Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People

by Gandhi, Rajmohan

  To Andrews, 25 May 1920: I have said always that absolute guarantees may be taken from the [Turkish] Sultan about noninterference with the internal administration of Armenia; similarly for Arabia.

  The position created by the peace treaty is simply intolerable. The Arabians have lost what independence they had under the Sultan because they were more than a match for him. And now if the king of Hejaz and Amir Feisal can help it, Arabia and Mesopotamia will be drained dry for both these men will be puppets in the hands of British officers whose one aim would be to make as much money as possible for the European capitalists (20:359).

  Writing a month later in Young India, Gandhi referred pointedly to Britain’s interest in ‘the oil of Mosul’ (30 June 1920; 20: 432). The Hunter Report had come on top of the Treaty of Sevres, and Gandhi asked Andrews ‘to realize with me the enormity of the double crime of the present British administration or make me see my folly and correct myself!’ (20: 411)

  His call. Now asking Indians not to take part in the elections due in November, Gandhi also spelt out, in a Young India article in early May, the gains he expected from non-cooperation: Hindu-Muslim friendship—Muslims were likely to respond positively to Hindu support over Khilafat—and an honourable India-Britain relationship.

  In this 5 May article Gandhi also outlined a four-stage strategy for non-cooperation. In the first stage Indians should return titles and honorary posts. Later, when leaders gave the word, Indians should think of quitting civilian jobs with the government. The more distant third and fourth stages would involve withdrawal from the police and the military, and nonpayment of taxes (20: 285-88).

  Quick to accept non-cooperation, some Muslim leaders requested his leadership. To them he addressed direct words about the practical consequences of non-cooperation:

  If there is no spirit of sacrifice at least they should get rid of a man like myself. I can secure no diplomatic triumph. I can only guide along the difficult, narrow and thorny path of self-sacrifice…2

  And also about nonviolence:

  Navajivan, 16 May 1920: I told them that non-cooperation would be possible only if they gave up the idea of violence. Even if there was a single murder by any of us or at our instance, I would leave. They agreed, and understood that non-co-operation was, in many respects, a more potent weapon than violence (20: 318).

  Admitting that many Muslims responding to non-cooperation did ‘not believe in my doctrine of nonviolence to the full extent’, that ‘if some of them could offer successful violence, they would do [so] today’, and that they were not ‘free from hatred’, he yet hoped that by ‘joining my love with their hatred’ he could ‘diminish the intensity of that hatred’ (Navajivan, 18 Apr. 1920; 20: 214).

  Violence was very much in the air, and in Muslim rhetoric, as was the notion of hijrat—migration from defiled to purer lands. A land ruled by a race destroying Khilafat was deemed defiled, and India’s Muslims were exhorted to migrate to a Muslim country.

  Gandhi advised against hijrat, but in the spring of 1920 several thousand Indian Muslims (mostly Pakhtuns from the North-West Frontier Province, including Abdul Ghaffar Khan) moved into Afghanistan. After a few months’ privation and several deaths they returned.

  Some enraged Muslims hinted at the possibility—‘for the purpose of forcing better peace terms’ for Turkey—of an invasion of British India from Afghanistan. Gandhi not only attacked the idea in Young India (23 June 1920); he said that in the event of such an invasion it would be ‘the duty of every Hindu to resist any inroad on India’, even as it was the duty of Hindus to join Muslims in nonviolent non-cooperation (20: 419).

  Jinnah, Ajmal Khan, Ansari & Azad. At the end of April, on the urgings of activists like Sobhani, Banker and Yagnik, Gandhi had accepted the presidency of the All-India Home Rule League. This did not go down well with Annie Besant, who had founded the League, or with Jinnah, one of its leading members, both of whom were wary of non-cooperation. Still, Gandhi now had a platform of his own in case the Congress found non-cooperation too hot, and he sought the help of Jinnah’s wife Ruttie, whose trust he had evoked, for winning her husband over.

  To Mrs Jinnah, 30 Apr. 1920: Please remember me to Mr Jinnah and do coax him to learn Hindustani or Gujarati. If I were you, I should begin to talk to him in Gujarati or Hindustani. There is not much danger of you forgetting your English or your misunderstanding each other, is there?.. Yes, I would ask this even for the love you bear me (20: 258).

  Whether or not Ruttie did as urged, Jinnah remained cool to Gandhi’s plans. Though resenting the treatment of Turkey, Jinnah was troubled by Gandhi’s interest in direct popular action, for he was a constitutionalist preferring hard negotiations in dignified chambers and in the English language.

  However, a Central Khilafat Committee of India’s Muslims embraced nonviolent non-cooperation, and several leading Muslim figures allied themselves to Gandhi, including the Ali brothers and two prominent medical practitioners of Delhi whom Gandhi had first met in 1915, Hakim Ajmal Khan (1863-1927) and Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari (1880-1936). Ajmal Khan had in fact returned his British medal in March.

  Another key Gandhi ally from 1920 was Calcutta’s Abul Kalam Azad (1888-1958), a brilliant writer, orator and Islamic scholar who had captivated Muslim India with his Urdu journals Al Hilal and Al Balagh, and whom the Raj had interned in Ranchi in Bihar from 1916 to 1920. A devout Muslim with Arab links on his mother’s side, Azad had always held that cooperating with Hindus violated no Islamic injunction.

  In 1920 Azad, who had briefly endorsed hijrat, announced his support for nonviolent non-cooperation, while clarifying that he was accepting nonviolence as a policy, not a creed. The Ali brothers had said the same thing.

  Audacious letter. Taking longer to know its mind, the Congress said that its decision on non-cooperation would be made at a special session in Calcutta in September. Not waiting for its decision, Gandhi announced at the end of June that non-cooperation would begin on 1 August, unless the terms for Turkey were revised and redress obtained over the Punjab.

  To Lord Chelmsford, the Viceroy, who had admitted that the treaty with respect to Turkey contained ‘terms which must be painful to all Moslems’,3 he penned, on 22 June in Delhi (in the home of his host, Principal Rudra of St Stephen’s College), a bold, sombre letter that merits an even longer quotation than here provided:

  Your Excellency, As one who has enjoyed a certain measure of Your Excellency’s confidence and as one who claims to be a devoted well-wisher of the British Empire, I owe it to Your Excellency and, through Your Excellency, to His Majesty’s Ministers, to explain my connection with and my conduct in the Khilafat question.

  At the very earliest stage of the War, even whilst I was in London organizing the Indian Volunteer Ambulance Corps, I began to interest myself in the Khilafat question. I perceived how deeply moved the little Mussulman world in London was when Turkey decided to throw in her lot with Germany.

  On my arrival in India in the January of 1915 I found the same anxiousness and earnestness among the Mussulmans with whom I came in contact. Their anxiety became intense when the information about the secret treaties leaked out… The peace terms and Your Excellency’s defence of them have given the Mussulmans of India a shock from which it will be difficult for them to recover…

  I consider that as a staunch Hindu wishing to live on terms of the closest friendship with my Mussulman countrymen, I should be an unworthy son of India if I did not stand by them in their hour of trial…

  So far as I am aware Mussulmans and Hindus have as a whole lost faith in British justice and honour. The Report of the Majority of the Hunter Committee, Your Excellency’s Despatch thereon, and Mr Montagu’s reply have only aggravated the distrust…

  Your Excellency must be aware that there was a time when the boldest though also the most thoughtless among the Mussulmans favoured violence and that hijrat has not yet ceased to be the battle-cry.

  The school of hijrat has received a check if it has not st
opped its activities entirely. I hold that no repression could have prevented a violent eruption, if the people had not had presented to them a form of direct action…

  I venture to claim that I have succeeded by patient reasoning in weaning the party of violence from its ways. I confess that I did not—I did not attempt to—succeed in weaning them from violence on moral grounds, but purely on utilitarian grounds. The result for the time being at any rate has however been to stop violence…

  At the same time I admit that non-cooperation practised by the mass of people is attended with grave risks. But… not to run some risks now will be to court much greater risks, if not virtual destruction of law and order.

  But there is yet an escape from non-cooperation. The Mussulman representation has requested Your Excellency to lead the agitation yourself as did your distinguished predecessor at the time of the South African trouble. But if you cannot see your way to do so, and non-cooperation becomes a dire necessity, I hope that Your Excellency will give those who have accepted my advice and myself the credit for being actuated by nothing less than a stern sense of duty. I have etc., M. K. GANDHI (20: 413-16)

  The letter was in effect a claim that he, brown-skinned, unarmed and without office, was guiding the country more effectively and justly than all the Raj; and a demand that the present Viceroy should support Gandhi even as the previous incumbent, Hardinge, had done.

  Maganlal’s misgivings. In his own ashram, however, Maganlal, its head when Gandhi was absent, complained that Gandhi was not giving enough time to the ashram or to the spiritual life. The involvement with politics in general and Muslims in particular troubled Maganlal and others in the ashram (most of them Hindus with conservative backgrounds), just as his stand over admitting the Dheds had done five years earlier. Saraladevi, too, was a major issue, if one about to die down, between Gandhi and his closest ashram colleagues.

  In addition, Maganlal was surprised that Gandhi seemed open to the idea of a car for the ashram. Finally, Maganlal felt that Gandhi was losing both physical strength and spiritual lustre. Gandhi’s ‘power, in virtue of which everyone was obliged to listen to what you said’, had disappeared. The reply sent to Maganlal (4 May 1920) was every bit as self-assured as Gandhi’s letter to the Viceroy.

  While conceding that he had lost his ‘former fire’, Gandhi termed the loss purely physical. ‘My illness has disabled me,’ he wrote. ‘The steel-like strength of my body’ had gone. ‘Did anyone ever see me going for a change of air? Well, that is what I do now.’ But he added:

  My staunchness has not disappeared. My ideas have grown stronger and more piercing. My indifference to worldly pleasures has increased. What I used to see but dimly has now become clearer to me. I have grown more tolerant, so that I am less particular about others [doing what I want them to do].

  As for the car, Gandhi said:

  Economically, I saw that a car would be an advantage. We certainly use cars a good deal. The question was whether we could accept a car as a gift. I did not think it quite proper to give an immediate reply on my own. For two days I struggled hard against the idea but, thinking of Lyall*, I softened and thought that I would accept the gift if you also desired that I should.

  On Khilafat, Gandhi wrote:

  If I had not joined the Khilafat movement, I think, I would have lost everything. In joining it I have followed what I especially regard as my dharma… I am uniting Hindus and Muslims… [I]f non-cooperation goes well, a great power based on brute force will have to submit to a simple-looking thing.

  The Khilafat movement is a great churning of the sea of India. Why should we be concerned with what it will produce? All that we should consider is whether the movement itself is a pure and worthy cause.

  In the end Gandhi reminded Maganlal that Doke had called him ‘a pathfinder’ and had wanted to call his book ‘Pathfinder’ or ‘Junglebreaker’ rather than ‘An Indian Patriot’, the title for which Polak had successfully pressed (20: 281-4).

  The regret about his ‘abandoning spirituality for politics’, expressed by not just Maganlal, was memorably answered in Young India (12 May 1920). Repudiating any notion that he was a saint, Gandhi added:

  But though by disclaiming sainthood I disappoint the critic’s expectations, I would have him to give up his regrets by answering him that the politician in me has never dominated a single decision of mine, and if I seem to take part in politics, it is only because politics encircle us today like the coil of a snake from which one cannot get out, no matter how much one tries.

  I wish therefore to wrestle with the snake, as I have been doing, with more or less success, consciously since 1894, unconsciously, as I have now discovered, ever since reaching the years of discretion.

  Gandhi was acknowledging an affair with politics ever since his boyhood. But he insisted that he was introducing the religious spirit into it.

  Quite selfishly, as I wish to live in peace in the midst of a bellowing storm howling round me, I have been experimenting with myself and my friends by introducing religion into politics.

  Let me explain what I mean by religion. It is not the Hindu religion, which I certainly prize above all other religions, but the religion which transcends Hinduism, which changes one’s very nature, which binds one indissolubly to the truth within and which ever purifies (20: 304).

  He was saying two things. One, he preserved his balance in the tempest of politics by holding tight to a firmly-fastened religious bar or rail. Two, that a religious bar or rail was something moral and universal, transcending Hinduism.

  Despite such explicit clarifications, Gandhi was seen, and knew he was seen, as a (or, by many, the) symbol of Hinduism. Not, to be sure, as the founder of a new Hindu sect or order, but as a man of action, a karmayogi, who represented the Hindu world to Hindus, Muslims, the Empire and others.

  Useful in politics, this image was a challenge also to the Hindu world, to which gradually yet surely Gandhi was introducing the touchstones of rationality, fairness and compassion. Becoming India’s best-known and most-loved Hindu, he had acquired the stature to instruct the Hindu world in resisting domination from without, and intolerance from within.

  Nobly conscientious, Maganlal had sacrificed his dreams and life for Gandhi. But he wanted his hero to settle down, not cut new paths. On the other hand, Harilal, refusing stubbornly to be rooted to anything and forever in debt, responded enthusiastically to non-cooperation and for a while wore the simple white khadi cap, copied from a prison uniform in South Africa, that became a symbol of the non-cooperation struggle.4

  It was not easy for the righteously loyal Maganlal to recognize either the significance of his uncle’s newest undertaking or the depth of the personal struggle inside one aiming at historic changes even while caught in a doomed human relationship that had appeared to promise so much. Maganlal was too close to Gandhi, and too focused on his ashram duties, to appreciate the vigour, innovative enterprise, boldness and self-denial of the fifty-year-old Gandhi who in 1920 took on the Empire and took up his people’s burdens while shutting the door to a possibly satisfying relationship with a talented woman.

  Defying fatigue and weakness, sleeping short hours, Gandhi travelled, wrote letters, wrote articles, spoke at meetings, persuaded face-to-face, debated in the press. There were meetings in Allahabad (early June), in Bombay (early July), in cities in the Punjab (Lahore, Amritsar, Rawalpindi, and Jullundur in the middle of July), Sindh (late July), in south India (August) and in Gujarat (end-August). In his talks Gandhi explained non-cooperation, asked for nonviolence, and claimed, as in his letter to the Viceroy, that it was the non-cooperation alternative that had prevented violence. Pyarelal would afterwards recall:

  One day I counted fifty-six letters which he had written in his own hand. Each of them he carefully read from the date line to the final detail of the address before handing them for dispatch. At the end of it he was so exhausted that, pressing his throbbing temples between his two hands, he flung himself down on the hard
floor just where he was sitting, without even spreading the bedding he was leaning against. He simply pushed it aside.5

  Tilak is no more. Hindu caution regarding non-cooperation had been ended by the Hunter report, and in fact Hindus were not indifferent. Even Tilak, jealous of the Hindu interest, had said at the end of May 1920 that ‘Hindus would support’ Muslim decisions on Khilafat.6 The comment recalled Tilak’s lead for the 1916 pact where, in exchange for Muslim support, the Congress had accepted a separate Muslim electorate.

  However, worn out by diabetes and years in prison, Tilak, the man who had taught Indians to say, ‘Swaraj is my birthright’, died on 1 August, the day non-cooperation was to start. Gandhi shouldered the bier, stood beside the flames that took away the Lokamanya’s sixty-four-year-old body, and composed a tribute calling Tilak ‘a giant among men’, ‘the idol of his people’ and ‘the lion’ whose voice was ‘hushed’ (21: 111).

  Later that day Gandhi sent a letter to the Viceroy enclosing the medals he had received for services in South Africa and saying that after the double let-down over Khilafat and the Punjab, he retained neither respect nor affection for the Raj. Across India, many returned their medals. In his reply Chelmsford called non-cooperation ‘the most foolish of all foolish schemes’.

  The Calcutta session. While many Indians disagreed with the Viceroy, several Congress leaders did not. They mounted a bid to thwart non-cooperation at the Calcutta session in September. Motilal Nehru met Jinnah off his train and talked tactics. Also cool towards non-cooperation were Annie Besant, Bengal’s Chitta Ranjan Das and Bipin Chandra Pal, Pandit Malaviya of Benares, and the man who would preside, Lala Lajpat Rai of the Punjab, who had been away in America when the Jallianwalla killings occurred.

  This was a formidable line-up of older leaders, but the rank and file were with Gandhi, as was the younger leadership, including Patel, C.R., Prasad, Jawaharlal and Azad. Before the Calcutta meeting, Patel, who had given up all thought of entering the Bombay legislature, had organized a Gujarat conference that endorsed non-cooperation and asked Hindus to support Muslims ‘heart-broken’ by the treatment of Turkey.7