Gandhi
Page 88
IV
After seven weeks in eastern India, Gandhi moved down the Coromandel Coast to Madras. He spent ten days in the city, meeting social workers, speaking to them of the importance of taking Hindustani, the putative link language of free India, to Tamil and Telugu speakers. In Madras, Gandhi also visited the ailing Liberal leader Srinivasa Sastri several times. The two had a long, if occasionally contentious, relationship. Both disciples of Gokhale, one had moved into mass politics while the other remained in the realm of constitutional discussion. Sastri deplored satyagraha, his opposition largely principled, but also inflected by a measure of personal jealousy at Gandhi’s ever-growing popularity.
In the late 1930s, Gandhi’s devoted secretary, Mahadev Desai, had asked Sastri to help him edit the second, revised English edition of The Story of My Experiments with Truth. As draft chapters were conveyed between Sevagram and Madras and back, Sastri and Desai debated in a friendly manner about a man the former had reservations about and whom the latter unreservedly admired. While ready to improve the Gujarati’s English, the Madras scholar was loth to make his part public. Sending the last set of chapters with his corrections, Sastri instructed Desai to ensure that ‘my name shall never be disclosed in the preface or introduction or press notices’. He agreed that Gandhi himself could be told; otherwise, ‘the fewer the people that are let into the secret the better’.18 When the second edition of Gandhi’s autobiography appeared, in 1940, Mahadev’s preface explained that this fresh translation had ‘the benefit of careful revision by a revered friend, who, among many other things, has the reputation of being an eminent English scholar. Before undertaking the task, he made it a condition that his name should on no account be given out. I accept the condition. It is needless to say that it heightens my gratitude to him.’19
Now Mahadev himself was dead. The Quit India movement had come and gone. Sastri was sick and seemingly on his deathbed. Gandhi gamely forgot their differences and went to chat and console him. Seeing his visitor come into the hospital room, Sastri, overcome with emotion, struggled to rise from his bed and hug him. Sastri was an acknowledged authority on the Ramayana; now, he told Gandhi, the ‘living Rama’ had come to meet him. When Gandhi protested against such extravagantly hyperbolic comparisons, Sastri answered, ‘Ha! don’t I know Gandhi, though you have come to me as my friend that you are the greatest fellow living in the world today?’20
In early February, Gandhi left for the inland town of Madurai, whose famous Meenakshi temple had finally, reluctantly, opened its gates to those stigmatized as ‘untouchables’. In a speech the day he left Madras, he explained that for him the maidan ‘was really the best temple of God. They had the fine blue sky for their roof, under which there was no difference between the rich and the poor, the master and the servant, the millionaire and the worker, or the Hindu, the Muslim, the Christian and the Parsi.’
Gandhi’s own prayer meetings were always held in the open. He did not feel the need to go to temples to pray. While ‘no idol worshipper’ himself, he yet knew the ‘great place idol-worship has among Hindus’. At railway stations on the way to Madurai, he told those who had come to hear him that he was travelling to the temple town as a pilgrim, to see and experience for himself the mixing of savarnas and Harijans which was now, for the first time ever, being practised there.
Before entering the Meenakshi temple, Gandhi addressed a public meeting in Madurai town. The gathering was mammoth—in excess of five lakh. Gandhi thanked the crowd for showing their love and affection, but urged them not to follow him into the temple itself. He wanted to go there in solitude; he was, as he put it, on this occasion ‘himself a Harijan who wanted to worship there’.21
In the first week of February 1946, Gandhi returned to Sevagram, after nine weeks on the road. ‘It’s been a marvellous tour,’ wrote Amrit Kaur to a friend, ‘but of course a tremendous strain on all & most of all on Bapu. It is only his iron will & power of the spirit that sustains him. I am amazed at the physical strength he gains thereby. The people’s love is unrestrained but one can’t blame them. I’ve never seen women in such crowds.’22
Gandhi was now seventy-five years old. This tour in Bengal and Madras had been physically arduous but emotionally satisfying, the groundswell of love and goodwill renewing his spirit, wounded by the loss in recent years of his wife, his secretary, and his closest friends.
Meanwhile, Gandhi’s English weekly Harijan—shut since the Quit India movement of 1942—had been revived, and, with its Gujarati counterpart Harijan Bandhu, became once more the chief vehicle for his speeches, talks and articles. These spoke, as always, of Hindu–Muslim harmony, of the emancipation of the so-called ‘untouchables’, and the promotion of khadi.
After their long absence, the potential readership of Gandhi’s weeklies had massively increased. The Quit India movement had brought many young patriots into the Congress fold; they all wanted to read, in English, Hindi or Gujarati, what their hero was saying or writing. When the first three issues quickly sold out, the print run was revised radically upwards. In February 1946, the Navajivan Press was printing 60,000 copies of Harijan, 40,000 of Harijan Bandhu, and 25,000 of Harijan-Sevak, or 125,000 in all. This required some 390,000 pounds of newsprint, which the government was finally persuaded to provide.23
For some readers, Harijan without Mahadev Desai was not what it used to be. One patriot in the town of Unnao wrote to Pyarelal that while he was thankful that Harijan had resumed publication, Mahadev was ‘sorely missed’. For, ‘he was such a fine and loveable personality, so simple and yet so acute—a true interpreter of Gandhiji, his philosophy and all that he stands for. His pen pictures were simply beautiful.’24
V
While Gandhi was travelling in eastern and southern India, elections were being held for the central legislature and the provincial assemblies. With the franchise restricted by education and property, some forty-one million Indians were eligible to vote, of whom about six million were women.
The Muslim League campaigned principally on the plank of Pakistan. It warned Muslims that a vote for the Congress would lead to the construction of a ‘Hindu Raj’. On the other side, the Congress promised economic development and social progress, while reminding voters of its sacrifices during the Quit India movement.
Between 1937 and 1946, the League’s reach had enormously expanded. Once a party of large landholders, it had now attracted to its fold many professionals and many students too. Muslim doctors, lawyers, professors and businessmen were increasingly nervous of their prospects in a free but undivided India, where they would have to compete with their more numerous, and often better-educated, Hindu counterparts.
By early February 1946, the votes had been counted. The results revealed a divided electorate, itself mirroring a divided land. Across India, the League took a majority of seats reserved for the Muslims. It won seventy-five out of eighty-six in the Punjab, 114 out of 119 in Bengal, and twenty-eight out of thirty-four in Sindh. These were all provinces that would form part of any future Pakistan. Yet, even in provinces that would never be part of a Muslim homeland, the League did extremely well. For example, it won all thirty Muslim seats in Bombay, and all twenty-nine in Madras. It was only in the NWFP, where Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his Khudai Khidmatgars were strong, that the Congress could count on Muslim support. Here, the seats reserved for Muslims were divided almost equally between the League and the Congress.
The steady growth of the Muslim League through the war years had been confirmed at the polls. Jinnah’s party, once confined to large landlords and aristocrats, had now drawn millions of other people into its fold. They were fired with the idea of creating an Islamic nation in the subcontinent, seeking to join the growing ranks of Muslim states across Asia. Turkey, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt already existed as independent countries with a Muslim majority; the hope, and expectation, was that Pakistan would soon join this list.25
Since Muslim seats were often a small percentage of the total, the Congress still did well overall in these elections. In Madras and Bombay, despite losing all Muslim seats, it won a majority and formed the government. The Congress also formed governments in Orissa, Bihar, the United Provinces and the Central Provinces.26
The elections of 1946 dealt a decisive blow to the Congress’s claims to represent Muslims. However, it could take some consolation in its performance in that other important category of reserved seats, that of Scheduled Castes. Out of 151 seats reserved for the erstwhile ‘untouchables’ across India, the Congress won 142, while Ambedkar’s Scheduled Caste Federation (SCF) won only two. The SCF was wiped out in Bombay, where it had won twelve seats in 1937. Congress was able to capitalize on the Quit India movement and the sacrifice of its leaders in prison, at a time when Ambedkar himself sat on the viceroy’s executive council.27
The 1946 elections were a body blow to one of Gandhi’s great rivals, B.R. Ambedkar. But they were a cause of enormous satisfaction to his other, and older, rival, M.A. Jinnah. Across India, Muslim voters had vindicated Jinnah’s claim that the League, and more or less the League alone, represented their interests. If the elections were to be seen as a referendum on the two-nation theory, then the result was an emphatic vindication of Jinnah and his party. This would make the task of the Congress, and of Gandhi himself, far harder in any future negotiations with the British.
VI
On 18 February 1946, Gandhi left Sevagram for a stint in a nature-cure clinic in the village of Uruli Kanchan, on the outskirts of Poona. No sooner had he reached there than news came of a naval mutiny having broken out in Bombay. Protesting against bad food, inadequate housing and inhuman working conditions, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh ratings stopped work, took down the flag of the Royal Navy and raised nationalist slogans.
The mutiny in Bombay found its echoes in Karachi and Calcutta, where Indians on British ships likewise struck work. The leaders of the strike were placed under arrest, intensifying the protests. Many millhands came out in support of the striking seamen. American flags were burnt, a British soldier in uniform beaten up. The Raj’s reaction was swift, and punitive. Fighter planes flew menacingly overhead, while a British battalion fired on the protesters, killing six ratings and wounding several others.28
Gandhi was one of the heroes of the rebellious navy men. Their leaders had invoked both the Salt March and the Quit India movement. ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai’ was one of the slogans the protesters shouted. (‘Hindu–Muslim Ek Ho’ was another.) But Gandhi, of course, could not approve of their methods. From Poona, he issued a statement deploring the use of violence by the rebellious ratings. The methods they had used were ‘not the way to swaraj as defined by the Congress. Burning of tram-cars and other property, insulting and injuring Europeans is not non-violence of the Congress type, much less mine.’ Left-wing commentators had praised the rebels for disregarding religious differences. For Gandhi, however, ‘a combination between Hindus and Muslims and others for the purpose of violent action is unholy and will lead to and probably is a preparation for mutual violence—bad for India and the world’.
Vallabhbhai Patel, who was in Bombay at the time, was more ambivalent in his response. He agreed that ‘the destruction of property was wantonly thoughtless’; yet, he recognized the deep ‘resentment of distinction between Europeans and Indians’ that sparked the uprising. Patel persuaded the ratings to surrender unconditionally, promising them the Congress would ensure that ‘full justice would be done and that there would be no victimization’.29
In the second week of March, Gandhi came to Bombay for a meeting of the CWC. On the sidelines, he met some returned former soldiers of Subhas Bose’s Indian National Army. ‘The real test of the I. N. A.,’ he told them, ‘was to come only now. In the fighting line there was the romance and excitement, not so in civil life. The country today was faced with the spectre of famine. Would they help the people to fight it with the same courage, cohesion, doggedness and resourcefulness which they had shown on the battle-field?’ Gandhi praised the INA soldiers for their ‘physical stamina, discipline, and…a feeling of solidarity and oneness, untainted by narrow communalism’. These attributes now put them ‘in a singular position of vantage for introducing non-violent discipline and organization among the masses’.30
VII
In late March, a three-man ‘Cabinet Mission’ arrived from England to seek to formalize the transfer of power from British to Indian hands. Announcing this initiative in the British Parliament, Clement Attlee noted that ‘the idea of nationalism is running very fast in India and indeed all over Asia….It is no good applying the formula of the past to the present position. The temperature of 1946 is not the temperature of 1920, 1930 or even 1942.’ Attlee pointed out that in the two World Wars, thousands of Indians had sacrificed their lives for the freedom of others. Now it was time that India ‘should herself have freedom to decide her destiny’. He himself hoped and felt ‘that political India might be the light of Asia’.31
It was the kind of speech Attlee’s predecessor could never have made. We don’t know whether Churchill was in the house when the prime minister spoke. He would surely have been dismayed by what Attlee said and how he said it. In India, the speech was received very warmly. The Cabinet Mission’s members included Frederick Pethick-Lawrence and Stafford Cripps, both of whom Gandhi knew and liked (the third member was also a senior Labour politician, A.V. Alexander). Indeed, on arriving in India, Pethick-Lawrence had written Gandhi a warm letter, saying he was ‘greatly looking forward to seeing you again and renewing the acquaintanceship & friendship which began some 40 years ago when you came to lunch with us in Clements Inn’.32 So, Gandhi now chose to re-engage with politics, travelling to Delhi to be at hand while the mission talked with Congress leaders and with other political interests.
Gandhi’s patron and disciple, G.D. Birla, invited him to stay at his capacious house in New Delhi. Gandhi chose to stay in the Bhangi (sweepers’) colony instead. Birla now hastened to install electricity and provide fresh water to the humble home which his master had chosen to grace. Gandhi sent a note to Birla, via Pyarelal, hoping that these ‘arrangements will be permanent. If the wires are removed the moment he goes out of the Bhangi Niwas, the whole thing will become a farce.’
Gandhi arrived in Delhi on 1 April. The same evening, at a prayer meeting, he called ‘Untouchability the blackest spot in Hinduism’. The ‘least expiation’ caste Hindus could do was ‘to share with the Harijans their disabilities and to deny ourselves the privilege[s] which the latter cannot share’.
On 2 April, Gandhi wrote to Pethick-Lawrence that he should lean on the viceroy for ‘the immediate release of political prisoners irrespective of the charge of violence or non-violence’. This would be welcomed by all parties, not just the Congress, and create a conducive atmosphere for talks. He also hoped that the salt tax would finally be abolished.
On the 3rd, Gandhi had his first meeting with the Cabinet Mission. He told them that he was not an authorized representative of the Congress; any formal proposals they had should be conveyed to the party president, Maulana Azad. But he would say, in his personal capacity, that the Muslim League’s two-nation theory was ‘dangerous’; for, the Muslims in India were themselves sons of the soil.
In his prayer meeting on 6 April, Gandhi recalled the same day twenty-seven years previously. That was when the Rowlatt Satyagraha began, when ‘for the first time the entire masses of India from one end to the other rose like one man’. In that, his first major national campaign, ‘Hindus and Muslims for the time forgot all their differences’. In the city in which he now spoke, a ‘monster gathering’ of Hindus and Muslims had come together in the great Jama Masjid, to be addressed by Swami Shraddhananda. That, recalled Gandhi wistfully, ‘was a glorious day in India’s history, the memory of which we shall always treasure’. But, he added sadly, ‘the situation has changed today. We ha
ve gone wrong somewhere. The hearts of Hindus and Muslims are sundered. The air is poisoned with communal bitterness and rancour. A section of the Muslims have begun to claim that they are a separate nation.’
In the years following the Rowlatt Satyagraha, 6 to 13 April had been observed as ‘National Week’. Gandhi now asked the citizens of Delhi to recall those events and those associations, to work anew for communal harmony and for the fulfilment of the constructive programme for ‘the attainment of non-violent swaraj’. Back in 1919, ‘every home in the Punjab hummed with the music of the spinning-wheel’. Could Indians now not recreate that mood and that magic, by undertaking ‘sacrificial spinning’ and ‘by purging our hearts of any trait of communal hatred’?33
Not many young Muslims were listening, however. A student leader in Bareilly, a passionate supporter of the Pakistan movement, wrote to Gandhi that ‘like the Hindus, Muslims want complete independence, which you have yourself nurtured in them. Rightly or wrongly they have decided to have Pakistan. How are you going to crush the spirit fostered by you? By force? That will result in bloodshed. You alone can avoid it.’
Gandhi replied wearily, and in Hindi: ‘Mere paas talwar nahin hai na mein chahta hoon. Jis ko mein samjha sakta hoon woh talwar kabhi istamaal nahin kar sakte.
Rahi baat Pakistan ke chahne valon ki. Ve kahte hain “ham lad kar lenge”. Agar aisa hai to ve hi talwar khichenge.’34
(I do not have a sword, nor do I want one. Those whom I can persuade will never use a sword either.
There remain the people who ask for Pakistan. They say they will fight for it. If that is so they will be the ones who draw the sword.)