Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People

by Gandhi, Rajmohan

  In April 1923 Banker completed his sentence and was released. Going to Yeravda’s gates to greet him, Rajagopalachari thought that Banker’s soul had been ‘polished by a master hand’ during his obligatory retreat for thirteen months in Gandhi’s company (Young India, 19 April 1923).

  Missing his faithful prison-mate, Gandhi was glad when, on 16 April, Devadas, now twenty-three, made his second visit to Yeravda. In between, the son had spent several months in prison in Allahabad, after saying at his trial there: ‘We Indians do not joke when we say that jail is the only abode which a self-respecting man can choose for himself at this time.’3

  Walking to the Yeravda entrance to see his son off, Gandhi found Vallabhbhai, who was waiting outside. Breaking into a broad smile, Gandhi exclaimed, ‘What a gift I have had today!’4

  If thoughts of defeat did not assail Gandhi, thoughts of death did. We know, from what he would write after his release, that he reflected on the mystic Hallaj, who had died for his beliefs. Mortality was also underlined by sharp abdominal pains from April 1923.

  On 5 May and again ten days later, Col. Maddock, the Poona-based surgeon-general of Bombay presidency, examined Gandhi, and on 18 May Kasturba was allowed to meet her husband, who had been moved to the jail’s European ward, which was less harsh.

  The problem seemed to subside but may have been a factor in Gandhi recounting, from November 1923, the story of the South African battles led by him. Without the aid of documents or notes, he started dictating it to Yagnik, in Gujarati. He wanted the story told before he died.

  CONGRESS DISUNITY

  Outside, the thousands emerging from prisons and other politically conscious Indians were confused and divided. The Congress had preferred challenging the Empire to entering the Raj’s councils, but constructive work was less exciting than either. Not for everyone. Vallabhbhai, for instance, had raised a million rupees for Gujarat Vidyapith, and men like him and Rajagopalachari had advanced the fight against untouchability in their areas.

  These two, and Bajaj, Rajendra Prasad, Devadas and Vinoba Bhave, were also involved in a morale-boosting if localized satyagraha in Nagpur that restored the right to fly the Congress flag.

  In another part of the land, Akalis who in accordance with custom were collecting firewood (for their temple’s common kitchen) in Guru-ka-Bagh, ten miles from Amritsar, refused to be cowed down by police lathis. Batch after batch went to fell wood and nonviolently took beatings until their right to the fuel was acknowledged.

  But flags and firewood could not match the attraction of councils, for which elections were due again in November 1923. Motilal Nehru, released in June 1922, and Chitta Ranjan Das, freed two months later, proposed a reversal of the policy of council boycott. They were backed by many, including Vithalbhai Patel, who spoke of ‘smuggling into the enemy fort with a view to conquering it’ and argued that Congress members would ‘wreck’ the councils from the inside if it proved impossible to influence them.

  Brother Vallabhbhai pointed out that the fortress of the enemy was located not in the largely decorative legislatures but in the impenetrable estates of the Viceroy and the governors, who would rule by ordinances no matter what the councils said.5 Claiming that debates and votes could nonetheless embarrass the Raj, many in the Congress—the Pro Changers as they were called—asked for a new policy.

  The No Changers were led by C.R., Patel, Rajendra Prasad and Jamnalal Bajaj. At the end of 1922, when the Congress met for its annual plenary in Gaya in Bihar under the presidency of Das, Rajagopalachari proved to be the star performer. The No Changers won the debates and the votes.

  But Das, Motilal Nehru and Vithalbhai responded by forming a Swaraj party that claimed to be the Congress’s pro-council wing. Much acrimony resulted, and a third group led by Azad and Jawaharlal tried in vain to restore unity, but the Swarajists contested the November elections and won several seats.

  Motilal Nehru entered the Central Legislative Assembly from Allahabad. Defeating independents and a Liberal party candidate, Vithalbhai was elected from one of Bombay city’s two seats, Jinnah winning the other seat, which was reserved for Muslims. In Bengal the Swarajists led by Das emerged as the largest single group, and in the Central Provinces they were the majority. Elsewhere, they were outperformed by local parties and independents.

  Pro Changers and No Changers signed a truce of sorts in December 1923 when the Congress met in Bezwada (Vijaywada), with a recently released Muhammad Ali in the chair. Non-cooperation was reaffirmed as Congress policy but endorsement was also offered to the Swarajists’ entry into the councils, with the clarification that they represented themselves, not the Congress.

  SURGERY AND RELEASE

  On 12 January 1924, after the abdominal pains had returned in extreme form and an emaciated Gandhi had been removed to Sassoon Hospital, Col Maddock diagnosed appendicitis. (Later, when there was criticism at the delay in identifying the problem, Gandhi defended the doctors by saying that appendicitis was not easy to diagnose, which at the time was indeed the case.)

  On Maddock offering to approach doctors he wanted, Gandhi named Dr Jivraj Mehta and Dr Dalal, but neither could be quickly traced, whereupon Gandhi wrote a letter authorizing Maddock to perform the surgery. On 12 January, a power outage forced Maddock to operate under torchlight, but the exercise was successful.

  The Raj publicly announced the news. Though saved by Maddock from a predicament, the Raj could not continue to detain Gandhi, for it knew that India loved him, everybody knew that he was ill and weak (those allowed to visit him thought he was half his size), and everybody remembered that two years earlier he had called off a national struggle because of Chauri Chaura.

  On 5 February, when he was still at Sassoon Hospital, he was informed that because of his condition he was being unconditionally released. Though Gandhi expressed regret that the release was tied to his health, India felt a current of delight.

  But he was too ill to leave the hospital. When, on 10 March, he finally emerged into the open air, his ‘very efficient English nurse’ (to quote from what Gandhi wrote two months later), speaking with ‘a smile curling round her lips’ and an ‘insidious twinkle in her eyes’, asked Gandhi to remember that he, ‘a fierce boycotter of everything British’, as she called him, had been operated upon by a British surgeon with British surgical instruments, and received British drugs and the ministrations of a British nurse.

  The nurse’s ‘last triumphant sentence’ was that the umbrella shading him on his way out of the hospital was British too. But when Gandhi answered that the boycott he had asked for was not of British or imperial goods but of cloth made outside India—whether in Britain, Europe, America or anywhere else—and that he had asked for it for the sake of the charkha and the women and men of India’s villages, the spirited nurse evidently remarked that she might wear khadi herself (Young India, 15 May 1924).

  Goals in 1924. A Bombay businessman, Narottam Morarjee, offered his seaside home in Juhu for Gandhi’s convalescence. There Gandhi came to some conclusions. For one thing, he would rule out leading another attack on the Raj before March 1928, when his six-year sentence would expire.

  Since India in any case was too divided to fight, he would aim for reconciliation—in India as a whole and in the Congress—promote constructive work and safeguard his vision for the Hindus in an increasingly intolerant climate. Finally, he had to start thinking of an Indian leadership after him.

  He revealed himself and some of his thoughts at a meeting on 31 August in Bombay’s Excelsior Theatre, after ardent non-cooperators had booed speakers who had been non-cooperation’s critics. Gandhi asked the disturbers to stand up and apologize, which they did. Then Gandhi said that his own nature had two sides, ‘the severe and the mild’. The former, he admitted, had alienated ‘my wife, son and departed brother’. When he wore that face, added Gandhi, his concealed love had to be ‘looked for’. Now (he seemed to claim) India would see his gentler side (29: 65).

  Opposition, ingenu
ity, unity. The No Changers in the Congress wanted Gandhi to crush the Pro Changer rebellion; the Pro Changers hoped he would bless it. At first Gandhi suggested a clear division of responsibilities to resolve the quarrel, the Swarajists engaging with the councils and the No Changers keeping charge of the Congress. Wanting, however, a say in the party as well, Motilal Nehru (who had been elected leader of a forty-five-strong Swarajist group in the Central Assembly) and Das rejected the proposal.

  At an AICC meeting held in Ahmedabad in June 1924, Gandhi saw the strength of the sentiment against positions dear to him. Not only was council-entry defended; Das and others assailed and almost defeated a resolution of Gandhi’s that condemned an Englishman’s murder in Calcutta. ‘Your way has been tried from 1920. Now give our way a chance.’ This seemed to be the message to him from Das, Motilal Nehru, Vithalbhai and several others.

  Gandhi was challenged in the Congress on another front: there was a demand for boycotting all products of the Empire. As the Sassoon Hospital nurse had found out, Gandhi opposed this policy. He felt it smacked of hatred, could touch off violence and was impractical. By contrast, he claimed, his alternative of a boycott of foreign cloth was a practical proposition, for the charkha, together with India’s textile mills, could make all the cloth India needed.

  If an anti-British boycott signalled a step towards violence, its alternative, the charkha, became—to him and his critics—a symbol of nonviolence.

  India had the undoubted right, Gandhi argued, to adopt ‘the time-worn method’ of violence, but superiority in arms would enable the British to crush Indian violence and extend their rule indefinitely. Gandhi also warned that Hindus and Muslims were bound to use violence against each other, and not merely against the British, so that if independence was somehow won by assassination, it would descend on a Hindu or a Muslim state, not on an India for all (Young India, 22 May 1924; 24: 99-102).

  Though he prevailed in Ahmedabad on votes, the attacks on his policies hurt Gandhi so much that he openly wept at the session and said that he felt ‘defeated and humbled’. But he bounced back and offered, in an ingenious move, to give in to the Swarajists over the councils if they supported him on khadi. They agreed, and a Gandhi-Das-Nehru pact was signed to end the Congress infighting.

  Gandhi accepted that the Swarajists were in the councils on the Congress’s behalf, and the Swarajists agreed that only those who plied the charkha could become members of the Congress. Instead of paying four annas a year, Congress members would henceforth turn in hanks of yarn. If not spinning themselves, they could hand in yarn made by others. Gandhi had lost on the councils but won on khadi, which he (and others) interpreted as nonviolence.

  In 1924 the Raj arrested several Swarajists in Bengal, including Subhas Bose. Gandhi’s response was to ask the Congress to support the arrested men by owning them. The No Changers felt aggrieved at Gandhi’s generosity towards the Swarajists but remained loyal, and hoped for a realization of Gandhi’s belief that the Swarajists would ‘retrace their steps when experience has disillusioned them’.6

  Yet non-cooperation was in effect given up in 1924. Hoping that three planks—khadi, Hindu-Muslim harmony and a struggle against untouchability—would add up to a new platform of national reconciliation, Gandhi invited everyone, including the Liberal party, to converge onto it.

  CRACKS IN THE BRIDGE

  The Hindu-Muslim issue presented a huge challenge. Gandhi called it ‘the question of questions’, employing the phrase he had used five years earlier for Khilafat. The bridge that Reading had acknowledged was cracking, thanks in part to the Raj’s diplomacy.

  In February 1924, the month of Gandhi’s release, a Muslim member of the Viceroy’s executive council, Sir Muhammad Shafi, spent three hours with the Ali brothers and obtained, as he wrote in his diary, a promise from the brothers not to oppose the ‘organizing of the Muslim community for… defending and promoting Muslim interests’. Shafi had ‘emphasized’ to them ‘the danger to Islam’ from the ‘shuddhi and sangathan movements’ started among Hindus following the Moplah tragedy of August 1921.7

  Those calling for shuddhi (purification or reconversion) and sangathan (consolidation) included Gandhi’s old friend, Swami Shraddhanand. The man who in 1919 had been invited to speak in Delhi’s Jama Masjid was now a Hindu first. In 1922, when his demand for Congress funds for shuddhi was turned down, he left the Congress and forged new links with the Hindu Mahasabha, founded in 1915, hoping to make that body more resolute for ‘Hindu interests’.

  In 1923, Gandhi’s adversary from 1909, Vinayak D. Savarkar, who two years earlier had been moved from the cellular jail in the Andamans to Ratnagiri jail, had a tract published, Who is a Hindu? Promoting ‘Hindutva’ or ‘Hinduness’, the tract argued that only those who saw India as both a homeland and a holy land could be patriotic, a reasoning that rendered Muslims and Christians unpatriotic by definition.

  When, in 1911, Savarkar first entered his cell in the Andamans (to serve a life sentence for a role in the 1909 assassination of the collector of Nasik, a Sanskrit-knowing British officer called A.M.T. Jackson), the British were his enemy number one, but before long Muslims occupied that position.

  To the Raj he sent an apology. Conditionally released in 1924 but confined to Ratnagiri district until 1937, when he was freed, Savarkar continued, it seemed, to believe in the manliness of certain acts of violence, and in ‘the national duty’ of patriots to kill ‘the nation’s enemies’.

  This came across from his writings in the 1920s, 1930s and later. Much earlier, in a history of the 1857 rising that he wrote in 1909 (the year when he and Gandhi had met, and when Gandhi had condemned, while he had encouraged, the Wyllie murder), Savarkar had refused to condemn the brutal killings of British women and children.8 On a range of current and historical questions, Savarkar thus stood sharply opposed to Gandhi.

  In August 1923 the Hindu Mahasabha endorsed Savarkar’s line and called for shuddhi and for Hindu self-defence squads. There were parallel Muslim movements for tabligh (spreading the word) and tanzim (organization). Both sides, Hindu and Muslim, claimed to be acting in defence, but Hindu-Muslim riots occurred nonetheless, including eleven significant ones in 1923.9

  While Muslims, including Muhammad Ali, complained to the released Gandhi about shuddhi and sangathan, and about utterances by Hindu leaders like Pandit Malaviya, Lala Lajpat Rai and Swami Shraddhanand, Gandhi also received ‘unprintably’ abusive letters from Hindus who attacked him for having roused Muslim passion, which they claimed now targeted Hindus, not the British.

  Did he not know, Gandhi was asked, of Muhammad Ali’s response when accused by Muslims of being ‘a follower of Mahatma Gandhi in his religious principles’? Ali had replied that while ‘in actual character’ he could not think of anyone ‘entitled to a higher place than Mahatma Gandhi’, he nevertheless regarded ‘the creed of even a fallen and degraded Mussulman [as] entitled to a higher place’ than that of the then imprisoned Gandhi.10

  Even the heightened polarization did not require a comparison in such terms. In the uproar that inevitably followed, some demanded Ali’s resignation as the Congress chief. Gandhi’s comment was that a molehill—Ali’s effort to underscore his loyalty to Islam—had been made into a mountain.

  Essay & an indiscretion. As long as Hindus and Muslims were jointly fighting the British, some crucial and divisive questions could be set aside. Now Gandhi was obliged to address them frontally. He did so at the end of May in a wide-ranging Young India essay that merits close attention.

  Entitled ‘Hindu-Muslim tension: Its cause and cure’, the essay began with the ‘indictments’ that Gandhi was receiving. If Hindus alleged that Gandhi’s position on Khilafat had enhanced the prestige of the Maulvis, who had now ‘proclaimed a kind of jehad against us Hindus’, Muslim complainants charged that Hindus had tricked Muslims by quietly returning to the Raj’s courts, colleges and councils, whereas Muslims had stayed out.

  One Muslim critic said that the Aligarh C
ollege had been ‘utterly spoilt’ by non-cooperation and lamented that a man like Muhammad Ali, who in the past had done ‘solid work for the Muslim community’, was ‘won over to your side and he is now a loss to the community’, even though, fortunately, only ‘a few’ Muslims continued to remain ‘in your camp’.

  Rejecting the charges, Gandhi wrote in the essay that he was ‘totally unrepentant’. If he had been ‘a prophet and foreseen all that has happened’, he would have still done what he did. ‘The awakening among the masses’ was ‘a tremendous gain’ and he would do nothing ‘to put the people to sleep’ again.

  Pointing out that recent riots had claimed Muslim as well as Hindu victims, and declaring that the Punjab, where news sheets from both sides vied with one another ‘in using abusive language and reviling the religion of the opponent’, was ‘the seat of the trouble’, he said that attempts to justify violence constituted the biggest challenge confronting India. Quoting a Muslim friend who had said to him, ‘Violence is the law of life’ and ‘I must hate my enemy’, Gandhi added that some Hindu critics, too, found nonviolence ‘repugnant’.

  ‘Some of my Hindu friends tell me that killing is a duty enjoined by the Gita under certain circumstances.’ His own firm view was that the Gita ‘inculcated the duty of eradicating the evil within us without hesitation, without tenderness’. But there were Hindus who ‘scornfully rejected my interpretation’. ‘I feel the wave of violence coming,’ Gandhi warned.

  He was not asking Indians, Gandhi pointed out, to respond with absolute nonviolence to villainy, or against ‘thieves, robbers, or… nations that may invade India’. However, ‘the means for the attainment of Swaraj must be nonviolent’. Secondly, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Parsis ‘must not settle their differences by resort to violence’. Hindu-Muslim disputes should be settled through arbitration or in courts of law: