Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  Sarabhai was keen that Gandhi himself wrote on this matter. If he did, ‘it would be very effective and carry great weight. It would also help the Labour Union to bring about speedily a reform for which they are striving….I am sorry to trouble you at a time when you are not well and have pressure of work. But you have always stood out for what you believe to be right. A person thinking only of an objective to be reached, would not like you have brought to the fore-front the issue such as Untouchability before Swaraj had been attained. You had the rare courage to do so, in spite of the knowledge that it might partially weaken the caste Hindu support, which you had formerly.’50

  Gandhi wrote a brief reply, saying he would write on the subject when he had the time.51 Perhaps he did send a statement to be circulated among the workers in Ahmedabad. Unfortunately there is no trace of it in his papers. But we do know that in these months, Gandhi thought often about the subject of caste, and, as he did, adopted positions far more radical than he had once adopted. In May 1945, some Gujarati colleagues decided to reprint an old pamphlet of Gandhi’s on the caste system. They asked him for a fresh foreword, which he disarmingly began by saying: ‘I do not have the time to read this book again. I do not even wish to.’ He then outlined his current thinking on caste. While the Hindu scriptures spoke of four varnas, in his view ‘there prevails only one varna today, that of Shudras’, or, you may call it, Ati-Shudras’, or Harijans’ or untouchables….Just as it is not dharma but adharma to believe in the distinctions of high and low, so also colour prejudice is adharma. If a scripture is found to sanction distinctions of high and low, or distinctions of colour, it does not deserve the name of scripture.’ Given how far he had moved on in this regard, Gandhi requested the reader ‘to discard anything in this [older] book which may appear to him incompatible with my views given above’.52

  VIII

  On 14 June 1945, the viceroy announced the release of the members of the CWC. In a broadcast the same day, Wavell said he was inviting representative leaders of Indian opinion for a conference in Simla to arrive at ‘a settlement of the communal issue, which is the main stumbling block’. He hoped this would lead, in the short run, to a new, expanded executive council, an ‘entirely Indian Council, except for the Viceroy and the Commander-in-Chief, who would retain his position as War Member’. For the first time, Indians would hold the crucial finance and home portfolios. This new council was, Wavell emphasized, a first step towards a ‘final constitutional settlement’.53

  Wavell had, in fact, wanted to release the Congress leaders much earlier. In October 1944, he wrote to Churchill suggesting that he, as viceroy, invite the main leaders of the Congress and the Muslim League for talks. He saw this gesture of reconciliation as crucial to Britain’s long-term interests in Asia. ‘Our prestige and prospects in Burma, Malaya, China and the Far East generally,’ the viceroy told his prime minister, ‘are entirely subject to what happens in India. If we can secure India as a friendly partner in the British Commonwealth our predominant influence in these countries will, I think, be assured; with a lost and hostile India, we are likely to be reduced to the east to the position of commercial beggars.’

  Wavell was working towards the best possible British position in a post-imperial world. Churchill, on the other hand, did not think the Empire should end at all. He delayed for months in responding to the viceroy’s proposal. Meanwhile, the term of his government was coming to an end. More thoughtful Conservatives warned Churchill that if he was too obdurate towards Wavell (and India), the viceroy might resign, which would be used against their party in the forthcoming elections. So, in June 1945, the prime minister finally consented to setting free the Congress leaders who had been detained since the Quit India movement.54

  On being released from prison, the members of the CWC headed straight to see Gandhi in Panchgani. As he arrived at that hill town, Vallabhbhai Patel was besieged by journalists asking for comments on the political situation. He said he had been shut away in jail for three years, and in any case would need to consult with his colleagues first. ‘There is one sentence, however, in the Viceregal declarations on which I must speak,’ said Patel, ‘not as a member of the Working Committee but as a Congressman. It is that the parity between caste Hindus and Mussalmans must be preserved. If this condition subsists the Congress can have no place at the Conference. The Congress is not a sectional organisation. It represents Indians belonging to all creeds and races. It can be and has been represented by Muslim, Hindu, Christian and Parsi Presidents. I hope no nationalist will be party to any arrangement which has as its basis a religious division. I express these sentiments not only on my behalf but all those Congressmen who are with Gandhiji at this moment.’55

  Wavell had mentioned Gandhi by name as one of the invitees to the Simla conference. Gandhi said he would come, but in an individual capacity, not as a, still less the, representative of the Congress Party. Only the president and working committee members could serve that function.56

  Gandhi reached Simla on 24 June. The same day he met the viceroy, this their first meeting. They spoke for over an hour, Wavell noting that Gandhi ‘was rather vague and discursive, but on the whole gave his blessings to the proposals’. The viceroy was puzzled by Gandhi’s frequent digressions, such as ‘a most graphic digression of the death of his Private Secretary, and the relation of his carrying down the wounded General Woodgate from Spion Kop in 1899’. We should be less puzzled, since Mahadev Desai meant more—far more—to Gandhi than any private secretary had to any viceroy, while by his recounting of his aid during the Boer war, Gandhi was indicating that he bore no ill will towards the British.

  Immediately after he met Gandhi, Wavell had an equally long meeting with Jinnah, who was ‘much more direct than Gandhi, but whose manners are far worse’.57

  Apart from the participating politicians and their hangers-on, a horde of journalists had also descended on the imperial summer capital to cover the conference. In a conversation on the sidelines, Gandhi told one of these reporters that ‘Jawaharlal Nehru is my heir. He has got ability, knowledge and close touch with the public here and can interpret India’s mind.’58

  While Gandhi was in Simla, he received numerous telegrams urging the claims of different communities. Religious minorities like Christians and Sikhs, vulnerable economic groups like fisherfolk and pastoralists, all asked him not to neglect their interests in any future settlement. Muslim associations in Allahabad, Gulbarga and other places told Gandhi that only Jinnah and the League represented them. Some correspondents asked Gandhi to tell Maulana Azad to ‘avoid helping Kafirs and side with Muslims’, since he would have to show his ‘face to God on the day of resurrection’. On the other hand, the Sialkot Pathans assured Gandhi they had ‘full confidence in you in Simla Conference’, while the association of ‘Bhisti Mussalmans’ (water-carriers by profession) said they recognized not Jinnah but Azad as their ‘true representative’.

  One of the more curious wires received by Gandhi in Simla came from a certain Babasaheb from Bombay, representing the ‘Universal Astrological and Statistical Bureau’. Dated Thursday, 12 July, it read: ‘Stars position changes strongly favourable from next Monday resulting Viceroy’s plan success to empower Congress in spite of present unfavourable position eleventh hour change for better Jinnah’s collapse or surrender.’59

  The astrologer’s prediction did not come to pass. The Simla conference failed, mostly on the question of Muslim representation. The Congress wanted the right to nominate its members to an expanded executive council regardless of religion, but the Muslim League insisted that only it could nominate Muslims. Even the Congress president, Maulana Azad, was effectively barred by the League’s veto.60

  On 14 July 1945, the day the conference ended, Jinnah issued an angry statement blaming the viceroy for not granting the Muslim League complete parity in the proposed executive council. He insisted that the Muslims his party represented were ‘not a minority but
a nation’. The Muslim League had, he said, ‘repeatedly made it clear to the British Government several times since 1940, that we cannot consider or enter into any provisional interim Government unless declaration is made by the British Government guaranteeing the right of self-determination of Muslims and pledging that after the war, as soon as it may be possible, the British Government would establish Pakistan…’

  Wavell’s own statement, issued on the same day, was more restrained. If the conference had succeeded, he remarked: ‘Its success would have been attributed to me, and I cannot place the blame for its failure upon any of the parties. I ask the party leaders to accept this view, and to do all they can to ensure there are no recriminations.’61

  The Congress president, Maulana Azad, put aside his personal disappointment and wrote Wavell a warm letter, saying that the failure in Simla notwithstanding, they must continue to explore ‘future possibilities of finding a way out, honourable to all concerned, and leading to the objective of Indian freedom’. Towards that end, he asked the government to nurture a cooperative atmosphere, by releasing all political prisoners, lifting the ban on the Congress and its allied organizations, and restoring full freedom of the press.

  The war in Europe had been won, but the war in the East was still being fought. So, Azad reminded Wavell ‘on behalf of the Congress that whatever the result of your promised effort [to try and break the deadlock] the Congress is and has always been against the Japanese. Therefore, there will always be on the part of the Congress a desire for the defeat of Japan in her designs upon China or any other aggression on her part.’ However, ‘the effort now being made on Indian soil [against Japanese aggression] will continue to be looked upon as a British and Allied effort, so long as there is not at the Centre a popular government assisted by provincial popular governments’.62

  Gandhi wrote to Wavell on the same day as Azad (15 July), but in more anguished tones. ‘It grieves me,’ he remarked, ‘to think that the conference which began so happily and so hopefully should have ended in apparent failure—due exactly, as it would seem, to the same cause as before. This time you have taken the blame on your own shoulders. But the world will think otherwise. India certainly does.’

  ‘I must not hide from you,’ Gandhi continued, ‘the suspicion that the deeper cause is perhaps the reluctance of the official world to part with power, which the passing of the virtual control into the hands of their erstwhile prisoners would have meant.’63

  Wavell himself thought that it was not so much British obduracy as the inability of Indians to forge a united front that impeded the transition to self-government. In a long letter to the British monarch about the Simla conference, Wavell remarked that ‘the root cause of the failure was Jinnah’s intransigence and obstinacy. But it represents a real fear on the part of the Muslims, including those who do not support Jinnah, of Congress domination, which they regard as equivalent to a Hindu Raj….It shows more openly than ever before the great rift between Hindus and Muslims, which the events of the last few years have accentuated.’64

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Prelude to Partition

  I

  In the last week of July 1945, the Labour Party won a landslide victory in the UK General Elections, securing 393 out of 641 seats in the House of Commons. The Conservatives, who had as many as 386 MPs in the outgoing house, won a mere 197. The result was entirely unexpected. Most observers thought that the war hero, Winston Churchill, would be rewarded with another term as prime minister. But the British electorate thought otherwise. Seeking to rebuild their lives and their economy, they put their trust in Labour and its understated, uncharismatic leader, Clement Attlee.

  The Labour Party had long been committed to ending British rule in India. When, on 15 August, Japan surrendered and the war was finally over, Attlee’s government restarted the democratic process in Britain’s largest colony. On 21 August, the Government of India announced that fresh elections would take place to the provincial and central legislatures. A month later, the viceroy said the elections would be followed by the establishment of a body to design a constitution for a free India.

  The elections for the central legislature were to be held in December 1945; those for the provincial assemblies, in January 1946. The Congress preparations for the polls were, as they had been back in 1937, principally in the hands of two men: Vallabhbhai Patel, who took charge of candidate selection and campaign finance; and Jawaharlal Nehru, who was the chief speaker at the party rallies. Gandhi himself took little interest in choosing candidates, election propaganda, and the like.

  The veteran socialist-feminist Frederick Pethick-Lawrence (he had added his wife’s surname to his own) was appointed secretary of state for India in Attlee’s Cabinet. Gandhi had first met Pethick-Lawrence in 1906, in England, when he was lobbying for the rights of Indians in South Africa. That summer the suffragettes had been particularly active on the streets of London, defying the police by holding large marches and making stirring speeches. Gandhi followed their activities with admiration. He met some of their leaders, among them Emmeline Pethick, as well as her socialist husband. Forty years later, Gandhi wrote Pethick-Lawrence a warm letter of congratulation, saying: ‘If the India Office is to receive a decent burial and a nobler monument is to rise from its ashes, who can be a fitter person than you for the work?’1

  II

  In July 1945, B.R. Ambedkar published a book called What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables. This argued that Gandhi’s campaign to lift the Depressed Classes had failed, and for three reasons. First, ‘Gandhi’s sermons on Untouchability have completely failed to move the Hindus’, who ‘hear his after-prayer sermons for few minutes and then go to the comic opera’. Second, that while Gandhi claimed to be against untouchability, he had himself never launched a concerted political (as distinct from social) campaign for its abolition. Third, that (as Ambedkar saw it) ‘Gandhi does not want the Untouchables to organize and be strong. For he fears that they might thereby become independent of the Hindus and weaken the ranks of Hindus.’

  Ambedkar argued that ‘it is to kill this spirit of independence among the Untouchables that Mr. Gandhi started the Harijan Sevak Sangh’. He claimed that ‘the whole object of the sangh is to create a slave mentality among the untouchables towards their Hindu masters. Examine the Sangh from any angle one may like and the creation of slave mentality will appear to be its dominant purpose.’

  When asked why there were no Harijans in the governing body of the Harijan Sewak Sangh, Gandhi had answered that it was an institution that asked caste Hindus to make reparations for the sins of the past. The exploiters had to make amends themselves. Ambedkar saw this as a cunning ploy to keep the ‘untouchables’ forever subservient. He claimed that ‘if the Sangh was handed over to the Untouchables Mr. Gandhi and the Congress will have no means of control over the Untouchables. The Untouchables will cease to be dependent on the Hindus….[T]he Untouchables having become independent will cease to be grateful to the Hindus.’2

  Ambedkar had often criticized Gandhi in the past, but this was the first time he had devoted a full book to the subject. In August, shortly after What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables was published, a Congress social worker, himself from a low-caste background, came to see Gandhi. The conversation turned to B.R. Ambedkar, and his recently published attack. The social worker asked whether Ambedkar had ‘proved himself to be more than a match to Gandhi’. To this Gandhi responded:

  My answer is ‘Yes’ and ‘No’. Dr. Ambedkar is a fierce and fearless man. He does not scruple to beat the Hindu dog with any stick he can get. He wants to destroy Hinduism. It is open to him to do it….I want Harijans to be as able and earnest as Dr. Ambedkar but in a different way. I want you to do even better. I want you to produce sterling men who will reshape the whole of our society.3

  In truth, although Gandhi was by now quite accustomed to Ambedkar’s
attacks, this latest assault had shaken him. He worried that it might erode the credibility of the Congress, already undermined by the growth of the Muslim League. So, he asked C. Rajagopalachari to write a pamphlet rebutting the arguments of What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables. ‘There is no other person,’ he told his long-time friend and comrade, ‘as well-informed and able as you to answer Dr. Ambedkar’s indictment of the Congress on the question.’4

  Of all of Gandhi’s associates, Rajaji had been most solidly behind him in the campaign to abolish untouchability. Where Nehru and Patel saw it as a distraction from the freedom struggle, Rajaji understood both its social and political significance. After he had abandoned his flourishing legal career because of non-cooperation, the sole appearance he made in court was to defend an ‘untouchable’ who entered a temple to which caste Hindus had denied him access. In December 1931, while Gandhi was returning to India after the Round Table Conference, Rajaji was active in a campaign to have ‘untouchables’ enter the famous (and famously orthodox) Guruvayur temple. As he told an audience assembled there: ‘It would certainly help us in the fight for Swaraj if we open the doors of this temple. One of the many causes that keeps Swaraj away from us is that we are divided among ourselves. Mahatmaji received many wounds in London. But Dr. Ambedkar’s darts were the worst. Mahatmaji did not quake before the Churchills of England. But he had to plead guilty to Dr. Ambedkar’s charges. Mahatmaji pleaded that the removal of untouchability was an accepted national programme in India and that he himself was the greatest exponent of it. If therefore we postpone this quarrel, Swaraj would be more distant than ever.’5