Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India

by Joseph Lelyveld

  When the leaders finally faced each other in the study of Jinnah’s residence on Mount Pleasant Road in the upscale Malabar Hill section of Bombay on September 9, 1944, in the first of what would be a marathon of fourteen sessions over eighteen days, Jinnah asked for Gandhi’s credentials. “I thought you had come here as a Hindu, as a representative of the Hindu Congress,” he said archly, according to Gandhi’s version of the exchange, fully aware that this formulation would grate on his guest. “No, I have come here neither as a Hindu nor as a representative of the Congress,” Gandhi replied. “I have come here as an individual.” In that case, his host wanted to know, if they reached an accord, who would “deliver the goods”?

  It was a barbed but reasonable question. Setting aside his openly eclectic, nonsectarian approach to religion, not to mention his decades-long quest for “unity,” Gandhi had tacitly accepted the idea of a separate Muslim state as a basis for negotiation. Not only had the Congress already voted down the set of proposals he now advanced for discussion; it had done so with his approval. If he was reversing himself, Jinnah wanted to know, who would follow him? Was he even serious? The Pakistan Gandhi was ready to support would enjoy a certain amount of autonomy within an Indian union, which might be a relatively loose federation in which defense and foreign affairs were handled as national concerns. If Pakistan could be kept within India, he allowed himself to hope, “heart unity” might yet follow. Putting it in writing at the start of the third week of talks, Gandhi went a step further, acknowledging a right of secession for the Muslim-majority areas that could lead to a “Treaty of Separation” between “two sovereign independent states.”

  That still wasn’t far enough for Jinnah. The Pakistan he had in mind had to start off as sovereign. It couldn’t trust a Hindu-dominated regime to draw its boundaries or see to the terms of its separation; only by its own free choice could it find itself inside an independent India. Thus its destiny and boundaries had to be determined before independence, not after, as Gandhi kept insisting. Immediately, it was apparent that they were discussing two different Pakistans, two different ideas, at least, of the bargaining power Jinnah would wield in any showdown. “I am amazed at my own patience,” Gandhi said after a grueling first session, which lasted three and a quarter hours.

  With Jinnah at the start of Malabar Hill talks, September 1944 (photo credit i11.2)

  Godse, the assassin-to-be, and his fellow Hindu chauvinists needn’t have feared that Gandhi would embrace a shrunken Hindustan. His aim, Gandhi remarked privately, while the talks were still going on, was to prove to Jinnah “from his own mouth that the whole of the Pakistan proposition is absurd.” His words here convict him of overconfidence. The Quaid-i-Azam finally became convinced that a wily Gandhi was stringing him along. “I have failed in my task of converting Mr. Gandhi,” he said. The “Mr.” could be read as a tip-off that the talks had failed.

  Jinnah claimed that only the Muslim League could speak for British India’s ninety million Muslims and only he could speak for the Muslim League. Gandhi’s claim, though couched with infinitely more generosity and tact, was no less sweeping. “Though I represent nobody but myself,” he wrote to Jinnah, “I aspire to represent all the inhabitants of India. For I realize in my own person their misery and degradation, which is their common lot, irrespective of class, caste or creed.”

  Jinnah was so engrossed in the tactics of the moment that he may have outmaneuvered even himself by waiting so long to define his idea of a satisfactory Pakistan, putting it forever beyond reach. (This is so, at least, if, as has sometimes been argued, his actual aim was to secure for Muslims a permanent share of power at the national level within India, rather than a separate state.) Gandhi, a master of the art of compromise, at least by his own estimate, may have been willing now to recognize a right of “self-determination” in Muslim-majority provinces and, therefore, a theoretical right of secession. But he was elusive on the central issue of power. Just as in his bargaining with Ambedkar, he couldn’t contemplate any scaling back of his movement’s claims—or his own—to represent the whole of India. That was the difficulty with “truth” as a standard for political judgment: it lacked flexibility. Neither the Quaid-i-Azam nor the Mahatma was a completely independent actor. Jinnah had to take care not to shatter the expectations he’d aroused in Muslim-minority provinces that could never be part of any conceivable Pakistan. Gandhi couldn’t ignore the rising specter of Hindu militancy. Each needed an act of faith from the other that was next to impossible now that Jinnah had given up on Indian nationalism.

  “I could not make any headway with Jinnah because he is a maniac,” Gandhi told Louis Fischer. In the next breath he said, “Jinnah is incorruptible and brave.” It’s a tantalizing statement, seeming almost to imply that Jinnah had been unmoved when Gandhi dangled the possibility of high office.

  Having decided he couldn’t depend on Gandhi to deliver “the goods,” the Quaid-i-Azam continued to be a prideful and elusive negotiator, counting on the British, the waning colonial power, to push a constitutional deal better than any he could hope to wrest from the Congress. Finally, with no words to his followers about such niceties as nonviolence, he gambled on what, with menacing ambiguity, he called “direct action” to force the pace. Direct action, his followers explained, meant mass struggle by nonconstitutional means.

  By then, virtually ensuring that some kind of partition, some kind of Pakistan, would be the price to pay for independence, the Congress had reluctantly accepted a British proposal for the creation of an interim government and the start of a constitutional process in which the agreement of the Muslim League was to be treated as a virtual prerequisite. Gandhi, who’d negotiated on a separate Muslim state with Jinnah two years earlier, had swung around to proposing a boycott of the interim government as a way of forestalling Pakistan, keeping it from becoming an inevitability. But his stand was laced with equivocation, as if he knew it stood no chance with the movement he no longer dominated. He said it was based on an “unfounded suspicion,” an “intuition,” an “instinct.” His suspicion was that the division of the country could be cataclysmic.

  If he’d pushed his case forcefully and publicly, the Congress might have found it difficult to proceed without him. But he had no appetite for such a test, and couldn’t see clearly where it would lead. Instead, on June 23, 1946, the day of decision on the intricate, multistage British plan, he asked permission to be excused. “Is there any reason to detain Bapu further?” asked Maulana Azad, a nationalist Muslim chairing the Working Committee meeting. “Everybody was silent. Everybody understood,” writes Narayan Desai, son of Gandhi’s devoted secretary, Mahadev, and author of a magisterial Gujarati-language biography of the Mahatma. Pyarelal’s version captures the bitterness Gandhi had to swallow. “In that hour of decision they had no use for Bapu,” he wrote.

  “I know India is not with me,” he told Louis Fischer a few days later. “I have not convinced enough Indians of the wisdom of nonviolence.”

  Jinnah had anticipated a Congress rejection of the British plan. Perhaps he’d hoped that the viceroy would then turn to the Muslim League—meaning him—to form the interim government. “Direct action” can be seen as the consequence of his disappointment. It was an adaptation—calculated, deliberately vague—of the Gandhian tactic of noncooperation, from which he’d recoiled a generation earlier. Jinnah was inevitably asked the day his new campaign was proclaimed, scarcely a month after the fateful Congress decision on the British plan, whether it would be violent. His reply, non-Gandhian in the extreme, was probably meant as psychological mood music rather than as a signal for mob violence. Nevertheless, it was chilling. “I’m not going to discuss ethics,” he said.

  He’d set Direct Action Day for August 16, 1946. What happened then over four days came to be known as the Great Calcutta Killing. By August 20, some three thousand persons had been beaten, stabbed, hacked, or burned to death in the capital city of Bengal, the only province at the time with a gov
ernment dominated by the Muslim League. Corpses littered the streets, pulled apart by swarming vultures and dogs. If Muslims were the initial aggressors, the Hindu response was no less organized or brutal. Both sides deployed gangs, armed in advance with swords, knives, the lead-tipped rods called lathis, gasoline and other inflammables. But Calcutta was a Hindu-majority city—Muslims accounting for barely 20 percent of its population—and numbers finally told: more Muslims were killed than Hindus. In New Delhi, Vallabhbhai Patel, one of Gandhi’s original disciples, expressed satisfaction over that result. “Sword will be answered by sword,” this old Gandhian later warned. But that wasn’t the way the story was generally understood or told at the time by caste Hindus who remained convinced that their community had endured the brunt of the attacks. Each side, having suffered grievously, felt thoroughly victimized.

  For India’s prophet of unity, nonviolence, and peace, these events—the overture for a year and a half of mass mayhem, murder, forced migration, property loss on a vast scale, extensive ethnic cleansing—provided ample reason for despair, enough to bring his whole life into question. Or so he seemed to feel at his lowest ebb. But if he was shaken, he clung ever more fervently to his core value of ahimsa, on which much of India seemed to have given up. And so, after a period of uncertainty over what his role now should be—which “lonely furrow” he should plow—he made his way at the start of his seventy-eighth year to a remote, watery district of Muslim-dominant East Bengal, now Bangladesh, putting himself almost as far in an eastward direction as he could get in what was still India from the center of political decision making in Delhi, a distance of more than a thousand miles. The district, known even then for the extremism of its mullahs, was called Noakhali. It had few phone lines and was actually closer to Mandalay in central Burma than it was to Delhi. As seen from the capital, Gandhi was practically in Southeast Asia.

  Noakhali qualified as a destination because it had lately been the scene of another communal mania: gruesome violence, committed mostly by Muslims, in retaliation for the Calcutta bloodletting. Here Hindus had been beheaded, burned alive, raped, forcibly converted to Islam, made to eat beef, and, in the case of at least two and possibly many more women, married off under duress to Muslim men. In an assault on a single household belonging to a Hindu landowner in a village called Karapa, twenty-one men, women, and children were slaughtered. The Calcutta papers soon put the deaths at five thousand, which turned out to be a mighty exaggeration. Two to three hundred proved to be the more likely figure. It was bad enough.

  The chief minister of what was still an undivided Bengal, a smooth Muslim politician with an Oxford pedigree named Shaheed Suhrawardy, saw only problems for himself and the Muslim League if Gandhi made it to the troubled area of East Bengal. So he tried to head the Mahatma off, calling on him on October 31 at a small one-story khadi center and ashram at Sodepur, on the outskirts of Calcutta, where the Mahatma often camped. Suhrawardy, who’d reemerge in the 1950s as prime minister of Pakistan, had a reputation among Muslims as well as Hindus for opportunism. Conspiratorial theorists among Hindus could not be convinced that he was anything other than the mastermind behind the Great Calcutta Killing. But he claimed a filial relationship to Gandhi dating back to the Khilafat agitation, and the old man, who had few illusions about Suhrawardy, retained a measure of affection for him from those days. “Shaheed sahib, everyone seems to call you the chief of the goondas,” Gandhi began teasingly, using a common term for goons. “Nobody seems to have a good word to say about you!” Lounging on a bolster, the chief minister bantered back, “Mahatmaji, don’t people say things about you too?”

  Barun Das Gupta, a retired correspondent of The Hindu newspaper and son of the founder of the Sodepur ashram, witnessed that exchange as a young man. The impression he retains is that the chief minister was a little tipsy. Suhrawardy did what he could to persuade Gandhi to give up his Noakhali mission, trying out an argument that Gandhi would increasingly hear over the ensuing months: that he could be of more use in Bihar, a predominantly Hindu North Indian province he’d just traversed to get to Calcutta. Six days earlier Hindus there had proclaimed a “Noakhali day,” which they’d marked and were still marking by a retaliatory slaughter of their own, including forced conversion of Muslims and razing of Muslim homes. The killing in Noakhali had all but stopped; the killing in Bihar was continuing in a widening swath, far surpassing in numbers of dead the grisly achievement of East Bengal. Before it burned out, it may have resulted in the loss of eight or nine thousand lives.

  According to the old Hindu correspondent, Gandhi heard Suhrawardy out in silence. The chief minister’s argument wasn’t lacking in force, but the Mahatma wouldn’t be moved; he’d fixed his sights on East Bengal and Noakhali. His instinct and ambition went beyond making a politician’s symbolic drop-in to an area in crisis, what now might be discounted as a photo op. He’d settle down and dwell in Noakhali, he’d eventually vow, until the district presented an inspiring example of reconciliation to the rest of the subcontinent. Behind this vow was a peculiarly Gandhian mix of calculation and deep, half-articulated feeling. For his own reasons, he placed a greater emphasis on showing by his presence there that Hindus could live peacefully in the midst of a Muslim majority than on persuading Bihar’s Hindus not to massacre Muslims. Noakhali struck him as a greater challenge for himself and his doctrine than Bihar precisely because it was Muslim League territory and thus an area bound to be ceded in any likely partition. Too easily, he persuaded himself that he could calm Bihar’s Hindus from afar by going on a partial fast, which involved giving up goat’s milk and reducing his meager intake of mashed vegetables; if the killing went on, he warned, he’d take no food at all. With that powerful ultimatum hanging over their collective heads, the new Congress government in Bihar assured him that it could be relied on to restore order. Allowing himself to be detoured away from Muslim-dominated Noakhali would, in his view, be tantamount to ceding the province. He was thus making himself a hostage not only in the cause of peace but that of an undivided India.

  Suhrawardy didn’t press his point. In a generous gesture, the Muslim League chieftain sportingly laid on a special train to carry the Mahatma and his party to the station nearest his destination, assigning three members of his provincial government to tag along. Gandhi, who now had fifteen months to live, stayed in the vicinity of Noakhali for the next four. He said he’d make himself a Noakhali man, a Bengali, that he might have to stay many years, possibly even be killed there. Noakhali, he said, “may be my last act.” With his usual flair for self-dramatization, he raised the stakes from day to day. “If Noakhali is lost,” he declared finally, “India is lost.” What could he have meant? What was it about this small and obscure, impoverished and virtually submerged patch of delta on the fringe of the subcontinent that so transfixed him?

  In Noakhali, November 1946 (photo credit i11.3)

  The answers, though Gandhi provided many, aren’t instantly obvious. It had been the suffering of Hindus—in particular, Pyarelal tells us, “the cry of outraged womanhood”—that had established Noakhali in Gandhi’s imagination as a necessary destination: the reports of rapes, forced conversions, followed by the rewarding of Hindu women to Muslim rioters as trophies, sometimes literally at sword’s point. Judging from his later preaching, Gandhi’s original concept of his mission involved persuading Hindu families to take back wives and daughters who’d been snatched from them rather than reject them as dishonored. He also wanted to persuade them to stay put in their villages where, typically in East Bengal, they were outnumbered four to one, or if they’d already fled to refugee camps, as they had by the tens of thousands, to now open their minds to the idea of returning to rebuild their charred, ruined homes. But as long as communal peace was his overriding objective, he needed a message for the area’s Muslim majority as well. For East Bengal’s Muslims, avenging Calcutta had been an occasion—it might even be called a pretext—for ousting Hindu landowners and moneylenders, thereby overtur
ning a lopsided agrarian order that oppressed them. The defining social statistic was that the minority Hindus owned 80 percent of the land. In a sense, he’d have to balance “the cry of outraged womanhood” against the cry for a fairer division of the income that could be squeezed from Noakhali’s bountiful harvests of fish, rice, jute, coconuts, betel, and papayas.

  At his first large prayer meeting, at a place called Chaumuhani on November 7, the elderly Hindu in a loincloth faced an overwhelmingly Muslim crowd of about fifteen thousand. He dwelled on the theme that the Islam he’d studied was a religion of peace. Earlier he’d vowed not to leave East Bengal until “a solitary Hindu girl” could walk safely among Muslims. The Muslim majority needed to tell the women of “the small Hindu minority,” he now said, that “while they are there, no one dare cast an evil eye on them.” Within a week, he found that two remaining Muslim Leaguers who’d been traveling with him had dropped out after finding themselves criticized in the Muslim press for “dancing attendance on Mr. Gandhi.”