Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People

by Gandhi, Rajmohan

  You may take the name of independence on your lips but all your muttering will be an empty formula if there is no honour behind it. If you are not prepared to stand by your words, where will independence be?36

  Bose had many supporters at the Calcutta session. Though his amendment was lost, it won 973 votes, compared with 1,350 cast against. As for Gandhi, he was now ready to intensify sentiment against British rule but wary of inciting racial hatred. In October 1928 he wrote:

  I have nothing to be ashamed of if my views on Ahimsa are the result of my Western education. I have never tabooed all Western ideas, nor am I prepared to anathematize everything that comes from the West as inherently evil (Young India, 11 Oct. 1928).

  AGREED CONSTITUTION?

  Jinnah and Muhammad Ali arrived in Calcutta with their ‘Delhi Proposals’ for an Indian constitution and stressed three key demands: statutory Muslim majorities in the Bengal and Punjab legislatures; the separation, from Bombay presidency, of Sindh, which would create a new Muslim-majority province; and a one-third share for Muslims in the Central Assembly.

  If, said Jinnah and Ali, the Congress backed these proposals, Muslims might give up the separate Muslim electorate to which the Congress had agreed under the 1916 Lucknow Pact, and which the British had accepted.

  Jinnah was hoping to revive an earlier equation with Motilal Nehru. Through the Nehru Report the Congress on its part had accepted the separation of Sindh, asked for joint electorates, and proposed the end, in every province, of weightage, a provision from the Lucknow Pact that gave minorities a higher-than-proportionate share in every provincial legislature. In India’s largest Muslim-majority provinces, Bengal and the Punjab, the provision had become a sore point with Muslims, for it seemed to give non-Muslims a chance to rule.

  Doing away with weightage, the Nehru Report laid the ground for Muslim majorities in Bengal and the Punjab without mandating them. (Before his death Lajpat Rai had criticized statutory Muslim rule, and the Punjab’s Sikhs were also opposed.) As for the Central Assembly, the Nehru Report gave the Muslims a quarter of the seats, matching the population percentage.

  The differences between the Nehru Report and the Delhi Proposals did not appear large. The prospect of joint electorates was attractive to many in the Congress who thought separate electorates undermined the sense of a common nationality. Addressing a conference of all parties, Jinnah and Muhammad Ali presented their case with passion. However, no agreement resulted.

  Though describing Jinnah as ‘a spoilt child’, the lawyer and liberal leader, Tej Bahadur Sapru, had urged the Congress to concede his demands and ‘be finished with it’. But his colleague M.R. Jayakar said that Hindu groups had accepted the Nehru Report with ‘great difficulty’ and would urge ‘violent and arrogant’ claims if the issue was reopened.37

  Telling Jinnah that he was prepared personally to concede the Muslim demands, Gandhi pointed out that the Sikhs had declared that they would back out if changes were made to the Nehru Report.38

  The only concession the Congress offered was to raise the Muslim share in the Central Assembly from 25 to 27 per cent. Mindful of the strength of Hindu and Sikh feeling, the Congress leaders were in addition unsure that Jinnah and Muhammad Ali spoke for Muslims as a whole. Denouncing joint electorates, Sir Muhammad Shafi had split from Jinnah, and the poet Iqbal, an increasingly influential figure in Muslim politics, had supported Shafi.

  After Calcutta a bitterly disappointed Jinnah spoke of ‘a parting of the ways’39 and an angry Muhammad Ali formally left the Congress, asking Muslims to stay away from it.

  As for Gandhi, his mind was on a possible fight with the Raj. He had sensed its likelihood, saying in October that he hoped to hit upon a path of struggle ‘which I may confidently commend to the people’ (Young India, 11 Oct. 1928).

  Lure of violence. Also on Gandhi’s mind was a fascination for violence in young Indians. Lajpat Rai’s injury and death had been followed (in December 1928) by the revenge killing in Lahore of a police officer, J.P. Saunders, and by an incident in April 1929 in the Central Assembly in Delhi, when two young men, Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt, dropped a couple of crude bombs and bundles of leaflets onto the Assembly floor. The two were arrested and tried for this incident and also for their involvement, soon established, in the Lahore killing.

  The sensational character of the Lahore and Delhi incidents, the defiant demeanour, during their trial, of Singh and Dutt, and the revelation that the Lahore killing was part of a revolutionary conspiracy in which other youths were also involved, thrilled many in India.

  Gandhi responded with a Young India article, ‘The Cult of the Bomb’. Insisting that the votaries of ‘revolutionary terrorism’, as they described their ideology, did not represent the Indian masses, he underlined its hazards.

  Firstly, ‘every time violence has occurred we have lost heavily’. Military expenditure rose, and there were harsh reprisals. ‘The masses in whose name, and for whose sake, we want freedom, have had to bear greater burdens.’ Secondly, it was ‘an easy natural step’ from ‘violence done to the foreign ruler’ to ‘violence to our own people’, to anyone seen as an obstruction.

  Once killing was made respectable, India’s weak and crippled would be at risk. Violence against Indian oppressors was also unwise, for, ‘maddened with rage over their coercion’, they would ‘seek the assistance of the foreigner in order to retaliate’. By contrast, said Gandhi, India had seen in 1919-22 the results of nonviolence:

  Mass awakening came no one knows how. Even remote villages were stirred. Many abuses seemed to have been swept away… The system of [forced labour] vanished like mist in… several other parts of India, wherever the people had become awakened to a sense of the power that lay within themselves… It was true swaraj of the masses attained by the masses (Young India, 2 Jan. 1930; 48: 184-6).

  The incidents of violence intensified Gandhi’s search for a nonviolent satyagraha that would attract young Indians hungry for defiance and sacrifice. In February 1929, when Young India and Navajivan published the last instalment of the Autobiography, Gandhi asked Jawaharlal, a general secretary of the Congress, to prepare the party for a nonviolent campaign in the following year.

  Ghaffar Khan. In the summer of 1929, Gandhi and Abdul Ghaffar Khan of the Frontier province met in Lucknow. The thirty-nine-year-old Ghaffar Khan had followed Gandhi closely ever since the 1919 stir against Rowlatt, which the Pakhtun leader had joined, and seen Gandhi at different Congress sessions, but this was their first meeting. Jawaharlal, who had known Ghaffar Khan’s older brother, Dr Khan Sahib, from their days as students in Britain, brought Ghaffar Khan to Gandhi.

  Their talk—about the Pakhtuns living in the Frontier province, in Afghanistan, and in the tribal territories in between—was heartening to both. Well aware of the history of British reprisals and anxious to overcome the revenge code of the Pakhtuns, Ghaffar Khan was convinced about nonviolence. In September 1929, within weeks of the Lucknow meeting, he launched (in his village Utmanzai), the Khudai Khidmatgars, a body of ‘servants of God’ pledged to serve the Pakhtuns, and if necessary struggle for them—nonviolently.

  By this time Gandhi had been given the Congress chair, which he renounced. Ten provincial committees of the Congress having proposed his name, Gandhi’s election was announced, but he successfully pressed the Congress to place Jawaharlal in the chair.

  JAWAHARLAL VS. PATEL

  Gandhi had been desired as president because a fight would need a general, negotiations with the British would need a seasoned interlocutor, and there was ‘yet the Hindu-Muslim knot to undo’.

  Declining the office, Gandhi cited his lack of energy and added (Young India, 1 Aug. 1929): ‘The battle of the future has to be fought by younger men and women. And it is but meet that they are led by one of themselves.’ His own gifts were independent of any office and would not be kept back. Continued Gandhi:

  In my opinion the crown must be worn by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru… Older men hav
e had their innings… Responsibility will mellow and sober the youth, and prepare them for the burden they must discharge.

  Jawaharlal had proved an able secretary. Also,

  by his bravery, determination, application, integrity and grit he has captivated the imagination of the youth of the land. He has come in touch with labour and the peasantry. His close acquaintance with European politics is a great asset in enabling him to assess ours.

  Admitting his ‘intellectual differences’ with Jawaharlal, Gandhi added:

  [T]hose who know the relations that subsist between Jawaharlal and me know that his being in the chair is as good as my being in it…[O]ur hearts are one. And with all his youthful impetuosities, his sense of stern discipline and loyalty make him an inestimable comrade in whom one can put the most implicit faith.

  Moreover,

  a President of the Congress is not an autocrat. He is a representative working under a well-defined constitution and well-known traditions. He can no more impose his views on the people than the English King… And it is the Congress as a whole with which, when the time is ripe, British statesmen will have to deal (46: 329-331).

  So Jawaharlal was empowered, and also informed of his limits, while others were told that they were not powerless. Gandhi was presenting Jawaharlal as first among a set of equals. If need arose, the others together could overrule the chair. Gandhi’s influence on Jawaharlal would be an additional check.

  Vallabhbhai, in particular, was on Gandhi’s mind. As Subhas Bose would later recall, ‘The general feeling in Congress circles was that the honour should go to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.’40 Five provincial committees had proposed the hero of Bardoli, but on Gandhi’s prompting Patel instantly withdrew in favour of Jawaharlal, who had been suggested by three committees.

  In preferring Jawaharlal over Patel at this stage, Gandhi was strongly influenced by the age factor. Vallabhbhai, only six years younger than him, was more like a younger brother to Gandhi, whereas Jawaharlal, twenty years younger, was like a son. Patel was an indispensable part of Gandhi’s team, Jawaharlal the potential leader of the new generation.

  And Gandhi clearly hoped that the move would help ‘to wean Nehru himself from the drift to the far left’, apart from encouraging young radicals increasingly tempted by militant or Communist ideas to remain with the Congress.41

  British proposal, Lahore Congress. At the end of October, Irwin, the Viceroy, announced that HMG wished to meet Indian leaders in London during the coming year. To pave the way, four Indian leaders—Gandhi, Motilal Nehru, who was in the final weeks of the Congress presidency, Vithalbhai, president of the Central Assembly, and Jinnah, president of the Muslim League—were invited to meet Irwin in Delhi on 23 December, eight days before the Congress deadline was to expire.

  Hours before the meeting, a bomb exploded under a special train carrying the Viceroy, who however escaped without injury. After describing the incident to the leaders, Irwin broached the political question, asking, ‘How shall we start?’ Gandhi’s response was direct: ‘Will the London conference proceed on the basis of Dominion Status?’ When Irwin said he could offer no such assurance, the gathering dispersed.42

  Now the ball was in the court of the Congress, which held its December-end plenary outside Lahore, on the banks of the Ravi. The cold was bitter, yet, as the Congress historian, Pattabhi Sitaramayya, would write: ‘The heat of passion and excitement, the resentment at the failure of negotiation, the flushing of faces on hearing the war drums—oh, it was all in marked contrast with the weather.’43

  Led by Ghaffar Khan, the Khudai Khidmatgars were conspicuous at the session. At midnight on New Year eve, Jawaharlal hoisted the Congress tricolour. Britain having failed to promise Dominion Status, the Congress was now pledged to struggle for Complete Independence. In his presidential address, the forty-year-old Jawaharlal spelt out his socialist and republican hopes for the long run, but the immediate question was how the Congress would do battle.

  For an answer, all eyes turned to Gandhi, who asked, firstly, for a nationwide test of readiness. Let Indians across the land, he said, meet on 26 January, raise the tricolor, and take a pledge of independence and of willingness, if instructed, to break laws. Secondly, he asked for the resignation of Congress’s representatives in the legislatures. Finally, he said that in due course he would announce when, where and how the struggle should commence, and over what question.

  Meanwhile, for goodwill but also to underline the nonviolent character of the impending struggle, Gandhi asked the Congress to congratulate Irwin on his escape. Subhas Bose at once opposed the idea, and many in Lahore backed him. Votes were taken, and it was only narrowly that Bose lost. He walked out, as did Srinivasa Iyengar, the two forming the Democratic Party as a bloc within the Congress.

  In a little over three weeks, on 26 January 1930, Gandhi would know whether Indians were ready for another round of struggle. He would be disappointed if they were not. But it would be harder if they were ready, for then he would have to present a strategy of nonviolent war.

  Chapter 10

  Assault—with Salt

  India, England, India, 1930-32

  How did one coax an aggrieved yet disarmed, heterogeneous and divided populace to wage an assault on a powerful Empire? On 18 January 1930 Tagore called at the ashram and asked Gandhi about his strategy. ‘I am furiously thinking night and day,’ replied Gandhi, ‘and I do not see any light’.1 But he had reached some conclusions. One, during the first stage only trained ashramites, committed to nonviolence, would be deployed; the model they presented could thereafter be followed by the untrained. Two, he would order a stoppage if violence entered his movement but not if extraneous violence occurred.

  On 26 January, tens of thousands gathering in different parts of India soberly assented to a statement-cum-pledge, drafted by Gandhi, that called British rule a ‘four-fold disaster’—economic, political, cultural and spiritual. Calling submission to that rule ‘a crime against man and God’, the statement asserted the right of Indians to freedom and to the fruits of their toil, and ‘the further right to alter or abolish a government withholding such rights’. Also affirmed was the right, under Congress instructions, to disobey laws ‘without doing violence, even under provocation’ (48: 215).

  As for the content of disobedience, Subhas wanted the creation of a parallel government, Bajaj suggested a march to the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi, Vallabhbhai a fight over land revenue (an understandable choice in the light of Bardoli) and Rajagopalachari attacks on the sale of liquor.

  Not everyone thought Indians were ready for a fight. One of Gandhi’s closest colleagues and a key Muslim ally, Dr Ansari, cautioned him that the climate for giving battle was worse than in 1919-22, when rising prices, the Rowlatt legislation, martial law and Khilafat had united Indians against the British. Now, in contrast, Indians entertained hopes from a new Labour government in Britain and from the seemingly warm attitude of the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, a conservative politician from a landed family in Yorkshire. Some Indians meeting him thought that the Viceroy was interested in a ‘Christian’ approach to Indian nationalists.

  In a letter to Gandhi, Ansari added that Hindu-Muslim unity was at a low point, the Sikhs (again unlike in 1920) had turned against the Congress, the Congress was divided, and the youth seemed drawn to violence (48: 524-8).

  At 3.30 a.m. on 16 February, Gandhi wrote a reply to Ansari. Agreeing that ‘the Hindu-Muslim [question] is the problem of problems’, Gandhi suggested that Muslims should nonetheless have no fear as long as the Congress ‘act[ed] on the square under all circumstances’ (48: 324-5). Two weeks later, in another letter to Ansari, Gandhi said: ‘We cannot achieve (Hindu-Muslim) unity through any conference. But we can through fighting for common causes’ (3 March 1930; 48: 369).

  Devadas, for one, agreed with some of Ansari’s reservations and said so to his father. However, the Working Committee authorized Gandhi to plan and direct the promised battle. His colleagues had no agr
eed plan of their own, and in any case they had learnt over the years to respect Gandhi’s judgement.

  In the middle of February his ‘furious’ search ended: the intuition came to him ‘like a flash’2 that the assault should be over salt.

  Salt? By taxing the manufacture and sale of salt, the government was injuring ‘even the starving millions, the sick, the maimed and the utterly helpless’. Nature had gifted salt to India, but Indians could not collect or use it without paying a tax much higher than the cost of removal. All were hurt by the salt law, and all could defy it. Satyagrahis near the coast could defy the law simply by walking to where the salt lay and scooping it up. Indians in the interior could perform satyagraha by buying or selling ‘illegal’ salt.

  Gandhi pictured a march to the sea by his ashramite army, with himself at the head, if the British did not arrest him earlier. The defiance would provide striking scenes, exert maximum pressure with the minimum risk of violence, and would be hard for the British to crush: could they police the entire coastline? Gandhi thought that satyagraha could spread quickly from the ashramites to the general public, as had happened sixteen years earlier in South Africa.

  In the climate of 1930, the salt tax held another virtue for Gandhi: all could jointly oppose it, Hindus and Muslims, peasants and the landless. The poor needed salt more than the rich, who got it from all their foods. As Gandhi put it:

  Next to air and water, salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life. It is the only condiment of the poor. Cattle cannot live without salt. Salt is a necessary article in many manufactures. It is also a rich manure.3