Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  It was in Bombay that Gandhi had his most long-standing and steadfast political supporters. The city had rallied to the Rowlatt Satyagraha, the non-cooperation movement, the Salt March. With Gandhi old and ailing, Patel was acting as His Master’s Voice, rousing the masses before the crucial Congress meetings in their city.

  Impressed by the response to Patel’s speech was that other long-time loyalist of Gandhi, the Bombay Chronicle newspaper. ‘The mammoth meeting held on the Chowpatty sands on Sunday evening,’ it noted, ‘is a phenomenon which it will be unwise for [the] Government to ignore. It symbolically demonstrates for the thousandth time the deep loyalty of crores of Indians to Congress and Gandhiji. It will be dangerous for [the] Government to flout the Congress by banking on the differences within it, and between it and other political bodies.’

  The Chronicle reminded the British that Gandhi had reached out to them ‘by permitting the continuance of Allied troops in India to resist Japanese aggression’. Since the political aims of the Congress and Gandhi were ‘in substance similar’ to those made by other parties, the paper warned that if these demands ‘are not substantially conceded at once, the inevitable result will be wide and acute discontent, whatever shapes it may take’.58

  Gandhi himself arrived in Bombay on Monday, 3 August, with Mahadev and Kasturba in tow. They were met at Dadar station by Patel and prominent Bombay Congressmen, including B.G. Kher and Yusuf Meherally. ‘An eager and enthusiastic crowd filled the platform and cheered the Mahatma as he walked to the waiting car.’59

  The CWC met on the 4th and 5th, with Gandhi present throughout. In the evenings he held his customary prayer meetings. He was also examined by two Bombay doctors closely associated with the Congress, M.D. Gilder and Jivraj Mehta. They ‘found him better and stronger. He has put on weight. But they were of [the] opinion that his period of rest should not be encroached upon.’60

  On 6 August, speaking to the press in Bombay, Gandhi said he ‘definitely contemplated an interval between the passing of the Congress resolution [which would ask the British to “Quit India”] and the starting of the struggle’. He planned to write a letter to the viceroy, ‘not as an ultimatum but as an earnest pleading for avoidance of a conflict’. He continued: ‘If there is a favourable response, then my letter can be the basis for negotiation.’61

  The much-awaited meeting of the AICC began at 2 p.m. on 7 August, at the Gowalia Tank Maidan in central Bombay. On his arrival, ‘Mahatma Gandhi and the other leaders had to pass through serried ranks of cheering humanity along the road to the pandal and in the pandal itself.’62

  In his speech to the gathering, Gandhi urged Congressmen to under no circumstances show sympathy for the Japanese. ‘At a time when I am about to launch the biggest fight in my life,’ he remarked, ‘there can be no hatred for the British in my heart.’ ‘The coming in of Japan,’ he warned, ‘will mean the end of China and perhaps of Russia, too.’ Gandhi also urged Congressmen to ‘not resort to violence and put non-violence to shame’.

  The next day, speaking to the AICC again, Gandhi focused on the deepening divide between Hindus and Muslims. He recalled the days of the Khilafat movement, ‘when every Mussalman claimed the whole of India as his motherland’, and ‘Muslims throughout the country accepted me as their true friend’. But now Muslim newspapers demonized him, and were even more savage in their treatment of Maulana Azad, who was ‘being made a target for the filthiest abuse’. He asked why Jinnah allowed the vilification of Muslims who were still with the Congress.

  Gandhi deplored the separatism of the Muslim League, but he did not approve of Hindu majoritarianism either. As he put it: ‘Those Hindus who, like Dr. Moonje and Shri Savarkar, believe in the doctrine of the sword may seek to keep the Mussalmans under Hindu domination. I do not represent that section.’

  Gandhi told the audience that the struggle that the Congress was contemplating would not start immediately. ‘I will now wait upon the Viceroy and plead with him for the acceptance of the Congress demand. That process is likely to take two or three weeks.’ In the meantime, he advised members of the Congress to promote spinning and other elements of the constructive programme, and to ‘consider yourself a free man or woman, and act as if you are free and are no longer under the heel of this imperialism’.63

  On 8 August, the AICC passed a resolution asking for the immediate end of British rule in India. Once India became independent, it would become an ally of the Allies, ‘sharing with them in the trials and tribulations of the joint struggle for freedom’. The resolution envisaged a provisional government, this not dominated by the Congress but ‘a composite government, representative of all important sections of the people of India’.

  The AICC held that ‘the freedom of India must be the symbol of and prelude to the freedom of all other Asiatic nations under foreign domination’. The French, the Dutch and the British should withdraw from their colonies, and ‘it must be clearly understood that such of those countries as are under Japanese control now must not subsequently be placed under the rule or control of any other colonial power’.

  The AICC hoped that Britain and the Allies would heed this plea for freedom for India. But if they did not, then the Congress could not ‘hold the nation back from endeavouring to assert its will against an imperialist and authoritarian government’. Therefore, ‘for the vindication of India’s inalienable right to freedom and independence’, the AICC was sanctioning the ‘starting of a mass struggle on non-violent lines on the widest possible scale’, which would ‘inevitably be under the leadership of Gandhiji’.64

  The resolution was moved by Nehru, and seconded by Patel, once more establishing these two as Gandhi’s most trusted, loyal lieutenants as well as his designated political successors. Their speeches, and of course Gandhi’s too, were listened to with ‘rapt attention’ by the ‘enthusiastic mass of humanity’ that had occupied ‘every inch of the 35000 square feet of the pandal’.65

  After his long speech to the AICC on the 8th, Gandhi told Mahadev and Vallabhbhai that when he got up to speak he did not know what he would say. ‘Now I know why I was not able to sleep last night,’ he said in Gujarati. ‘There was so much on my mind; I did not know whether I would be able to express it all or not….I have said practically all I wanted to say to the country.’66 That a man who normally slept so easily was so restless is an indication that Gandhi sensed that, approaching his seventy-third birthday, this was indeed the last major political battle of his life.

  The motion passed by the Congress on 8 August 1942 is customarily known as the ‘Quit India’ resolution. Remarkably, that redolent, now celebrated, phrase does not occur in the resolution as worded and passed. There is an intriguing parallel, for the likewise famous ‘Pakistan Resolution’ passed by the Muslim League in Lahore in March 1940 had not actually used the word ‘Pakistan’ either.

  XV

  In December 1920, at a well-attended Congress meeting in Nagpur, Gandhi had launched his non-cooperation movement. It took more than a year for the British to arrest him. A decade later, he launched the Salt March; once more, rather than detain him at once, the British allowed him to undertake his slow, majestic march to the sea, to break the law and attract worldwide attention before they eventually acted.

  Gandhi may have thought that this time too, the British would behave in a fashion customary to them, tardily from one point of view, if gentlemanly from another. On the night of the 8th, he told Mahadev that he did not believe that the British would arrest him after his speeches to the AICC, which had displayed respect, even affection, for the British.67

  But the rulers were now less indulgent. Linlithgow was less charitably disposed to Gandhi than either Reading or Irwin. The Second World War had greatly clouded relations between Indian nationalists and the Raj. Fighting their own desperate battle for survival, the British were not disposed to look at all kindly on the needs and aspirations of other peoples.

&nb
sp; The Quit India resolution was passed on the evening of 8 August. Early the next morning, at around 5 a.m., Gandhi was served a notice of arrest at the Bombay residence of the industrialist G.D. Birla, where he was staying. Gandhi was given half an hour to gather his effects. He used the time to have his customary breakfast of goat’s milk and fruit juice. A Muslim member of the Sevagram Ashram, who was present, then recited verses from the Koran, which was followed by a collective rendition of ‘Vaishnava Jana’ To. Gandhi packed his bag for prison with, among other things, the Bhagavad Gita, the Koran, an Urdu primer and ‘his inevitable “Charkha”’.68

  Gandhi—along with Mahadev Desai, Sarojini Naidu and Mira, all also staying in Birla House, all also now placed under arrest—was taken in a police convoy to the station and put in a special train to Poona. The group was made to get off at Chinchwad station (ten miles short of Poona) and conveyed in a police car to the Aga Khan Palace. An eyewitness who saw them drive off reported that ‘Mahatma Gandhi was seen cracking jokes with Sarojini Naidu’ in the car.

  Meanwhile, the other major Congress leaders, Nehru, Patel, Azad and company, were also detained and taken to ‘an unknown destination’. The government declared the Congress and its affiliated organizations ‘unlawful’ under Section 16 of the Indian Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1908, on the grounds that they constituted ‘a danger to the public peace’. Congress offices all over India were sealed.69

  Justifying its pre-emptive attack, the government issued a communiqué saying that the AICC resolution was in effect an invitation to the Axis powers to attack India. ‘The Congress Party is not India’s mouthpiece,’ said the viceroy and his government. It charged the Congress with ‘pursuing a totalitarian policy’ of imposing its view on all Indians.70 The use of the term, ‘totalitarian’, normally reserved for absolutist regimes such as those run by Hitler and Stalin, was of course outrageous hyperbole when applied to a party with no power and no arms. It reflected the bitter, indeed extreme, hostility which Linlithgow and his officials had developed for Gandhi and his party.

  The day after Gandhi was arrested, the War Cabinet met in London. Churchill was in a jovial mood, for, as he told his assembled colleagues, ‘We have clapped Gandhi into prison.’ General Smuts introduced a note of seriousness, telling Churchill that Gandhi ‘is a man of God. You and I are mundane people. Gandhi has appealed to religious motives. You never have. That is where you have failed.’ Churchill, with a grin, replied: ‘I have made more bishops than anyone since St. Augustine.’ But Smuts was not amused; as an eyewitness reported, ‘his face was very grave’.71

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  A Bereavement and a Fast

  I

  The Aga Khan Palace, where Gandhi and his companions were incarcerated, was built in the 1890s. It was five miles outside Poona city, on a small hill, commanding a fine view of the countryside. Two storeys high, it was enclosed by a wide and shady veranda running along the house. There were nine large bedrooms, while the drawing room had chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, and portraits of previous Aga Khans on the wall.

  Seventy acres of grounds came with the main building, with twelve gardeners to tend them. There was a deer park on the premises, as well as several greenhouses. In the salubrious climate of Poona, both trees and plants grew abundantly. From the terrace, one saw a profusion of colours all around.

  The Aga Khan Palace had been acquired in 1941, just in case Gandhi had to be arrested. The Bombay government sent a long note to the viceroy on its size and character, along with photographs, noting that this description ‘will make as much impression as is necessary on the American public!’ The rent paid to the Aga Khan was Rs 12,000 a year, the money remitted to him in Geneva, with the arrangement kept secret from the public.

  After the Aga Khan Palace was acquired, certain alterations were made to the premises by the public works department. The cost of these alterations was some 9000 rupees; the Government of Bombay, mindful of its pennies, successfully got this reimbursed from the Government of India, since it was they who had got Gandhi interned. The amount was debited under the heading: ‘Miscellaneous Expenditure connected with the War: Payments to Provincial Governments’. Delhi also accepted liability for the salaries of the jailers and soldiers keeping a watch on Gandhi, of a doctor kept on duty in the palace, of the malis tending the garden, and (among other things) for the installation of a telephone.

  A recurring sum of Rs 450 per month was also sanctioned to take care of the food and other items supplied to Gandhi and his party (this was later increased to Rs 550, and in time to Rs 700, to keep pace with wartime inflation).1

  Early in 1942, as the confrontation between the Congress and the government sharpened, the authorities began building a barbed wire fence around the property. Fourteen new sentry boxes were also constructed. They decided that, as and when Gandhi was arrested, they would post a certain A.E. Kately in charge of the palace prison. Kately was a Gujarati-speaking Parsi, who had been a jailer in Yerwada when Gandhi was confined there in 1932–33, and so knew him well. He was in place, with seventy-six constables to assist him, when Gandhi was taken to Poona from Bombay in the second week of August 1942.2

  Gandhi had never lived in such luxurious surroundings before—whether as a convicted satyagrahi or as a free man. The government had sent Kasturba and Pyarelal to be with him; with Mahadev, Mira and Sushila Nayar also at hand, he had family and close disciples around him. But he was not happy at being incarcerated. He had met previous prison sentences quite willingly; this time, however, he felt the government had acted in haste.

  Gandhi arrived at the Aga Khan Palace on 9 August. Two days later, he began drafting a letter to the viceroy. On the 14th, he finally sent it. The letter began: ‘The Government of India were wrong in precipitating the crisis. The Government resolution justifying this step is full of distortions and misrepresentations.’ The resolution charged the Congress with preparing to launch ‘violent activities’, although, as Gandhi pointed out, ‘violence was never contemplated at any stage’. In any case, why could the government not have waited till mass action was launched?

  Gandhi’s letter, perhaps unconsciously, brought to the fore the intense debates within the Congress that preceded the Quit India resolution. Thus he wrote to the viceroy: ‘The Government of India think that the freedom of India is not necessary for winning the cause. I think exactly the opposite. I have taken Jawaharlal Nehru as my measuring rod. His personal contacts make him feel much more the misery of the impending ruin of China and Russia than I can—and may I say than even you can. In that misery he tried to forget his old quarrel with imperialism. He dreads more than I do the success of Fascism and Nazism. I have argued with him for days together. He fought against my position with a passion which I have no words to describe. But the logic of facts overwhelmed him. He yielded when he saw clearly that without the freedom of India that of the other two was in jeopardy.’

  Given Nehru’s views, well known and widely publicized, Gandhi told the viceroy that ‘surely you are wrong in having imprisoned such a powerful friend and ally. If notwithstanding the common cause [the defeat of Nazism and Fascism], the Government’s answer to the Congress demand is hasty repression, they will not wonder if I draw the inference that it was not so much the Allied cause that weighed with the British Government, as the unexpressed determination to cling to the possession of India as an indispensable part of the imperial policy.’3

  II

  Ever since they had been arrested, Mahadev Desai had been worried that Gandhi might embark on a fast unto death. On the night of the 14th, he unburdened his worries to Sarojini Naidu. The next morning, Mahadev got up early, prepared Gandhi’s musambi juice and his breakfast, and then went back to the book he had been reading the previous night, The Art of Living by André Maurois. Later, he joined Gandhi for a stroll in the garden. As ever, he had many ideas buzzing in his mind. He told Gandhi that he wished, when they were released,
to bring out an anthology of instances of non-violence in literature.

  As they walked around the garden, Gandhi and Mahadev also indulged in nostalgic remembrance. Gandhi asked his secretary what Vallabhbhai Patel was like before he met him in 1917. Mahadev told him that the Sardar was a fastidious dresser, who had his suits made by the best tailors. He was also inordinately fond of bridge. He made enough money in a week’s work in the court to spend the rest of the month on the card table at the Gujarat Club.

  After their walk, Gandhi went for his daily massage, given by Sushila Nayar. Shortly afterwards, Kasturba rushed in to call Sushila. Mahadev, she said, was having a fit. He complained of feeling giddy, and then fell down. When Sushila reached where Mahadev was, she found his pulse had stopped beating, and there was no sound in his heart either. The prison authorities were called in; they declared him dead.

  Sarojini Naidu was convinced that it was the worry about Gandhi fasting that killed his secretary. ‘If ever a man laid down his life for another it was Mahadev,’ she told the others in the palace prison.4

  Mahadev had turned fifty earlier in the year. He was relatively young, ate simple ashram food, and exercised regularly. However, he had not been keeping well for some time. Twenty-five years of continuous work and travel had weakened him. The months and years since the war broke out had been filled with tension, indecision, an agonizing back and forth between reaching out to the Raj and confronting it. As the prime messenger and mediator between Linlithgow and Gandhi, Bose and Gandhi, Nehru and Gandhi, Rajaji and Gandhi, the various provincial Congress leaders and Gandhi, the troublesome/possessive ashram disciples and Gandhi, Mahadev had borne it all. Although the official cause of death was cardiac arrest, Mahadev had in fact died of overwork. He had given his life in the service of his master and their yet-to-be-free country.