A British journalist (whom Mahadev Desai observed was ‘full of the doubts and fears of the average Englishman’) asked Gandhi whether, if the viceroy asked him to come to Delhi, he would go to meet him. ‘Oh yes,’ he replied. ‘Would the campaign collapse if [the] Government sent you and thousands of followers to jail?’ now asked the anxious Englishman. Gandhi replied: ‘I hope not, on the contrary it should gain strength if it has any vitality.’
A journalist from the Chicago Daily News asked Gandhi whether he was apprehensive that the Congress’s decision would ‘antagonize American opinion’. Perhaps it might, he answered, but why, he asked in turn, should the American or even the British people ‘fight shy of a just demand for absolute freedom’? As for the provisional government that he envisaged, Gandhi said he hoped the Muslim League would also participate in its formation; at any rate, ‘no one party would take the lead’.38
XI
A conspicuous absentee from the working committee meeting in Sevagram was C. Rajagopalachari, Gandhi’s ‘Southern Commander’, who was now at odds with his master and his party.
Rajaji had been opposed to a fresh round of civil disobedience. Now, reading the reports of the working committee meeting, he wrote to Gandhi that the resolution demanding the British leave India was fraught with danger, for it asked for ‘the withdrawal of the government without a simultaneous replacement by another’. If put into effect, the proposal would lead to ‘anarchy’ and ‘wide-spread self-inflicted suffering’. Rather than demand the British quit, said Rajaji, the Congress and the Muslim League should come together, and press for an interim national government ‘which can take over power and preserve the continuity of the state’.39
Rajaji’s critique was worded soberly, as was his wont. More anguished was a letter written by a Polish woman who had converted to Hinduism and joined Ramana Maharshi’s ashram in Tiruvannamalai. She charged Gandhi with betraying freedom and humanity by planning to launch his Quit India movement. Anything that hindered the Allied war effort, she argued, ‘prolongs the sufferings of 250 million people under the Nazis’ rule of whose moral and physical agonies you have not even the slightest idea; comparing [sic] with them Indians are till now in a heaven of peace and freedom…’
The lady in Tiruvannamalai had received reports from her native Poland of the brutality of its Nazi occupiers. A satyagraha at this juncture, she insisted, would be akin to stabbing the British in the back. ‘If an ordinary politician, a worldly, narrow nationalist—like Subhas Bose—would push towards such [a] movement,’ she remarked, ‘it would at least be logical from the worldly political point of view—justified; as crude nationalism cares little for Humanity, and for the repercussions of its own exploits on other nations. But one who claims to be a spiritual man, to care for the religious spirit, for Truth…It is impossible to understand.’40
While long-time admirers expressed their disappointment directly, Gandhi’s long-term adversaries, the officials of the British Raj, were quietly planning their own response. In a meeting held in the home department on 25 July, it was decided that action would be taken when the AICC met in Bombay in August. As soon as this larger body ratified the resolution asking the British to quit India, the government would detain Gandhi, Nehru and other ‘dangerous members of the Working Committee’. These arrests, it was decided, ‘should not be made at the meeting, but as quietly as possible afterward, preferably during the night’, perhaps at the railway station if some members were leaving Bombay by train.
The officials planned to confine the working committee leaders in one place, but Gandhi in another. Back in May 1941, the government had, in anticipation of such an eventuality, leased a large double-storeyed house in Poona owned by the Aga Khan. Some officials thought Gandhi should be sent, as so often before, to the Yerwada prison. Others argued that the ‘Aga Khan Palace’ (as it was called) would be a better choice, not least because the Americans would be less cross if they knew Gandhi was, as it were, in a palace. To further sugar the pill, Gandhi’s close companions in the ashram, such as Mahadev, Mira, Pyarelal and Sushila Nayar, would be allowed to live with him.41
Such were the opinions of the officials; meanwhile, their boss, the viceroy, had some interesting ideas of his own. Linlithgow thought that ‘if a break is forced upon us by the Congress’, the government should put Gandhi in the Aga Khan Palace, old and ailing members of the working committee elsewhere in India, and dispatch the rest to a British colony in Africa (perhaps Uganda or Nyasaland) for the duration of the war. The viceroy believed that ‘a dramatic move of this nature might well produce a deep impression on followers of the Congress and create a degree of confidence which would be of value among other individuals who, from fear that there would be an early settlement with [the] Congress, may be disposed to give us more lukewarm assistance than might otherwise be the case’.42
The British commander-in-chief of the army in India warmed to Linlithgow’s proposal. He proposed to send Nehru, Patel and company in flying boats, promising that the Royal Air Force (RAF) ‘would arrange European style food for the whole party. If Indian food is required I don’t quite know what we would do, but that must be thought about.’ A senior RAF man he consulted ‘rather pooh-poohs the idea of any of the gentlemen going on hunger-strike in the flying-boat; he says travelling at 12,000 feet will soon put a stop to that’.43
Also enthusiastic was the governor of Nyasaland. He had identified a good hotel at Dedza, 120 miles north of Zomba ‘in high healthy climate’ which could be made ready in a week to house the deportees. The hotel was owned and managed by Europeans, had electricity and hot water, and was well-furnished. The governor would provide an African guard under a European officer.44
However, the governors of India’s major provinces came out strongly against the viceroy’s scheme. The governor of Bihar said sending Nehru and Patel to Africa would ‘be regarded as unduly harsh’, leading to ‘a serious revulsion of even moderate feeling in Bihar’. The governor of Bombay likewise remarked that deportation would ‘shock moderate opinion in India and alienate support from us’. Only the governor of the Punjab (where the Congress had the least influence) was in favour.45
Linlithgow now reluctantly dropped his proposal. The working committee members would be sent instead to the Ahmednagar Fort, in the Deccan, which was surrounded by a moat and approached by a drawbridge, so that (even though they were in India and not Africa) the prisoners would still be ‘completely cut off from the outside world’.46
XII
In the third week of July 1942, Gandhi published a letter addressed to the Asian nation whose army was pressing upon India. Published in several Japanese papers, and also in English (the language in which it was originally written), this began by Gandhi squarely stating: ‘I intensely dislike your attack upon China. From your lofty height you have descended to imperial ambition.’
Gandhi told the Japanese that their wish ‘to take equal rank with the great powers of the world’ was a ‘worthy ambition’. Yet, their ‘unprovoked attack against China’, their ‘merciless devastation of that great and ancient land’, was ‘surely an unwarranted excess of the ambition’. Noting the reports of a planned attack on India, Gandhi asked the Japanese ‘to make no mistake about the fact that you will be sadly disillusioned if you believe that you will receive a willing welcome from India’.47
The open letter to the Japanese had followed upon a public appeal to the British, and private letters written to Chiang and FDR. Gandhi wanted to launch what he knew to be his last struggle with clean hands. A week after his appeal to the Japanese, Gandhi printed an appeal to the Muslims of India. Jinnah had recently said that ‘Pakistan is an article of faith with Muslim India and we depend upon nobody but ourselves for the achievement of our goal’. Quoting this remark, Gandhi observed that ‘today there is neither Pakistan nor Hindustan. So I say to all India, let us first convert into the original Hindustan and then adjust all rival claims.’
Gandhi then made a direct appeal to Jinnah. ‘If the Quaid-e-Azam really wants a settlement,’ he wrote, ‘I am more than willing and so is the Congress.’ He urged Jinnah to ‘accept the Congress President’s offer that Congress and League representatives should put their heads together and never part till they have reached a settlement’.48
Jinnah did not reply to Gandhi directly. But, in a public statement issued on 31 July, he said the Congress’s ultimatum to the Raj was ‘the culminating point of the policy and programme of the Hindu Congress of blackmailing the British and coercing them’ to transfer power to the Congress, thereby ‘throwing the Muslims and other minorities at the mercy’ of ‘a Hindu Raj’.49
Meanwhile, Gandhi’s other great rival, B.R. Ambedkar, had been recently elevated to the viceroy’s executive council. In a speech in Bombay on 22 July, he said it was the ‘patriotic duty’ of all Indians to resist the Congress, for the struggle they wished to launch would create ‘anarchy and chaos’ at a time when ‘aggressive Japan [is] standing right at the gates of India’. Ambedkar was in ‘no doubt that to start [a] civil disobedience movement at such a juncture would be directly playing the game of the enemy. It is a game we will not allow the Congress or anybody else to play. It is a game of treachery to India.’ He continued: ‘I yield to none in my desire for the freedom of this country, but I do not want to drive out the British to help [the] establishment of Japanese rule over this country.’50
Gandhi was perhaps not entirely surprised by what Jinnah and Ambedkar had said. What may have worried him more was the fact that President Roosevelt had not yet replied to him. And the British had turned their backs on Gandhi altogether. The Labour Party, once so sympathetic to the Congress and to Indian independence, now called the working committee resolution ‘proof of political irresponsibility’. The British papers, conservative, liberal and socialist, all united in attacking Gandhi and the Congress.51 Their own national existence was at peril; at this time, the British had no thought for people of other nations still struggling to be born.
Gandhi now made one last appeal, to the people of the United States, a country he had never visited, but where he knew he had many admirers. This was written on 3 August, on the train to Bombay, where he was going to attend the meeting of the AICC. He told the Americans of his admiration for Thoreau, Ruskin and Tolstoy, three writers from the three nations now battling Hitler and the Nazis. ‘After having imbibed and assimilated the message of [Ruskin’s] Unto This Last’, he wrote, ‘I could not be guilty of approving of Fascism or Nazism, whose cult is suppression of the individual and his liberty.’
Gandhi warned Americans against the ‘interested propaganda’ that painted him ‘as a hypocrite and enemy of Britain under disguise’. He also reminded them that, by making common cause with Britain in the war, ‘you cannot therefore disown responsibility for anything that her representatives do in India’. He therefore urged America, and Americans, ‘to look upon the immediate recognition of India’s independence as a war measure of first class magnitude’.52
XIII
That Gandhi, and the Congress, now planned a major countryside struggle against colonial rule was a matter of public record. That some, perhaps many, Indians opposed the idea was also known. That the British would act swiftly and punitively was also understood. What remained private at the time, and largely unknown since, was this—that, in July 1942, Gandhi was actively contemplating a hunger fast.
Gandhi had fasted many times, on occasion to atone for a lapse of one or more of his disciples, on other occasions to compel Indians to change their ways, so as to promote Hindu–Muslim harmony (as in Delhi in 1924), or to stop the practice of untouchability (as in Yerwada in 1932). But he had never, so far, actually fasted in opposition to British rule per se. His campaigns against colonialism had always taken the form of the breaking of what he considered unjust laws. And these breaches had always been collective, involving many other satyagrahis apart from himself.
It was now almost three years since the war had broken out. In that time, Gandhi and the Congress had made repeated overtures to the government. Gandhi had even resiled from his commitment to non-violence to permit Indian soil being used for military purposes—so long as an assurance of political independence was given. Yet, all these attempts were in vain. The colonial government in India, and His Majesty’s Government in Great Britain, refused to trust the Congress. Linlithgow, Churchill and company could not bring themselves to see the fundamental contradiction between their claim to be fighting the Nazis on behalf of democracy and freedom and their denial of democracy and freedom to the people of India. Tired of trying, and increasingly aware of his own mortality, Gandhi now thought of dramatic measures to force the British into the concessions they were so far reluctant to make.
Gandhi’s own writings give no hint that he was planning to fast against the British in July 1942. But the letters of his disciples do. On 23 July, Mahadev Desai, at Gandhi’s side in Sevagram, wrote to Amrit Kaur, then at her family home in Simla:
Bapu is well but the Fast idea, he says, is getting more and more [active]. It would be a tremendous blunder, I am afraid, for these folks will spare no effort to mis-represent him to the World and we have so [far] declined to make people listen to us. There is such amount of misunderstanding and equal amount of wilful distortion and mischievous propaganda that there could not be [a] more inauspicious moment for a step like that. But I am hoping and praying that God will guide him….I want to have a good argument with him one of these days. The W[orking] C[ommittee] people did not discuss it at all—They all sat mum—and Bapu took the silence to mean consent.53
Mahadev himself had been unwell for months, a product entirely of the hard work he had put in on his master’s behalf the past quarter of a century. Earlier that year he had had a mild heart attack. Rest was prescribed, but Mahadev would not take it, for who else could then work for and with Gandhi? And, if the occasion demanded, chastise him too?
On hearing of Gandhi’s proposed fast, Amrit Kaur wrote back to Mahadev:
How tragic B[apu]’s fast would be. You must prevent it at all costs. I do not see how such acts can affect people who are already enraged and who have no eyes to see or hearts to understand. That is why I have been pleading for delaying action until the tide of war has definitely turned in their favour or, at any rate, is not so dead against them as it is today….Personally I feel that if a last appeal with a reasonable time limit is given there will be a response from those quarters which are antagonised today. Fasting against people who are in the throes of a life and death struggle is surely wrong.54
Mahadev was determined to have that ‘good argument’ with Gandhi—although, unusually for him and their relationship, it was initiated by means of a written communication. On 27 July, Mahadev wrote Gandhi an anguished letter urging him not to fast. ‘You are,’ he told him, ‘mistaken in your belief that the Working Committee approves of this step. Its silence was not consent but sullenness.’ Mahadev warned Gandhi that ‘there is bound to be a very big class of people who honestly do not understand about [such] a fast; and we would lose the sympathy of those few in England who understand you’. And if Gandhi died as a result of a fast, he ‘would be leaving behind a legacy of hatred for the English for ever till the existence of [the] sun and [the] moon’. In sum, said Mahadev bluntly to Gandhi, the ‘entire idea [of a fast] is delusionary’.55
Gandhi decided in the end to drop the idea of putting pressure on the British by offering his own life as a sacrifice, and instead stay with the well-tried, and less morally coercive, route of non-violent mass protest. Mahadev Desai had done Gandhi many favours since he joined him in 1917; persuading him not to fast in July 1942 was one of the most substantial.
XIV
Of Gandhi’s oldest and most valued colleagues, C. Rajagopalachari was most bitterly opposed to the launching of a mass movement against the Britis
h. Jawaharlal Nehru was ambivalent, but eventually reconciled himself to the idea. Vallabhbhai Patel, on the other hand, was enthusiastic from the start. This man of peasant stock, one of whose forefathers had taken part in the great rebellion of 1857, was now itching for a fresh round of struggle.
On 26 July 1942, Patel addressed a public meeting in Ahmedabad. More than one hundred thousand people heard him say that ‘every Indian should act as a free man as soon as the struggle is launched’. Two days later, addressing students in the same city, Patel said, ‘Mahatma Gandhi’s last struggle will be short and swift, and will be finished within a week.’ The key word here was, of course, ‘last’.56 Having served as Gandhi’s chief lieutenant in Kheda in 1918, and in Bardoli in 1928, and in several other campaigns besides, Patel was extremely keen to play a key part in what he sensed would be the final struggle of his master.
Patel now proceeded to Bombay, where the CWC and the AICC were due to meet. On Sunday, 2 August, he addressed a massive crowd at the Chowpatty beach, the audience standing or squatting on the sands. Patel rehearsed how India ‘was dragged into the war against her consent’. The Congress had been prepared to help the British in their war efforts if a national government was formed. Patel spoke of how through its indifference to Gandhi’s pleas, ‘the British Government had lost the support of one whose love towards them had been true and sincere’. Now Gandhi was seventy-two years old, and ‘felt that Britain should withdraw her rule from India’. The Mahatma, said Patel, believed that ‘the continuation of British imperialism would act as a temptation for another imperialist power [Japan] to covet this land. In this vortex of imperialist ambitions, wars would extend and continue.’57
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