Every Indian who desires freedom and strives for it must be his own guide urging him on along the hard road where there is no resting place and which leads ultimately to the independence and deliverance of India (83: 451-4).
A small group of thirteen, most of them Congressmen sympathetic to the Soviet Union, had voted against the ratification. Speaking twice after the voting, first in Hindi and then in English, Gandhi started with the dissenters:
I congratulate the thirteen friends who voted against the resolution.
Turning to Muslims and the two-nation demand, he said:
Time was when every Muslim claimed the whole of India as his motherland. During the years that the Ali Brothers were with me, the assumption underlying all their talks and discussions was that India belonged as much to the Muslims as to the Hindus.
I can testify to the fact that this was their innermost conviction and not a mask; I lived with them for years. I spent days and nights in their company…
I believed even at [a] tender age that… it did not matter if I made no special effort to cultivate friendship with Hindus, but I must make friends with at least a few Muslims. It was as counsel for a Muslim merchant that I went to South Africa. I made friends with other Muslims there, even with the opponents of my client, and gained a reputation for integrity and good faith… I captured their hearts and when I left finally for India, I left them sad and shedding tears of grief at the separation.
In India, too, I continued my efforts and left no stone unturned to achieve that unity. It was my life-long aspiration for it that made me offer my fullest co-operation to the Muslims in the Khilafat movement. Muslims throughout the country accepted me as their true friend.
Not a trace of suspicion lurked in anybody’s heart. Where has all that dignity, that nobility of spirit, disappeared now?
I should ask all Muslims, including Quaid-e-Azam Jinnah, to recall those glorious days and to find out what has brought us to the present impasse. Quaid-e-Azam Jinnah himself was at one time a Congressman… May God bless him with long life, but when I am gone, he will realize and admit that I had no designs on Muslims and that I had never betrayed their interests.
Where is the escape for me if I injure their cause or betray their interests? My life is entirely at their disposal. They are free to put an end to it, whenever they wish to do so. Assaults have been made on my life in the past, but God has spared me till now…
But if someone were to shoot me in the belief that he was getting rid of a rascal, he would kill not the real Gandhi, but the one that appeared to him a rascal… You may take it from me that one day you will regret the fact that you distrusted and killed one who was a true and devoted friend of yours.
He spoke of Hindu counterparts of Muslim separatists:
If the Hindus tyrannize over the Muslims, with what face will they talk of a world federation? Those Hindus who, like Dr Moonje and Shri Savarkar, believe in the doctrine of the sword may seek to keep the Muslims under Hindu domination.
I do not represent that section. I represent the Congress. You want to kill the Congress which is the goose that lays golden eggs. If you distrust the Congress, you may rest assured that there is to be a perpetual war between the Hindus and the Muslims.
But he could not wait for communal unity:
I… want freedom immediately, this very night, before dawn, if it can be had. Freedom cannot now wait for the realization of communal unity… [T]he Congress must win freedom or be wiped out in the effort. And forget not that the freedom which the Congress is struggling to achieve will not be for the Congressmen alone but for all the forty crores of the Indian people…
In the coming revolution, Congressmen will sacrifice their lives in order to protect the Muslim against a Hindu’s attack and vice versa.
After separately addressing journalists, government servants, soldiers, princes and students, Gandhi spoke again in personal terms:
I have travelled all over India as perhaps nobody in the present age has. The voiceless millions of the land saw in me their friend and representative, and I identified myself with them to the extent it was possible for a human being to do.
I saw trust in their eyes, which I now want to turn to good account in fighting this Empire upheld on untruth and violence. However gigantic the preparations that the Empire has made, we must get out of its clutches.
How can I remain silent at this supreme hour and hide my light under the bushel? Shall I ask the Japanese to tarry a while? If today I sit quiet and inactive, God will take me to task for not using up the treasure He had given me, in the midst of the conflagration that is enveloping the whole world…
He outlined what lay ahead:
Nevertheless, the actual struggle does not commence this moment. You have only placed all your powers in my hands. I will now wait upon the Viceroy and plead with him for the acceptance of the Congress demand. That process is likely to take two or three weeks.
What would you do in the meanwhile?.. Every one of you should, from this moment onwards, consider yourself a free man or woman, and act as if you are free and are no longer under the heel of this imperialism…
Here is a mantra, a short one, that I give you. You may imprint it on your hearts and let every breath of yours give expression to it. The mantra is: ‘Do or Die.’ We shall either free India or die in the attempt…
Keep jails out of your consideration. If the Government keep me free, I will spare you the trouble of filling the jails…
Take a pledge with God and your own conscience as witness, that you will no longer rest till freedom is achieved and will be prepared to lay down your lives in the attempt to achieve it. He who loses his life will gain it; he who will seek to save it shall lose it.
The cascading lava was Indian but also human and universal, so that Gandhi naturally used a biblical sentence and, a few sentences earlier, took his mantra from Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade (‘Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die’). He said he was at last uttering the cry he had wanted to articulate from 1920, when non-cooperation was launched:
For the last twenty-two years, I have controlled my speech and pen and have stored up my energy… But today the occasion has come when I have to unburden my heart before you.
Perhaps the cry had lain even longer in the subconscious, from the moment half a century earlier when, in the Rajkot Residency, Charles Ollivant had asked Gandhi to quit. Now it was out.
I have given you my message and through you I have delivered it to the whole of India150 (83: 186-200).
‘It’s done.’ He had reached the finishing line, passed on the mantra to hundreds of thousands of hushed, stirred and suspense-filled Indians. Now it wouldn’t matter even if he was arrested the very next minute. But he was not. He continued in English:
I have been called [the satyagrahis’] leader or, in military language, their commander. But I do not look at my position in that light. I have no weapon but love to wield my authority over anyone.
I do sport a stick which you can break into bits without the slightest exertion. It is simply my staff with the help of which I walk. Such a cripple is not elated, when he is called upon to bear the greatest burden. You [would] share that burden only when I appear before you not as your commander but as a humble servant.
Once more he sought to woo Linlithgow:
I have enjoyed the privilege of friendship… with Lord Linlithgow. It is a friendship which has outgrown official relationship. Whether Lord Linlithgow will bear me out I do not know; but there has sprung up a personal bond between him and myself. He once introduced me to his daughter.
His son-in-law, the ADC, was drawn towards me. He fell in love with Mahadev more than with me, and Lady Anne and he came to me. She is an obedient and favourite daughter. I take interest in their welfare… It is a terrible job to have to offer resistance to a Viceroy with whom I enjoy such relations…
The remarks in English were directed at Western correspondents:
; Then there is the sacred memory of Charlie Andrews which wells up within me at this moment. The spirit of Andrews hovers about me. For me he sums up the brightest tradition of English culture. I enjoyed closer relations with him than with most Indians. I enjoyed his confidence. There were no secrets between us. We exchanged our hearts every day… He is unfortunately gone…
I know that the spirit of Andrews is listening to me… [B]ut even for the friendship [of Western friends] or their love, I must not suppress the voice within, call it conscience…
That something in me which never deceives me tells me now: ‘Forsake friends, wife, and all; but testify to that for which you have lived, and for which you have to die.’
Not that he wished to die. In fact he wanted to live long, seeing and enjoying the independence of India and of all colonies:
Believe me, friends, I am not anxious to die. I want to live my full span of life. According to me, it is 120 years at least. By that time India will be free, the world will be free.
He spoke of ‘the coloured races of the earth’:
Are England and America fighting for the liberty of these races today? You shall not limit my concept of freedom. The English and American teachers, their history and their magnificent poetry have not said you shall not broaden the interpretation of that freedom…
There are representatives of the foreign press assembled here today. Through them I wish to say to the world that [the] United Nations, who say that they have need for India, have the opportunity now to declare India free and prove their bona fides. If they miss it, they will be missing [the] opportunity of their lifetime.
Recalling that Britons had evacuated Malaya and Burma, he added:
Where shall I go and where shall I take the forty crores of India? How is this vast mass of humanity to be aflame in the cause of world-deliverance?.. If lustre is to be put into their eyes, freedom has to come not tomorrow but today. I have, therefore, pledged the Congress and the Congress has pledged herself that she will do or die151 (83: 201-6).
Never before had he or his hearers been stirred like this.
CRACKDOWN
Returning to Birla House, Gandhi talked with Patel, Desai and Birla. The last two were certain that Gandhi would be arrested before dawn, but Gandhi thought that Linlithgow would send for him, and that action would be withheld until then, or until he violated a law. He assured Kasturba that he would not be arrested ‘unless I courted arrest myself’.152
He was mistaken. In consultation with Leopold Amery and Churchill, Linlithgow had planned an instant and tough response, including deporting Gandhi to Aden and the Working Committee to Nyasaland. Since the deportation idea seemed capable of enraging all Indians, including those soldiering for the Allies, it was abandoned, but plans were in place for arresting Gandhi and the Working Committee, suppressing defiance, breaking strikes, and unleashing propaganda.
In the pre-dawn hours of 9 August Gandhi, Mahadev and Mira were removed from Birla House and the Working Committee members and many local Congressmen from their lodgings in Bombay. Kasturba, who was shocked at her husband’s arrest, and Pyarelal were told that they could either accompany Gandhi to jail or stay out. Desai’s son Narayan has left an account of what followed:
We all believed that this time in prison would be the final one. Miraben was pleased to be able to share it with Bapu. But Ba was perplexed. She said to Bapu, ‘You tell me what to do.’
Bapu said, ‘Since you ask, I’d like you to get arrested separately by speaking in my place at the rally scheduled for this evening. But if you want to come with me I won’t object. If they arrest you separately they may keep you apart from me. You must consider all this and decide.’
It was no easy choice. On the one hand was their life-long relationship. It was not certain that Bapu would survive this prison term. And even visiting Bapu might not be possible. On the other hand were Bapu’s own wishes.
Yet Ba made her decision in less time than it has taken to tell. She said resolutely, ‘As for me, I would like to be with you in this hour. But even more, I want to fulfil your wishes. So I will stay.’
I stared dazedly at her, at this example of sacrifice.
Adds Narayan:
As Kaka (‘Uncle’, Narayan’s word for his father) was about to get [inside the police car], I told him, ‘We will meet again in free India.’ In reply Kaka kissed my cheek.’153
Pyarelal too chose not to go with Gandhi. Prayers were recited before the three prisoners were driven off in a police car, and Gandhi dictated to Pyarelal a message:
Let every nonviolent soldier of freedom write out the slogan ‘Do or Die’ on a piece of paper or cloth and stick it on his clothes, so that in case he died in the course of satyagraha, he might be distinguished by that sign from other elements who do not subscribe to nonviolence.154
Within hours the words ‘Do or Die’—‘karenge ya marenge’ in Hindi—would be on lips across India. Not knowing or caring, Churchill, who received word of the arrests on what in London was the night of 8 August, ‘pouted’ to Moran: ‘We have clapped Gandhi into gaol.’155
In Bombay the arrested were all taken to V.T. station and put on a train. Azad and Patel entered the compartment where Gandhi was lodged but were ordered by the police to return to their seats. ‘I don’t think I will see you again,’ Patel said to Gandhi and Desai before leaving.156 He had sensed, or heard, that Gandhi and the Working Committee would be lodged in separate jails.
Gandhi asked Azad to demand a Congress president’s rights in prison, but Azad, a reluctant convert to Quit India, was no longer eager for advice from one who had landed him and the Working Committee into an indefinite and probably long spell of imprisonment. Azad thought that Gandhi was taken by surprise by the prompt arrest and looked resentful.157
The train proceeded towards Poona. At Chinchwad station Gandhi, Mahadev, Sarojini Naidu and Mira were put in a car and taken to ‘Aga Khan Palace’, which the Raj had obtained from the Aga Khan, the head of the world’s Ismaili or Khoja Muslims, for war-time use and selected for Gandhi’s detention. A group of Bombay Congressmen were herded into two lorries and taken to Yeravda jail. Some minutes later, at Kirkee station, another group of Bombay Congressmen, including the socialists Yusuf Meherally and Asoka Mehta, were taken off the train and sent to Yeravda jail. The Working Committee were taken beyond Poona to Ahmednagar station and thence to the sixteenth-century Ahmednagar Fort, commandeered by the army, and known as ‘the Keep’.
After Kasturba announced that she would address a meeting in the evening, she too was arrested, along with Sushila. Mercifully the two were sent to Aga Khan Palace, where Kasturba arrived violently sick. En route, at a railway station in Bombay, the two women detained in a waiting room observed that life went on even as critical events were overtaking many lives. Sushila would recall:
Trains came and went, people came and went, the station officials passed by smoking and talking to each other, the coolies were heard haggling with the passengers. Ba had been watching this carefully. Suddenly she turned to me and said, ‘Sushila, the world goes on as if nothing has happened. How will Bapuji win Swaraj?’158
The next morning (10 August) the Congress was banned, press censorship was tightened and all public meetings were prohibited. An official statement charged that the Congress had intended violence, was pro-Axis and aimed at totalitarian control over India.
INDIA ERUPTS
The railway station scene was misleading. The arrest of Gandhi and the Working Committee triggered a spontaneous, nationwide wave of fury. Town after town, and village after village, found heroes willing to defy, disrupt, die. Six hundred were killed by the Raj’s police in the first four days, and over 1,000, the House of Commons was informed, by end-November. The actual figures were higher.
Pockets in Bengal, Bihar, UP, Bombay, Karnataka and Orissa declared themselves free. Factories went silent. In Bombay a clandestine radio station broadcast messages for three months. From Berlin, Subhas’s voice encourage
d the rebellion. Demonstrating Indians streamed out of bazaars, villages and colleges shouting ‘Do or Die.’ The Raj countered with arrests, beatings and bullets. In some places rebels were machine-gunned from the air.
Over 100,000 Indian nationalists were jailed for indefinite terms, and the eruption was crushed by the end of August, but, in a letter to the King, Linlithgow called Quit India ‘by far the most serious rebellion since that of 1857’.159
It was not peaceful. Bridges were blown up, telegraph and telephone wires cut, police and post offices burnt down, employees of the Raj killed. Some who believed in nonviolence thought that on this occasion property could be destroyed as long as lives were not taken; stricter ‘Gandhians’ disagreed. Other rebels felt that freedom was the question, not nonviolence.
Because all prominent Congress leaders were behind bars before the eruption occurred, it proved impossible for the Raj to connect any of them to the violence, though no effort was spared to find a link. The Raj supposed that a ‘pre-concerted central plan’ carried out through ‘oral instructions’, to use the words of Hallett, the UP governor,160 had produced the rebellion, but Linlithgow would admit in January 1943, ‘We have not yet got the link between the campaign of violence and the Working Committee.’161 No link was found because none existed. In a fiercely anti-British climate, the arrests of Gandhi and the Working Committee sufficed to set off the violence.
In some pockets, underground governments functioned for a while: in Satara in Maharashtra, Midnapore in Bengal, Ballia in UP, and several Bihar areas. In its unplanned, undirected, explosive fury, Quit India was the complete opposite of the 1940-41 ICD, where Gandhi personally chose each satyagrahi and laid down a precise manner of law-breaking. In August 1942 each rebel, and mode of rebellion, was self-selected.
Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People Page 65
