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Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People

Page 72

by Gandhi, Rajmohan


  Let no one run away with the idea that I wish to put in a defence of Japanese misdeeds in pursuance of Japan’s unworthy ambition. The difference was only one of degree. I assume that Japan’s greed was more unworthy. But the greater unworthiness conferred no right on the less unworthy of destroying without mercy men, women and children of Japan in a particular area (Harijan, 7 July 1946; 91: 220-1).

  Vision of free India. While at Panchgani he drew, in response to a reader’s question, his picture of independent India. In his India, where ‘the last is equal to the first or, in other words, no one is to be the first and none the last,’

  Independence must begin at the bottom. Thus, every village will be a republic or panchayat having full powers…

  In this structure composed of innumerable villages, there will be ever-widening, never-ascending circles. Life will not be a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom. But it will be an oceanic circle whose centre will be the individual always ready to perish for the village, the latter ready to perish for the circle of villages, till at last the whole becomes one life composed of individuals, never aggressive in their arrogance but ever humble, sharing the majesty of the oceanic circle of which they are integral units.

  Therefore the outermost circumference will not wield power to crush the inner circle but will give strength to all within and derive its own strength from it.

  I may be taunted with the retort that this is all Utopian and, therefore, not worth a single thought. If Euclid’s point, though incapable of being drawn by human agency, has an imperishable value, my picture has its own… Let India live for this true picture, though never realizable in its completeness (Harijan, 28 July 1946; 91: 325-7).

  A new Congress president. ‘I shall have to go,’ Gandhi wrote to Patel, referring to Wavell’s invitation for talks in Delhi (90: 123). Not he but the Working Committee or its nominees would represent the Congress at the negotiations, but he would be around to counsel. After all, he knew the Empire better than the Working Committee did; and his understanding of the mind of Jinnah, who was bound to be a major factor in the talks, would also be useful.

  Moreover, he had to sort out the urgent question of the Congress’s next president. Struggles, bans and imprisonments had precluded any change since 1940, when Azad was chosen to the chair, but now there was scope for a new head who, if the British did part with power, would probably become India’s Prime Minister.

  Though Azad had been in the chair for six years, he had also been in jail for much of this time. He aspired for re-election. Recalling, among other credentials, Patel’s Quit India exertions, several PCCs nominated him. Kripalani too was proposed. Gandhi concluded, however, that the position should go to Jawaharlal. When an Urdu newspaper reported that Azad was likely to be re-elected, Gandhi sent him a letter of frank advice, in Urdu:

  20 April 1946. Please go through the enclosed cutting… I have not given my opinion to anyone. When one or two Working Committee members asked me, I said it would not be right for the current President to continue…

  If you are of the same opinion, it may be proper for you to issue a statement about the newspaper report and say that you have no intention to become president again.

  In today’s circumstances I would if asked prefer Jawaharlal. I have many reasons for this. Why go into them?62

  As no PCC had proposed Nehru’s name, Kripalani, acting, as he puts it, ‘in deference to Gandhiji’s wishes, sent a paper round, proposing the name of Jawaharlal’.63 This was on 25 April, four days before the deadline for candidates. The Working Committee members signed the paper, including Azad and Patel, as also some Delhi Congressmen.

  Nehru was now a proper candidate, but so were Vallabhbhai and Kripalani. At Gandhi’s instance the latter two formally withdrew, and on the next day Azad issued a public statement asking for Nehru’s election, which was unanimously achieved. Azad however suggested that his successor should not take over until the end of the year, but Gandhi again intervened, and it was agreed that Nehru’s term would start in July.

  Before long Gandhi publicly gave one of his reasons for preferring Nehru. ‘He, a Harrow boy, a Cambridge graduate and a barrister is wanted to carry on the negotiations with Englishmen.’64 If the talks were successful and led to a national government, Jawaharlal as the Congress president would lead it. This seemed appropriate to Gandhi, who for years had spoken of Nehru as his heir and India’s future helmsman.

  He was conscious, moreover, that Jawaharlal had links with Muslims that Patel, for one, lacked, a critical factor in the period of communal tension that had arrived. Nehru’s capacity to ‘make India play a role in international affairs’ was another element weighing with Gandhi, who may have also reckoned that Patel was more likely than Nehru to be content in second place. ‘They will be like two oxen yoked to the governmental cart,’ said Gandhi, referring to Nehru and Patel. ‘One will need the other and both will pull together.’65 Another consideration, almost a decisive one, was of Patel’s poor health.

  All the same, this was the third time that on Gandhi’s word the soldierly Patel had stood down for Nehru, a repeat of exercises in 1929 and 1937. The newest sacrifice was hardly painless, yet a week after Nehru’s nomination Patel was making everyone, including Gandhi, ‘laugh a lot’.66 He had had to make room for Nehru, but Patel was aware of his independence and strength in the Congress’s inner circle.67

  Sweepers’ colony. It was in a room amidst the sweepers of Balmiki colony, though not exactly in a sweeper’s home, that Gandhi lived in New Delhi.

  Prayer-meeting remarks, 1 April 1946. I… do not delude myself with the belief that by staying here I am sharing the actual life with the Harijans… I know too that this place has been brightened up. Indeed I feel embarrassed by the amenities that have been provided here by Seth Birla for me and my party. My coming to stay here, I hope, is my first step, not the last… (90: 173-4)

  In New Delhi, as at Uruli-Kanchan, he recommended the recitation of the name of God:

  4 April 1946. I laugh within myself, when someone objects that Rama or the chanting of Ramanama is for the Hindus only… Is there one God for the Mussalmans and another for the Hindus, Parsis or Christians? No, there is only one omnipotent and omnipresent God. He is named variously, and we remember Him by the name which is most familiar to us.

  My Rama, the Rama of our prayers, is not the historical Rama, the son of Dasaratha, the King of Ayodhya. He is the eternal, the unborn, the one without a second. Him alone I worship, His aid alone I seek, and so should you. He belongs equally to all. I, therefore, see no reason why a Mussalman or anybody should object to taking His name. But he is in no way bound to recognize God as [Rama]. He may utter to himself Allah or Khuda… (90:188)

  CABINET MISSION

  Headed by the elderly secretary of state for India, Lord Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, whose Quaker wife Emmeline had collaborated with Gandhi in earlier years, the Cabinet Mission that arrived in India at the end of March 1946 included Sir Stafford Cripps, the brilliant lawyer, Labour Party leader and president of the Board of Trade who had failed in his 1942 mission to India, and Lord A.V. Alexander, who had risen from trade union ranks to become First Lord of the Admiralty. ‘An imperialist disliking any idea of leaving India’, as Wavell described him, Alexander got on well with the Viceroy, who was the fourth member of the British negotiating team.68

  This team had two goals: resolving the Pakistan demand, and converting the Viceroy’s executive council into an interim national government. For all of April, all of May and most of June the three ministers and Wavell conferred with Indian politicians—in New Delhi, Simla and New Delhi again. Never before had three cabinet ministers from Britain spent three summer months together in India.

  Pethick-Lawrence and Cripps broke some norms of Empire, calling on Gandhi in the Balmiki colony of the ‘untouchables’, attending some of his prayer meetings, and showing other courtesies that irritated Wavell, but Gandhi saw that despite its Labour background the Missi
on carried an imperial burden of ‘fairness’ that ruled out transferring power to the majority.

  Gandhi was frankly told that the Mission would not recommend a transfer of power to the Congress, even though it enjoyed majority backing, since the Muslim League, supported by a majority of India’s Muslims, was opposed; and also that the Mission would not right away say to Jinnah what it believed, which was that neither ‘small’ Pakistan (with the Punjab and Bengal divided) nor ‘large’ Pakistan (containing all of the Punjab and Bengal) was a solution.69

  Unwilling to leave the future to Indians or pronounce their own clear opinion, the ministers said they wanted the Congress and the Muslim League to agree before they returned home. Going by his talks nineteen months earlier with Jinnah, and by the more recent Simla conference, Gandhi thought this an impossible goal, humanly speaking. He said so to the Mission, and on 3 April he asked the large audience at his prayer meeting to pray:

  God alone can help us. Nobody else can help, neither you nor Englishmen. Let us pray to God to guide our talks and grant wisdom to all those participating in them… (90: 183)

  He however asked the Cabinet Mission for two things right away: the release of Jayaprakash Narayan, Rammanohar Lohia and other long-detained political prisoners, and the removal of the salt tax. While the first request was quickly granted, the second was turned down by the Viceroy. Abell, Wavell’s secretary, told Amrit Kaur that Jinnah would be offended if the salt tax were abolished.70

  Simla, forebodings & the 16 May Statement. At his first meeting with the Mission, Jinnah was asked if he would accept the ‘small’ Pakistan of the Rajagopalachari formula if it was entirely sovereign. He said no. He wanted, Jinnah said, ‘all six provinces (Punjab, Sindh, the NWFP, Baluchistan, Bengal and Assam) and complete sovereignty’.71 The Congress, on the other hand, made clear its opposition even to ‘small’ Pakistan if it was fully sovereign, if it preceded independence, and if the NWFP, where the Congress had recently defeated the League, was compelled to join it.

  To square the circle the British conducted a series of negotiations, which were shifted after a month to Simla, where a four-member team represented the Congress: Azad, Nehru, Patel and Ghaffar Khan. Jinnah came to the mountain town with his League group. Both the Raj and the Working Committee asked Gandhi also to travel to Simla, which he did, but he did not sit at the negotiating table.

  Tantalizingly close to freedom and its rewards, including positions of prestige and power, Gandhi’s colleagues were more eager than he was to have issues ‘settled’. During these negotiations they often felt closer to the British ministers than to their chief—their erstwhile chief, to be truer to the facts.

  Their impatience troubled Gandhi as much as the Mission’s insistence on a Congress-League accord; he sensed, in addition, that Hindu-Muslim relations were worsening at ground level. But he did not know what he should do. ‘You do not know how uneasy I feel,’ Gandhi wrote to Cripps on 29 April. ‘Something is wrong.’72

  ‘There is a crisis within a crisis,’ he told Agatha Harrison, who had also come to Simla, ‘a crisis within and a crisis without’.73 His response to the unease was unexpected if also characteristic: he asked Pyarelal and others on his personal staff to leave Simla, where, along with Patel and Ghaffar Khan, he again stayed in ‘Manor Ville’, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur’s home.

  He must throw himself entirely on God, he told Pyarelal, and use ‘the sharp axe of detachment’, sending away aides who were also, or even more, his family, providing cushion, support and comfort. ‘If you are surrounded by your family,’ he explained, ‘they divide your attention in however small or subtle a measure. I wish in this crisis to give my undivided self to God.’74

  He was acting in the spirit of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words written a century earlier: ‘It is only as a man puts off all foreign support and stands alone that I see him to be strong and to prevail.’75 Though pained and also troubled for him, the aides were stoic. They left for Delhi.76

  To Ghaffar Khan, who remained with him, Gandhi gave an unexpected assignment in Simla: the Badshah of the Pakhtuns was to study the living conditions of the ‘untouchables’ of Simla. Their quarters were ‘not fit for animals, much less for human beings’, Ghaffar Khan reported, and Gandhi was ‘filled with anger and grief’.77

  The Simla talks centred around a scheme (thought up by Cripps) of a three-tiered India where Provinces would form the bottom tier, ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ Groups of provinces the middle tier, and a Union the top tier. On 6 May Jinnah said in Simla that he could agree to a nominal Union provided it enjoyed Hindu-Muslim parity and if the Muslim area was large enough.

  Nehru said he could agree to Groups provided the Union had a legislature and Provinces were free to join or not join a Group. According to Wavell’s diary, ‘Patel’s cold face of angry disapproval’ when Nehru partially agreed with Jinnah ‘was a study’.

  Some minutes later Jinnah said that a Group should be able to secede after five years, at which Patel exclaimed, ‘There, we have it now, what he has been after all the time.’ Wavell wrote in his diary: ‘The damage had been done in Patel’s mind, and he had been given a handle for his contention that the League are not really in earnest about entering a Union and mean to get out as soon as possible.’78

  That was the crux: mistrust. The Congress (not just Patel) thought that Jinnah would run off with six provinces, inclusive of Assam, East Punjab and West Bengal, where Muslims were in a minority, whereas Jinnah feared that the Congress would prevent any Muslim-majority area, howsoever small, from emerging.

  Jinnah’s parity demand was another obstacle. Consulted in the wings at Simla, Gandhi gave Cripps his opinion that parity between a Hindu majority and a Muslim minority was unreasonable and undemocratic and ‘really worse than Pakistan’.79 Once enjoined for the Union, Hindu-Muslim parity would become an India-wide demand at every level, from the village up.

  At this stage, in an ideal world, the Mission should have said to the Congress that the League had to be conceded a large area if it was to agree to a Union, and to the League that it had to unreservedly accept a Union if it wanted a large area. A sacrifice of territory had to match a sacrifice of sovereignty. Instead, the Mission chose to sacrifice clarity and consistency. Following the Simla talks, it drafted a document that the League could interpret one way, the Congress another, and both accept.

  This was the ingenious, brilliant and fatally ambiguous Statement of 16 May. Finally declaring (to the Congress’s delight) that ‘neither a larger nor a smaller sovereign state of Pakistan would be an acceptable solution’, rejecting also the demand for parity in a Union legislature, and providing for a Union to deal with foreign affairs, defence and communications, the British Statement nonetheless outlined (in Para 15) a scheme permitting all the six provinces wanted by Jinnah to merge into two Muslim-majority Groups within an Indian Union, one in the west and the other in the east.

  For preparing future constitutions for Provinces, Groups and the Union, 16 May spelt out (in Para 19) a procedure for creating a Constituent Assembly, or, rather, three Sections of a Constituent Assembly. Existing provincial legislatures would elect, and rulers of princely states nominate, representatives to a Constituent Assembly, which ‘shall’ meet in three Sections—members from Punjab, Sindh, the NWFP and Baluchistan assembling in one, those from Bengal and Assam in another, and the rest in a third. Meeting separately, the three Sections would first prepare their Group and Provincial constitutions. Then they would come together and jointly write the Union constitution.

  While the Congress interpreted the scheme to mean that elected representatives from any or all of the six legislatures could join or stay out of a proposed ‘Pakistan’ or Muslim-majority Section (the word Pakistan was not used in the document)—thus enabling their province to join or stay out of a Group—the League not only insisted that all six provinces were required to amalgamate (four in the west and two, Bengal and Assam, in the east); it claimed a future right for the Pakistan G
roups to secede from the Union.

  The 16 May document used the expression ‘should be free to’ in one place (Para 15), and ‘shall’ elsewhere (Para 19). Cripps would explain to the House of Commons that the wording was kept ‘purposely vague’ so as to enable both sides to join the 16 May scheme.80 The document also said that Union and Group constitutions could be reconsidered ten years after they were framed, a provision welcomed by the League as a door to secession. In short, while the League declared the Union in 16 May to be optional, the Congress said the Groups were.

  On 24 May an aide to the Mission and a future British MP, Woodrow Wyatt, advised Jinnah that though Pakistan had been turned down in it, he could nonetheless accept 16 May ‘as the first step on the road to Pakistan’.81 On 6 June the League formally ‘accepted’ the 16 May plan, reiterating at the same time that ‘complete sovereign Pakistan’ remained ‘its unalterable objective’, claiming that ‘the foundation of Pakistan’ was ‘inherent’ in what it described as the plan’s ‘compulsory grouping’, and asserting that ‘by implication’ 16 May gave the Muslim Groups ‘the opportunity and the right of secession’.82

  Explanations and assurances of an opposite kind were offered to the Congress. Relieved by its rejection of Pakistan and of parity, Gandhi welcomed 16 May, but he and the Working Committee asked for confirmation of a Province’s right to stay out of a Group. At first the demand was turned down. In a statement on 25 May, the Mission said that Grouping was ‘essential’ to the scheme of 16 May and accorded with the Mission’s ‘intentions’. Gandhi and the Working Committee argued back that the text was more relevant than intentions, and that the wording of Para 15 ruled out compulsory grouping.

  Interim government. The Working Committee however withheld a formal response to 16 May, preferring to look first at the outcome of negotiations for an interim government. These negotiations too troubled Gandhi. On 13 June he wrote a blunt letter to Wavell, telling the Viceroy what he also told the Working Committee, which was that a League-run interim government was preferable to an Empire-dictated coalition that compromised the Congress’s national character:

 

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