There’s reason to believe that Buber’s letter, dispatched to Segaon from Jerusalem in March 1939, never reached Gandhi. In any case, by then the Mahatma had already left a distressing trail of futile, well-intentioned missives. He’d written to the Czechs on the uses of satyagraha to combat storm troopers and to the viceroy, offering to mediate between Hitler and his Western prey, including Britain. Within several months, he’d write the first of two letters to the führer himself. “Will you listen to the appeal of one who has deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success?” he asked rhetorically, in a desperate, naive mix of humility and ego. The British, who monitored his mail, made sure the letter went nowhere. The letter to Hitler began with the salutation “My friend.” Hitler had already indicated what he thought of the Mahatma and his nonviolence. “All you have to do is to shoot Gandhi,” he advised a British minister.
Eventually, after the outbreak of war and his own final imprisonment, Gandhi would write to Churchill offering his services in the cause of peace. “I can’t imagine anyone with Gandhi’s reputation writing so stupid a letter,” a new viceroy, Lord Wavell, confides to his diary after intercepting it.
Unrealistic, self-regarding, and dubious in their reasoning as most of these letters were, Gandhi’s basic understanding of Churchill’s “gathering storm” wasn’t always unfocused. “If there ever could be a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity, a war against Germany, to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race, would be completely justified,” he wrote. “But I do not believe in any war.”
The onetime sergeant major had volunteered as a noncombatant in the Boer and Zulu wars. He’d offered to serve as the “recruiting agent-in-chief” for the viceroy at the end of the previous world war, even inscribing himself as a candidate for enlistment at the age of fifty. Now, for the first time, he was striking a truly pacifist stance. This can only be understood in the Indian context. The looming issue was whether the national movement could barter its support for the war effort in exchange for a reliable promise of freedom. Put another way—in the way most Indian nationalists at the time understood it—the pivotal issue was whether India could be asked to fight for the freedom of the colonial power when the colonial power’s commitment to India’s freedom was still uncertain. Gandhi’s dogmatic pronouncements on the application of satyagraha to the Jewish-Arab conflict and the menace of Nazi Germany can best be interpreted as trial runs for the penultimate chapter of the Indian struggle. It was as if he sensed that he’d be called back one last time from Segaon to lead his movement, and that this time he might have to put aside whatever lingering loyalty he might still have felt to the British.
However, when Britain finally entered the war, following the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, Gandhi’s immediate instinct was to tell the viceroy that he viewed the struggle with “an English heart.” This viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, had proclaimed India’s entry into the war the previous day without consulting any Indian. Summoned to the Viceregal Lodge in Simla, Gandhi had offered no protest, not even a mild complaint, over this stunning oversight—stemming from habitual presumption and a calculated refusal to negotiate—that would soon ignite a prolonged struggle between the colonial authority and the Indian national movement. Eventually, perhaps inevitably, but only after much wavering, Gandhi would again take on the mantle of leadership to set out the strategy for that confrontation. It would pit him against the British at the height of the war. But in Simla the day after the viceroy’s declaration, under the illusion that he had established a warm personal tie to Linlithgow—not unlike what he sentimentally imagined his tie to Smuts to have been a quarter of a century earlier in South Africa—Gandhi by his own testimony “broke down,” shedding tears as he pictured the destruction of the houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, and the heart of London. “I am in perpetual quarrel with God that he should allow such things to go on,” he wrote the next day. “My nonviolence seems almost impotent.”
11
MASS MAYHEM
BY THE END of his seventh decade, Mahatma Gandhi had been forced to recognize that the great majority of his supposed followers hadn’t followed him very far when it came to what he’d listed as the four pillars of swaraj. The last and most important of these was supposed to be ahimsa, or nonviolence, which for Gandhi was both a core religious value and his set of patented techniques for militant resistance to injustice. Now, with the eruption of another world war, he was forced to recognize that “Congressmen, barring individual exceptions, do not believe in nonviolence.” It would be his lot “to plough a lonely furrow,” for it seemed he had “no co-sharer in the out-and-out belief in nonviolence.”
Here the Mahatma seems to be deliberately striving for pathos. It’s a favorite posture, that of the isolated seeker of truth, and it’s not untinged with moral and political pressure, a whiff of emotional blackmail; his closest associates are left to feel guilty over their failure to measure up to his high ideal. Increasingly, this self-portrayal comes to define his sense of his inner reality as well as his political position. He can still draw huge reverential throngs, has a loyal entourage hanging on his every word and wish, but there are intangible, evidently important ways in which he feels himself to be alone. If Gandhi the prophet is to be taken at his word here, the temple of swaraj as he’d conceived it had now collapsed with the crumbling of its last pillar.
But the prophet’s declaration of his “out-and-out belief” doesn’t remove the political leader from the scene. Gandhi is never more elusive or complex than he is in this final decade of his life and career as he strains to balance his own precepts, values, and self-imposed rules with the strategic needs of his movement. It’s a strain that only increases as power is seen to be within its grasp. From wrenching questions about the uses of nonviolence in a war against fascism (but not imperialism, as India was quick to catch on) to the just-emerging issue of what he’d term “vivisection”—the carving out and renaming of India’s Muslim-majority areas as a state called Pakistan—Gandhi would regularly manage to stand on at least two sides, distinguishing his personal position from that of his movement, before stepping forward at the last hour to offer his loyal support for the position of the movement, and then, almost as regularly, stepping back. As early as 1939, he drew a distinction between himself and his supporters who “want to be true to themselves and to the country which they represent for the time being, even as I want to be true to myself.” The idea that country and what he’d long since been used to calling “truth” could pull in opposite directions was a relatively new one, a source of profound inner conflict.
Again on tour, 1940 (photo credit i11.1)
To a bluff British general like Lord Wavell, the penultimate viceroy, it was all an act. Gandhi was a “malevolent old politician, who for all his sanctimonious talk has, I am sure, very little softness in his composition,” Wavell wrote after his first encounters with the Mahatma. Had the viceroy’s skepticism been anywhere near the mark, the climax of Gandhi’s career would amount to little more today than an extended footnote, a kind of tributary to the torrent of onrushing events he tried and largely failed to influence. Instead, Gandhi’s last act can be read as a moral saga in its own right, not unworthy of the rubric “tragic” in its fullest, deepest sense. The public issues with which he wrestled retain their importance, but what stands out after all these years is the old man himself as he goes through a series of strenuous self-imposed trials in a time of national crisis, veering at the end of his life between dark despair and irrepressible hope.
If readiness to offer up one’s own body and life—what he called “self-suffering”—were the mark of a true votary of Gandhian nonviolence, a true satyagrahi, then the Mahatma’s lonely, detached, largely ineffectual last years and months can be invested with grandeur and interpreted as fulfillment. Which was one of the ways that Gandhi, shaping his narrative as always, was inclined to see it. The premonition that he might meet an assassin’s bullet
s became a persistent leitmotif of his private ruminations. More than five years before his actual end in a New Delhi garden on January 30, 1948, he imagined his assailant would be a Muslim, despite all he’d done since the “glorious days” of the Khilafat movement, when, in his recollection, dignity and “nobility of spirit” reigned. “My life is entirely at their disposal,” he said. “They are free to put an end to it, whenever they wish to do so.” Perhaps he was thinking back to the slaying of his fellow mahatma Swami Shraddhanand at the hands of a Muslim extremist in 1926. His foreboding proved to be partly misplaced. It anticipated the circumstances of his death but not the motive behind the eventual plot or the identity of the plotters. It was Hindu extremists who targeted him. They saw him as pro-Muslim.
At the same time, the tragic narrative can’t be easily disentangled from the self-staged, nearly comic subplot of the Mahatma’s ins and outs—his repeated exits from leadership of the national movement and his sudden returns. In the months and years following the viceroy’s declaration of war on behalf of an India he never bothered to consult, Gandhi’s comings and goings get to be like the old stage routine of a performer holding up one end of a very long ladder while exiting stage left, only to reenter stage right an instant later, hoisting the other end.
In September 1939, in the immediate aftermath of the declaration, the Congress rejects a resolution Gandhi drafted. It’s the first time in twenty years this has happened; he views it as a “conclusive defeat.” The spurned draft promised support of the British war effort by all available nonviolent means. Instead, the Congress sets up a bargaining situation, making its promise of support conditional on a British commitment on independence. Implying the bargain it imagines, it soft-pedals Gandhi’s emphasis on nonviolence. Ten months later, in June 1940, it formally votes at Gandhi’s request “to absolve him from responsibility for the program and activity which the Congress has to pursue” in order to free him “to pursue his great ideal in his own way.” Three months later, after the viceroy has brushed off its demand for a commitment on Indian freedom, it summons Gandhi back to leadership. In December 1941 he’s out again, over disagreements about the use of force. A mere two weeks later, he’s back on his own terms, only now his terms have started to undergo a subtle shift. Eventually, he makes a reluctant concession: if India is declared independent during the war, he acknowledges, it will probably conclude it needs armed forces; he also agrees that Allied forces could continue to use its territory as a base from which to bomb Japanese positions in Burma and fly arms over the hump to China. These adjustments in his and the Congress’s position come painfully, over many months. They’ve no effect. The British still aren’t biting: Winston Churchill, the “die-hard” imperialist, would famously assert that he hadn’t become prime minister to preside over the empire’s dissolution. Having failed so far to dislodge or even budge the Raj, Gandhi and the Congress prepare for the largest campaign of noncooperation and nonviolent resistance in twelve years, since the Salt March, serving an ultimatum on the British: hand over sovereignty or face the consequences. In 1942, at the height of the Japanese advance across Asia, against the better judgment of Nehru, who took the threat of an invasion seriously, “Quit India!” becomes their cry.
Through all his ins and outs, Gandhi has now moved over three years from unconditional support for the war effort by all available nonviolent means to a threat of nonviolent resistance on a massive scale unless India is freed to make “common cause” with the Allies in ways that wouldn’t necessarily be nonviolent. On August 8, 1942, the Congress endorses the “Quit India” resolution, which promises that a free India will “resist aggression with all the armed as well as nonviolent forces at its command.” That phrase embodies Gandhi’s tacit shift on the question of armed force, his willingness to align himself with Nehru and other Congress leaders. Now he’s ready to go full tilt. The coming campaign will be, he promises, “the biggest struggle of my life.” Here we’ve a flash of the fully possessed, “do or die” Gandhi, the fervent commander, who led indentured miners into the Transvaal in 1913, who later promised “swaraj in a year,” who subsequently marched to the sea to harvest a handful of salt. But the morning after the vote on the “Quit India” resolution he’s arrested again in Bombay and taken as a prisoner to the Aga Khan Palace outside Poona, where he’s sidelined for the next twenty-one months until the British, alarmed by his high blood pressure, decide to let him go in order not to have to face an uproar over his dying in detention.
Churchill’s cabinet has discussed the idea of deporting Gandhi to Uganda but recognizes finally that its American ally, not to mention the masses of India, might find this hard to swallow. Gandhi’s last campaign hadn’t achieved anything like his standard of nonviolent discipline. “Mob violence remains rampant over large tracts of the countryside,” the viceroy reported to Churchill three weeks after his arrest. By the end of the year, nearly one thousand persons had been killed in clashes with the police; some sixty thousand arrested in the British crackdown on the Congress. Egged on by Churchill, the British searched for evidence that Gandhi, though jailed, had been complicit in this violence, perhaps conspiring with the Japanese. They never found it, but Gandhi’s own words before his arrest seemed to hint that he wouldn’t be surprised by a surge in rioting. Indian nonviolence had always been imperfect, “limited in both numbers and quality,” he coolly told an American correspondent—that is, in the availability of trained satyagrahis who could be relied on to make the requisite self-sacrifice—but “it has infused life into the people which was absent before.” He isn’t threatening or justifying violence, but assuming for the moment the position of a detached observer, a realist, he seems to be suggesting that this time it couldn’t be ruled out. This Gandhi sounds like the pre-Mahatma of 1913 who warned the South African authorities he might lose control of his movement.
Gandhi’s moral stubbornness, ascribed by the Mahatma to the dictates of his “inner voice,” seems to function in his later years like a suddenly released spring or coil, distancing him from responsibility for far-reaching political decisions. The pattern had been set by the time his last imprisonment ended on May 6, 1944. But Nehru and Patel, the whole Congress Working Committee, remained in jail; the viceroy rebuffed his request to consult them. So, for the next thirteen months, until their release, only he could act on national issues. His most significant venture in that time was an attempt to bridge the widening chasm between the Indian National Congress and the Muslims—in particular, a resurgent Muslim League under its self-styled Quaid-i-Azam, or “great leader,” Mohammed Ali Jinnah.
This was the same Jinnah who’d welcomed him to India nearly three decades earlier with a heartfelt plea for national unity; the nationalist whom Gokhale, Gandhi’s sponsor and guru, had earlier hailed as an “ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity”; who in 1916 lived up to that tribute by cementing an accord between the Congress and the Muslim League that seemed a breakthrough at the time; the same Jinnah, fastidious lawyer that he was, whose belief in constitutional methods had then been so ruffled, so offended, by Gandhi’s introduction of mass agitation based on appeals to religious themes (of Muslims as well as Hindus) that he’d walked away from the Congress; the political broker who was, nevertheless, still trying as late as 1928 to find common ground between the two movements on the constitutional shape of an independent India; and who in 1937 offered to enter coalitions with new Congress governments at the provincial level, only to be rebuffed.
He was the same man but no longer the same nationalist. Returning from his four-year exile in England, he paid Gandhi the implicit compliment of imitation. Mass agitation based on religion no longer offended him; it was, he’d learned, the surest path to national leadership. Now he argued that there’d never been and never could be an Indian nation, only Hindu India (Hindustan) and Muslim India (Pakistan)—two equal nations, no matter that one outnumbered the other by better than two to one (roughly three to one if untouchables were counted as Hindus). By Jin
nah’s reasoning, if Muslims were a nation, they weren’t a minority, whatever the population tables showed; any negotiations, he insisted, had to be on that basis. The Quaid’s sartorial transformation wasn’t as drastic as the Mahatma’s, but in place of his smart, custom-tailored double-breasted suits he now sometimes appeared in the long traditional, buttoned-up coat known as a sherwani and the rimless cap fashioned from sheep hide that learned Muslims called maulanas favored; henceforth it would sometimes be described as a Jinnah cap, worn in contrast to the white khadi caps donned by congressmen that were everywhere known as Gandhi caps. With skill and considerable cunning, the Quaid had set himself up to be Gandhi’s foil.
There’d never been much warmth between these two Gujarati lawyers, but Gandhi, who’d always treated Jinnah with respect and had reached out to him at times when Nehru and most other Congress leaders tended to write him off, now made a point of referring to him as Quaid-i-Azam. (In 1942, days before the launch of the “Quit India” campaign, he’d even suggested that Jinnah could form a government if the British weren’t ready to hand over power to the Congress.) For his part, Jinnah had always made a point of referring to him frostily as “Mr. Gandhi,” conspicuously shunning any use of his spiritual honorific. But now the Quaid unbent sufficiently, on one occasion at least, to call him Mahatma. “Give your blessings to me and Mahatma Gandhi so that we might arrive at a settlement,” he asked a throng of Muslim Leaguers in Lahore as the day of their summit neared. These small glimmers of regard were enough to make the British worry that the two leaders might form an anticolonial front in the midst of the war. Hindu nationalists worried as well. A mob showed up at Wardha with the intention of physically blocking Gandhi’s way when it was time for him to leave for the station to board his train for Bombay to meet Jinnah. Their idea, then as now, was to protest any move to alienate any piece of the “motherland.” Prominent in the crowd was a high-strung Brahman editor named Nathuram Godse who several years later, after India’s partition, would step forward as the gunman Gandhi had long anticipated.
Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India Page 37
