Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People

by Gandhi, Rajmohan

  When Jinnah’s demand was not met by the Raj, the League revoked (on 29 July, in Bombay) its acceptance of 16 May, asked Muslims to return titles bestowed by the Raj, and announced ‘Direct Action’ to achieve Pakistan. ‘Today we bid goodbye to constitutional methods,’ said Jinnah. The Congress, he added, had always employed the weapon of mass struggle, and the British held ‘authority and arms’, but now ‘we have also forged a pistol and are in a position to use it’.112

  16 August was declared Direct Action Day.

  Asked if Direct Action would be nonviolent or violent, Jinnah replied, ‘I am not going to discuss ethics.’ Lesser leaders said that Muslims were ‘not believers in Ahimsa’. A ‘council of action’ appointed by the League drew up a programme that used the language of jihad; leaflets, whether or not authorized by the League, spoke of clashes between Muslims and heathens; and the chief minister of Bengal, Hassan Shaheed Suhrawardy of the League, declared that if the Congress was put in power at the Centre, Bengal would rebel.113

  Direct Action triggered a mayhem in Calcutta that the Suhrawardy ministry was unwilling or unable to prevent. On the first day (16 August), hundreds of Hindus were killed as thousands of youths armed with lathis and daggers and shouting slogans for Pakistan roamed the city. In the next three or four days, Hindus retaliated and an even larger number of Muslims were killed. The Statesman, British-owned, which had defended Jinnah in his dispute with Wavell, wrote of what became known as the Great Calcutta Killing:

  20 Aug. 1946: The origin of the appalling carnage—we believe the worst communal riot in India’s history—was a political demonstration by the Muslim League.

  Gandhi’s worst fears were coming true, but, back now in Sevagram, he did not know what he could do. In a statement (19 August) he called for refraining from retaliation, said that if the madness went on Calcutta ‘will cease to be the City of Palaces, it will become the city of the dead’, and added:

  Would that the violence of Calcutta were sterilized and did not become a signal for its spread all over. It depends upon the leaders of the Muslim League of course, but the rest will not be free from responsibility (91:45).

  Once more airing forebodings of spreading violence, Gandhi however said that for ending riots Hindus and Muslims should turn to their own resources, not to ‘the British authority’ which, though weakening, was capable of extending its rule in the name of restoring peace.114 Even for peace he would not embrace the Empire.

  Confrontation with Wavell. On 24 August the composition of the interim government was announced. Seven of the twelve names were from the Congress: Nehru, Patel, C.R., Prasad, Sarat Bose (Subhas’s older brother), Jagjivan Ram, the Dalit leader from Bihar, and Asaf Ali, a Muslim. Two non-Congress Muslims (Ali Zaheer and Shafaat Ahmed Khan) and three others from outside the Congress, John Matthai (a Christian), Baldev Singh (a Sikh) and C.H. Bhabha (a Parsi) completed the list.

  Keeping Gandhi informed but not seeking his advice, Nehru and Patel had together chosen the League-less team, and Wavell accepted it for the time being.

  Three days later (27 August), he invited Gandhi, who had returned to Delhi, and Nehru to talk with him at Viceroy’s House. The meeting was a disaster. The Viceroy showed Gandhi and Nehru a prepared statement that he wanted them to sign. The statement committed the Congress to accept the League’s interpretation of 16 May, which the Viceroy said was also his and that of HMG.

  He was a plain man and a soldier, not a lawyer, Wavell said, and did not wish to debate the intricacies of 16 May. If they signed the statement, the League too would be able to enter the interim government. If they did not sign, continued Wavell, riots would escalate. Also, he would not then convene the Constituent Assembly that 16 May had spelt out and initiated.

  Gandhi and Nehru replied that the text of 16 May supported the Congress’s reading. ‘The argument went on for some time, and Nehru got very heated,’ Wavell would note in his diary. According to Penderel Moon, the editor of the Viceroy’s diary, ‘Lord Wavell always used to say that on this occasion Gandhi thumped the table and said, “If India wants her bloodbath, she shall have it.”’ Wavell seems to have responded by saying that he was ‘very shocked to hear such words’ from Gandhi.115

  The typed statement ready for signature and the threat of not convening the Assembly had clearly offended Gandhi, but even an unprovoked Gandhi would have rejected an Empire-imposed peace. The next morning, writing a letter to Wavell from his room in the sweepers’ colony, Gandhi charged that Wavell had shown a ‘minatory’ attitude. For the Congress to let the Calcutta killings change its stand would only lead, he said, to ‘an encouragement and repetition of such tragedies’.

  The letter added that Wavell should feel free to withdraw his invitation to Nehru and the rest to join his government—and should obtain for himself a legal aide. The last sentence read: ‘You will please convey the whole of this letter to the British Cabinet’ (92: 73).

  Wavell did not implement his threats. The invitation to Nehru and company was not withdrawn: early in September the new ministers were sworn in, with Nehru taking the external affairs portfolio and Patel home. And the Constituent Assembly too was duly convened. But, with Nehru’s consent, Wavell persisted in his bid to induct the League.

  Before being sworn in at Viceroy’s House (2 Sept.), Vallabhbhai, Sarat Bose, Rajendra Prasad and Jagjivan Ram called on Gandhi in the sweepers’ colony for blessings. Amrit Kaur garlanded them with yarn spun by Gandhi. It being his silent day, he scribbled out a message:

  Abolish salt tax, remember Dandi March, bring together Hindus and Muslims, remove untouchability, adopt khadi (92: 102).

  A few days later, when a Christian missionary asked if independent India would have a state religion, Gandhi gave this reply:

  If I were a dictator, religion and State would be separate. I swear by my religion. I will die for it. But it is my personal affair. The State has nothing to do with it. The State would look after your secular welfare, health, communications, foreign relations, currency and so on, but not your or my religion. That is everybody’s personal concern (92: 190).

  Noakhali & the Muslim League. On 15 October Gandhi was greatly troubled on hearing that Hindus in the district of Noakhali in East Bengal, a small minority amidst a large Muslim majority, were being attacked. That evening he said at his prayer-meeting:

  Ever since I heard the news of Noakhali, indeed ever since the blood-bath of Calcutta, I have been wondering where my duty lies. God will show me the way. But I want to tell you and through you a wider public that it is the duty of every Hindu not to harbour any thoughts of revenge on Muslims in spite of… Noakhali.116

  The next day (16 Oct.) he learnt that the Muslim League had agreed to enter the interim government—and that its five-member team would include a Hindu, an ‘untouchable’ leader from Bengal called Jogendra Nath Mandal. In the evening Gandhi said:

  I cannot sense any generosity in the nomination of a Harijan by the Muslim League in their quota of five seats especially when I read of what is happening in East Bengal.

  A man like myself ought to be glad, you may say, that another seat has been given to a Harijan. But I would be deceiving himself and Mr Jinnah if I say so. Mr Jinnah has… been of the opinion that Muslims and Hindus are two nations. How then can [the League] nominate a Harijan to represent them?

  I fear that that the League’s mode of entrance into the Cabinet has not been straight. I am therefore forced to wonder whether they have come into the Cabinet also to fight (92: 335-6).

  A Hindu Leaguer—Jinnah’s answer to Asaf Ali, the Congress Muslim–was more than sweet revenge; including a Hindu Harijan from Bengal in the League’s quota could also strengthen a bid to claim all of Bengal for Pakistan.

  Gandhi urged Nehru and Patel to make an issue of Mandal’s nomination with the Viceroy, but they demurred. Their priority, they said, was to prevent Wavell from transferring the home portfolio to the League. Patel was able to retain home, but from its start the interim gov
ernment became what Gandhi had feared, ‘an incompatible mixture’ and a house at war.

  While the Congress ministers continued to challenge Groups, the League made clear its opposition to the Union envisaged by 16 May. Ghazanfar Ali Khan, one of the new ministers from the League, said frankly in Lahore: ‘We are going into the interim government to get a foothold to fight for our cherished goal of Pakistan.’117

  Liaqat Ali headed the League team, for Jinnah, unwilling to be ranked below Nehru, had kept himself out. To make room for the League, Sarat Bose, Ali Zaheer and Shafaat Ahmed Khan left the government, which now had fourteen ministers.

  In January 1947 Azad replaced Asaf Ali in the council after Ali was named ambassador to Washington. Earlier, with Gandhi’s concurrence, Kripalani had been elected Congress president to succeed Nehru, who resigned the party post on assuming governmental office.118

  Departure for Noakhali. Conscious of his age, Gandhi planned each day in the sweepers’ colony with care, giving precise thought to what he should eat, drink and do. As before, listening to callers and writing to associates or for Harijan took up most of his time. To each conversation and chore he tried to give his best. ‘You must watch my life,’ he told a visiting missionary in September, ‘how I live, eat, sit, talk, behave in general. The sum total… is my religion’ (92: 190).

  But he had little left to do in New Delhi, where his successors, about to be joined by the League, had taken over. He contemplated returning to Sevagram and/or to Uruli-Kanchan, but chose instead to go to Noakhali.

  The League’s strategy of uniting Muslims and ‘untouchables’ played a role in this decision: Gandhi wished to counter it by uniting Bengal’s Hindus and Muslims. But he was also influenced by the violence in Noakhali and the adjacent district of Tippera. He had heard of scores, perhaps hundreds, killed. There were reports, too, that ‘women were being carried away, abducted and converted to Islam’ (92: 344).

  From February Gandhi had given expression to a sense of coming violence. In August, the Calcutta killings demanded an answer. Now, in October, Noakhali had occurred—in retaliation, it seemed, for the second phase of the Calcutta killings.

  How should he respond? Pyarelal thought that Gandhi was holding ‘a silent court within himself’.119

  He recalled the 1931 martyrdom for Hindu-Muslim unity of Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi in Kanpur, the recent sacrificial deaths in Ahmedabad of Rajab Ali and Vasantrao, and, in Bombay, of another Hindu-Muslim duo, unnamed, who also braved the fury of a maddened crowd and (in Gandhi’s description) ‘went down together literally clasped in a fatal embrace but refused to desert each other’ (92: 346).

  ‘On or before 18 October’ two associates from Bengal called on him, Satis Chandra Dasgupta, a scientist and inventor influenced by Gandhi who ran a khadi ashram near Calcutta, and Satin Sen. Both expressed willingness to go to Noakhali. In his remarks to them, Gandhi touched on ‘Jesus’s example’ of ‘perfect sacrifice’:

  A man who was completely innocent offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others, including his enemies, and became the ransom of the world. It was a perfect act. ‘It is finished’ were the last words of Jesus, and we have the testimony of his four disciples as to its authenticity. But whether the Jesus tradition is historically true or not, I do not care. To me it is truer than history because I hold it to be possible and it enshrines an eternal law—the law of vicarious and innocent suffering taken in its true sense (92: 345-6).

  ‘Go forth, therefore,’ Gandhi said to the Bengali co-workers, who spoke of their readiness to die. ‘Let there be no foolhardiness about it,’ Gandhi added. ‘You should go because you feel you must and not because I ask you to.’ ‘That goes without saying,’ the two replied.120

  On 17 October he expressed appreciation that Sarat Bose, though ill, was visiting his Bengal province, and that Kripalani, the new Congress president, and Kripalani’s Bengali wife Sucheta were going to Noakhali ‘to do what they could to stop the slaughter’. ‘They were not going there to protect one party,’ said Gandhi, ‘but to stop the fratricidal warfare’ (92: 344).

  But he could not resist a call to go there himself. When ‘a very esteemed friend’ (which is how Pyarelal describes him, without giving his name) tried to persuade Gandhi not to travel at his age to a far, isolated and hazardous area, Gandhi explained his helplessness against ‘the spontaneous urge which he felt within him to go to the people of Noakhali’:

  I do not know what I shall be able to do there. All I know is that I won’t be at peace with myself unless I go there.

  There are two kinds of thoughts—idle and active. There may be myriads of the former swarming in one’s brain. They do not count. But one pure, active thought proceeding from the depth and endowed with all the undivided intensity of one’s being, becomes dynamic and works like a fertilized ovum (Conversation ‘on or before 28 October,’ Harijan, 10 Nov. 1946; 92: 423).

  Giving up the Sevagram/Uruli plan, he would also skip the Congress’s annual session, scheduled for November in Meerut in western UP. This was not a minor decision, for he knew that much could hang on the lead the Congress gave. Yet Nehru or Patel or Kripalani, the new president, had not asked him to Meerut.

  This may have been a factor, but what pulled him towards Noakhali was something much deeper. It was almost as if he suspected that all the journeys in his life so far—by ship, by train, on foot—were but a preparation for this journey to Noakhali.

  Claiming that he was going ‘as God’s servant’, not ‘to pass judgement on anybody’ but to ‘wipe the tears’ of Bengal’s women and ‘put heart into them if he could’, Gandhi boarded a train for Calcutta on 28 October 1946.121

  Chapter 15

  Walk Alone…

  East Bengal, 1946-47

  Swaraj seemed round the corner in October 1946. Leaders of popular parties had at last occupied governing positions in New Delhi. Yet the forebodings felt by Gandhi had touched others as well. In their anxious enthusiasm, many looked to Gandhi, who had just passed his seventy-seventh birthday.

  At railway stations in UP and Bihar on his way to Calcutta, crowds converged onto Gandhi’s train, clambered to the carriage-roof, choked the windows, pulled the alarm-chain, and shouted, demanding his darshan. Gandhi plugged his ears with his fingers but turned down a suggestion for switching off lights in the compartment: people should be able to see him if they wanted to, he said.1 Despite the din, he managed on the train to write a dozen or more letters and a few Harijan pieces.

  One of Gandhi’s goals in Calcutta—his base for proceeding by train and boat to Noakhali—was to befriend Shaheed Suhrawardy (1892-1963), the Bengal premier belonging to the Muslim League, and get him to do more to restore the security of Hindus in the eastern districts. During the Khilafat days young Suhrawardy had called Gandhi ‘Bapu’ (father); now, at the end of October 1946, he urged Gandhi to delay his departure for Noakhali. Calcutta, he said, also needed Gandhi’s presence.

  Assured by Suhrawardy that fresh attacks on Noakhali’s Hindus would be prevented, Gandhi paused in Satis Dasgupta’s khadi ashram in Sodepur on the outskirts of Calcutta. In the city he saw legacies of the August violence: entire streets of gutted shops and burnt-down houses, and high piles of garbage.

  While waiting for the journey to Noakhali, Gandhi learnt of large-scale killings of Muslims in Bihar, a province to which he had been attached from the days of the 1917 Champaran satyagraha. Nehru flew to Bihar along with Patel and two League colleagues in the council, Liaqat Ali and Abdur Rab Nishtar; Rajendra Prasad and Jayaprakash made themselves active in their province; and a shaken Gandhi also wondered whether he should not go to Bihar instead of Noakhali. Though deciding to keep to his plan, he announced he would fast unto death if the Bihar violence, portrayed as avenging Noakhali, did not cease.

  At this time Gandhi thought his end was not far, and said as much in a number of letters he wrote between 3 and 6 November, addressed to or for his ashram associates (Mashruwala, Vinoba, Kalelkar and othe
rs), his political colleagues (Nehru, Patel, C.R., Azad, Prasad), his ‘sisters’ and ‘daughters’ (including Amrit Kaur and Lilavati Asar), and his son Devadas.

  They must remain where they were if he fasted, he wrote, and remain strong if he died. If some were not named in his letters, he explained, it was because he had no time, not because he had forgotten them. No one should worry over him; he was with a competent team.

  However, he wanted one more person—someone in particular—to join him. To Jaisukhlal, the father of Manu, his nineteen-year-old grandniece, Gandhi wrote (4 Nov.) of his hope that she would come to Noakhali, saying he needed her support (92: 440-51). He had been encouraged by a letter from Manu in October. We do not have its text, but in reply Gandhi had written (from Delhi):

  11 Oct. 1946. Chi. Manudi, I have gone through your letter. I gave it to Sushila Pai, Kanu, Sushila (Dr) and Pyarelal to read. Here I shall tell you only this, that I liked your letter. Further, I shall be happy if you come over and have a talk with me. I do not wish to put any pressure on you. It is my earnest desire that you should remain a pure virgin till the end of your life and spend your life in service. I hope Umiya’s son (Umiya was Manu’s older sister) is doing well. Blessings to all from Bapu (92: 310).

  He clearly wanted Manu near him, and said to colleagues that he wished to develop her and also explore Manu’s possible marriage with Pyarelal, now forty-six, who was in love with her.2 But there was another reason. Convincing himself of a link between chastity and nonviolence, and of the power of the perfectly chaste to melt surrounding violence, Gandhi intended to strengthen his brahmacharya and that of his grandniece, who also seemed resolved on it.