Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People

by Gandhi, Rajmohan

  Sensing the mood in Calcutta, including that of his son, Motilal switched and voted for Gandhi’s resolution asking for non-cooperation. In his speech Gandhi cited the sentiment he had found throughout India—once more his travelling had helped him. Malaviya, Das, Pal, Jinnah, and Mrs Besant spoke in opposition, but Gandhi’s resolution was carried by a large majority, 1855 votes to 873.

  The resolution asked for a surrender of the Raj’s honours and titles, a boycott of the Raj’s councils and of the November elections, a boycott of foreign goods and a gradual withdrawal by students and lawyers from the Raj’s schools, colleges and courts. The word ‘gradual’ was a concession to reality: even enthusiasts were not ready right away to leave the Raj’s institutions, or to ask their children to do so.

  We may note that on this visit to Calcutta, Gandhi stayed with his son Harilal, on Pollock Street. Also meeting in Calcutta, the Muslim League passed without opposition a similar resolution championed by Shaukat Ali. Presiding over the League’s session, Jinnah spoke of Rowlatt, ‘the Punjab atrocities’ and ‘Khilafat, a matter of life and death’, and conceded that some kind of non-cooperation was unavoidable.

  But he fell out with Gandhi the following month when, at Gandhi’s instance, the Home Rule League changed its constitution and name. By forty-two votes against nineteen, the body decided that henceforth it would seek, simply, ‘Swaraj’, rather than ‘Self-government within the Empire’, and be called Swarajya Sabha. One of the outvoted nineteen, Jinnah had asked for retaining the reference to the Empire. Charging that the meeting was not competent to change the body’s constitution, Jinnah resigned, as did eighteen others.

  Disagreeing on the constitutional point, Gandhi had recommended ‘Swaraj’ because it left open the question of India’s link with the Empire, which could be retained or snapped as needed. He requested Jinnah to return and invited him to ‘take your share in the new life that has opened up before the country’. The suggestion that he had to be offered a role did not go down well with Jinnah, who responded with sarcasm and expressed his fears regarding Gandhi’s agenda:

  I thank you for your kind suggestion offering me ‘to take my share in the new life that has opened up before the country’. If by ‘new life’ you mean your methods and your programme, I am afraid I cannot accept them, for I am fully convinced that it must lead to disaster.8

  Though unclear whether he was dealing with a singular or a plural noun, Jinnah was clearly predicting violence.

  Nagpur session. Despite the Raj’s hope that ‘the sanity of the classes and masses alike would reject non-cooperation’, November provided evidence that at least the masses were embracing it. Two-thirds of India’s electors boycotted the voting for the new legislatures. Jinnah was among the boycotters, but he was one of merely three leaders, Annie Besant and Malaviya being the other two, who signalled their opposition to Gandhi’s agenda when, in December, the Congress met in Nagpur for its annual plenary.

  As chairman of the reception committee, the Wardha-based Jamnalal Bajaj, Gandhi’s ally from 1915, organized the session, which was chaired by C. Vijiaraghavachariar from the south, but the Gandhian programme needed no props. The country’s preference was plain to everyone, and those who had opposed non-cooperation in Calcutta advocated it in Nagpur.

  Das moved the resolution endorsing it, and Lajpat Rai and Pal backed Das. Annie Besant did not attend Nagpur. In town but unwell, Malaviya sent a message opposing non-cooperation. It was heard with respect but not heeded. Only two persons, one from UP and the other from Sindh, voiced dissent when Das’s resolution was put before the house. Their names are not known.9

  At Nagpur the Congress also accepted the new bottom-up structure for its organization that Gandhi had proposed. Three general secretaries were appointed for the coming year: Motilal Nehru, Ansari and Rajagopalachari. For the first time in its history, a campaign against untouchability was made part of the Congress programme. Finally, as the Home Rule League had done, the Congress changed its aim from ‘Swaraj within the Empire’ to just ‘Swaraj’.

  Jinnah was emphatic in his opposition to this change, and at first Das and Pal agreed with him. Later Jinnah was left alone in dissent, and when he referred in his remarks to ‘Mr Gandhi’ and ‘Mr Muhammad Ali’, there were shouts that he should say ‘Mahatma’ and ‘Maulana’. Gandhi urged the audience to respect Jinnah and his choice of words, but the Bombay barrister felt he had had enough. After Nagpur he left the Congress.

  Jinnah’s keenness on the link with the Empire was in line with an important strand in Muslim thinking that went back to Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-1898), who had founded the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU). Pointing out that Hindus would dominate any democratic self-government in India, Sir Sayyid had asked the qaum, his Muslim community, to invoke the Empire’s protection.

  On the other hand, as Gandhi recognized, many Hindus, too, ‘believe[d] that British rule serve[d]… to protect Hinduism’ from possible Muslim attacks. But he felt that nothing could be ‘more humiliating’ to Hindus than the idea that despite being three times more numerous than Muslims they needed British protection. If Hindus took the unexpected opportunity that lay before them—‘the like of it will not come again for a hundred years,’ he repeated—and supported the Muslims, the latter were likely to respond positively. If they did not, the Hindus were strong enough to take care of themselves (Navajivan, 29 Aug. 1920; 21: 209-10).

  TWO POLES AND A NEW SPIRIT

  From 1920 onwards, Indians seemed conscious of two political poles, one represented by the Empire and the other by Gandhi. Those gravitating openly to the second pole, non-cooperators and their supporters, identified themselves by wearing khadi and often by spinning on a charkha. Muhammad Ali donned khadi, as did his old mother. By the end of 1921, hundreds of thousands were doing so.

  Two million charkhas spinning across India was part of the Congress’s (and Gandhi’s) positive agenda, which also included a fund, in the name of Tilak, of one crore rupees and a Congress membership of one crore. If, said Gandhi, the positive and negative targets were all reached, India would find Swaraj in a year. Whether or not the Empire was dismantled, Indians would experience self-government.

  Heeding the call for non-cooperation, top lawyers ended their practice, among them Chitta Ranjan Das in Calcutta, Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru in the UP, Patel in Ahmedabad, Rajagopalachari in Madras, and Prasad in Patna. Though not knowing what the future held, hundreds of successful lawyers joined them in walking away from the courts.

  The boycott of elections to the Raj’s councils (for which regional parties, independents and a new Liberal party formed by some of the former Congress moderates provided candidates) was impressive. Two-thirds of those qualified to vote stayed away, and Sir Valentine Chirol, writing for the London Times, recorded that ‘at a freshly swept polling station’ near Allahabad, not a single voter showed up from eight in the morning to twelve at noon.10

  Objecting to the Raj’s control over their colleges, thousands of bright young men and women walked out. Many streamed into squalid villages and city slums to propagate khadi or Hindustani or Hindu-Muslim unity or the removal of untouchability or to recruit members for the Congress.

  Others entered newly-started national colleges, including the Jamia Millia Islamia in Aligarh, the Gujarat Vidyapith in Ahmedabad and other colleges in Calcutta, Patna, Maharashtra and Madras. Muhammad Ali, the prime mover over the Jamia, to which many AMU students and professors migrated, became its first rector after the poet Iqbal declined the position despite an appeal from Gandhi, who had said to Iqbal, ‘The Muslim National University calls you.’11

  Across the land potential leaders surfaced. Recently returned from England, twenty-five-year-old Subhas Chandra Bose (1897-1945) gave up a plan of entering the Raj’s civil service, joined the stir and, following a suggestion from Gandhi, became Das’s lieutenant and the head of a new national college in Calcutta.

  After Gandhi visited Patna and Abul Kalam Azad made a stirr
ing speech there, nineteen-year-old Jayaprakash Narayan (1902-1979) ‘flung his textbooks into a dam’, quit the Raj’s educational system—though only a few weeks remained for him to write his university examination in Patna—and joined the newly-started Bihar Vidyapith.12

  Men like Bose and Narayan would acquire national, and wider, fame, but hundreds of others joining the stir in province after province would also provide future leadership to small or large constituencies.

  In some regions (including large parts of Gujarat), non-cooperators fanned out to every single village, literally. People wore a new cloth, walked with new companions, talked on new subjects, did things they had not done, went to places they had not seen. After a year the Congress had six million new members, the Tilak fund target was fully reached, and hundreds of thousands of charkhas were humming.

  A Congress worker in Andhra said to Gandhi that the spinning wheel should feature in free India’s flag. Agreeing enthusiastically, Gandhi proposed that the flag should be in three colours—orange for India’s Hindus, green to represent Muslims, and white to represent all the others—and made from khadi cloth. Thus was born the Congress flag, the basis, on independence, of India’s national standard.

  In 1921, when many Indians actually expected ‘Swaraj in one year’, a fresh spirit blew away the cloud of fear. It seemed to blow away also the veils standing between Indians, especially between Hindus and Muslims, who began to fraternize in unprecedented ways. Muslims were invited to meals in the homes of orthodox Hindus; Hindu leaders were invited to speak in mosques. As a gesture toward Hindus, Muhammad Ali stopped eating beef; departing from age-old practice, numerous Muslim homes celebrated Eid without beef.

  Towards the end of 1921, Muhammad Ali declared: ‘After the Prophet, on whom be peace, I consider it my duty to carry out the commands of Gandhiji.’13 Observing what was happening, Lord Reading (the former Rufus Isaacs), who replaced Chelmsford as Viceroy in April 1921, wrote to his son of the ‘bridge over the gulf between Hindu and Muslim’ that was being erected.14

  The new spirit touched another important community: the Sikhs. Groups of Sikhs struggled nonviolently to free their religious shrines, the gurdwaras, from the control of often-corrupt priests, and the Akali movement was born.

  The Untouchables. The caste front saw progress but also challenges. Criticisms in the press and a whispering campaign followed an announcement (in October 1920) that the new national university in Ahmedabad, the Gujarat Vidyapith, would not admit students from schools that excluded ‘untouchables’.

  The journal Gujarati alleged that Christians like Andrews had influenced Gandhi’s stand against untouchability, and orthodox Hindus told Gandhi that ‘the movement for Swaraj will end in smoke’ if Antyajas (as the ‘untouchables’ were referred to in Gujarat at the time) were admitted to the national schools.15

  Gandhi answered that he would rather reject Swaraj than abandon the Antyajas (Navajivan, 5 Dec.; 22: 57), but the threat of returning to the Empire’s pole did not come only from caste Hindus. Some leaders of the ‘untouchables’ also thought that salvation for their people was ‘only possible through the British Government’.16 In April 1921 Gandhi asked a meeting of the ‘untouchables’ in Ahmedabad to assert their self-respect:

  I prayed… today: ‘If I have to be reborn, I should be born an untouchable, so that I may share their sorrows, sufferings and the affronts levelled at them, in order that I may endeavour to free myself and them from that miserable condition.’

  You should not ask the Hindus to emancipate you as a matter of favour. Hindus must do so, if they want, in their own interests… You should now cease to accept leavings from plates… Receive grain only—good sound grain, not rotten grain—and that too only if it is courteously offered… (23: 45-7)

  The ‘I should be born an untouchable’ sentence had emotion but also realism. Gandhi sensed that in the end the untouchables would accept the lead only of one of their own. But he would try to win them (and shame the orthodox) by acknowledging the offence of untouchability. In Navajivan he had written that cruelties to the untouchables constituted ‘an outrage grosser than that in the Punjab against which we have been protesting’ (22: 316). At the Ahmedabad meeting he was again brutally frank:

  What crimes for which we condemn the Government as Satanic have we not been guilty of towards our untouchable brethren?.. We make them crawl on their bellies; we have made them rub their noses on the ground; with eyes red with rage, we push them out of railway compartments—what more than this has British rule done? (23: 44)

  Still, he would ask the ‘untouchables’ not to see caste Hindus as irredeemable enemies. ‘The Hindus are not sinful by nature,’ he told the ‘untouchables’. ‘They are sunk in ignorance…’ (23: 47)

  The Gandhi pole was immersed in conflict and complexity over caste, yet it contributed to ‘untouchable’ dignity and high-caste shame, and instilled in many caste Hindus a long-term commitment to justice for the ‘untouchables’.

  Tribals. In the new climate, ‘adivasis’ (original inhabitants) listed by the Raj as ‘scheduled tribes’ and in some cases as ‘criminal tribes’, also fought for dignity. In 1921-22 there were tribal stirs in parts of western, southern and eastern India, led by local figures inspired by Gandhi. These stirs were not always nonviolent or supported by Gandhi himself, but associates of Gandhi (including Indulal Yagnik, Amritlal Thakkar and Jugatram Dave) had by this time started work or ashrams for tribals in southern Gujarat.17

  The spirit also touched opium-taking and prostitution. Andrews would later write of ‘old abuses… being swept away’ and of a ‘treasured memory’ of two hours that he and Gandhi spent in Barisal in Bengal with ‘sisters’ who used their bodies for subsistence.18

  Learning of what was happening in India and why, a Unitarian minister in New York, John Haynes Holmes, declared in a sermon in April 1921 that Gandhi was ‘unquestionably the greatest man living in the world today’.19

  HURDLES

  But the non-cooperation train ran into hurdles. The biggest was sent by the Turks. Emerging as Turkey’s man of destiny, fighting the Greeks and the British and forming a government of his own in Angora (Ankara), Mustafa Kemal derided the person for whom India’s Muslims seemed ready to die, the Sultan of Turkey. In February 1921 a Khilafat conference that Gandhi attended urged the Sultan to enlist the rising leader’s partnership, but the two Turkish governments were at war, and there was no sign that Kamal was interested in Khilafat.

  Increasingly desperate, the Ali brothers made intemperate speeches. Muhammad Ali remarked that he would assist an Afghan army that invaded and freed India and returned home. Hindus were troubled, and Reading, the Viceroy, confronted Gandhi with the brothers’ speeches, whereupon Gandhi said he would either obtain regrets or dissociate himself.

  At Gandhi’s instance the Ali brothers apologized. To a friend Muhammad Ali wrote that he had expressed regrets because ‘we had made up our mind to bring about a complete entente between Hindus and Muslims’ and also ‘to prove to Gandhi that we have enough respect for our colleague and leader’s advice’.20

  Praising their step in Young India (1 June 1921), Gandhi wrote of the ‘big burden’ the brothers carried and of their responsibility for ‘the prestige of Islam’ (23: 216-17). Montagu and Reading conceded that the recantation prevented a breach between the brothers and Gandhi, but Montagu also thought that Gandhi’s insistence on the apology ‘must have left very unpleasant thoughts in their minds which are all to the good’.21

  Although Gandhi’s alliance with the Ali brothers survived the apology, suspicion was injuring partnership at the grassroots. In both communities, voices whispered that the Other side mouthed non-cooperation but retained government jobs. This undercurrent of suspicion and rivalry can be seen in a comment by the Pakistani writer, Sheikh Muhammad Ikram, on a 1921 fatwa in the Punjab asking Muslims to leave the Raj’s police and army.

  The fatwa was widely hailed by Hindu newspapers of the Punjab, who had compla
ined of Muslim preponderance in the police and the army, but it had no serious results as very few soldiers and policemen obeyed it.22

  But the most damaging episode occurred in Malabar in the Malayali country in August 1921. Many of the Malabar Moplahs, Muslims with a trace of Arab blood and a background of fanaticism, were tenants of Hindu landlords. Alleged insults to their religious leaders brought them into violent rebellion, first against the government and then against their landlords. ‘Independence’ was declared, arson and murder occurred, and some Hindus were forcibly converted.

  The Raj moved thousands of soldiers into the area. In the full-scale military action that ensued, over 2,000 were killed (mostly Moplahs) and over 24,000 convicted of rebellion or lesser crimes. These figures, withheld for many months, were not known in 1921, but stories of rebellion and forcible conversion spread across the land, injuring Hindu-Muslim trust.

  The rebellion was local in origin and aim. No propaganda for Khilafat had been permitted in the Moplah country, which had neither seen nor heard the Ali brothers. Yet in March 1922 the Raj’s home member would speak of ‘the many Hindus killed and dishonoured in Malabar and of the thousands of Moplahs misled and driven to death and ruin by the incitements of Mohamed Ali, Shaukat Ali, and those who think like them.’23

  In October Gandhi gave his reactions to the Moplah events. It was short-sighted but typical of the Raj, he said, that he and other non-cooperators were barred from entering Malabar. Not wishing ‘to give non-cooperators the credit for peacefully ending the trouble’, the authorities were ‘desirous of showing once more that it is only the British soldier who can maintain peace in India’.