VIII
In early May, the Cabinet Mission shifted its base to Simla. Stafford Cripps asked Gandhi also to come up from the plains to continue their discussions. He did, and on his first prayer meeting in the hills expressed the hope ‘that this time the Cabinet Mission will do the right thing by India and that the British power would finally and completely be withdrawn’.35
The Cabinet Mission had prepared a draft for discussion, which proposed a Union government in control of foreign affairs, defence and communications, with all remaining powers to be vested in the provinces. They further proposed parity between five ‘Muslim-majority’ provinces (Punjab, Bengal, Assam, Sindh, the NWFP and Balochistan) and six ‘Hindu-majority’ ones (Madras, Bengal, Bombay, the United Provinces, Bihar, Assam and Orissa), with the two groups being represented equally in the discussions on a future constitution and in any future federal parliament. The position of the princely states was left ambiguous; they could remain part of the federation, and join a province with which they shared a boundary. But the possibility of some larger states striking out on their own for an independent status was not explicitly ruled out.
Shown the proposal, Gandhi found his enthusiasm for the Mission rapidly evaporate. The designated ‘Muslim’ provinces had a combined population of some ninety million; the so-called ‘Hindu’ provinces, more than twice as many. To place them at par seemed grossly biased.36
In the second week of May 1946, with the talks deadlocked, Nehru suggested to Jinnah that an ‘Umpire’ who was not Muslim, Hindu, Sikh or English be appointed to arbitrate on differences between the parties.
This was a fascinating suggestion. For, the idea of an umpire was quintessentially British, coming in fact from that most English of games, cricket. Nehru wanted an umpire who would be from some other Asian country or perhaps an American. Jinnah, however, only trusted the British to see or take his side. And so, he rejected the proposal.37
In Simla, as in Delhi, the Cabinet Mission failed to bring the Congress and the League anywhere close to an agreement. Gandhi himself thought his presence in Simla unnecessary, and returned to the plains. On his last day in the imperial summer capital, he told a prayer meeting that while the Mission appeared to have failed, ‘it would not necessarily mean that all was over. After all, Hindus and Muslims are brothers. Some day they are certainly going to unite.’38
On 16 May, the Cabinet Mission issued a long statement focusing on the Hindu–Muslim question. The Muslim League had demanded a ‘separate and fully sovereign State of Pakistan’, which would include all of Bengal, the Punjab, NWFP, Sindh and Balochistan, and possibly chunks of Assam too. The mission found it unjustified to include in any such state those districts of Bengal and Punjab which were predominantly non-Muslim. A second alternative would be to partition these two large and crucial provinces; but this too would render asunder populations with a ‘common language and long history and tradition’. The mission thus concluded that ‘neither a larger nor a smaller sovereign State of Pakistan would provide an acceptable solution for the communal problem’.
The immediate creation of Pakistan ruled out, the Mission went back to its original proposal of a loose federation, with the Centre controlling a few areas, the rest left to the provinces, these combined into groups. Any province could, after ten years, opt out of its assigned group and, at a pinch, out of the Union itself. This scheme, said Pethick-Lawrence and Co., would not ‘completely satisfy all parties’, but perhaps ‘at this supreme moment in Indian history statesmanship demands mutual accommodation’.39
Sent this document, Gandhi wrote to Pethick-Lawrence to protest the grouping scheme, since some provinces (such as Assam and NWFP) might not wish to join the group assigned to them. He further noted the lack of any assurances to the people of the princely states, these ‘groaning under a double yoke’, that of their rulers and of the British Raj. Gandhi was disappointed that the Mission had not called for the immediate formation of a national government, and dismayed that it had not made clear that British troops would have to leave India for good when the Raj ended.
The secretary of state wrote back in stiff, formal terms, saying that he ‘quite definitely’ disagreed with Gandhi on the questions of a national government and troop withdrawal. Gandhi archly replied that this letter was ‘in the best imperialistic style which I had thought had gone for ever’.40
The degeneration in tone was unpropitious. By the middle of May, it was clear that the Cabinet Mission plan was going nowhere. It pleased neither the Muslim League, since it did not explicitly concede Pakistan; and it alienated the Congress, since it seemed to leave behind a weak Centre with little control over potentially secessionist provinces and always autocratic princes. The negotiations dragged on till the middle of June, before finally being proclaimed a failure.
Meanwhile, the viceroy, Lord Wavell, was seeking to form a provisional government at the Centre, composed (unlike the executive councils of the past) wholly of Indians. There would even be an Indian war member, or defence minister.
Which parties or individuals would be represented in this interim government? In his correspondence with Wavell, Jinnah had demanded parity between the Congress and the Muslim League. He suggested that these parties nominate five ministers each, with Sikhs and Christians, themselves small but distinct minorities, nominating one minister apiece. Jinnah further told Wavell that he would not allow Maulana Azad to represent the Congress in talks regarding Cabinet formation, even though Azad was—as he had been since 1940—the party’s president. The opposition was personal, but also strategic—by denying Azad a place at the negotiating table, Jinnah would further solidify the League’s claim to represent the interests of all Indian Muslims.
Gandhi met Wavell in Delhi on 11 June. When the viceroy put Jinnah’s conditions to him, Gandhi gently expressed his own reservations about parity. He was more forceful in condemning Jinnah’s bid to keep Azad out of the talks. The Congress, he told Wavell, ‘could not be expected to sacrifice its faithful servant of twenty-five years standing whose self-sacrifice and devotion to the national cause had never been in question’.41
A week later, the CWC met in Delhi. Gandhi told them that if asked to nominate members for this interim government, they must choose at least ‘one nationalist Muslim and one woman’. He stressed that the ‘Congress will lose its prestige if it ceases to have a national character’.42
The Congress’s negotiating position was weakened by Jinnah’s obduracy, and by the unrelenting hostility towards them of many British members of the Indian Civil Service, who had not forgotten the uprising of 1942. The governor of the United Provinces told Wavell that ‘we must stop Congress getting a dominating position, with Gandhi as de facto dictator behind the scenes. This can only be done if HE [Wavell] accepts Jinnah’s nominees [for the interim government], even if it crashes the conference.’43
This was advice the viceroy was prepared to heed. To be sure, Wavell was more sympathetic to Indian aspirations than his predecessor. Unlike Linlithgow, he knew the British must, for their own sake as much as for their subjects, leave soon. Yet, he retained deep reservations about India’s pre-eminent political party. He could not forgive the Congress for launching the Quit India movement at a time when the fate of the World War hung in the balance; when, as the commander-in-chief of the Indian Army, he was himself organizing the defence of the subcontinent against the Japanese. He thought that Gandhi’s party was adroit at raising ‘mob passion and mob support’, writing somewhat hyperbolically that the Congress ‘do not hesitate to use the worst and most violent elements in the population for their purposes’. He was enraged that Gandhi, Nehru and company had—as he saw it—‘chosen to exalt and glorify the few thousands of traitors of the INA, who were mostly the cowards and softlings; and to neglect the magnificent men who really fought for them’. Such were the sentiments that led Wavell, when the Cabinet Mission was in India, to confide to his journal tha
t ‘I sympathise with the Muslims rather than with Congress…’ He sympathized least of all with the Congress’s long-time leader, telling his journal that ‘I have always regarded G[andhi] as our most inveterate, malignant and rather hypocritical enemy’.44
IX
In the last week of June 1946, the Cabinet Mission departed for England, having failed to bring about a resolution of the dispute between the Congress and the League. Another way, and some other interlocutors, would have to be found to take the transfer of power from British to Indian hands forward.45
Meanwhile, the Indian National Congress had to choose a new president. The war, Quit India and the incarceration of their main leaders had disrupted the normal process of having fresh elections every year. Maulana Azad had, willy-nilly, served as Congress president from 1940 to 1946. Now it was time to choose a suitable successor.
J.B. Kripalani, the Congressmen who had known Gandhi longest, wanted to throw his hat in the ring. Twelve of the fifteen secretaries of the provincial Congress committees nominated Vallabhbhai Patel, in acknowledgement of his role in building and rebuilding the party. But Gandhi himself wanted Jawaharlal Nehru. In the event, his will prevailed, and the working committee nominated and selected Nehru.46
Why did Gandhi choose Jawaharlal Nehru over Vallabhbhai Patel? The question was debated somewhat at the time, and has in fact been debated far more intensely in recent years, when—in part due to the misdeeds of his descendants—the popular mood in India has turned fiercely against Nehru and his legacy.47 First, Gandhi knew that, with independence imminent, the person who became Congress president in 1946 would most likely become the prime minister of a free India. Second, for at least a decade now, Gandhi had regarded Nehru as his political heir. In statements both private and public, he had made this choice clear. This was something Patel himself was quite aware of, which is why he did not press his candidacy but withdrew in favour of Nehru. Patel also knew that while the provincial secretaries may have backed him, he would not have won a vote against Nehru in the wider AICC, still less among the party membership as a whole.
Gandhi chose Nehru as his political heir because he most reliably reflected the pluralist, inclusive idea of India that the Mahatma stood for. The two other alternatives—Patel and Rajagopalachari—had, by contrast, somewhat sectional interests and affiliations. Patel was seen as a Gujarati Hindu; Rajaji as a South Indian Brahmin. But Nehru was a Hindu who was trusted by Muslims, a North Indian who was respected in the south, and a man committed to equal rights for women.
Like Gandhi, but like no one else in the Congress, Nehru was a genuinely all-India leader. His popularity among the public at large had been amply demonstrated through the leading role he played in the election campaigns of 1937 and 1946. He had two further attributes: he was the most internationalist among the Indian nationalists, and he was much younger than the other contenders, and thus likely to have a longer tenure.48 That is why, and despite their differences on economic policy, Gandhi had from at least the mid-1930s clearly and consistently identified Nehru as his political heir.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Marching for Peace
I
Gandhi had rarely spoken about what a free India would look like. In July 1946, a correspondent asked him for a ‘broad and comprehensive picture of the Independent India of your conception’. Gandhi obliged with an article in Harijan which argued, first, that independence should mean the independence of the whole of India, including the princely states and the areas under French and Portuguese control; second, that it ‘must begin at the bottom’ so that ‘every village will be a republic or panchayat having full powers’; third, that ‘in this structure composed of innumerable villages, there will be ever-widening, never-ascending circles. Life will not be a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom. But it will be an oceanic circle whose centre will be the individual always ready to perish for the village, the latter ready to perish for the circle of villages, till at last the whole becomes one life composed of individuals, never aggressive in their arrogance but ever humble, sharing the majesty of the oceanic circle of which they are integral units.’
Gandhi said that in the India of his conception, every religion would have ‘its full and equal place’. As for the economy, ‘there would be ‘no room for machines that would displace human labour and that would concentrate power in a few hands’. To be sure, ‘every machine that helps every individual has a place’.1
This was Gandhi’s idea of India, a nation built from the bottom up, village loyalties blending into regional loyalties and so on upwards.
II
In three decades of fighting for freedom, Gandhi had two main challengers: two individuals who stood for ideas and interests that did not harmonize with Gandhi’s own. One was M.A. Jinnah, whose Muslim League had, by 1946, radically undermined the Congress’s claim to represent all of India. Through its growth during the Second World War, and its performance in the elections held after the war had ended, the League compelled the Raj to concede them parity with the Congress, as demonstrated in the Simla conference of 1945 and the Cabinet Mission discussions of 1946.
While Jinnah and the League grew in strength and visibility, Gandhi’s other great rival, B.R. Ambedkar, had seen his once rapidly advancing political career receive a series of setbacks. This former member of the viceroy’s executive council had seen his Scheduled Caste Federation fare miserably in the elections of 1945–46. When the Cabinet Mission came to India, it met with representatives of the ‘Nationalist Scheduled Castes’ such as Jagjivan Ram, making it clear that (even in British eyes) Ambedkar was not the sole or even the main leader of the community.
Ambedkar now sought to reach out to the Congress. In July 1946, Ambedkar met Patel through an intermediary (the trade unionist N.M. Joshi), and they discussed a possible alliance between the Congress and his Scheduled Caste Federation. During and after the war, leaders of the Muslim League had sought to make common cause with followers of Ambedkar, based on their mutual dislike of Gandhi and the Congress. Patel knew of (and deplored) these attempts;2 now, with Ambedkar himself seeking to make peace with the Congress, Patel sensed an opportunity to neutralize one former adversary, while making the Congress’s case against the adversary that remained, the Muslim League, more robust.
When Patel wrote to Gandhi about his meeting with the Scheduled Caste leader, he wrote back that ‘it was a good thing that you met Bhimarao Ambedkar’.3 However, as the discussions progressed, Ambedkar set a condition for an alliance—20 per cent of all seats should be reserved for his party. When Patel wrote to Gandhi about this new development, Gandhi replied that he saw ‘a risk’ in forging such an alliance, since Ambedkar
follows one single principle, viz., to adopt any means which will serve his purpose. One has to be very careful indeed when dealing with a man who would become a Christian, Muslim or Sikh and then be reconverted according to his convenience. There is much more I could write in the same strain. To my mind it is all a snare. It is a ‘catch’. Besides, it is not necessary for him at present to insist on 20 p[er cent]. If India becomes independent in the real sense—the provinces to some extent are—and if the caste Hindus are true to themselves, all will be well. But if the number of fair-minded persons is small and if power passes into the hands of fanatics, there is bound to be injustice, no matter what agreements you make today. You may come to any understanding you like today—but who are the people who beat up Harijans, murder them, prevent them from using public wells, drive them out of schools and refuse them entry into their homes? They are Congressmen. Aren’t they? It is very necessary to have a clear picture of this. I therefore feel that at present we should not insist on an agreement such as you suggest. However, we should stress the capacity of the Congress to do justice. Mine may be a voice in the wilderness. Even so I prefer it that way. Therefore, if we negotiate with Ambedkar out of fear of the League we are likely to lose on both
the fronts.4
Gandhi did not entirely trust Ambedkar. He had seen him accept the Poona Pact, then reject it; seek to convert his followers to Sikhism, then abandon the idea; strongly ally with the British during the war but now, with independence imminent, seek to come closer to the Congress. Beyond these disagreements on tactics lay a more fundamental divergence of views. Gandhi did not believe in mass conversion, particularly if (as Ambedkar had once proposed) it arose not through any genuine spiritual desire but for purely instrumental purposes. At the same time, while Ambedkar put great faith in state action, Gandhi thought that real change would come only if upper-caste Hindus themselves repented of their past behaviour towards the ‘untouchables’.
Patel wrote back, once more making the case for an alliance with Ambedkar. Gandhi replied: ‘I have your letter. If you see no risk in it, what is there for me to say? Do by all means settle with [Ambedkar].’5
Ambedkar now sent Patel a detailed memorandum, proposing reservation for Scheduled Castes in the public services (as well as in the legislature), state support for them in high school and university, and state funding for the foreign education of their best students. Ambedkar also urged the renewal of the system of separate electorates, since the recent 1946 elections had, in his view, ‘proved how the Scheduled Castes can be completely disenfranchised under the existing system’. In his covering letter to Patel, Ambedkar said that ‘if you have an open mind I hope to convince you that they [separate electorates] are not so bad as it is generally made out’.
Patel, in reply, said that he had read Ambedkar’s memorandum and given ‘the most anxious consideration to your proposals’. But, he noted, their ‘approach to the whole question’ differed, with the Congress aiming at ‘the assimilation of the Scheduled Castes into the general Hindu community’ while Ambedkar intended ‘to provide safeguards which would perpetuate the separation of the Scheduled Castes from the general Hindu community’.
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