Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  VI

  On 11 May 1942, Gandhi issued an appeal through the pages of Harijan ‘to every Briton’. He recalled here that at the start of his ‘public career’, he had written ‘An Open Letter to Every Briton in South Africa’ about the disabilities faced by Indians in that land. Now, more than forty years later, he asked ‘every Briton to support me in my appeal to the British at this very hour to retire from every Asiatic and African possession and at least from India’.24

  The reference to his early petition in South Africa was a reminder, not least to himself, of how long Gandhi had been in public life. From 1893 to 1914, he had fought steadily for greater rights for Indians in South Africa. From 1915 to 1942, he had campaigned for Hindu–Muslim harmony, for the emancipation of low castes and women, and for the freedom of India from British rule. This last was the campaign that had attracted him the most followers within India, and the most attention outside India. Yet, it remained unfulfilled. Hence this desperate appeal to the British to quit.

  Three days after he drafted this appeal, a representative of the News Chronicle interviewed Gandhi in Bombay. He asked how the administration would function if the British did as he had asked, and simply withdrew. The British, replied Gandhi, ‘have to leave India in God’s hands, but in modern parlance to anarchy, and that anarchy may lead to internecine warfare for a time or to unrestrained dacoities. From these a true India will rise in the place of the false one we see.’25

  Gandhi made this startling statement on 14 May; six days later, Burma fell to the Japanese. The war was coming closer and closer. The several hundred thousand Indians who lived in Singapore, Malaya and Burma had now witnessed it at first-hand. They had experienced the brutality of the Japanese, but also the amorality of the British, most notably in Burma, where the whites were evacuated on ships, leaving Indians to find their own way back to their homeland by trekking across hill and forest, many perishing in the process.26

  Many of the Indians in South East Asia were Tamils. News of their plight reached their fellow Tamil, C. Rajagopalachari. The Japanese advance made Rajaji even more determined to find a way to cooperate with the British. He sought and obtained Gandhi’s permission to go see Jinnah in Bombay. Jinnah told Rajaji that he wanted ‘separate sovereignty’ for areas in which Muslims were in a majority, to be ratified or rejected by a referendum after the war. If the Congress conceded this, Jinnah’s Muslim League would form a coalition government with them, so long as the British then agreed to leave India once the war was won. When this proposal was put to Gandhi, he was lukewarm, since it might pave the way for the partition of India on religious lines.27

  On 28 May, a representative of The Hindu asked Gandhi about the report that he had ‘matured plans for some big offensive’. He replied: ‘There are certainly many plans floating in my brain. But just now I merely allow them to float in my brain.’ Noting that he had ‘never believed in secrecy’, he said that, as in the past, ‘British authority will have a full knowledge of anything I wish to do before I enforce it’.28

  VII

  In the first week of June 1942, Louis Fischer came to Sevagram. Fischer was a famous (and controversial) American journalist, who had lived for many years in Soviet Russia and admired Stalin before the truth about that brutal dictator belatedly dawned on him. In the 1940s, on the rebound, he visited India, and found his way to the village home of the subcontinent’s most famous (and most controversial) man.

  Before coming to see Gandhi, Louis Fischer had called on the viceroy. Linlithgow told the visiting American that had Gandhi ‘remained the saint that he was in South Africa he would have done a lot of good to humanity. But unfortunately politics absorbed him here and have made him vain and egoistical.’29

  Fischer spent a week in Sevagram, where he had long discussions with Gandhi, recording his words as he spoke, later writing them up as a short book. The first question, however, was posed by Gandhi himself. It was: ‘You have lived in Russia for fourteen years. What is your opinion of Stalin?’ Fischer answered: ‘Very able and very ruthless.’ When Gandhi asked whether Stalin was ‘as ruthless as Hitler’, the American replied: ‘At least.’

  The conversation then turned to the Cripps Mission and why it had failed. Gandhi explained the sources of disagreement; stressing, as Azad and Nehru had done to Cripps himself, that ‘there must be civilian control of the military’. He gave this striking example: ‘If the British in Burma wish to destroy the golden [Shwedagon] pagoda because it is a beacon to Japanese airplanes, then I say you cannot destroy it, because when you destroy it you destroy something in the Burmese soul.’

  The next day, Gandhi told Fischer that while the Congress had asked for the constitution of a provisional national government of all parties, British and American troops could remain in India for the course of the war. ‘I do not wish Japan to win the war,’ he said, emphatically. ‘I do not want the Axis to win.’ He added that ‘Britain is morally indefensible while she rules India’.

  Fischer interpreted this (correctly) as a major climbdown from Gandhi’s earlier position on the subject. From ‘The British Must Go’, he was now saying, ‘The British army can stay and conduct the war from India’. Gandhi was now ‘ready to tolerate the war effort and, under certain circumstances, support it’.

  Asked by Fischer about Hindu–Muslim relations, Gandhi said that in recent years, ‘thanks to the British government, the divergence between the two communities has been widened’. Gandhi himself believed that ‘in actual life it is impossible to separate us into two nations’. Across India, Hindus and Muslims lived in the same villages; they ate the same food; spoke the same language. He acknowledged the existence of conflict, such as over cow protection and music before mosques, pointing out, however, that ‘it is our superstitions that create the trouble and not our separate nationalities’.

  The next stop on Louis Fischer’s Indian journey was the princely state of Hyderabad. On the long train ride through the Deccan, he reflected on his conversations with Gandhi. ‘Part of the pleasure of intimate intellectual contact with Gandhi,’ thought Fischer, ‘is that he really opens his mind and allows the interviewer to see how the machine really works.’ Other politicians chose their words carefully, so as to ‘bring their ideas out in final perfect form so that they are least exposed to attack’. Gandhi, on the other hand, ‘gives immediate expression to each step in his thinking’. It was as though a writer was to publish the first draft of his story, then the second, then a third, changing his mind and refining his arguments for all to see.

  Fischer had also met Jinnah several times. He admired his intellect, and knew him to be personally incorruptible. Yet, whereas Gandhi spoke spontaneously, Jinnah, wrote Fischer,

  talked at me. He was trying to convince me. When I put a question to him I felt as though I had turned on a phonograph record. I had heard it all before or could have read it in the literature he gave me. But when I asked Gandhi something I felt that I had started a creative process. I could see and hear his mind work. With Jinnah I could only hear the needle scratch the phonograph record. But I could follow Gandhi as he moved to a conclusion. He is, therefore, much more exciting [for an interviewer] than Jinnah. If you strike right with Gandhi you open a new pocket of thought. An interview with him is a voyage of discovery, and he himself is sometimes surprised at the things he says.30

  VIII

  In the second week of June, Jawaharlal Nehru visited Sevagram. He and Gandhi spent the better part of three days closeted together. Their talks remained private, but it appears that Gandhi finally persuaded Nehru that the time had come for one last struggle against the British. However, Nehru exacted a price: he got Gandhi to write a letter to Chiang Kai-shek, explaining that while India wanted freedom, it would never choose the Japanese over the British.

  In his letter to Chiang, Gandhi offered sympathy and admiration for the heroic resistance of the Chinese against the Japanese, n
ow in its sixth year. ‘My appeal to the British power to withdraw from India,’ said Gandhi, ‘is not meant in any shape or form to weaken India’s defence against the Japanese or embarrass you in your struggle.’

  Nehru had persuaded his mentor to abandon, for this specific purpose and aim, his commitment to non-violence. So Gandhi told Chiang that if India gained its independence immediately, ‘I would personally agree that the Allied Powers might, under treaty with us, keep their armed forces in India and use the country as a base for operations against the threatened Japanese attack’.

  Chiang, in reply, sent a brief telegram indicating that he desired the status quo to continue. The war, he said, ‘appears to be at [a] critical stage’, and so ‘nothing should take place in India to harm prosecution of the war and which would also harm India in those countries sympathetic to her’.31

  Meanwhile, Gandhi offered the same proposal in a wired interview to Reuters, as well as in an article in Harijan. Prompted by Nehru, he said that an independent India would sign a treaty with the Allies, aimed specifically at repulsing the Japanese. ‘India must not,’ he remarked, ‘by any act of hers short of national suicide let China down or put the Allied powers in jeopardy.’ He wished ‘British opinion could realize that [the] Independence of India changes [the] character of [the] Allied cause and ensures [its] speedier victory’.32

  Gandhi stood firm on his demand for immediate independence. But, in deference to Nehru, he had not allowed his own pacifism to get in the way of a coordinated response to the Japanese. As he told a group of British Quakers visiting Sevagram in late June, he ‘was confident that a free India will wish to keep the British and even the American soldiers in the country in order to resist a Japanese invasion, as there is no prospect that a free India will accept his [Gandhi’s] pacifist convictions’.33

  IX

  While Gandhi, in Sevagram, was planning his next move, a correspondent of the BBC was in Bombay, speaking to his chief political rivals. In a single week in June 1942, the BBC reporter met Ambedkar, Jinnah and the Hindu Mahasabha leader V.D. Savarkar. Ambedkar was angry with the BBC and its Indian arm, All India Radio, ‘for not giving him a platform’. He demanded that the AIR give Gandhi, Jinnah and himself the opportunity to each deliver one talk a month. Ambedkar told the visiting journalist: ‘We scrap and revile each other in print, why not on the air? Public meetings do no harm, why are you afraid of air combat? At present India is all in sects, and each sect listens to its titular deity. I am the titular deity of the Depressed Classes. I also want to talk to the Hindus. For 2,000 years the Brahmins have been carrying out propaganda: I want to have my propaganda against them, which Hindus will listen to. They may not the first time, or the second, but one time they will listen. And I know I can persuade them.’

  Ambedkar was arguing that he was as important a player in Indian politics as Gandhi and Jinnah, and that like them, he commanded the loyalty of tens of millions. The claim was tenuous—at any rate in 1943. At this time, Ambedkar commanded the support of his own Mahar community in western India, and of sections of the Depressed Classes elsewhere. He was by no means an all-India leader in the sense that Gandhi had been since 1920, and Jinnah since 1937.

  While undoubtedly as personally courageous as Gandhi, and as intellectually alert as Jinnah, Ambedkar was not—in 1943—as politically consequential as they. Yet, his belief in himself was so strong that he demanded parity with the two most influential leaders of the time. He thus represented the political landscape in India as a three-cornered contest, between the Hindus, the Muslims and the Depressed Classes, with Gandhi, Jinnah and himself being the titular deities of these three sects respectively.

  The next day, the BBC reporter met Savarkar, who ‘was very anxious for me to put the Hindu Mahasabha case in England’. Savarkar claimed that while the ‘English thought of Muslims and Congress’, the contest now was between ‘Muslims and Hindu Mahasabha. Congress is nothing any longer.’

  Later the same day, the reporter called on Jinnah. The Muslim League leader argued that a united India would mean a Hindu Raj, and that was something Muslims could not accept. Jinnah charged the Congress with wanting ‘Hindu caste rule’, adding that Ambedkar and the ‘untouchables’ ‘are much more bitter about the Hindus than I am’. Jinnah said he had been in public life for three decades, and ‘after years of patiently working it out’ had ‘decided for Pakistan’.34

  Jinnah’s commitment to the idea of Pakistan was manifest in many public statements made by him since the resolution demanding a separate homeland was passed by the Muslim League in Lahore in March 1940. In November of that year, he said in New Delhi that ‘Pakistan is our sheet anchor’. The Congress, he insisted, ‘must give up their dream of a Hindu raj and agree to divide India into [a] Hindu homeland and [a] Muslim homeland’. The next month he told an audience in Karachi that ‘Pakistan is the only solution of Hindu–Muslim tension’. Speaking in Madras in April 1941, he claimed that not since the fall of the Mughal Empire had Muslims in India been ‘so well organised and so alive and so politically conscious’ as they now were. In February 1942, he wrote to a British MP that ‘the partition of India demand, the Muslim idea, is not only a political reality, it is our creed and our article of faith’. In April, he rejected the Cripps Mission since in its proposals ‘Pakistan was not conceded unequivocally and the right of Muslim self-determination was denied’.

  To the Congress and the British, Jinnah insisted that the partition of India into what he called Hindu and Muslim homelands was the only solution the League would accept. Meanwhile, he told his followers that they must be prepared to fight to realize that ideal. Speaking to a group of Muslim students, he remarked: ‘Muslims must assert themselves in this country and outside and although our enemies…are carrying on false propaganda against us yet, I am sure, no power on earth can resist the onward rush of 80 millions [of Muslims] who are determined to materialize their ideal of Pakistan and to stand united on a soil which they can call and claim as their homeland.’35

  X

  As Jinnah grew more uncompromising on the question of Pakistan, Gandhi, prodded by Nehru, was making a last-ditch attempt at finding a meeting ground with the British. Hence his abandonment of non-violence, if only in return for a clear declaration of Indian independence. Having written in this vein to Chiang Kai-shek, he now wrote to the one man who did have some influence on the British and their recalcitrant prime minister—namely, the American President, Franklin Roosevelt. Gandhi knew that if he posted the letter, the British censor would read it, and perhaps (as had happened previously with his letter to Hitler) not allow it to reach its recipient. Even if the censor passed the letter on, the staff at the White House might not show it to Roosevelt. So, to make absolutely sure the American President saw it, Gandhi sent the letter by personal courier, through Louis Fischer, who was now going back to his homeland.

  Gandhi’s letter to FDR began by noting that many of his compatriots had been educated in America, while he himself had ‘profited greatly by the writings of Thoreau and Emerson’. Gandhi then added that despite his ‘intense dislike of British rule’, he had ‘numerous personal friends in England whom I love as dearly as my own people’. Besides, he had been educated there. Therefore, said Gandhi to Roosevelt, he had ‘nothing but good wishes for your country and Great Britain’.

  Gandhi told Roosevelt that ‘the Allied declaration that the Allies are fighting to make the world safe for freedom of the individual and for democracy sounds hollow so long as India and, for that matter, Africa are exploited by Great Britain and America has the Negro problem in her own home’. He proposed to Roosevelt that if India was made independent, then the Allies could keep their troops in the country, ‘not for keeping internal order but for preventing Japanese aggression and defending China’. Gandhi said while he personally abhorred war and violence, he recognized that not everyone had ‘a living faith in non-violence’. Therefore, he was willing, prov
ided India was offered freedom, to countenance armed resistance to the Japanese to be conducted from Indian soil.36

  Gandhi’s letter to Roosevelt was dated 1 July 1942. In the same week, the members of the CWC descended on Sevagram. They had nine days of intense discussions, following which they passed a resolution on 14 July, asking for the withdrawal of British power from India. The working committee noted that ever since the war began, the Congress had ‘steadily followed a policy of non-embarrassment’. Yet, the British had responded by seeking to strengthen their hold over India. The Congress, having patiently waited three years, now made a final offer, namely, that the British should grant immediate independence, whereupon, in exchange, any ‘provisional Government’ of free India would allow Allied troops to continue to use Indian soil to fight the Japanese.

  The working committee hoped the British would accept this ‘very reasonable and just proposal’, made ‘not only in the interest of India but also that of Britain and the cause of freedom, to which the United Nations proclaim their adherence’. However, if the appeal was rejected, then the Congress would ‘be reluctantly compelled to utilize all the non-violent strength it might have gathered…for the vindication of the political rights and liberty’. This struggle, said the resolution, would ‘inevitably be under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi’, and the final decision as to how it was to be conducted was to be taken at a meeting of the AICC, scheduled in Bombay on 7 August.37

  Present in Sevagram was a large group of journalists, both Indian and foreign. Immediately after the working committee meeting ended, they crowded around Gandhi, peppering him with questions. The interrogation began on the evening of 14 July, continuing well into the next day. Gandhi was asked what methods of struggle he had planned. All, he answered, so long as they were non-violent. He also said that he might, if arrested, resort to fasting, adding: ‘Though I would try to avoid such an extreme step so far as possible.’