Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  This holy city of the Hindus had previously been witness to other speeches where Gandhi had asked his audience to grow beyond their prejudices. In 1916, then relatively unknown, Gandhi had spoken in Banaras of the importance of middle-class Indians identifying with the poor. In 1934, then famous and celebrated, he had spoken in Banaras of the importance of ending untouchability. Now, even more famous and respected, he spoke in Banaras of the importance of Hindu–Muslim unity.

  II

  On 11 February, Jamnalal Bajaj died of a cerebral haemorrhage. He was only fifty-two. The death affected Gandhi deeply. ‘Bapu is in greatest need of consolation,’ wrote Mahadev Desai to Rajagopalachari. ‘I think his grief is as deep and profound as it was on Maganlal Gandhi’s death.’

  Bajaj was, in effect, a fifth son to Gandhi. He had put his wealth at the service of the freedom struggle, his personality at the service of his leader. Other industrialists such as Ambalal Sarabhai and G.D. Birla had given Gandhi moral and material support. But they had not gone to jail on his behalf. Bajaj had, several times. He had also acted as the treasurer of the Congress, and was instrumental in Gandhi’s move to central India. Indeed, the ashram in Sevagram was built on what was once Bajaj’s ancestral property.

  In a fine tribute, Mahadev wrote of Bajaj that this ‘treasurer of the nation’s wealth was also the treasurer of the nation’s honour. He was among the very few capitalists who recklessly threw themselves in the fray for the nation’s freedom and bore the rigours of imprisonment every time the call had been made’. Bajaj had, by opening his family temple to ‘untouchables’, ‘risked the wrath of his hide-bound community’. He was equally committed to Hindu–Muslim unity, ‘for which he cheerfully bore heavy blows in the course of a riot…’4

  Soon after Bajaj died, Gandhi had a meeting with his family. He told the elder son, Kamalnayan, to take over and run his father’s businesses; and the younger son, Ramkrishna, to ‘dedicate your whole life to service and completing whatever work Jamnalal has left incomplete’.5

  In between these memorial meetings for Bajaj, Gandhi made a quick trip to Calcutta. The Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek was visiting India to canvass support for resistance to the Japanese. He had hoped to come to Sevagram to see Gandhi. In the event, this proved unfeasible, so Gandhi travelled to Calcutta to meet him.

  Chiang and his wife were staying at Government House. Gandhi was staying at the residence of the industrialist G.D. Birla, which is where the meeting took place, on 18 February 1942, with the Indian spinning away at his wheel while they talked. Madame Chiang had been educated in America, so Gandhi asked why she didn’t interpret instead of the official translator the Generalissimo had brought along. ‘Surely he did not marry an interpreter,’ responded Madame Chiang, ‘he married a woman.’

  Chiang told Gandhi that while non-violence might work against the British, it would never work against the Japanese. As Mahadev Desai (who was present) reported: ‘He was naturally full of indignation at what Japan had done and was doing in China, and he had grave fears of India having to go through China’s terrible fate if the Japanese overran India.’

  Writing to Vallabhbhai Patel, Gandhi summarized the gist of Chiang’s argument in these words: ‘Help the British anyhow. They are better than the others and will improve further hereafter.’6 Meanwhile, Chiang wrote in his diary that ‘after meeting Gandhi yesterday, I’m disappointed. My expectations were too great, but perhaps the pain of being ruled by the British has hardened his heart.’7

  As soon as Gandhi returned to Sevagram, Mahadev Desai fell ill. Mahadev had just completed twenty-five years in the service of Gandhi—and India. He was his master’s amanuensis and shadow, his secretary, nurse and cook, his translator and his interpreter.

  Mahadev had always worked ferociously hard. But in the past two years he had, if anything, worked even harder. He had been continuously on the road, travelling often to Delhi to negotiate with government officials and across the country to monitor the individual satyagraha movement. He was now utterly exhausted. His blood pressure had risen alarmingly. Gandhi advised him ‘to take prolonged rest’.8

  III

  Just before the meeting between Gandhi and Chiang Kai-shek, Singapore fell to the Japanese. This was a serious blow to the British; weeks later, in a blow to the Dutch, the Japanese overran the island of Java.

  In the first week of March, a Lahore Congressman named Jagannath wrote identical letters to Nehru and Rajagopalachari saying that the freedom of India was paramount, and everything else was secondary. Hence a struggle against the British had to be launched immediately. Nehru wanted his country to be independent too, but, as he now told the Lahore patriot: ‘We cannot isolate India from the rest of the world and I do think that it is important that we give our moral sympathy completely to China and Russia. Their defeat will be a tragedy from the larger point of view and from the point of view of the future of Indian freedom.’ Nehru thought that ‘we have become too obsessed with our hatred of British imperialism not to see this larger picture. Britain is already a second class power and the British Empire cannot survive. It will be dangerous for us to allow things to happen which lead to other empires being formed.’

  Rajaji likewise warned the Lahore Congressman that a struggle against the British now would only help the Axis powers. ‘I do not hope to get Indian independence,’ he wrote, ‘through the intervention of the Japanese at this juncture. We must get it if at all now by playing a[n] honourable part on the side of the British. If unfortunately the British lose and the Japanese take possession of India, we will have to be prepared for a new kind of dominion for a good long time to come.’9

  Gandhi did not recognize the Japanese threat as fully as Nehru and Rajaji. Besides, he still contemplated a mass non-violent struggle against the British. However, for the moment he went along with the Bardoli resolution of the working committee, which had sought to make one last effort for compromise with the British.

  As the Congress, led by Nehru and Rajaji, made fresh overtures towards the British, from the other side the Labour members of the British Cabinet also pushed for a rapprochement. The prime minister, Winston Churchill, was a diehard imperialist, who—as the secretary of state for India, Leo Amery, noted in April 1941—‘just dislikes the idea of anything being done in India at all…and just hopes that we can sit back and do nothing indefinitely’.10 However, Amery himself was less hostile to Indian aspirations, while his Cabinet colleagues from the Labour Party, such as Clement Attlee and Stafford Cripps, had long been committed to the independence of India. Attlee warned Churchill not to ‘accept and act on the crude imperialism of the Viceroy, not only because I think it is wrong, but because it is fatally short-sighted and suicidal’.11 Cripps, who shared Attlee’s views in this regard, was in addition a friend of Nehru’s and Gandhi’s; shortly after war broke out in September 1939, he had come to India to meet them both.

  Meanwhile, left-wing anti-colonialists in Britain were urging an immediate pact with Indian nationalists. Writing in the Observer in February 1942, George Orwell said the Indian people could be won over only by ‘some concrete unmistakable act of generosity, by giving something away that cannot afterwards be taken back’. Orwell himself offered a three-part proposal: ‘First, let India be given immediate Dominion status, with the right to secede after the war, if she so desires. Secondly, let the leaders of the principal political parties be invited at once to form a National Government, to remain in office for the duration of the war. Thirdly, let India enter into formal military alliance with Britain and the countries allied to Britain.’12

  In March, the British Cabinet finally decided to send Stafford Cripps to India to seek a provisional settlement. The brief he was given promised Dominion Status after the war had ended—rather than immediately, as both the Congress and Orwell had urged. When the war had been won, a constitution would be designed by an elected body of Indians, albeit with each province havi
ng the right to accept or reject it. Meanwhile, the British-controlled Government of India would ‘bear the responsibility’ for ‘organizing to the full the military, moral and material resources of India’ in prosecuting the war, albeit ‘with the co-operation of the peoples of India’.13

  IV

  Stafford Cripps arrived in New Delhi on 23 March. Four days later he met Gandhi, who had travelled to the capital. The conversation was civil, but there remained a fundamental disagreement. Gandhi thought that the clause allowing provinces to reject the Constitution ‘was an invitation to the Moslems to create a Pakistan’.14

  Cripps spent three weeks in India. He met with leaders of the Sikhs, the Muslims, the princes and the Depressed Classes. And he spoke extensively to leaders of the Congress. Though he met both Gandhi and Nehru, Cripps spent more time with Maulana Azad, then Congress president. Azad, for his part, consulted regularly with Nehru (and to a lesser extent with Gandhi) on his talks with Cripps.

  Both Cripps and Azad brought an open mind to the discussions. Both wished for a compromise, both acted in good faith. Cripps, like Attlee and other senior Labour leaders, believed that the Allied cause would be given more legitimacy if the Congress, the leading voice for freedom in Britain’s largest colony, was brought on board. Azad, like Nehru, Rajaji and Gandhi, empathized with the British predicament; like Nehru and Rajaji (but unlike Gandhi), he had no doctrinal commitment to absolute non-violence, and so was willing, if offered honourable terms, to participate in the war.

  Cripps and Azad spoke for many hours and wrote many letters to one another. The Congress, said its president, had three major disagreements with the British Cabinet. First, whatever Linlithgow and Churchill might claim, the Congress spoke for far more than caste Hindus. Second, while the Congress was happy to form a national government with the Muslim League and other parties, it hoped for a clear devolution of power to Indian hands, with the viceroy being to the government what the king was to the British Cabinet. Third, the Congress believed that if it had to join the war effort, an Indian member of the viceroy’s executive council should bear ultimate responsibility for the defence of the country.

  The third point proved to be the stickiest. For, the British would not trust anyone but an Englishman with the defence of India. Cripps suggested that the existing commander-in-chief of the Indian Army be made war member in the executive council, with an Indian member taking on other responsibilities such as ‘public relations’, ‘all canteen organizations’, ‘stationery, printing, and forms for the Army’, etc. Azad (and the Congress) found this condescending, and even humiliating. The C-in-C could remain in charge of military matters, but the defence member had to be Indian. For, as Azad pointed out, ‘the chief functions of a National Government must necessarily be to organize defence, both intensively and on the widest popular basis, and to create [a] mass psychology of resistance to an invader’.15

  Liberals like Sapru and Jayakar, placed between the Congress and the Raj, told the viceroy that ‘the adoption of an Indian Defence Member will have a great effect on Indian psychology. It will inspire the people with confidence…We think that the presence of such a Member will, far from weakening the military position in India, strengthen it, and the political effects of this step will be very wholesome.’16

  However, an Indian as defence member was not acceptable to Linlithgow. The viceroy wrote to the secretary of state for India that ‘morale in [the] sense of willingness to suffer for a national cause is a non-existent quality in India and could not be evoked by any political concessions. Among Indians and especially Hindus who preponderate in threatened areas the ruling instinct is self-preservation and the preservation of family and property.’

  This was an extraordinary comment to make, especially at a time when Indians (many of them Hindus) were winning battles for the British in North Africa.17 Yet, it was entirely in character. Linlithgow had no sympathy with the Cripps Mission, no desire at all to build bridges with the Congress. While Cripps wished desperately to bring the Congress on board, Linlithgow resisted every attempt to make the government more representative of Indian interests.

  On 12 April, when it was clear that the Cripps Mission had failed, Jawaharlal Nehru addressed a press conference in Delhi. Nehru said the Congress made it clear to Cripps that on the battlefield per se the (British) commander-in-chief would and should have full autonomy. But having an Indian as defence member or minister would ‘make it a popular war’, would ‘make every man and woman do something for the war’. Only then would ‘India feel that she was fighting her own war for her freedom’.

  The request was refused; meanwhile, Cripps, who had begun these discussions talking of the formation of an interim ‘National Government’ composed of Indians, soon reverted to speaking of an expanded viceroy’s ‘Executive Council’. Nehru said he was ‘amazed’ at this change of nomenclature. Had, he asked, Sir Stafford ‘been pulled up by his senior partner in England or someone here’? It was a pertinent question. The Labourite in Cripps was committed to Indian independence, but his prime minister did not envisage the British leaving India any time soon (if at all), and nor, of course, did the incumbent viceroy himself.18

  When Churchill heard that Cripps’s talks with the Congress leaders had finally collapsed, he danced with glee around the Cabinet room. ‘No tea with treason,’ he declared: ‘No truck with American or British Labour sentimentality, but back to the solemn—and exciting—business of war.’19

  The most acute contemporary assessment of the Cripps Mission was offered by the radical British journalist H.N. Brailsford. Cripps went to India with good intentions, wrote Brailsford, but ‘when he asked the Indians for an act of faith, the sour memories of all that has been amiss from Clive’s day to Churchill’s surged up, to wreck our hopes and their ambitions’.

  Brailsford pointed out that ‘liberal Indians, who follow international affairs closely, were as hostile to the Axis as we are ourselves, but we had wounded them by making India a belligerent without her consent’. Cripps’s offer had promised the substance of ‘independence’ but had refrained from using that ‘magic word’, had outlined the elements of a ‘National Government’ but without using ‘that inspiring term’.20

  V

  In April 1942, soon after Stafford Cripps returned home empty-handed, the Japanese bombed ports on the east coast, including Vizagapatnam and Kakinada. The war was coming closer to India. American troops were arriving to assist the beleaguered British. Writing in Harijan, Gandhi said the ‘introduction of foreign soldiers’ into India was ‘a positive danger thoroughly to be deplored and distrusted’. He thought it would be better ‘for Britain to offer battle in the West and leave the East to adjust her own position’. If the Japanese or the Nazis then chose to invade India, claimed Gandhi, ‘they will find that they have to hold more than they can in their iron hoop. They will find it much more difficult than Britain has. Their very rigidity will strangle them.’21

  In the last week of April, the AICC met in Allahabad, to consider their future course of action. Gandhi did not attend, but sent a draft resolution which asked the British to withdraw and leave India to Indians. Nehru dissented, saying the proposal, if accepted by the Congress, would ‘inevitably make the world think that we are passively lining up with the Axis powers’. Nehru felt that ‘the whole thought and action of the draft is one of favouring Japan. It may not be conscious…It is Gandhiji’s feeling that Japan and Germany will win. This feeling unconsciously governs his decision. The approach in the draft is different from mine.’

  Nehru was here being slightly unfair to Gandhi. It was not so much that he felt the Japanese would win, but that he thought his own time on earth was running out. The deaths of Andrews, Tagore and, most recently, Jamnalal Bajaj, had brought home to him his own mortality. For some time, Gandhi had been planning another mass struggle against colonialism. He had kept that on hold so long as there was any hope of compromise with
the British. Now that hope had disappeared, with the failure of the Cripps Mission. Hence his demand that the British leave India to the Indians.

  At the Allahabad meeting, the socialist Achyut Patwardhan vigorously disagreed with Nehru. ‘Jawaharlalji’s attitude,’ he claimed, ‘will lead to abject and unconditional co-operation with British machinery.’ Noting the growing presence of American troops on Indian soil, Patwardhan said, ‘I doubt America is a progressive force.’ Rajendra Prasad, speaking as a long-term Gandhi loyalist, added that ‘we have to strengthen Bapu’s hands’. The Assam leader Gopinath Bordoloi and the Oriya Congressman Biswanath Das also felt that it was right and proper to ask the British to withdraw.

  The younger socialists favoured Gandhi’s draft because they hated Britain (and America). The older conservatives favoured it because to them Bapu’s word was God. But one long-term Gandhian held out. This was Rajagopalachari, who said ‘our reaction to [the] evils of Britain should not make us lose our sense of perspective’ and ‘run into the arms of the Japanese’.22 Later, writing to Gandhi on his return to Madras, Rajaji told him that ‘your as—yet—uncrystallised ideas of concentrating on moral opposition to Britain are most unfortunate. I have worked with you so long and have I been an altogether bad counsellor? Do not do it for God’s sake….Your appeal [for the British to withdraw from India] will not be responded to….The only effect will be national weakening of any opposition such as there is to Japan and great moral assistance to the enemy at a most critical moment. Do not take the Congress that way at the end of all these years.’23