Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People

by Gandhi, Rajmohan

  The Viceroy added that it had been decided not to ‘give to Congress what they are asking for, which is an understanding… that India will be given political independence at the conclusion of the war’.8

  Like Gandhi, Linlithgow had realized the importance of Jinnah, who after declining Gandhi’s invitation accepted, in early October, the Viceroy’s. Jinnah informed Linlithgow that the Muslim League would support the war effort if, but only if, Muslim interests were protected to its satisfaction in any future Indian constitution; and he did not ask for immediate steps towards independence.

  Unlike the Congress, he could wait for independence, for by now many Muslims in India felt that the Hindu and not the Briton was their chief foe.

  In November Gandhi and Nehru had talks in New Delhi with Jinnah, giving the Viceroy (as he confessed to Zetland) ‘one or two rather anxious moments’.9 For one meeting with Linlithgow, Gandhi and Jinnah arrived together at Viceroy’s House in one car (Jinnah’s). ‘I urged that we at least make the appearance of unity by going to the Viceroy together,’ Gandhi would later recall.10 But Jinnah had no intention of helping the Congress. The same being true of most princes and of Ambedkar, Linlithgow was able to claim that the Congress did not speak for all of India.

  In October, when Patel and Prasad also had talks with the Viceroy, the latter evidently told Patel that if the Congress did not offer support the British would ‘have to take the Muslims’ help’, a remark that caused Patel to regret the rejection of Gandhi’s advice of unconditional support.11

  On 17 October the Raj gave its formal reply to the Congress’s resolution and demands: ‘HMG have not themselves defined with any ultimate precision their detailed objectives in the prosecution of the war.’ However, after the war ended Indians could hold constitutional talks with the British. During the war the Congress could, if it wished, send representatives to a consultative committee.12

  This reply spelt the end of what some months earlier Gandhi had described as the Congress’s ‘alliance with the British Government’.13 The Working Committee asked all provincial ministries to resign, though it did so in ‘studiedly moderate’ words, as Gandhi would say. Costly as loss of office would be, loss of face with the Indian masses would be worse.

  Rajagopalachari’s ministry in Madras resigned on 27 October. While anxious to give ‘wholehearted support to Britain in the fight against gangsterism personified’,14 C.R. thought Britain had ‘simply thrown away a great opportunity’ of enlisting Indian friendship.15 By 27 November all Congress ministries were out of office, including Dr Khan Sahib’s in the NWFP, and governors ruled with the help of nominated advisers.

  Hitler’s war had shattered the Congress-Raj alliance. Jinnah said Muslims had reason to celebrate. Ambedkar said the Dalits also felt that way. Leading a movement in the Tamil country that simultaneously targeted Brahmins, the Hindi language and north Indians, E.V. Ramaswami Naicker said he too was joyous. Their parties observed 22 December 1939 as Deliverance Day.

  Nursing a leprosy patient. While he was in Simla to meet the Viceroy, one person on Gandhi’s mind, as Narayan Desai would recall, was Parchure Shastri.16 A member, once, of the Sabarmati Ashram, and present in Yeravda jail in 1932 when Gandhi broke his fast, Shastri was a Sanskrit scholar and leprosy patient who, after being shunned everywhere else, had asked for permission to live and die in the Sevagram Ashram. Admitting Shastri, Gandhi added that permission to die would not be given.

  A hut was built for Shastri not far from the Gandhis’, and Gandhi himself regularly nursed and massaged him. After improving for a while, Shastri would eventually succumb in 1945, but his stay under Gandhi’s supervision in Sevagram inspired associates of Gandhi to start a therapeutic colony for leprosy patients near Wardha.17

  Andrews dies. In February 1940 Gandhi visited his friend Andrews, the friend also of Tagore and many others and especially the downtrodden, who lay ill in Calcutta. ‘Mohan, Swaraj is coming,’ said Andrews from the sickbed from which he would not rise. Later, Gandhi sent Mahadev to be with the patient but early on 5 April Charles Freer Andrews died. In Harijan Gandhi wrote of the only person to call him ‘Mohan’ in his adult life:

  Nobody probably knew Charlie Andrews as well as I did… When we met in South Africa, we simply met as brothers and remained as such to the end… It was not a friendship between an Englishman and an Indian. It was an unbreakable bond between two seekers and servants…

  If we really love Andrews’ memory, we may not have hate in us for Englishmen, of whom Andrews was among the best and the noblest (Harijan, 13 April 1940; 78: 128-9).

  JINNAH AND ‘PAKISTAN!’

  From the last quarter of 1939, the person most on Gandhi’s mind was Jinnah, under whose leadership the Muslim League had attracted hundreds of thousands of new members in the late 1930s. At the end of October 1939, Gandhi acknowledged ‘the tremendous fact’ that the Muslim League looked upon ‘the Congress as the enemy of the Muslims’ (77:66).

  More disturbing was a call that Gandhi first heard in a letter that October. A school teacher, probably from the Punjab and described by Gandhi as ‘a Muslim friend’, asked for ‘the recognition of Muslims as a separate nation’ (Harijan, 28 Oct. 1939: 77: 27). Others too were voicing such a demand (mostly Muslims but also some Hindus), Jinnah sounded close to embracing it, and Gandhi felt he had to answer it comprehensively:

  Why is India not one nation? Was it not one during, say, the Moghul period? Is India composed of two nations? If it is, why only two? Are not Christians a third, Parsis a fourth, and so on? Are the Muslims of China a nation separate from the other Chinese? Are the Muslims of England a different nation from the other English?

  How are the Muslims of the Punjab different from the Hindus and the Sikhs? Are they not all Punjabis, drinking the same water, breathing the same air and deriving sustenance from the same soil? What is there to prevent them from following their respective religious practices? Are Muslims all the world over a separate nation? Or are the Muslims of India only to be a separate nation distinct from the others?

  Is India to be vivisected into two parts, one Muslim and the other non-Muslim? And what is to happen to the handful of Muslims living in the numerous villages where the population is predominantly Hindu, and conversely to the Hindus where, as in the Frontier Province or Sind, they are a handful?

  The way suggested by the correspondent is the way of strife. Live and let live or mutual forbearance and toleration is the law of life. That is the lesson I have learnt from the Koran, the Bible, the Zend-Avesta and the Gita (Harijan, 28 Oct. 1939: 77: 27).

  RSS. A different perspective, in some ways justifying Jinnah’s new line, was offered from the Hindu side in 1939 by Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, who had succeeded Hedgewar as the head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). In We, or Our Nationhood Defined, Golwalkar wrote:

  Germany has… shown how well nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by…

  The foreign races in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture, i.e., of the Hindu nation and must lose their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment—not even citizens’ rights.18

  This was, among other things, a repetition of Savarkar’s 1937 claim, noted earlier, that Hindus and Muslims were different nations. The war was sharpening India’s partisan swords.

  Gandhi’s moves. Acknowledging Jinnah’s rising stature, from January 1940 Gandhi started calling him Quaid-i-Azam (‘The People’s Leader’), the honorific that many Muslims were by now using. Gandhi made three other moves.

  Firstly, to refute Jinnah’s charge that the Congress was a Hindu body, h
e asked Azad to succeed Prasad in the Congress chair. Secondly, he tried to get closer to the Muslim premier of the Punjab, the Unionist leader, Sir Sikandar Hyat Khan.19

  Thirdly, noting that the League chief had aligned himself with Ambedkar and Ramaswami Naicker and was said also to be meeting Savarkar, Gandhi encouraged Jinnah, referring to him as ‘my old comrade’, to lead all the anti-Congress forces in India and if possible push the Congress to second place. Better an anti-Congress movement across India than separating Muslims from India.

  If the Quaid-e-Azam can bring about the combination, not only I but the whole of India will shout with one acclamation, ‘Long Live Quaid-e-Azam Jinnah’ (Harijan, 20 Jan. 1940; 77: 222-3).

  But Jinnah did not fall for the bait. ‘India is not a nation,’ he commented. ‘It is a subcontinent composed of nationalities.’20 More than willing to fight the Congress, henceforth he would fight even more the notion of one India, and encourage men like Ambedkar and Naicker also to fight it.

  At the end of 1939, Linlithgow remarked to Jinnah that a separate state was the logical implication of his stand, whereupon, according to Linlithgow, Jinnah ‘blushed’.21 But in January he said publicly that Hindus and Muslims were not only distinct, they were two nations. And in March 1940, when the League met in Lahore, the call for separation was formally and dramatically made.

  ‘Pakistan’. In a resolution moved by the premier of Bengal, Fazlul Huq, the League declared that it would accept nothing short of ‘separate and sovereign Muslim states, comprising geographically contiguous units… in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority, as in the northwestern and eastern zones of India.’22 But the units or their boundaries were not specified, and there was also a suggestion of more than one Muslim state being demanded.

  Pointing out that the resolution did not name the provinces that would constitute the new state, a delegate at Lahore expressed the fear that its imprecise wording would justify partitioning the Punjab and Bengal. In his answer, Liaqat Ali Khan, the League’s general secretary, defended vagueness:

  If we say Punjab that would mean that the boundary of our state would be Gurgaon, whereas we want to include in our proposed dominion Delhi and Aligarh, which are centres of our culture… Rest assured that we will [not] give away any part of the Punjab.23

  Ten years earlier, at a meeting in Lucknow, the poet Iqbal had first asked for a consolidation of Muslim areas in the subcontinent’s north-west. Muslims of the eastern zone were not part of Iqbal’s scheme, which envisaged a ‘Muslim India within India’, or a separation that was not complete. Also, Iqbal said that the Punjab’s eastern areas, where Hindus and Sikhs outnumbered Muslims, could be excluded from his Muslim zone.

  Soon afterwards, a man called Khwaja Abdur Rahim thought of ‘Pakistan’ or Land of the Pure, an amalgamation of the Punjab, the Frontier province, Kashmir, Sindh, and Balochistan. In 1933 a student in Cambridge, Chaudhry Rahmat Ali, used the expression in print and gave it currency.

  The Lahore resolution of 1940 demanded something larger but more vague than what Iqbal had asked for in 1930, and did not use the word ‘Pakistan’. But the press needed a name for the state or states that the resolution sought. ‘Pakistan’ was remembered, the Lahore resolution soon became known as the ‘Pakistan’ resolution, and the League adopted the term.

  Azad’s perspective. At Ramgarh in Bihar, where the Congress met ten days before the League’s Lahore gathering, Abul Kalam Azad delivered a stirring presidential address:

  I am a Muslim and proud of the fact. I am indispensable to this noble edifice. Without me this splendid structure of India is incomplete.

  It was India’s historic destiny that many human races and cultures and religions should flow to her, and that many a caravan should find rest here… One of the last of these caravans was that of the followers of Islam. This came here and settled here for good.

  We brought our treasures with us, and India too was full of the riches of her own precious heritage. We gave her what she needed most, the message of human equality. Full eleven centuries have passed by since then. Islam has now as great a claim on the soil of India as Hinduism.

  Everything bears the stamp of our joint endeavour. Our languages were different, but we grew to use a common language. Our manners and customs were different, but they produced a new synthesis… No fantasy or artificial scheming to separate and divide can break this unity.24

  To this Jinnah’s answer, given in Lahore, was that Hindus and Muslims could ‘never evolve a common nationality’ and that ‘to yoke together two such nations under a single state’ would destroy any fabric of government. The Times of London reported that prolonged cheering almost drowned Jinnah’s remark when he said he would ‘give his life to achieve’ a Muslim state.25

  Even though Sikandar Hyat Khan opposed the Lahore resolution in the Punjab legislature, saying he did not want ‘a Muslim raj here and a Hindu raj there’,26 and the Khan brothers remained firm in the Frontier, the bulk of the subcontinent’s Muslims seemed to cheer Jinnah more than Azad. When Azad proposed a conversation with him, Jinnah sent back a rude telegram:

  I refuse to discuss with you, by correspondence or otherwise… Can’t you realize you are made a Muslim show-boy Congress President?.. The Congress is a Hindu body. If you have self-respect resign at once.27

  Gandhi’s response. The Pakistan call presented Gandhi with a dilemma. Launching a struggle would now not only invite repression from a Britain at war; it could also ignite Hindu-Muslim violence. Yet doing nothing would demoralize the Congress base. Gandhi’s answer was to recommend selective and disciplined disobedience by carefully chosen individuals, under his own direction.

  More serious than the dilemma on strategy was the attack on Gandhi’s vision that the Pakistan demand represented. He responded in several ways. For a start, he questioned the doctrine behind it:

  The ‘two nations’ theory is an untruth. The vast majority of Muslims of India are converts to Islam or are descendants of converts. They did not become a separate nation as soon as they became converts.

  A Bengali Muslim speaks the same tongue that a Bengali Hindu does, eats the same food, has the same amusements as his Hindu neighbour. They dress alike. I have often found it difficult to distinguish by outward sign between a Bengali Hindu and a Bengali Muslim…

  When I first met [Jinnah], I did not know that he was a Muslim. I came to know his religion when I had his full name given to me. His nationality was written in his face and manner…

  Were the Ali Brothers and their associates wrong when they hugged Hindus as blood brothers and saw so much in common between the two? (Harijan 6 April 1940; 78: 109)

  Religion binds man to God and man to man. Does Islam bind Muslim only to Muslim and antagonize the Hindu? Was the message of the Prophet peace only for and between Muslims and war against Hindus or non-Muslims? Are eight crores of Muslims to be fed with this which I can only describe as poison?..

  I have lived with and among Muslims not for one day but closely and almost uninterruptedly for twenty years. Not one Muslim taught me that Islam was an anti-Hindu religion (Harijan 4 May 1940; 78: 178-9).

  He warned Muslims against division, calling it ‘suicidal’ (Harijan, 4 May 1940; 78: 183).

  I should be failing in my duty, if I did not warn the Muslims of India against the untruth that is being propagated amongst them…

  It is worse than anarchy to partition a poor country like India whose every corner is populated by Hindus and Muslims living side by side. It is like cutting up a living body into pieces (speech of 16 Sept. 1940, Harijan Sevak 12 Oct. 1940; 79: 231).

  He hoped that the Muslim masses would reject the call:

  But I do not believe that Muslims, when it comes to a matter of actual decision, will ever want vivisection. Their good sense will prevent them. Their self-interest will deter them. Their religion will forbid the obvious suicide which the partition would mean (Harijan, 4 May 1940; 78: 183).

  He rejected separatio
n personally:

  It makes no difference to me that some Muslims regard themselves as a separate nation. It is enough for me that I do not consider them as such (Harijan, 4 May 1940; 78: 183).

  But he conceded that separation was possible:

  If the vast majority of Indian Muslims feel that they are not one nation with their Hindu and other brethren, who will be able to resist them? (Harijan, 30 March 1940; 78: 93)

  I know no non-violent method of compelling the obedience of eight crores of Muslims to the will of the rest of India, however powerful a majority the rest may represent (Harijan, 6 April 1940; 78: 109).

  Pakistan cannot be worse than foreign domination. I have lived under the latter though not willingly. If God so desires it, I may have to become a helpless witness to the undoing of my dream. But I do not believe that the Muslims really want to dismember India (Harijan, 4 May 1940; 78: 178).

  And he offered a sort of separation:

  The Muslims must have the same right of self-determination that the rest of India has. We are at present a joint family. Any member may claim a division (Harijan, 6 April 1940; 78: 109).

  Five months later, however, he declared he would resist any bid to force partition. In apparent contradiction to what he had said in April and May, he asserted in September that partition would be prevented:

  I do not say this as a Hindu. I say this as a representative of Hindus, Muslims, Parsis and all. I would say to Muslim brethren, ‘Cut me to pieces first and then divide India. You are trying to do something which was not attempted even during the Muslim rule of 200 years. We shall not allow you to do it’ (speech of 16 Sept. 1940; Harijan Sevak, 12 Oct. 1940; 79: 231).