Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  With Gandhi in Bihar was Mridula Sarabhai, daughter of Ambalal Sarabhai, who had saved the ashram in Ahmedabad from going under in 1915. Mridula had known Gandhi all her life, but this was the first time she had seen at such close quarters his method of working. She was impressed by how, through his prayer meetings, Gandhi spread the message of religious toleration. These began with a Buddhist prayer taught to him by a Japanese monk who had lived in Sevagram, and continued via verses from the Koran, the Gita, the Bible and the Zend-Avesta to Gandhi’s favourite Ramdhun, whose last verse he had tweaked to ‘Ishwar Allah téré naam, sabh ko sanmati dé Bhagwan’ (God is called both Ishwar and Allah, and may He give good sense and wisdom to all).

  Mridula observed that ‘it was Gandhiji’s practice to investigate every complaint himself. His insistence on satisfying himself in every matter, big or small, compels everybody working with him to be continually vigilant.’ Visiting a village where many Muslims were reported to have been killed, he was told by the local magistrate and police officers that the reports were false. But Gandhi saw some wells had been filled up; he had them excavated, to find many decaying corpses within.11

  III

  While urging ordinary Hindus to repent and make amends, Gandhi continued to have reservations about the Muslim leadership. ‘If you are true representatives of the League,’ he told Muslim League functionaries in Bihar, ‘you should frankly tell Jinnah Saheb or Liaquat Ali Saheb that they are going in the wrong direction; only then you would be serving the League faithfully. Noakhali, Bengal and the Punjab are still witnessing massacres by Muslims. I do not deny that Hindus too are perpetrating such crimes, but both Jawaharlal and I have been strongly condemning their misdeeds and publicly appealing to them to desist. Has any representative of the League made any such appeal to Muslims?’12 The criticism, or complaint, was not without foundation: Jinnah and his second in command, Liaquat Ali Khan, were by no means as forthright in speaking out against Muslim communalism as were Gandhi and Nehru with regard to Hindu communalism.

  Negotiations regarding the transfer of power were reaching a crucial stage. Nehru and Patel thus wanted Gandhi back in Delhi. He returned to the capital for a week, consulting with leading Congressmen, and also meeting Mountbatten and Jinnah. It now looked more and more likely that, when the British left, they would leave behind not one nation but two. Jinnah’s campaign for Pakistan was on the verge of success. Gandhi still hoped it would not come about; arguing that ‘the Congress should in no circumstance be party to partition’.13

  Gandhi met Jinnah in Delhi on 6 May; afterwards, the League leader issued a statement saying that Gandhi ‘thinks division is not inevitable, whereas in my opinion, not only is Pakistan inevitable but this is the only practical solution of India’s political problem’.14 But Gandhi yet hoped to stall the inevitable; writing to the viceroy that ‘it would be a blunder of the first magnitude for the British to be a party in any way whatsoever to the division of India’.15

  In truth, the increasing polarization was manifest at Gandhi’s own prayer meetings, with many Hindus objecting to the recital of verses from the Koran. One correspondent wrote saying the Koran’s philosophy ‘is an anti-thesis of all the Gita teaches’. Gandhi’s reading of these verses, charged the critic, was an ‘expression’ of his ‘appeasement policy’. Another writer sarcastically commented that ‘in order to support the Congress, the Hindu need not become an ardent admirer of the “Quran” or allow it to be sung [sic] at his place of worship’. If this practice continued, he warned, ‘the Congress will cease to exist as the Hindus are no longer in a mood to be treated in the way they have been’.16

  From Delhi, Gandhi proceeded to Calcutta, where a movement had arisen for a ‘united Bengal’, for a state that would not join Pakistan but unite Bengali speakers regardless of religious affiliation. Among its chief advocates were Subhas Bose’s younger brother Sarat Chandra Bose and H.S. Suhrawardy. On the other hand, it was opposed by the Hindu Mahasabha leader Syama Prasad Mookerjee, who claimed it was promoted largely by British commercial interests. The scheme was also rejected by the Muslim League, for whom Bengal was as big a prize for Pakistan as the Punjab. Gandhi met both proponents and opponents of the idea. While he did not commit himself to either side, the idea of unity on the basis of ‘a common culture and a common mother tongue’ appealed to him. But, as he told Sarat Bose, the proposal had to be put to the democratic test of the citizens of Bengal. However, Nehru and Patel also came out against the United Bengal scheme, so, as Gandhi wrote to Bose, he would now have to persuade both the Congress and the League, an impossible task.17

  Gandhi moved on to Patna again, talking to citizens and volunteers, pursuing his campaign for communal harmony. He was disappointed by the lack of commitment of Congressmen to ‘establishing good relations among the Hindus and the Muslims’. He struck a note of despair, saying, ‘a rot has set in in the Congress. It means that Congressmen are no longer honest. If those who are selfish capture the Congress it cannot function well.’18

  In the last week of May, Gandhi returned to Delhi. His prayer meetings were now regularly obstructed by protesters. These were often Hindu refugees from West Punjab, thrown out of their homes and villages as the violence in the province grew progressively more intense. Gandhi was also receiving many abusive letters. As was his wont, he read out excerpts from these letters in these meetings. He did not contest their facts, while pointing out that no one could cast the first stone, since ‘the Hindus in Bihar have not lagged behind in committing atrocities. Not only were the atrocities of Noakhali avenged, but much more was done.’ On the other side, ‘we shall have to tell the Muslims that [violence] is not the way to achieve Pakistan’.19

  Partition had now become inevitable. On 3 June, Mountbatten announced that the British government had recommended that British India be divided into two successor states, India and Pakistan, both remaining in the British Commonwealth, but retaining the right to secede from it. The 15th of August was set as the date of formal transfer of power. British India was to be partitioned; so too would be two of its largest provinces, Bengal and the Punjab. Cyril Radcliffe, a British judge with no previous experience of India and Indians, was tasked with drawing the line that divided India from Pakistan in the east and in the west.

  Once Pakistan came into being, said Gandhi at a prayer meeting on 7 June, then ‘it becomes the duty of the Congress to…make its best efforts in the portion that remains with it. Let the people in Pakistan go ahead of the Congress in their efforts to bring progress to their land.’ Five days later, he remarked that ‘geographically we may have been divided. But so long as hearts too have not been divided, we must not weep.’ Four days later still, he insisted that even if Pakistan and India became two different countries, ‘if I have to go to the Punjab, I am not going to ask for a passport. And I shall go to Sind also without a passport and I shall go on walking. Nobody can stop me.’

  Gandhi urged his audiences to ensure that those Muslims who stayed back in India were treated as full citizens. Their safety and security must be assured. At the same time, there was no question of separate electorates for Muslims. Those electorates ‘were a poisonous weed planted by the British but we shall be just to them. Their children will have as much opportunity of education as other children.’20

  IV

  Through the second quarter of 1947, the situation in the Punjab continued to deteriorate. The province was ‘submerged under suspicion and hatred’, wrote one Punjabi: ‘Passions are running high. Killings, loot, arson, abductions and forcible conversions have hardened the people. All classes of men are feverishly arming themselves.’21 The governor of the Punjab threw up his hands, writing to a colleague in late May, as houses and localities were being set ablaze in Lahore, that ‘we haven’t the water or the fire-engines to exercise more than a very elementary control. No answer that HMG [His Majesty’s Government] can devise will really meet the Punjab situation…’22
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  Gandhi was reading the newspapers, and getting reports from Congressmen in the province. ‘Is Pakistan,’ he asked, ‘to be raised over the ashes of Lahore and Amritsar?’ He found himself in a dilemma. Punjab called, but so did Bihar, and so also Noakhali, where his ‘work was just started and [had] given much comfort to the Hindus’.

  In a prayer meeting on 10 July, Gandhi said: ‘There are still thirty-five days to August 15. Let us cease to be beasts and become men. We have all been put to the test and that includes the British.’ He had heard that, in Noakhali, Hindu refugees worried that once Pakistan came into being, they would not be resettled or compensated. Gandhi insisted that ‘the Pakistanis must demonstrate that the Hindus living in Pakistan will not be harmed in any way. Then we shall have reason to celebrate 15th of August as Independence Day. But if this does not happen, this independence is not for me nor, I am sure will it be for you. A lot can happen in these thirty-five days.’

  In another prayer meeting two weeks later, Gandhi said that after Partition, ‘the Congress can never become an organization of the Hindus. Those who seek to make it such will be doing great harm to India and Hinduism.’ Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Parsis who lived in India would have equal rights. For, ‘people professing different religions have mingled to form the Indian nation and they are all citizens of India and no section has the right to oppress another section’.23

  The creation of Pakistan was a great personal triumph for Muhammad Ali Jinnah. His idea of a separate nation for Indian Muslims had been widely scoffed at and mocked. As recently as 1942, Jawaharlal Nehru had written:

  Hindu and Muslim ‘cultures’ and the ‘Muslim nation’—how these words open out fascinating vistas of past history and present and future speculation! The Muslim nation in India—a nation within a nation, and not even compact, but vague, spread out, indeterminate. Politically the idea is absurd, economically it is fantastic; it is hardly worth considering.24

  Within five years of this magisterial dismissal, this absurd and fantastic idea had been fulfilled, albeit at a horrific human cost. Did Jinnah think it worth the price? We do not know, since his feelings on the division of India were, unlike Gandhi’s, not shared with the public. Meanwhile, Penderel Moon cynically wrote to a friend: ‘One man with two stenographers having created two kingdoms—J’s [Jinnah’s] own description of his achievement. He is apparently quite satisfied and doesn’t much mind if they both go to blazes…’25

  V

  On the last day of July, Gandhi left Delhi for Kashmir. This was at the request of Jawaharlal Nehru. The situation in that princely state was rapidly reaching boiling point. Once Independence came, on 15 August, all princely states would have the option of joining India or joining Pakistan, depending on which new nation its borders abutted. Of these five hundred-odd principalities, some the size of Jersey or Guernsey, some the size of Great Britain, the state of Jammu and Kashmir was one of the very few which had the choice of joining either India or Pakistan, since its borders touched both.

  The viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, urged the princes to join either state before 15 August. Several dithered, among them the maharaja of Kashmir and the nizam of Hyderabad, both of whom fancied staying independent. In Kashmir, a vigorous popular movement had arisen for democratic rule, led by the charismatic Sheikh Abdullah. The maharaja had responded with repression, throwing Abdullah and many of his colleagues in jail.

  The ruling family of Jammu and Kashmir was Hindu. The bulk of the population, however, was Muslim. While Sheikh Abdullah was a Muslim, he was also a close friend of Jawaharlal Nehru, sharing his socialist views. In terms of the religious composition of its population, the princely state was aligned more to Pakistan, but by the character and ideology of its major mass leader, drawn more to India. The Congress naturally wanted to focus on the latter, so as to facilitate Jammu and Kashmir’s accession to New Delhi.

  In June 1947, Nehru told Mountbatten that ‘he thought he would soon have to go to Kashmir to take up the cudgels on behalf of his friend [Sheikh Abdullah] and for the freedom of the people’. The viceroy dissuaded him from going, since he was needed in Delhi, and since Nehru had been arrested by the maharaja the last time he went to Kashmir (in 1946), and Mountbatten didn’t want the trouble to escalate. Nehru said in that case the viceroy must permit Gandhi to go instead.26

  Shortly before he left Delhi for Srinagar, Gandhi said: ‘The people of Kashmir should be asked whether they want to join India or Pakistan. Let them do as they want.’27 He took a train to Rawalpindi, from where he was to proceed by road to Kashmir. The train stopped at Amritsar, where angry Hindus waved black flags and asked him to go back. His disciple Brij Krishna Chandiwala, who was with him, thought immediately back to 1919, when Gandhi was a folk hero in Punjab, his arrest leading to mass protests culminating in the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh. ‘The same Gandhi was now the target of abuse by the people of that very province who 28 years ago, respected him so much.’28

  However, when Gandhi reached Kashmir he received a terrific reception. He drove from Rawalpindi to Srinagar, and on his entry into the town was met by thousands of people on either side of the road, shouting ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai’. Since the bridge across the river Jhelum had been taken over by the crowd, Gandhi took a boat to the other side, where he addressed a public meeting of some twenty-five thousand women, convened by Sheikh Abdullah’s wife.

  In Kashmir, Gandhi spent three days in the Valley and two days in Jammu. He met the maharaja, Hari Singh, as well as his controversial prime minister, Ram Chandra Kak. He also met the Sheikh’s political deputy, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, who ‘was most sanguine that the result of the free vote of the people, whether on the adult franchise or on the existing register, would be in favour of Kashmir joining the [Indian] Union provided of course that Sheikh Abdullah and his co-prisoners were released…’29

  VI

  Gandhi had asked Sushila Nayar to stay back in Rawalpindi, to help with refugee relief. She was herself originally from West Punjab, and Gandhi trusted her to provide him reliable reports of what was, and what was not, happening. He had, meanwhile, proceeded by train to Calcutta, from where he hoped to push on to Noakhali. But when he reached Bengal’s capital on 9 August, he found it convulsed by a fresh round of rioting.

  On the 11th, Gandhi went on a two-hour tour of the riot-affected areas of Calcutta by car. He was accompanied by, among others, Satis Chandra Dasgupta. A police contingent followed. In his tour, Gandhi ‘saw some burnt-out and devastated bustees and passed through roads lined with abandoned and shattered houses, the occupants having been evacuated’. At various places, his car was halted by crowds, where men and women narrated their experiences. ‘Mr. Gandhi, who was observing his day of silence, listened quietly to the tales of woe, occasionally jotting down notes.’30

  Gandhi now decided to stay on and ‘see if he could contribute his share in the return of sanity in the premier city of India’. He met H.S. Suhrawardy, now about to be jobless, since with the division of Bengal, there would be new chief ministers in its Indian and Pakistani sections. Gandhi persuaded Suhrawardy that they should stay together in a riot-torn part of the city to instil confidence simultaneously in Hindus and Muslims.

  On 13 August, Gandhi and Suhrawardy moved into the Hydari Manzil, a once grand but now derelict home of a Muslim merchant in the east Calcutta locality of Beliaghata. Manu Gandhi records that this was a ‘very shabby house’, with ‘only one latrine used by hundreds of people, including a number of volunteers, policemen and visitors’. Besides, ‘every inch of the place was covered with dust. In addition, rain had made the passages muddy.’31

  On their first day in this dismal place, an angry mob of Hindus came and shouted slogans against Gandhi. He invited in their leaders, who asked why he was staying in a Muslim locality rather than a Hindu one. Did he not know or remember what the Muslims had done on Direct Action Day in August 1946?

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sp; Gandhi acknowledged that ‘what the Muslims did was utterly wrong. But what is the use of avenging the year 1946 in 1947?’ He had come there ‘to serve not only Muslims but Hindus, Muslims and all alike’.32

  During the 14th, many visitors and deputations came to see the two leaders. ‘The local Hindus were reassured, the Muslims received fresh hopes.’ A large crowd had gathered for the evening prayers at 6 p.m. Suhrawardy was too nervous to come out; he lay inside the house, ‘his eyes shut’. Gandhi’s speech was heard in silence at first, but then some young men began to shout for Suhrawardy.

  Gandhi went back in, and then, a little later, as the shouting continued, came to the window of the house, and

  began to talk in a quiet voice to the youths just outside. Quickly the noise grew less, till there was absolute quiet. After ten minutes Suhrawardy joined Gandhi at the window, and began to speak. At first there were shouts of disapproval but soon the crowd listened and in spite of occasional taunts about his own responsibility for the past killings they gave him close attention; in response to an interruption he confessed to shame for the horrors of a year ago; and the crowd applauded his solemn assurances that he would go on working with Gandhi for peace in any part of Calcutta or East Bengal or wherever it might be needed.

  Later in the evening, an army officer brought news of a big procession elsewhere in the city of Hindus and Muslims celebrating together. This was communicated to the crowd outside, who then ‘left in peace’.33