Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People

by Gandhi, Rajmohan

  Huq was given Bengal’s premiership, and Sikandar assured, through a Jinnah-Sikandar pact, that the League’s Punjab unit would not defy him. In October 1937 Huq publicly embraced Jinnah at a Muslim League session in Lucknow and signed the League pledge. Sikandar too attended the session and acknowledged Jinnah as his national-level leader.

  Muslims in Hindu-majority provinces were asked by Jinnah to recognize ‘Hindu domination’. Within months of the Congress assuming office, he declared:

  All along the countryside, many of the 10,000 Congress committees and even some of the Hindu officials are behaving as if Hindu Raj had already been established.9

  When Gandhi protested, Jinnah complained that Gandhi had remained silent while Nehru and the others were belittling the League. Gandhi asked to be used as a bridge by Jinnah, who countered by asking Gandhi for a specific offer, and by continuing to press the allegation of Hindu Raj. Muslims in the UP and other Hindu-majority provinces increasingly believed him.

  After years in the political wilderness, including some spent as a lawyer in England, Jinnah now held a strong set of cards. Had Gandhi missed a trick over that feeler from Jinnah? The League leader never sent another.

  Congress ministries. To combat addiction in Congress ministers to office, Gandhi asked, and Nehru and Patel agreed, that their salaries be limited to Rs 500 a month, with a conveyance allowance of no more than Rs 250 a month. To make it harder for the Raj to soften them, ministers and MLAs were barred from attending functions sponsored by the governor or senior British officials. To reduce divide-and-rule opportunities, ministers were required to obtain their premier’s consent before meeting the governor.

  Each side, the Congress and the Raj, was testing the waters. An early tussle occurred when Congress ministries ordered the release of political prisoners, and governors in the UP and Bihar stood in the way. The Raj was opposed not so much to the releases as to a precedent of being bypassed on a critical issue.

  Gandhi and Patel advised premiers Pant and Sinha to resign, which they did. There was a flurry of cables between the provincial capitals and New Delhi, and between New Delhi and London. Unwilling to see a break, the Raj did not immediately accept the resignations, whereupon Gandhi made a conciliatory statement. The crisis could be avoided, he said, ‘if the governors were left free to give an assurance that their examination of cases was not intended to be usurpation of the powers of the ministries’.10 The governors gave the desired assurance and then allowed the releases.

  Gandhi’s interventions were rare. He did not choose the premiers. This was done by Congress legislators, generally under Patel’s advice, with roles also played by Nehru, Azad and Prasad. And it was the Patelled CPB that had given Congress tickets to the legislators.

  The ministries carried out the Congress agenda. Lands were returned to the rebels of 1930 and 1932. Water was taken to dry villages. Debts of impoverished peasants were cancelled. Temples were opened to Harijans. Land reform Bills were brought before legislatures. Though hard to enforce, bans on liquor seemed to improve life in hundreds of thousands of poor homes. Prisoners’ diet was improved. Khadi uniforms were prescribed for sections of government employees.

  In much of India, the Congress appeared to grow in both power and popularity, and indeed closer to its dream of Swaraj. As a reminder of that dream, every session of the AICC and of a Congress-controlled legislature demanded ‘representative government’ at the centre and a popularly-elected constituent assembly for devising a structure of democratic governance.

  Jawaharlal complained, however, that Congress ministers were excessively concerned with law and order. When, in November 1937, C.R. authorized the arrest of S.S. Batlivala, a Bombay socialist, for a speech in Madras province that allegedly incited violence, Nehru protested to Gandhi. He also proposed that premiers be required in such cases to obtain direction from the Working Committee. Neither Gandhi nor the Working Committee agreed with Nehru, though ministers were asked not to object to criticism.

  Subhas Bose. Gandhi involved himself in the Congress presidency: his choice for Nehru’s successor was Subhas Bose, who had been released in March 1937. We do not know what Nehru thought, but C.R. and Patel were opposed. Among other complaints, Patel alleged that before he died in Europe his brother Vithalbhai had been misled by Bose. He also questioned Bose’s balance. ‘I have seen that Subhas is unsteady,’ Gandhi replied, ‘but no one except him can be the president’.11

  Next to or as much as Nehru, Subhas was the hero of the young, an important factor for Gandhi, who was thinking of the future. Also, Subhas was fully committed to Hindu-Muslim unity. In addition, Gandhi felt that Bose, to Jinnah a less familiar face than Gandhi, Nehru or Patel, should have a chance to negotiate a settlement with the League leader.

  Subhas presided at the plenary held in February 1938 in the village of Haripura in Bardoli taluka, on the banks of the Tapti. For the session, as Nehru would concede, Patel ‘built a magnificent town’,12 with a waterworks, a printing press, a hospital, a garden, a bank, a post office, a telephone exchange and a fire engine. Two thousand volunteers ran the kitchens and kept the sanitary areas clean. Once more Nandalal Bose came from Santiniketan and did two hundred paintings, and Gujarat’s artists, Ravishankar Raval and Kanu Desai, created their pieces.

  Haripura reaffirmed the Congress’s dual policy towards the Raj, as also its policy towards the princes, which was dual too. The princes were advised to understand the times they were living in, while their subjects, keen on democratic rights, were told that individuals in the Congress would assist them. Gandhi (and, under his advice, the Congress) remained wary of pushing the princes deeper inside British arms. The alienation of so many Muslims was bad enough.

  Preserving unity among Congress leaders was a constant challenge. ‘Sardar and I are close to each other, we are as one, we work alike and we think alike,’ Gandhi said in Haripura,13 but in a letter to Patel he had to use another tone.

  20 Feb. 1938: Devadas complained against your speech today. Then Jayaprakash came and spoke about it in great distress. I think your speech was unduly severe. You cannot win over the socialists like that.14

  Mahadev Desai. At the end of March 1938—while he, Kasturba, Mahadev and several others were in Orissa—Gandhi heard that Kasturba, Mahadev’s wife Durga, and a woman relative of Durga’s had gone inside Puri’s Jagannath Temple, to which Harijans could not go. (Four years earlier, Gandhi had been abused near this temple’s entrance.)

  He was shocked, and troubled too, for he was told that ‘the whole of Puri’ was talking about Kasturba’s visit inside the temple. ‘Even the stationmaster asked us, “Did Kasturba really enter the temple?”’15

  Chastised by Gandhi, the women wept. Kasturba said she was wrong to have gone inside. Gandhi’s strongest rebuke, however, was reserved for Desai. He should have instructed the women not to go in, Gandhi told him. Mahadev’s son Narayan, fifteen at this time, was praised; though accompanying the women he had refused to go inside. At a public meeting in Delang, near Puri, Gandhi referred (30 Mar. 1938) to the transgression:

  It is my daily prayer, as it should be the prayer of you all, that if untouchability does not perish it were far better that Hinduism perished…

  I felt humbled and humiliated when I knew that my wife and two ashram inmates whom I regard as my daughters had gone into the Puri temple. The agony was enough to precipitate a collapse. The machine recorded an alarmingly high blood-pressure…

  The three… went in ignorance. But I was to blame, and Mahadev was more to blame in that he did not tell them what their dharma was… He ought to have thought also of its social repercussions…

  How are we to carry to [the Harijans] the conviction that we are with them through thick and thin, that we are completely identifying ourselves with them, unless we can carry our families—our wives, our children, brothers, sisters, relatives—with us..?

  If Indians developed true instead of false dharma, added Gandhi, its ‘power [would be] s
uch that the sword would drop from the Englishman’s hand’ (73: 69-70).

  While Gandhi’s blood pressure rose alarmingly, Mahadev felt he could take it no more. He thought Gandhi was making a mountain out of a molehill, and asked to be allowed to leave. As he put it, Gandhi, ‘who has performed several spiritual operations using the chloroform of love, had performed this one without that chloroform’. In Harijan he cried out:

  To live with the saints in heaven is a bliss and a glory, But to live with a saint on earth is a different story (Harijan, 9 Apr. 1938; 73: 457).

  But he was denied permission to leave.

  To Desai, 31 March 1938: I will tolerate thousands of mistakes, but I can never part with you… If you decide to leave me, will Pyarelal stay on? And if Pyarelal leaves, will Sushila stay?..

  They will all run away. Lilavati will simply go mad… And yet how can I prevent anybody from running away? (73: 73-74)

  The letter reveals Gandhi’s dependence on his close aides, and his fear of losing them. Later in the year Gandhi enthusiastically backed a plan, originating with Kallenbach, to give Desai, and perhaps Mira as well, a break in South Africa.

  To Desai, 5 Nov. 1938: I certainly liked the idea about a sea voyage. I like Kallenbach’s suggestion very much indeed. You may go and see the field of my battles. I should like you very much to see Phoenix, Tolstoy Farm, the house in which I used to stay in Durban, the Johannesburg office, etc. Manilal will dance with joy.

  But it might be difficult to take Durga (Desai’s wife) and Bablo (their son Narayan) as far as that. I should like Bablo to remain with me. And moreover, a visit to South Africa would mean at least four months. South Africa is not less big than India. Go and see the four Colonies. And you must not miss the Victoria Falls…

  It is worth going there even if only for the sake of meeting Miss Schlesin. Kallenbach will perhaps have a time that he will remember for ever. The climate there is beyond praise. Think over it. If you feel inclined, I am certainly ready to send you. If Mirabehn wishes to go, I am ready to let her go (74: 95-6).

  Unhappily, the idea was never realized.

  Protecting a dream. March and April 1938 were difficult months. Apart from the crisis in Puri, a major reason was his awareness that Muslim separatism was growing even as independence seemed nearer. Jinnah, now the chief spokesman of Muslim separatism (or, to use the phrase Jinnah preferred, of Muslim nationalism), was gaining noticeably in strength. Also, the Hindu Mahasabha was preaching Hindu-Muslim incompatibility. Would India find civil war along with, or instead of, Swaraj?

  While they lasted, the anti-British struggles of the early 1920s and the early 1930s had concealed Indian divisions. The 1937 elections and the negotiations that ensued revealed that India was larger than the Congress, and that the Congress could not contain all of India’s competing groups, let alone resolve all their mutual conflicts.

  None before Gandhi had tried to bond with every Indian group, or to persuade the Congress to do the same, but the task was beyond him, the Congress or any human agency. Not only that: seeking a bond with all Indians angered some of them. Thus both Jinnah and Savarkar attacked Gandhi’s effort to win Muslims to the Congress, Jinnah accusing him of ‘poaching’, and Savarkar charging that Gandhi was indifferent to Hindu interests.

  At the end of 1936, sensing a menacing divide and a yen for violence, Gandhi had said to students who wanted a message:

  What new message can I give you at the age of sixty-eight?.. Assassinating the body of course does not matter, for out of my ashes a thousand Gandhis will arise. But what if you assassinate or burn the principles I have lived for? (70: 225)

  In March 1938 he initiated correspondence with Jinnah. The two agreed that they should talk face to face, but Jinnah brusquely declined Gandhi’s invitation to meet in Sevagram, and Gandhi agreed to call on him in his Bombay home.

  Pride had to be swallowed (‘I wrote to Jinnah that I would even go and meet him,’ Gandhi would say to ashram colleagues16) but there was a deeper unease, for Jinnah had written to him that the ‘only basis’ for productive talks was for both sides to accept that the League represented India’s Muslims while Gandhi and the Congress spoke for India’s Hindus.17

  Jinnah was asking Gandhi to disown his life so far. Rejecting Gandhi’s suggestion that he meet with Maulana Azad to begin with, Jinnah said he would prefer to talk with Gandhi and then, if necessary, with Subhas, the Congress president. Gandhi agreed to an end-April meeting in Bombay, but about three weeks before it, for, he would say, ‘the first time in my public and private life’, he seemed to lose self-confidence. Admitting this publicly on 22 April, Gandhi added, ‘I find myself for the first time during the past fifty years in a Slough of Despond’ (73: 117).

  He was on the brink of knocking down the British thesis that there was no such thing as an Indian nation, or that Indians could not govern themselves, when Jinnah loomed up, ready to prove Gandhi wrong. But the Jinnah barrier was joined to something else, an incident that Gandhi took as a sign of personal infirmity.

  This personal ‘failure’—which we will look at later in this chapter—seemed for a while to unnerve him for the Jinnah interview. On the other hand, anxiety about the interview, and fear of losing Mahadev, may have contributed to the ‘failure’. In any case, Gandhi would fight his loss of confidence. In the 22 April statement he said:

  I may not leave a single stone unturned to achieve Hindu-Muslim unity…We are friends, not strangers. It does not matter to me that we see things from different angles of vision. I ask the public not to attach any exaggerated importance to the interview. But I ask all lovers of communal peace to pray that the God of truth and love may give us both the right spirit and the right word and use us for the good of the dumb millions of India (73: 118).

  On 28 April he and Jinnah talked for three-and-a-half hours. Later, Gandhi’s reaction was: ‘He is a very tough customer. If the other members of the League are of the same type, a settlement is an impossibility.’18 The ‘way out,’ Gandhi thought, was ‘a unilateral undertaking’ by the Congress to allay Muslim anxieties.

  Yet since ‘every attempt must be made to arrive at a mutual understanding’, he urged Subhas also to try with Jinnah.19 Observing that Subhas was ‘a good listener’, Gandhi thought it possible that ‘he may succeed where others might have failed’.20 Held in May, the Bose-Jinnah talks were also unsuccessful.

  IN THE FRONTIER

  Gandhi’s ability to reconnect with Muslim India had been hurt by the deaths of Ajmal Khan and Ansari, but he still had three influential Muslim allies, the Bengal-based Abul Kalam Azad and the Frontier’s Khan brothers.

  In July 1937, after Gandhi’s positive role in the Congress’s office-acceptance became plain, the new Viceroy, Linlithgow, wrote to Gandhi proposing a meeting. Gandhi not only replied, gracefully, that he too was thinking of a meeting, he made two requests from his side: Ghaffar Khan should be allowed to return to the NWFP, and he, Gandhi, should be allowed to go there.

  Ghaffar Khan returned to the Frontier, Nehru followed him there in October 1937, and Gandhi in May 1938, just after his meeting with Jinnah. Gandhi’s visit was preceded by that of Mahadev, who in 1935 had produced a short book on the Khan brothers, Two Servants of God, based on interviews during the brothers’ 1934 stay in Wardha. Struck by Ghaffar Khan’s ‘submission or surrender to God’, Desai had found the older brother less strict in Islamic observance. ‘My brother offers the namaaz on my behalf also,’ Dr Khan Sahib told Desai.21

  After a week in the Frontier in May 1938, Gandhi returned there for five weeks in the autumn of 1938, and again in July 1939, when he was accompanied by Kasturba. On all three trips Ghaffar Khan was his host, guide and interpreter. At Peshawar’s famed Islamia College, founded in 1908, Gandhi asked his Muslim audience to reflect on the boundaries of their community:

  Islam… believes in the brotherhood of man. But you will permit me to point out that it is not the brotherhood of Muslims only but universal brotherhood… Th
e Allah of Islam is the same as the God of Christians and the Ishwar of Hindus.22

  The province’s Hindu and Sikh minorities, troubled by raids by tribes descending into the Frontier’s settled areas, were told by him that self-defence was everybody’s birthright. ‘I do not want to see a single coward in India,’ Gandhi said on 25 October 1938 in the walled city of Bannu. Yet Gandhi also asked the Hindus and Sikhs to realize that the tribesman was ‘a human being, just like you and me, and capable of responding to the human touch’.

  He had met several tribesmen following his arrival in the province, Gandhi added, and he ‘did not find that their nature was essentially different from human nature elsewhere’. Then he challenged the Hindus:

  You are a community of traders. Do not leave out of your traffic that noblest and precious merchandise, love. Give to the tribesmen all the love you are capable of, and you will have theirs in return.23

  Unwell when he arrived for his second visit, Gandhi quickly recovered in the peace and quiet of the Khan brothers’ village, Utmanzai. After Gandhi had complained, Badshah Khan, as Ghaffar Khan was known among his Pakhtuns, had arms taken away from the men guarding the house where Gandhi stayed, but he refused to dismiss the guards.24

  During Gandhi’s travels across the NWFP, Ghaffar Khan’s Khudai Khidmtagars (KKs) were posted along his route, villages were festooned with arches, and tribal Pathans stood on perches to watch him. Everywhere Gandhi spent long sessions with KK groups, asking them to learn punctuality and crafts, and, as he put it in the town of Tank in Dera Ismail Khan district, ‘to become a living wall of protection to your (Hindu and Sikh) neighbours’.25

  Remembering that a Pathan, Mir Alam, had attacked him in South Africa, Gandhi probed the KKs on their nonviolence. When a Khidmatgar confessed that he would depart from nonviolence in case of ‘abuse of their revered leaders’, Gandhi said, ‘I know it is no joke for a Pathan to take an affront lying down.’26 Speaking to KKs in Tank, Gandhi made a remark that would be quoted often in the future: