Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  As the day progressed, there was a noticeable improvement in the communal situation. There were fewer incidents, with less than five deaths reported. A number of peace processions passed through the city shouting unity slogans. Some 5000 students marched through different localities, ‘urging the people to stand against goondaism to save the life of Mahatma Gandhi’.11

  At 8 a.m. on 4 September, the entire police force of Calcutta, ‘including Europeans and Anglo-Indians’ started a fast in sympathy with Gandhi.12 Later in the morning, a bunch of hooligans came to Beliaghata, begged for forgiveness, and placed their weapons at Gandhi’s feet. These rowdies included the Hindu leaders of the attack on the Hydari Manzil on the night of 31 August/1 September. They would, they now told Gandhi, ‘submit to whatever penalty you may impose’. He asked them ‘to go immediately among the Muslims and assure them full protection. The moment I am convinced that real change of heart has taken place, I will give up my fast.’

  The ruffians who had repented included Muslims as well as Hindus. One Muslim leader, weeping, urged Gandhi: ‘Please give up your fast. We were with you in the Khilafat fight. I take the responsibility of seeing that no Muslim in this locality creates any disturbance.’

  These hooligans-turned-peacemakers then visited all parts of the city, coming back in the evening to tell Gandhi that ‘there was quiet everywhere’. They promised to ensure that there would be no more rioting anywhere in Calcutta. An undertaking was signed by five leaders—two Bengali Hindus, one Bengali Muslim, one Punjabi Hindu and one Punjabi Sikh—and given to Gandhi. This pledged that ‘now peace and quiet have been restored in Calcutta once again, we shall never again allow communal strife in the city, and shall strive unto death to prevent it’.

  After some reflection, Gandhi decided to break his fast. He was doing so, he said, ‘so that I might be able to do something for the Punjab’. He hoped and expected ‘that the Hindus and Muslims here will not force me to undertake a fast again’. A few prayers were recited and hymns sung, and then, at 9.15 in the evening of the 4th, Gandhi drank a glass of lemon juice offered by Suhrawardy.13

  The return of peace to Calcutta prompted Mountbatten to write to Gandhi that ‘in the Punjab we have 55 thousand soldiers and large scale rioting on our hands. In Bengal our force consists of one man, and there is no rioting.’14 This tribute has been widely quoted. Less well known, but perhaps more moving and insightful, are two contemporary assessments by Gandhi’s fellow Indians, both, as it happens, Muslims. When Gandhi broke his fast in Calcutta, in Patna a member of the Bihar government remarked: ‘We are ashamed of ourselves for creating conditions in which the ordeal had to be undertaken, but we are supremely happy that the penance was only short-lived and that its reaction on Calcutta was literally miraculous.’ The minister continued: ‘Gandhiji is not a man of a particular place or community. He belongs to the world and his efforts for the restoration of mutual concord and harmony in Bengal or Bihar symbolise his services to humanity at large.’

  Gandhi’s fast, said the minister, prompted the question: ‘Why is it that while we are engaged in petty things and indulging in violence and slaughter, retaliation and reprisal, an old man of 80 is moving about on his tottering legs from one end of the country to the other asking people to give up madness and return to sanity?’

  The Bihar minister thought the continuing riots proved that the division of the country, ‘which was supposed to be the panacea of all the evils of the Indian Muslims, has been nothing but an undiluted curse for all’. He chastised the Muslim League for having given ‘a consistently wrong lead to the Indian Muslims’. Indians of all religions should now follow ‘the lead of Mahatma Gandhi which alone can ensure peace and security in India’.15

  This was a public statement, which Gandhi may or may not have seen. Meanwhile, he received a letter from Bangalore, written by Mirza Ismail, the widely admired former diwan of Mysore. Ismail told Gandhi that ‘you are rendering the greatest possible service to India in her most trying time. Your moral influence on all communities—Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, alike, and on all races, whether in or outside India, is at its highest to-day. May the Almighty spare you for the benefit, everlasting benefit, of India for very many years to come, for without your physical presence in our midst, India is lost. She will lose both her soul and her independence.’16

  To these Muslim appreciations let me add a Hindu one, that of R.P. Parasuram, the typist who had left Gandhi in early 1947 objecting to his experiment with Manu. He had since found a new job, in the office of the Socialist Party in Bombay. After reading about Gandhi’s fast on the other side of the subcontinent, Parasuram wrote to Nirmal Bose that ‘I was glad to find that you were with him once again’. Then he ruefully added: ‘I was one of those who thought that Bapu had perhaps outlived himself. He ought to have died. Then the creed of non-violence would have had greater success as one would not be faced with the spectacle of the author of non-violence himself frustrated in his attempt at stopping violence. But recent events have shown that Bapu is more needed than ever. In the present turmoil he is the only man to whom both the minorities can look up to with hope in their hearts.’17

  Meanwhile, a Tamil journalist wrote that after his deeds in 1947, surely Gandhi would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. His name had been mentioned off and on in this connection for twenty years. This year too his name had come up; the Tamil hoped the speculation ‘was well-founded’, for the other names being mentioned, such as the Czech politician Edvard Beneš and the British biologist John Boyd Orr, ‘though worthy enough persons and entitled to recognition on other meritorious grounds, are not in the same light’.18

  Alas, the Nobel Committee thought otherwise. The prize went in 1947 to the Quaker relief organization, the Friends Service Committee.

  II

  On 8 September, Gandhi left Calcutta for Delhi. He was met at Shahdara station by Vallabhbhai Patel and Amrit Kaur, who told him of the continuing violence in the capital. They took him to the large house of G.D. Birla, where they said he would be safer than in his preferred location, in the sweepers’ colony.19

  Birla House was located in the heart of New Delhi, close to the Claridges Hotel. It was a spacious two-storey house, with a large lawn adjoining it. Birla’s family moved to the upper storey, allowing Gandhi and his party the exclusive use of the ground floor. Knowing that there would be daily prayer meetings, to which uninvited guests and admirers would come, Birla had erected a platform on the lawn for Gandhi to speak from, equipped with microphones and loudspeakers. He had also placed one of his cars at the service of the Mahatma, to take him around the city or to run errands for his staff.20

  Gandhi had wished to go further north, to the Punjab. His disciple Amrit Kaur had recently been there, and come back with a ‘horrific tale of woe’. Hindus had fled West Punjab while Muslims had fled East Punjab, in each case experiencing ‘loss of all property and goods, brutal atrocities, no news of relatives—black despair’. There was, noted Amrit Kaur grimly, a ‘complete lack of confidence on the part of the minorities in the police administration both in West and East Punjab’.21

  Gandhi was being called to the Punjab, but he was detained in Delhi by the continuing violence in the capital. In a statement to the press, he said, ‘I must do my little bit to calm the heated atmosphere. I must apply the old formula “Do or Die” to the capital of India….I am prepared to understand the anger of the refugees whom fate has driven from West Punjab. But anger…can only make matters worse in every way. Retaliation is no remedy. It makes the original disease much worse. I, therefore, ask all those who are engaged in the senseless murders, arson and loot to stay their hands.’22

  In Delhi, the main sufferers were the Muslims, who were, at Partition, some 33 per cent of the city’s population. The happenings in West Punjab, as carried by Hindu and Muslim refugees, inflamed local passions. Muslims were driven out of their homes in the Old City. Shops owned by them and
mosques where they prayed were vandalized. In many cases, Hindu refugees from West Punjab had moved into Muslim-owned properties.

  Homeless Muslims had taken refuge in the capital’s ancient monuments. Tens of thousands huddled together in the Purana Qila and in the tombs of the Mughal emperor Humayun and the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya. Others were accommodated on the grounds of the Jamia Millia Islamia.

  Camps had also come up to house Hindu and Sikh refugees from the Punjab. These were on the grounds of temples and schools, and in parks. Towns close to Delhi, such as Kurukshetra, had witnessed a vast influx of Hindus and Sikhs from across the new international border.

  Gandhi visited both those displaced by the violence in Delhi and by the violence in West Punjab. While he did, as he stressed, understand the anger of the refugees from Pakistan, he did not wish it to be visited on the innocent Muslims of Delhi. ‘I would like to request you,’ he told the audience at his prayer meeting on 12 September, ‘not to regard the Muslims as your enemies….Just because the country has been divided into India and Pakistan, it does not befit us to slaughter the Muslims who have stayed behind.’ Would, he pertinently asked, attacks on Muslims in Delhi ‘mitigate the sorrows of the Hindus and Sikhs of the Punjab in any way’?

  At the same time, Gandhi appealed to the Muslims who had stayed behind to ‘open-heartedly declare that they belong to India and are loyal to the Union’. He also wanted ‘the Muslims here to tell the Muslims of Pakistan who have become enemies of the Hindus, not to go mad’.

  Gandhi was himself now reconciled to the fact and existence of Pakistan. But the violence on either side had put into question future relations between the two countries. He hoped that both governments would ‘come to a mutual agreement that they have to protect the minorities in their respective countries’.23

  Gandhi was in Delhi, but the Punjab continued to call. A civil servant wrote to him from Lahore that the situation in West Punjab was still very bad, with attacks by armed gangs on trains and refugee convoys. ‘The stock excuse given by everybody here, high and low, for this undesirable state of affairs,’ wrote the official, ‘is that the East Punjab Govt. is permitting worse things to happen on their side…This is a vicious cycle that only you can break.’24

  The Punjab called Gandhi, but while the capital of India was not at peace with itself, how could he go there just yet?

  III

  It was not merely its status as the new nation’s capital that compelled Gandhi to stay on in Delhi. He had an old and intimate connection with the city. He first visited it in 1915, to speak at St Stephen’s College in Kashmiri Gate, where his friend C.F. Andrews had once taught. He came back often during the days of Khilafat and the non-cooperation movement. He knew and admired two great Delhi doctors: Ajmal Khan, trained in the Unani style, and M.A. Ansari, trained in modern medicine. Both were also patriots; both had been presidents of the Congress. Gandhi was particularly close to Ansari, and was devastated by his death in 1936.

  Gandhi knew, from personal experience, how Muslims had defined the city of Delhi, its architecture, its literature, its musical and its medical traditions. In a speech on 13 September, he remembered that when he first came here, in 1915, he ‘was told that Delhi was ruled not by the British but Hakim [Ajmal Khan] Saheb….He was a Unani Hakim but had made considerable study of the Ayurvedic system. Thousands of Muslims and thousands of poor Hindus used to come to him for treatment.’

  The Muslim character of Delhi had been diluted when the British moved their capital here in 1911. The lovely old mosques and forts of Delhi had to share visual and social space with the grand new imperial structures built by Lutyens and Baker. Now, a mere three and a half decades later, the threat to Delhi’s Muslims was not merely aesthetic and symbolic, but physical and existential. Hindu and Sikh refugees were seeking revenge against the Muslims of Delhi for the suffering they had experienced at the hands of the Muslims of West Punjab. They demanded that these Muslims go away to Pakistan, vacating their homes, shops and schools for them to occupy.

  Gandhi had praised his late friend Hakim Ajmal Khan for healing his Muslim and Hindu patients. He too had now come to Delhi as a healer, albeit of souls, seeking to reconcile Hindus and Muslims and help them rebuild their lives and their country. And not just in India, but in Pakistan too. As he told H.S. Suhrawardy, who came to see him on 18 September, ‘both Governments should make a clean breast of their mistakes and failures’. Suhrawardy was on his way to Karachi; Gandhi told him to tell Jinnah ‘to face up to his own declaration respecting the minorities which were being honoured more in the breach than the observance’.

  The same day, addressing a gathering of Hindus and Sikhs in Delhi, he urged them to ensure that Muslims lived, not as slaves, but as full and equal citizens of India. He hoped to soon leave for Pakistan, where, as he put it, ‘I shall not spare them. I shall die for the Hindus and the Sikhs there. I shall be really glad to die there.’

  That trip to Pakistan would be contingent on the establishment of peace in India. There were millions of Muslims in the country; scattered across its villages, districts and states. There were even some in his own village, who were so ‘loyal to Sevagram, they would lay down their lives for it’. And yet, some Hindus questioned the loyalty of all Muslims who had chosen to stay behind.

  In one speech, Gandhi asked his audience: ‘Are you going to annihilate all the three-and-a-half or four crore Muslims? Or would you like to convert them to Hinduism? But even that would be a kind of annihilation. Supposing you were so pressurized, would you agree to become Muslims?…It is senseless to ask Muslims to accept Hinduism like this….Am I going to save Hinduism with the help of such Hindus?’25

  On 27 September, Winston Churchill, speaking in the British Parliament, argued that the communal violence in the subcontinent was a vindication of imperial rule. Churchill claimed that India had known a ‘general peace’ under ‘the broad, tolerant and impartial rule of the British Crown and Parliament’. The departure of the white rulers, claimed Churchill, was leading to ‘a retrogression of civilization throughout these enormous regions, constituting one of the most melancholy tragedies which Asia has ever known’.

  In his prayer meeting the next day, Gandhi referred to this speech. He praised Churchill’s role during the war, the saving of his nation from the Nazis, but thought that by this speech, ‘Mr. Churchill has harmed his country which he has greatly served’. For, the British themselves bore much responsibility for the communal violence. ‘The vivisection of India,’ commented Gandhi, ‘unwittingly invited the two parts of the country to fight each other.’ That said, Gandhi accepted that Indians had contributed to the troubles by their own partisan acts. ‘Many of you,’ said Gandhi to his audience in Delhi, ‘have given ground to Mr. Churchill for making such remarks. You still have sufficient time to reform your ways and prove Mr. Churchill’s prediction wrong.’26

  IV

  On 2 October 1947, Gandhi turned seventy-eight. From the morning a stream of visitors came to wish him. They included his close lieutenants Nehru and Patel, now prime minister and home minister respectively in the Government of India. His devoted English disciple, Mira, had decorated the chair he customarily sat in with a cross and the words Hé Ram, made of flowers.

  Gandhi was not displeased to see his old friends and comrades. But his overall frame of mind was bleak. ‘What sin have I committed,’ he told Patel in Gujarati, ‘that He should have kept me alive to witness all these horrors?’ As he told the audience at that evening’s prayer meeting: ‘I am surprised and also ashamed that I am still alive. I am the same person whose word was honoured by the millions of the country. But today nobody listens to me. You want only the Hindus to remain in India and say that none else should be left behind. You may kill the Muslims today; but what will you do tomorrow? What will happen to the Parsis and the Christians and then to the British? After all, they are also Christians.’

  Ever sinc
e his release from jail in 1944, Gandhi had spoken often of wanting to live for 125 years. Now, in the face of the barbarism around him, he had given up that ambition. ‘In such a situation,’ he asked, ‘what place do I have in India and what is the point of my being alive?’ Gandhi told the crowd who had gathered to wish him at Birla House that ‘if you really want to celebrate my birthday, it is your duty not to let anyone be possessed by madness and if there is any anger in your hearts you must remove it’.27

  Delhi had not yet completely dispossessed itself of its madness. But Calcutta had. C. Rajagopalachari sent Gandhi editorials published in two Muslim newspapers in that city, which, while wishing him a long life, nicely outlined what he stood for and why he was still needed. The Star of India remarked that the ‘baser passions to which many in the country have given a free rein threaten to make a messy thing of freedom—something entirely different from the Swaraj of Gandhiji’s conception. There is a crying need to rehabilitate men’s minds and there is also a unanimous feeling that no one is better qualified to do it than Gandhiji.’

  The Morning News, meanwhile, described Gandhi as ‘a symbol of the soul of India’, who had ‘held aloft the blazing torch of liberty’, who had ‘won freedom by his own sacrifices for ¼ of the world’s people’. The newspaper continued:

  Calcutta will never forget the superhuman effort Gandhiji made to make sanity return to the city when it seemed to have taken temporary leave of some of its citizens….He showed his real greatness in the miraculous way he was able to bring about a change of heart even among Calcutta’s criminals….Some of Gandhiji’s own co-religionists have undoubtedly betrayed him, made his message of non-violence a mockery. The prophet, as is proverbial, is never honoured in his own country. But Gandhiji, as he steps into his 79th year, crowned with the laurels, must have the supreme satisfaction of having used a technique with superb success against the mightiest military machine in the world. He has the rare distinction of having lived to see the fruits of his own labours. May he live long to see India tread the primrose path of its newly-won freedom.28