We saw that in the late Thirties Gandhi had found Jinnah ‘a very tough customer’ and despaired of a settlement with him. Yet from AKP he had made a bid for one, and now the two Gujaratis were face-to-face. In the Keep Azad told his colleagues that Gandhi was ‘making a great mistake’ by going to Jinnah.29 The Viceroy, on the other hand, thought that ‘the G-J meeting’ would at the least ‘result in a demand for the release of the Working Committee’.30
Journalists crowded Jinnah’s lawns and those of Birla House. Indians saw pictures of the two leaders smiling and were encouraged by their repeated meetings. Gandhi sent to Jinnah his nature-cure doctor and, on Eid day, which fell during the talks, a supply of wheat-crackers.
But the talks failed. Gandhi said he was willing to ask the Congress to agree to a post-independence Pakistan along the lines of the Rajagopalachari formula. The offer was categorically rejected by Jinnah. However, when Gandhi asked him to ‘give in writing what precisely on your part you would want me to put my signature to’, Jinnah refused to do so.31 He claimed nevertheless, when Gandhi probed him, that minorities would enjoy democratic rights in his Pakistan, including, if they wished, separate electorates.
Jinnah offered five grounds for rejecting Gandhi’s Pakistan. One, it was not large enough: West Bengal and East Punjab were excluded from it. Two, it was not sovereign enough, for Gandhi envisaged bonds of alliance between the separated portions. To Gandhi ‘utterly independent sovereignty, so that there is nothing in common between the two’, seemed ‘an impossible proposition’ and a recipe for conflict.32
Three, Gandhi’s scheme gave all residents in Muslim-majority areas the right to vote on Pakistan, whereas Jinnah felt the right belonged to Muslims alone. Four, Gandhi wanted voting for separation to follow independence, whereas Jinnah wanted the British to divide India before quitting: he did not trust an independent India to arrange a plebiscite. Finally, though conceding the right of Muslim-majority areas to separate, Gandhi did not admit that Hindus and Muslims were two nations.
‘Let us call in a third party or parties to guide or even arbitrate between us,’ Gandhi suggested on 22 September.33 Jinnah did not agree, and he also turned down Gandhi’s request for a chance to present his scheme to the League’s executive committee.
Gandhi said after the talks that Jinnah was ‘a good man’,34 and Jinnah acknowledged that Gandhi had been ‘very frank’.35 Did the meetings produce anything? Only an increase in Jinnah’s prestige, Azad (and others) thought. Gandhi was giving away parts of India, Savarkar charged.
Yet the talks had compelled Jinnah to be less vague. As long as it was not defined or delineated, ‘Pakistan’ enthused Muslims all across the land. After the Bombay talks, problems became apparent. His Pakistan, Jinnah had said, would include West Bengal and East Punjab. But if Hindu-majority areas could belong to Pakistan, why shouldn’t Muslim-majority areas remain in India? And if non-Muslims in Muslim-majority areas were denied a say, what were the prospects for Muslims in Hindu-majority areas?
Gandhi took away something else from the talks: a better understanding of Jinnah’s mind. He saw that a passion had captured it; the secular Jinnah now spoke as a saviour of Islam. But Jinnah’s refusal to draw a clear picture of Pakistan also conveyed a message.
This ‘tough customer’ seemed to want more than a large Pakistan area. Just what he wanted was not very clear to Gandhi or, at the time, even perhaps to Jinnah himself. Yet the talks produced a thought, filed in a corner of Gandhi’s mind, that despite his advocacy of Pakistan Jinnah might, in some circumstances, accept a leading role for himself in India as a whole.
Troubled yet merry. When, soon after Gandhi’s release, Malaviya expressed the hope that his friend would live for a hundred years, Gandhi complained that Malaviya had cut off twenty-five years. Yet for months Gandhi remained unwell and troubled, hearing mostly discouraging news. The Empire seemed heedless; he had failed with Jinnah; and friends like Kallenbach and Romain Rolland had died.
A letter to Carl Heath, a Quaker from England, conveyed Gandhi’s turmoil: ‘Though in the midst of a raging storm, I often hum to myself, “Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in Thee.”’36 However, he took a little pleasure, some weeks later, in the wedding of Kanu and Abha.
On 2 October 1944, his seventy-fifth birthday, Gandhi planted a tulsi sapling in front of Kasturba’s hut in Sevagram. Over 3,000 letters were waiting for the weary man in Sevagram, and any one of his numerous non-political concerns—spinning, village industries, basic education, the Kasturba Trust, a common language for all Indians, or whatever—could eat up all his time and strength.
Pressed by Rajagopalachari, Gandhi observed a ‘work fast’ and a ‘speech fast’. Conversation between the two was often merry, as when Gandhi asked for more of the other man’s company:
R: I may be able to come to Sevagram by the 30th.
G: So I shall look out for you…
R: If you so desire.
G: What is the meaning of ‘looking out for you’?
R: One looks out for dangers.
G: You may put it that way. I want that danger also. I have to compare notes about several things.
R: I hope both of us will have by then forgotten most of our notes…
G: Then we shall laugh together and fatten.
Talk moved to a saltless diet, to which Gandhi had recently returned.
R: When people are made to do without salt, they are likely to take to licking walls…
G: The walls will be cleaner. This is the beginning of the laugh we shall abandon ourselves to…
It was close to ten at night, past Gandhi’s bedtime. He told C.R.: ‘Now I am going to leave you if I am also to love you.’37 Marking that Gandhi bubbled when someone like C.R. was around and could be downcast at other times, Pyarelal wrote in his diary (6 Dec. 1944):
There is something frightening in Bapu’s utter spiritual isolation… His role hereafter should not be that of an engine-driver but of a pointsman only. He should indicate the direction, give forth ideas, and radiate moral and spiritual influence.38
In January 1945 Gandhi did not hesitate to ‘indicate the direction’ when a political delegation from the NWFP arrived in Sevagram for his counsel. Their province’s League ministry, installed in 1943, was highly unpopular, they said, and Dr Khan Sahib was in a position to come back as premier. Gandhi advised that he should try. On 12 March the League ministry lost its majority and Dr Khan Sahib was premier again. The release of his brother, Ghaffar Khan, quickly followed.
Working Committee released. If the isolated Gandhi felt certain of coming independence, that was also the Viceroy’s reading. Telling Churchill in October 1944 that the wish to sever the British connection had large backing in India, Wavell, the former C-in-C, significantly added that British soldiers were unlikely to want to stay on in a post-war India.
While Gandhi was in detention, a British soldier serving in India and claiming to speak for ‘many of us conscripted soldiers’ had written to him of his support for Quit India and his regret at having ‘to fight an imperialist war’.39 Wavell was admitting that sentiments such as the ones expressed in this letter (which Gandhi saw only after his release) were not isolated.
To ‘capture the Indian imagination’ for salvaging British-Indian ties, the Viceroy asked for permission to release the Working Committee. Churchill sat on the proposal for eight months and agreed only after Wavell journeyed to England and, between March and June 1945, lobbied ministers, MPs and civil servants.
On 29 March, when the Viceroy met Churchill, the Premier (according to Wavell’s diary) ‘launched into a long jeremiad about India which lasted for about forty minutes’ and indicated his preference for ‘partition into Pakistan, Hindustan, Princestan etc.’.40 In May the war in Europe ended, and new British elections were set for 5 July. But the Viceroy obtained his green light.
Back in India, Wavell made his big radio announcement on 14 June: the Working Committee were being released and India
n leaders invited to talk with him in Simla about a new executive council.
‘As soon as the jail gates were opened, we saw a new and surging life,’ Kripalani would later write.41 In the Keep the leaders had at times felt like non-persons. Now they saw that Quit India had turned them into heroes. Contradicting a rumour that his thinking had changed during detention, Patel said on 27 June:
[Our] cause… would have been lost for ever if the August 8 resolution had not been adopted… Independence is approaching like the roaring flood.42
Thin, exhausted and ill but finally free, the leaders went to their homes, families and doctors and, in July, to Simla. They went in high hopes, for Wavell’s announcement and telegrams of invitation had been couched in promising language. The Viceroy had invited Gandhi and Jinnah, other leaders of the Congress and the League, premiers and ex-premiers, and a few outside the two parties. But he had forgotten to invite Azad, who was still the Congress president.
Gandhi received his invitation in the hill town of Panchgani, where he had again gone to fight the summer. Reminding Wavell that he himself held no office in the party, Gandhi added that Azad would have to lead any Congress team. Rectifying the lapse over Azad, the Viceroy asked Gandhi to travel to Simla in any case.
Simla. This Gandhi did, journeying third-class across India’s baking hinterland, but he did not join the formal talks. Evidently he too felt, like Pyarelal, that his days as the Congress’s engine-driver had ended. After their time in the Keep, this was also the Working Committee’s wish. They were keen to take over; he was ready to hand over.
Spending three weeks in the hill town (in Manor Ville, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur’s house), Gandhi kept to the conference’s wings, breathed the freshness that the monsoon’s first rains bring to the Himalayas, and enjoyed, across Simla’s mist, the view of distant snows.
But he was willing to critique the Viceroy’s proposal. This provided for a council with equal numbers of caste Hindus and Muslims, and equal numbers from the League and the Congress, plus a scheduled caste Hindu. Equating the Congress with caste Hindus predictably perturbed Gandhi.
Cannily he advised the Working Committee to nominate only two or three caste Hindus, which, under the parity principle, would limit League Muslims to the same number. For remaining places the Congress should ask for talented and fair-minded persons (men and women, he insisted) from India’s ‘untouchable’, Christian, Sikh, Parsi, Anglo-Indian and Jewish communities.
Anxious for a settlement, his colleagues disagreed. On behalf of the Congress, the Working Committee accepted Wavell’s proposal of a council with an equal number of caste Hindus and Muslims, all but one of the former from the Congress, all but one of the latter from the League, with a non-League, non-Congress Muslim filling the remaining Muslim place, one Scheduled Caste, and two or three from other minorities. The Working Committee also accepted Wavell’s assurance that his viceregal veto should not be a problem.
When Jinnah asserted at the conference that the Congress represented none but Hindus, Dr Khan Sahib asked, ‘What does he mean? I am a Congressman. Am I a Hindu or a Muslim?’43 Jinnah, who refused in Simla to shake Azad’s hand, offered no reply to Dr Khan Sahib.
Also, he flatly turned down the Wavell proposal, saying that if he, as the League president, could not choose every Muslim name, the League would stay out. After Jinnah’s ‘no’, Wavell, who had wanted to include the Punjab’s Unionist premier Khizr Hyat Khan (the late Sikandar’s successor but not a relative), abruptly announced the failure of his conference.
Some of his advisers, including governors, had suggested going ahead with the Congress list and a few others, keeping places vacant for the League, but Wavell and Churchill were firmly opposed to a Congress-dominated council. As the Viceroy admitted in a letter to the King, he ‘could never rid [his] mind of’ the damage that Quit India had caused to Britain’s war effort in 1942, when he was C-in-C.44 While fusing Indians with the Congress, Quit India had brought the Raj and the League closer together.
London instructing him to refrain from blaming Jinnah,45 Wavell accepted personal responsibility for Simla’s failure. The result was a fresh shift in Muslim allegiance. Non-League leaders like Azad and Khizr lost support to Jinnah.
Patel’s independence. In a letter to Gandhi, Patel remarked that Gandhi’s talks with Jinnah ten months earlier had produced a similar effect.46 ‘I could not have done anything else,’ Gandhi replied, adding that his had been a ‘final’ offer to Jinnah, beyond which he would not go, and that Patel should feel free to condemn ‘from the housetops’ Gandhi’s approach to Jinnah.47
This Patel did not do, but his independence was now obvious. Quit India had been necessary, he conceded. But obeying Gandhi, henceforth, was not.
Gandhi signified his acceptance of Patel’s independence by calling him, from the middle of 1945, ‘Chiranjiv’ Vallabhbhai in his letters. Invoking blessings and long life, ‘Chiranjiv’ was a prefix for loved younger ones. Hitherto Gandhi’s letters to Patel had begun with ‘Bhai Vallabhbhai’.
For years ‘Chiranjiv’ Jawaharlal had been a son to Gandhi, enjoying a son’s independence and right to succession, and ‘Bhai’ Vallabhbhai, only six years younger than Gandhi, a trusty brother. Now Vallabhbhai too was a son with a mind of his own. In October 1945 Gandhi said, ‘Sardar is as dear as a son to me.’48 Two months later Gandhi again acknowledged Patel’s new status, saying to him in a letter, ‘You are after all the Sardar of Bardoli and, as it happens, of India.’49
Independence at seventy was scarcely a shocking idea, but Vallabhbhai’s determination to be his own guide was a new thing, produced by the Keep. Accepting his colleague’s independence, Gandhi also supervised Patel’s recovery in Dinshaw Mehta’s nature-cure clinic in Poona.
1945-46 elections. Doing what the now-dead Hitler had been unable to, British voters defeated Churchill in July 1945. The following month, after atom bombs were dropped on Hirsohima and Nagasaki, Japan surrendered. As for India, Clement Attlee, Churchill’s successor as Premier, and Attlee’s Labour colleagues agreed with Wavell that elections for the Central Assembly and provincial legislatures should be held in the 1945-6 winter.
Gandhi supported the Working Committee’s decision to contest the elections. Following Patel’s suggestion, Nehru drafted an election manifesto with Quit India as its basis.50 As in 1937, Nehru was the Congress’s ace campaigner and Patel the election ‘in-charge’.
To know where his ‘heir’ stood, Gandhi, now seventy-six, initiated a discussion with Nehru in the fall of 1945. Since, wrote Gandhi (5 Oct. 1945), he was ‘an old man’ while Nehru was ‘comparatively young’, it was essential that ‘I should at least understand my heir and my heir in turn should understand me.’
Some differences were of long standing: Nehru freely embraced modernity but was wary about religion, positions very different from Gandhi’s. Nehru tended to use a language of class war that Gandhi disapproved of, and supported a state-dominated economy about which Gandhi was skeptical.
We have seen that over Quit India Jawaharlal had been reluctant, and though Gandhi could not have known of Nehru’s diary jottings in Ahmednagar in which Gandhi was often blamed, he was curious about Jawaharlal’s latest thinking. Carried out through correspondence as well as face-to-face, the discussion did not reveal identical views.
Jawaharlal adhered to his objections to what he saw as Hind Swaraj’s anti-modern thrust and to Gandhi’s emphasis on the village. ‘I do not understand,’ wrote Nehru, ‘why a village should necessarily embody truth and nonviolence. A village, normally speaking, is backward culturally and intellectually, and no progress can be made from a backward environment.’
Gandhi reiterated his belief that in India life had to be improved in the villages, where most of the population lived. Arguing that ‘millions of people can never live in cities and palaces in comfort and peace’, he added:
In this village of my dreams the villager will not be dull—he will be all awareness. He will not live
like an animal in filth and darkness. Men and women will live in freedom, prepared to face the whole world. There will be no plague, no cholera and no smallpox. Nobody will be allowed to be idle or to wallow in luxury…
On the role of the state in the economy, and the relationship between the state and the individual, Gandhi said:
The sum and substance of what I want to say is that the individual person should have control over the things that are necessary for the sustenance of life. If he cannot have such control the individual cannot survive. Ultimately, the world is made up only of individuals.
On several critical principles, however, they were in complete agreement, e.g. on equal rights and opportunities for all Indians. ‘The talks… have given me the impression that there is not much difference in our outlook or the way we understand things,’ Gandhi wrote (13 Nov.). In sum he felt he could trust Jawaharlal to do the right thing. ‘Our hearts will still remain one, for they are one,’ he said (88: 118-20; 329-31).
He was called in to lower tensions between president Azad and Patel, who organized the Congress effort first from the Poona clinic and then from a small room in Bombay’s Congress House. But Patel rejected Gandhi’s advice against collecting funds from the rich.
To Azad he wrote, ‘It must be understood between us that no seats should be lost for want of money.’51 After the elections were over, Patel wrote to Gandhi: ‘The Maulana and the Working Committee wanted me (to collect funds). I did the work as I felt it was unavoidable. We would all have been blamed if it had not been done.’52
The elections showed a near-complete polarization, with the Congress winning the great bulk of non-Muslim seats and the Muslim League winning all thirty Muslim seats to the Central Assembly, and 427 of the 507 Muslim seats in provincial legislatures. The Congress formed eight provincial ministries and had a share in a ninth ministry: a Unionist-Akali-Congress coalition in the Punjab, headed by Khizr.
Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People Page 70
