Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India

by Joseph Lelyveld

  Announcing the fast at his prayer meeting on January 12, the Mahatma mentioned the insecurity of Muslims and the Congress’s corruption but not the blocked payment to Pakistan. “For some time my helplessness has been eating into my vitals,” he said. “It will end as soon as I start a fast … I will end the fast when I am convinced that the various communities have resumed their friendly relations, not because of pressure from outside but of their own free will.” But on the second day of the fast, the cabinet convened at Birla House, beside a string bed on which the old man was lying, for reconsideration of the frozen assets issue. An aggrieved Patel, momentarily convinced that he was the target of his leader’s fast, complained bitterly to Gandhi, then left for Bombay on the fast’s third day, though the Mahatma by then had visibly weakened. “Gandhiji is not prepared to listen to me,” he’s reported to have said. “He seems determined to blacken the names of the Hindus before the whole world.”

  Confronted with the charge that his fast was on behalf of Muslims and against Hindus, Gandhi readily conceded that it was basically true. “All his life he had stood, as everyone should stand, for minorities and those in need,” he said, according to the transcript of his talk that he authorized following the prayer meeting on the first evening of the fast.

  The timetable here is vital, for it meshes fatefully and finally locks into the crude cogs of a Hindu extremist plot being pursued with amateurish zeal in the city of Poona, near which the British had imprisoned Gandhi three times for a total of six years. Now with the departure of the British, he could be caricatured there as an enemy of Hindustan. By his assassin’s own testimony, it was Gandhi’s announcement of his fast on the twelfth that had lit the fuse on the plot he and his main accomplice hatched starting that night; and it was the declaration three days later that the cabinet had reversed itself and decided to transfer the blocked reserves to Pakistan, explaining that it was moved by a desire “to help in every way open to them in the object which Gandhiji has in heart,” that had clinched the secret verdict of the conspirators condemning him to death. Patel’s absence from Delhi, meanwhile, would ensure that the Home Ministry was without firm leadership. “Every condition given by [Gandhi] for giving up the fast is in favor of Muslims and against the Hindus,” Nathuram Godse would later testify at the trial where he was finally sentenced to hang for what he represented as a patriotic imperative. Among Gandhi’s conditions had been the return to Muslim custody of the mosques that had been attacked, desecrated, and turned into Hindu temples.

  Of the unfreezing of the assets, the assassin would say: “This decision of the people’s government was reversed to suit the tune of Gandhiji’s fast. It was evident to my mind that the force of public opinion was nothing but a trifle when compared with the leanings of Gandhiji favorable to Pakistan.” The victim’s sterling virtues were an inherent part of the problem, of the obstacle he represented. “A most severe austerity of life, ceaseless work and lofty character made Gandhiji formidable and irresistible,” the assassin said in his ex post facto justification of his deed. Something had to be done if India was ever to pursue its own interests the way other nations pursued theirs. Therefore, said Godse, he “decided to remove Gandhiji from the political stage.”

  In Delhi there were no large peace processions of Hindus and Muslims as there had been in Calcutta four months earlier until the fifth and next-to-last day of the fast. Then a crowd said to number 100,000 hankerers after peace stretched for about a mile. A few days earlier, a much smaller procession of Sikhs, protesting the slaughter of their people in Pakistan’s part of the Punjab, stalked by Birla House chanting, “Blood for blood!” and “Let Gandhi die!”

  “What are they shouting?” asked the Mahatma, trying to fall asleep in a darkened room.

  “They are shouting, ‘Let Gandhi die,’ ” he was told.

  “How many are there?” the seasoned crowd counter asked.

  When the answer came, “Not many,” he resumed his prayers.

  As previously, urgent efforts to appease and satisfy him were pressed by Hindu and Muslim leaders who knew their assigned parts in the play he was staging. Once again they’d have to work together to present a convincing case that conditions for reconciliation had been secured. Telegrams full of brotherly sentiment poured in from Pakistan. A Central Peace Committee, with 130 members, was formed in Delhi. It drafted a declaration promising full compliance with Gandhi’s demands. One of these involved the main food market where Hindu merchants and shoppers had been boycotting Muslims. Now the Hindus hastened to lavish food and business on them. And, once again, after the usual haggling and close examination of the signatures on the declaration, making sure there were no holdouts, Gandhi allowed himself to be persuaded, finally ending his last fast on its sixth day, January 18. Surrounded at that moment by the usual broad array of political and religious leaders, including Pakistan’s ambassador and Prime Minister Nehru, who quietly let him know he’d been fasting in sympathy for two days, he signaled that he was ready for nourishment.

  This time it was the nationalist Muslim Maulana Azad who did the honors, handing the Mahatma the glass of sweet lime juice, fortified with an ounce of glucose. He’d been assured that Delhi was quiet and not just on the surface. No one yet heralded a “Delhi miracle.” With events hurtling on, there was hardly time.

  On the evening of January 20, as a recovering Gandhi was addressing the prayer meeting in the garden for the first time in nearly a week, the loud bang and fading rumble of an explosion set off a commotion. The bomb had been meant to serve as cover for an attempt on Gandhi’s life that evening, but though there were seven conspirators stationed in the garden, including Nathuram Godse, the attempt was never made. Gandhi went on speaking, while the twenty-year-old Hindu refugee who’d been persuaded to ignite the device was finally led away to be submitted to harsh questioning.

  “Listen! Listen! Listen everybody!” the Mahatma cried out in a voice fainter than usual on account of his fast. “Nothing has happened.” He’d been predicting his own murder for months. His first impression that evening, however, was that the boom must have had something to do with a training exercise by the police or army.

  It didn’t take long for the investigators to clear away any lingering doubts about the plotters’ aim; by the next morning they had information that should have enabled them to trace and round up the bomber’s accomplices. They’d found out that one of the plotters was the editor of a militant Marathi-language newspaper in Poona called Hindu Rashtra (Hindu Nation), a name that proclaimed its cause. That was Godse. Thus they had ten days to connect what they knew to the man and apprehend him. Why this did not become a matter of urgency has been a subject for speculation and reinvestigation ever since. (A judicial commission of inquiry was still examining the question when I arrived in New Delhi in 1966. It didn’t submit its final report until 1969, twenty-one years too late.)

  For those ten days in that first January of India’s freedom, the clumsiness and confusion of the plotters were pitted against the unbelievable inefficiency and indifference of the police. Gandhi himself fatalistically waved away all congratulations on having survived an attempt on his life. “God will keep me alive so long as he needs me and put an end to my life when he does not need me,” he said. “I am only his servant. Why should I worry?”

  In that spirit, he objected to a police proposal to search all citizens drawn to the garden for the nightly prayer meetings. His objection helped make the congratulations on his survival premature. For Gandhi it was a matter of principle, a test of his nonviolence. “The rulers of the country have no faith in my non-violence,” he said, “They only believe that this police guard will save my life … perhaps I am the only believer in nonviolence.”

  It wasn’t that he viewed searches and pat-downs as violent acts in themselves. He instinctively recoiled from the message they’d send about nonviolence as a practical way of relating to the world. How could he preach one set of values while allowing himself to be pro
tected by another? In Noakhali, Calcutta, and Bihar he’d urged simple people, members of besieged minorities, not to flee their homes but to face death bravely, if that’s what it took to turn the tide of violence. Now, by applying this code to himself, he left a gaping hole in the security precautions at Birla House. No one recognized Nathuram Godse when he returned to the garden on January 30, though he was well-known to the Poona police as a Hindu extremist, nor noticed that he was packing a big black Beretta pistol.

  Gandhi anticipates his impending death so many times in his final days that he almost seems a party to the conspiracy. In the ten days following the bungled bombing in the garden, the subject of his demise crops up in his conversation, correspondence, and prayer meeting talks at least fourteen times. “If somebody fired at me point blank and I faced his bullet with a smile, repeating the name of Rama in my heart, I should indeed be worthy of congratulations,” he said on the first day. “I am waiting for such good luck,” he said on the second. “I wish I might face the assassin’s bullets while lying on your lap and repeating the name of Rama with a smile on my face,” he told Manu Gandhi, his grandniece and bedmate, on the third. And so it goes until the evening of January 29, when, with less than twenty-four hours to go in his life’s journey, he again tells Manu: “If an explosion took place, as it did last week, or someone shot at me and I received his bullet on my bare chest, without a sigh and with Rama’s name on my lips, only then you should say that I was a true mahatma.”

  So he can’t be accused of being blind to the threat. If anything, he imagines it as being just over the horizon, about to come into view at any instant. Meanwhile, his daily spinning goes on, his basic work goes on. He even continues his Bengali lessons, in preparation for the return to Noakhali he still intends to make. And all the old themes continue to run through his talks. At the prayer meeting on January 28, he brings up a renewal of Indian nonviolent resistance in South Africa, having just had some articles on the subject read to him during his bath. The segregation of blacks in the country, he says, is like the segregation of untouchables in India.

  “I have seen it with my own eyes,” he says. “That is the reason our countrymen there are fighting for their just rights.” Hindus and Muslims, in his portrayal, are fighting together against white oppression there. He seems to be offering the Indians of South Africa as exemplars of “unity” to India and Pakistan, just as he did when he returned to India in 1915. “I have lived for twenty years in South Africa,” he now says. “Therefore I regard it as my own country like India.”

  The next evening, in his final prayer meeting talk, he again finds a way back to South Africa. His theme is the self-reliance of South Indians. He’s applying it to a food shortage currently being suffered in Madras, now Tamil Nadu, and that pitches him retrospectively back more than three decades to his march with indentured Tamils into the Transvaal in 1913, his first major exercise in leading a mass movement. They had only a small daily ration of bread and sugar, he recalls, but they managed to forage for food in the wild. So they were an example to the poorest Indians today. “Our salvation and the satisfaction of our needs lies in working honestly,” he concludes. Surveying the course of his life from the Transvaal in white-ruled South Africa in 1913 to the capital of independent India in 1948, he settles on that as a core value.

  Immediately after that meeting, Gandhi focuses on a memorandum he’s drafting on the future of the Indian National Congress, from which he formally resigned nearly fourteen years earlier. Under Nehru, the Congress is effectively now the government of India. “Working honestly” is the memorandum’s central theme. Having achieved political independence, Gandhi argues, the Congress “has outlived its use.” It needs to give up power and refashion itself as what he names a Lok Sevak Sangh, or a People’s Service League, which will subsume all the service organizations for which Gandhi had previously drafted constitutions and rules: the spinners and village industries associations, the cow-protection league, the Harijan Sevak Sangh dedicated to the uplift of the former untouchables.

  On the last evening of his life, Mahatma Gandhi dreams again of the revival of the villages. “India has still to attain social, moral and economic independence in terms of its 700,000 villages as distinguished from its cities,” he writes.

  He dreams on. Each village will have its own village worker, a selfless teetotaler who spins his own yarn, weaves his own khadi, and rejects untouchability “in any shape or form in his own person or in his family.”

  He finished working on the draft in the morning and handed it to his faithful secretary, Pyarelal, for polishing. Later Pyarelal would publish it as “The Last Will and Testament” of Mahatma Gandhi. Never did it make its way onto the agenda of any meeting of the Indian National Congress as a subject for serious discussion.

  In the last hour of his life, however, Gandhi wasn’t thinking of disbanding the movement he’d led. Now, as regularly happened throughout his political life, the practical politician takes over from the visionary. Sitting in Birla House with Vallabhbhai Patel, who suspected that he’d lost the confidence of Nehru and even the Mahatma himself, he delves into party politics one last time as a conciliator, soothing a fretful, ailing minister, telling him how important it is for him to stay in the leadership at Nehru’s side. This delicate negotiation, between two old comrades, runs ten minutes past the hour at which the compulsively punctual Gandhi always walked into the garden for his prayer meeting. On the way, walking even more briskly than usual, the old man mentions an adjustment he needs to make in his diet, then chides Manu and another grandniece, Abha Gandhi, on both of whom he’s lightly leaning—“my walking sticks,” he called them—for letting him be late. “I cannot tolerate even one minute’s delay at prayer,” he grumbles.

  Later, when it came time to turn Birla House into a shrine, designers would have 175 cement footprints molded to simulate the vigorous long strides Gandhi took that evening, so different from the slow shuffle choreographed for the stage Gandhi at the end of the opera Satyagraha. The footprints run out just beyond four steps he had to mount to reach the prayer ground. They run out at the point at which Nathuram Godse stepped forward, his two hands pressed together in the Indian greeting of namaste. According to Godse’s own testimony, the black Beretta was concealed between his palms, but Tushar Gandhi, a great-grandson of the Mahatma’s who has compiled a sourcebook on the assassination, writes that after handling the weapon, he’s convinced it was too large to be hidden in that way. So he has the Beretta concealed under Godse’s khaki bush jacket. “There is no way a person could hide the pistol in folded palms,” he wrote. “It is too big and too heavy.”

  Wherever it came from, Manu never saw it. Stepping between Gandhi and the seemingly reverential man with the folded palms, whom she imagines to be reaching out to touch the Mahatma’s feet, she’s suddenly knocked to the ground. While she’s scrambling to retrieve the rosary, notebook, and spittoon she’d been carrying, three shots ring out. Then she hears what for weeks she’d been trained to expect: “Hei Ra … ma! Hei Ra … ” She writes, “The sound of bullets had deafened my ears,” but also says that she distinctly heard the prayer that Gandhi said would validate his mahatmaship.

  The killer Godse and Vishnu Karkare, one of his cohorts stationed nearby, testified that all they heard from their victim was a cry of pain, something like, “Aaah!” Pyarelal, after interviewing witnesses, revised Manu’s account. He said the last words were “Rama, Rama.” Gurbachan Singh, a Sikh businessman walking just behind Gandhi, also claimed to have heard the stifled sound of a prayer. Whether a seventy-eight-year-old man who has taken two slugs fired at point-blank range in the abdomen and one in the chest could conceivably have uttered four or five prayerful syllables as he fell is a forensic question not easily answered at a distance of more than six decades. If he could, it might qualify as something of a miracle, of a sort not infrequently ascribed to saints. On that basis, it can be noted that most of Gandhi’s many biographers have been content to
end the story of his life on this hagiographic note. The belief that he fulfilled his ambition of dying with the name of God on his lips has seldom been challenged, except by Hindu nationalists willing to rationalize, if not defend, the murder of Gandhi. In that sense, the victim succeeded in controlling his narrative until the end by forecasting his assassination as the final test of his mahatmaship.

  Some bystanders dug up clumps of bloodstained earth from the garden to keep as holy relics. Manubehn Gandhi saved fingernail clippings. His ashes were scattered at various points across India. The process goes on. Tushar Gandhi recovered some from a vault of the State Bank of India in 1996 and immersed them at the confluence of the Ganges and Jamuna rivers. As recently as 2010, another small cache of this latter-day saint’s ashes was strewn off the coast of South Africa, in Durban’s harbor, into which Gandhi first sailed more than a century earlier.

  Estimates of the crowds that lined the route of his funeral procession ranged from one to two million. The mood was one of remorse as well as grief. Among historians there’s general agreement that the murderous hatreds that had lashed the subcontinent for a year and a half finally burned themselves out with the assassination, or at least lapsed into a period of latency. An Indian academic argues that the country was permanently altered for the better by “a certain kind of bodily sacrifice in the public sphere—and a refusal by one outstanding leader to give his consent to the particular conception of the political community that was emerging.” That conception—that Muslims had no place in the new India—was rendered illegitimate by the murder of the leading exponent of unity across communal lines. Hindu-Muslim violence continued to flare intermittently and locally thereafter, but there wasn’t anything on the scale of the partition-era killing for more than half a century, until 2002, when pogroms against Muslims in Gandhi’s home state of Gujarat led to an estimated two thousand deaths in a little more than three months, during which some 200,000 Muslims were driven from their homes. The killings were tacitly sanctioned, even encouraged, by a right-wing Hindu party lineally descended from extremist movements that were banned for a time following Gandhi’s assassination on suspicion that they’d been complicit in the murder. That party has held power ever since in the Gujarati state capital named Gandhinagar, after the favorite son who deplored its brand of chauvinism, expressed in a doctrine of national identity called Hindutva, usually translated as “Hinduness.” As often noted, it’s diametrically opposed to the doctrine of Gandhi, who repeated in the last weeks of his struggle against communal violence what he’d started saying a half century earlier in South Africa: that members of the community should see one another neither as Hindus nor as Muslims but as Indians; their religions were a personal—not a public—concern.