jinnah. The Congress, he was saying, should seek a compromise with the Raj as well as with the Muslim League, instead of fighting both.
II
In the spring and summer of 1940, the Nazis swept through northern and western Europe. In the last week of May, Gandhi wrote to the viceroy suggesting that it might be prudent for the Allies to ‘sue for peace for the sake of humanity’ so that this ‘mad slaughter’ could stop. ‘I do not believe,’ remarked Gandhi, ‘Herr Hitler to be as bad as he is portrayed.’ If the idea appealed to the British government, he continued, ‘I am prepared to go to Germany or anywhere required to plead for peace not for this interest or that but for the good of mankind.’
The viceroy answered that the British government had ‘done their best in the past’ to avoid war. But now they could not ‘place any reliance in the light of events on any understanding or any promise that Herr Hitler might give to them. There is nothing for it…but to go on until victory is won.’
Once the British refused his offer to act as peacemaker, Gandhi wrote a piece in Harijan entitled ‘How to Combat Hitlerism’. The Germans ‘had robbed the small nations [of Europe] of their liberty’, but, asked Gandhi, ‘what will Hitler do with his victory? Can he digest so much power? Personally he will go as empty-handed as his not very remote predecessor Alexander. For the Germans he will have left not the pleasure of owning a mighty empire but the burden of sustaining its crushing weight. For they will not be able to hold all the conquered nations in perpetual subjection. And I doubt if the Germans of future generations will entertain unadulterated pride in the deeds for which Hitlerism will be deemed responsible.’
Having predicted the (eventual) fall of Hitler and Hitlerism, Gandhi yet wished that the Czechs, the Poles, the Norwegians, the French and the English had chosen to resist the Nazis not by arms but through non-violence. ‘I dare say,’ he wrote, ‘in that case Europe would have added several inches to its moral stature.’
In the last week of June, Gandhi travelled to Delhi to meet with the viceroy. The viceroy said he would ask London to announce that India would become a self-governing dominion (on the model of Australia and Canada) within a year of the war’s termination, subject to an agreed understanding on the status of the princes, on British commercial interests, and on the rights of minorities. Gandhi answered that this was too little too late, and asked that the British instead offer an unequivocal declaration of independence for India after the war.
The viceroy then said he hoped to expand his executive council, by inviting more Indians to join. Gandhi answered that no Congressman would serve on the council unless the commitment to full independence was made.
From Indian politics, the discussion turned to the global situation. Gandhi repeated his advice, earlier conveyed by letter, that Britain and Germany should begin peace negotiations to stop the senseless slaughter of innocents. With reports coming in of attacks on British towns by the Luftwaffe, the viceroy must have had a hard time containing his exasperation at hearing Gandhi’s ‘appeal to the British people to accept the non-violent method at this supreme juncture in their life as also the life of mankind’.4
Having failed with the viceroy, Gandhi now went public, with an article addressed to ‘every Briton’, urging them to fight Nazism not by the force of arms but through non-violence. He asked them ‘to invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take…possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds. If these gentlemen [sic] choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.’5
Gandhi claimed he was writing as ‘a lifelong and wholly disinterested friend of the British people’. But his public appeal was poorly timed. In the summer of 1940, the war had entered its most savage phase yet. The British were fighting desperately for survival. Russia and America, those two great and coming powers of the age, were in July 1940 still neutral. Stalin had signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler. Across the Atlantic, the Americans were waiting and watching, the pro-British elements among their political class countered by an equally influential group of isolationists. At this stage, for Gandhi to offer the advice he did was spectacularly ill-judged.
Gandhi sent a copy of his appeal to the viceroy, asking him to convey it to ‘the proper quarters’. Linlithgow did, later conveying to Gandhi the response of the British government that ‘with every appreciation of your motives they do not feel that the policy which you advocate is one which it is possible for them to consider, since in common with the whole Empire they are firmly resolved to prosecute the war to a victorious conclusion’.6
The argument between Gandhi and Linlithgow, or between the Congress and the Raj more generally, was an argument of right versus right. The war was professedly being fought for the defence of freedom and democracy. How then could the British deny freedom to India and Indians? The argument was compelling, except that, in the summer of 1940, Britain was battling heroically for its own survival. Its national honour was at stake in Europe just as much as India’s (putative) national honour was at stake in Asia.
It was this clash of national identities, indeed of national egos, that made the situation so painful, and a meeting ground so difficult to find. And Gandhi’s stubborn insistence that non-violence had an important place in international (as distinct from intra-national) affairs, with his unsolicited advice to Britons not to resist Hitler with arms, made it much more difficult still. Besides, virtually all British officials in India, from the viceroy downwards, had close family members on the battlefront in Europe. Some of these relatives had been killed, others captured, still others were missing in action.
Linlithgow and his advisers were temperamentally disinclined to abandon the British hold over India. In peacetime, they were happy to consider proposals for the (incrementally) greater involvement of Indians in government. But now, in the depths of this most bloody war, to be asked to promise India full independence was something they could never countenance.
On the Indian side, the war in Europe was unpopular not only because its aims were seen as hypocritical, but also because it bore down heavily on the population. In 1940 and 1941, Gandhi receiv
ed dozens of letters from correspondents across India, complaining of forcible collections for the War Fund. In some districts, peasants were made to buy war lottery tickets and students ‘V for Victory’ tickets. Motorcar owners were levied a war tax. Cows were seized and slaughtered to feed British troops. As large quantities of food and other commodities were transported to the theatres of war, their prices rose within India itself.7
III
On 10 May 1940, the Germans had begun their invasion of France. The government in Paris finally collapsed in the last week of June—the fall of France being by far the Nazis’ greatest triumph to date. In early July, the CWC met in Delhi, and ‘in the light of the latest developments in world affairs’, once more offered a compromise to the Government. If they committed themselves to complete independence for India after the end of the war, and meanwhile formed a provisional national government at the Centre, the Congress would ‘throw in its full weight in the efforts for the effective organization of the defence of the country’.
The resolution was drafted by C. Rajagopalachari, who had, from the outset of the war, warned against an attitude of confrontation with the government. It was supported by Jawaharlal Nehru, whose own hatred of the Nazis was of long standing, based on his own extended visits to Germany and other parts of Europe in the mid-1930s.
The resolution was also supported by Vallabhbhai Patel. Nehru, Patel and Rajaji were sometimes known as Gandhi’s ‘heart, hand, and head’ respectively. They were indisputably his closest political colleagues. But through this resolution, they were making it clear that they, as well as the Congress as a whole, did not share Gandhi’s absolute and fundamental commitment to non-violence.
Gandhi Page 71
