On 26 July Gandhi spoke, in a conversation with Syed Mahmud, of the folly of rejecting talented people merely because they had worked for the Raj:
They have not become our enemies because they served the British Government… Please remember that they are at heart patriots… If we seek the advice of such… persons, they will show their genius (96: 147-8).
While final decisions were made by Nehru and Patel, Gandhi’s suggestions influenced the remarkably diverse composition of free India’s first Cabinet. Apart from Nehru, who would be Prime Minister, and Patel, who would be styled deputy prime minister (Gandhi may have been behind this innovation), the Cabinet of fourteen included
A woman (Rajkumari Amrit Kaur),
two Muslims (Azad plus Jawaharlal’s associate from the UP, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai),
two ‘untouchables’ (Ambedkar and Jagjivan Ram),
two Christians (John Matthai and Amrit Kaur),
two former (and future) foes of the Congress (Ambedkar and Shyama Prasad Mookerjee of the Hindu Mahasabha),
a Sikh (Baldev Singh),
a Parsi (C.H. Bhabha),
one former Raj loyalist (R.K. Shanmukham Chetty), and
altogether seven (including Amrit Kaur) from outside the Congress.
Rajendra Prasad was retained in the cabinet but C.R. was asked to move to Calcutta as governor of West Bengal.
Princely states. From 8 April, when he first said that the question of the princely states could turn India into ‘a battleground’ (94: 261), Gandhi cast a steady eye on it. His consistent position, expressed publicly and in talks with the Viceroy, was that the end of British paramountcy should lead to the people’s sovereignty, that the ruler could not have the ultimate say.
31 May, New Delhi: Any Prince, just because he is a Muslim, would not be entitled to say that he would join Pakistan. Nor can a Hindu ruler, because he is a Hindu, say that he would be with the Congress. Either would have to follow the wishes of the people (95:179).
Referring specifically to the Nizam of Hyderabad, the Nawab of Junagadh and the Maharaja of Kashmir, he said in April and June that not these rulers but the people of these and all other states had the right to choose their future (94: 261; 95: 178-9).
In Muslim-majority Kashmir, the Hindu ruler, Hari Singh, saw a possibility of independence in the conflict between the state’s popular pro-India leader, Sheikh Abdullah, and elements favouring Pakistan. When Abdullah, with whom Nehru had close links, was jailed by Hari Singh, Jawaharlal declared he would go to Kashmir, the land of his forebears.
Since a visit by Nehru was likely to generate friction, Gandhi offered to go in his place and made, between 31 July and 6 August, his first-ever trip to Kashmir. To a friend he wrote (30 July):
I am going to Kashmir… to see for myself the condition of the people. In any case I shall have a glimpse of the Himalayas. Who knows if I am going there for the first and the last time? (96: 176)
Before leaving for Kashmir he said (29 July):
I am not going to suggest to the Maharaja to accede to India and not to Pakistan. This is not my intention… The people of Kashmir should be asked whether they want to join Pakistan or India. Let them do as they want (96: 173-4).
The trip enabled stops in the Punjab—in Lahore and Rawalpindi and in Wah, where Hindu and Sikh refugees were camping—as well as a visit to the Punja Sahib Gurdwara. In Kashmir, where huge crowds came to his prayer meetings, Gandhi met Hari Singh and his wife, Hari Singh’s premier, Ramchandra Kak, and Begum Abdullah, the detained leader’s wife. From the maharaja Gandhi elicited the admission that the wishes of the people should prevail.
On his way back, Gandhi said in Wah (where Sushila was asked to stay on to assist the refugees) that Kashmir ‘had the greatest strategic value, perhaps, in all India’ (96: 192). And in a note (6 Aug.) to Nehru and Patel he quoted the assessment of Abdullah’s colleague, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, that if Abdullah and his co-prisoners were released, all bans removed, and premier Kak replaced, ‘the result of the free vote of the people… would be in favour of Kashmir joining India’ (96: 194).
When a delegation of Nagas led by A. Z. Phizo met him on 19 July and spoke of Naga independence, Gandhi said that complete isolation was not possible. He added:
I was independent when the whole of India was under the British heel… Personally, I believe you all belong to me, to India. But if you say you don’t, no one can force you (96: 84-5).
Aung San, the Burmese leader, and several of his colleagues were assassinated on 19 July. Observing that Aung San had ‘brought Burma to the gates of freedom’, Gandhi expressed grief at killings in a Buddhist land. The news reminded him of conversations with Indian militants who ‘did not accept my advice’ and, like the killers of Aung San, regarded their ‘victims as criminals’ but ‘never regarded themselves as criminals’ (96: 102).
Hindu/Muslim, India/Pakistan. The Hindu-Muslim question, an inescapable part of his ‘very big job’, had morphed, with the acceptance of partition, into two questions: Hindu-Muslim relations inside each new nation, and the India-Pakistan equation.
Gandhi grappled with the questions in several ways. One, he urged the Congress and the League to make the division an Indian rather than an imperial affair. Thus on 7 July he asked ‘ten representatives of either party’ to ‘sit together in a mud hut and resolve that they will not leave the hut till they have arrived at an understanding’ (96: 9).
Two, he refused to limit himself to one of the two new countries. ‘Both India and Pakistan are my country,’ he said on 2 July. ‘I am not going to take out a passport for going to Pakistan’ (95: 388-9). Three, he acknowledged Jinnah’s feat. ‘Mr. Jinnah is doing something very big,’ he said on 11 June. ‘Nobody had ever dreamt that in this day and age Pakistan would become a possibility’ (95: 260).
Four, he challenged Jinnah, urging him (7 June) ‘to build a Pakistan where the Gita could be recited side by side with the Qur’an, and the temple and the gurdwara would be given the same respect as the mosque, so that those who had been opposing Pakistan till now would be sorry for their mistake and would only sing praises of Pakistan’ (95: 229). On 5 July he said:
But the real test of Pakistan will be the way it treats the nationalist Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Hindus in Pakistan. Then Muslims themselves have various sects; there are Shias and Sunnis and various others. It is to be seen how these various sects are treated (95: 404).
Five, he championed Hindustani written either in Nagari or Urdu as the subcontinent’s common language. In the bitter 1947 summer, this bid too was unsuccessful, and a common language spoken by large numbers of Hindus and Muslims was sought to be split into two, a Sanskritized Hindi for India and an Urdu loaded with Arabic and Farsi words for Pakistan. Yet overthrowing habit and convenience would not prove easy, and a great many in India and Pakistan would continue to speak the language that Gandhi had espoused.
Six, he reprimanded those like S.K. Patil, the Bombay Congress leader, who, according to press reports, had spoken of reprisals after 15 August by the Congress in India if Hindus were harmed in Pakistan.
12 July: You are enunciating the doctrine of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Only you will wait till the 15th August… Who will be responsible for the incalculable harm that will have overtaken the people of India as well as Pakistan in the meantime? Who can control the people if they go mad and launch on a course of retaliation? (96: 32)
Warning against an arms race, he said on 6 July:
The Pakistanis will say that they must increase their armed forces to defend themselves against India. India will repeat the argument. The result will be war… [S]hall we spend our resources on the education of our children or on gunpowder and guns? (95: 408-9)
Seven, he asked himself and everyone else, including refugees, to put disappointment to use:
24 June: If, therefore, we learn a lesson from the misery that has overtaken us and make our lives successful, then that misery is not misery but happiness…
Had Rama been crowned a king, he would have spent his days in luxury and comfort and the world would hardly have heard of him. But the day he was to be crowned, he had to put on bark clothing and go into exile. Isn’t it the limit of unhappiness? But Rama and Sita turned that sorrow into joy… (95:328)
Eight, he insisted on the unity of Divinity:
13 June: When God is here, there and everywhere God must be one…That is why I [ask] whether those calling God Rahim would have to leave [India] and whether in the part described as Pakistan Rama as the name of God would be forbidden. Would someone who called God Krishna be turned out of Pakistan? Whatever be the case there, this cannot be permitted here. We shall worship God both as Krishna and Karim and show the world that we refuse to go mad (95: 270).
Finally, he dealt directly, in his daily prayer-talks, with hate, anger and revenge. Thanks to Patel, who held the information and broadcasting portfolio as well as home, these talks were now being relayed over All India Radio. On 28 May Gandhi answered ‘somebody [who] asked what we should do with a mad dog, whether we should not kill it’. Saying that the questioner really wanted to know ‘what should be done when a man went mad’, Gandhi related an incident from his boyhood:
I remember when I was about ten, a brother of mine had gone mad. Afterwards he was cured. He is no more… In a fit of madness he would rush out and strike everyone. But what could I do to him? Could I beat him? Or could my mother or father beat him?.. A vaidya was called in and he was asked to treat my brother in every possible manner except by beating him. He was my blood-brother. But now I make no such distinctions. Now all of you are like my blood-brothers. If all of you lose your sanity and I happen to have an army at my disposal, do you think I should have you shot? (95: 161-2)
His utterances were in Hindi and in a voice that seemed constructed in the heart, not in the throat. The pitch was never raised, he did not stress his words, and yet the voice could penetrate listeners with its earnestness. ‘We almost wept,’ Erik Erikson would later write (referring to his wife Joan and himself), ‘when Pyarelal and his sister Sushila arranged for us to listen (in 1963) to Gandhi’s own voice and diction on recordings’. 47
Violence & serenity. For thirty years he had taught nonviolence to India. Yet Calcutta, Noakhali, Bihar and the Punjab had erupted in violence. His explanation (24 July) was that
Outwardly we followed truth and non-violence. But inwardly there was violence in us. We practised hypocrisy and as a result we have to suffer the pain of mutual strife. Even today we are nurturing attitudes that will result in war and if this drift is not stopped we shall find ourselves in a conflict much more sanguinary than the Mutiny of 1857 (96: 129).
Three days earlier, in a response to Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh, who asked about the violence, Gandhi had said: ‘There was violence in the name of nonviolence and now we are tasting its bitter fruit’ (96: 99). The twin components of Gandhi’s nonviolence, ‘fear not’ and ‘hate not’, were both difficult, but the first found wider acceptance than the second. And it was a short step from hating one lot of people (the British) to hating another lot (Hindus or Muslims). On 16 June he said:
No one at the time (during the battles for Swaraj) showed us how to make an atom bomb. Had we known how to make it we would have considered annihilating the English with it (95: 289).
Because a violent alternative was not visible, Gandhi added, ‘my advice was accepted’. Each time violence occurred during a Swaraj campaign Gandhi had offered a similar diagnosis, but although he frequently suspended a campaign because of violence, a resumption or a new campaign always followed.
Despite his pain and shame at the violence, the fact that ‘a great power had to leave the country’ was noteworthy, he said (8 July; 96: 13). But, he warned, if the violence continued, ‘England, Russia, America or China—any of these countries’ could intervene (25 July; 96: 130).
A letter he dictated to Manu on 10 June conveys agony but also a sense of peace and a sense of achievement. The unidentified addressee was obviously someone close to Gandhi:
I have passed through many an ordeal in my life. But perhaps this is to be the hardest… I am dictating these letters [to Manu] early in the morning… I know I make her work beyond her capacity. But God seems to sustain her in spite of it all…
Still another sign of His grace is the way in which He is keeping up my physical strength, enabling me to maintain my serenity in the midst of daily shocks and turmoil. I remain happy and cheerful.
For sixty years we have been in the thick of the fight, and now we have ushered the goddess of liberty into our courtyard (95: 247-8).
Gandhi sounded ready, however, to be killed:
25 May: I would die smiling with the name of Rama on my lips (95: 140).
16 June: I shall consider myself brave if I am killed and if I still pray to God for my assassin (95: 290).
Bitter ‘refinement’. In July the Congress and the Constituent Assembly selected a refined Congress flag as India’s national flag. Not agreeing that it was ‘haughty’ on the part of the Congress to propose its banner as the national flag, Gandhi pointed out that all over India freedom’s battles had been waged under the tricolour with the charkha in the middle.
But he was hurt when told that ‘instead of the charkha there is only a wheel on the flag’. Though he said (22 July) that it was ‘all the same to me whether they keep or do not keep the charkha,’ adding, ‘Even if they cast it away, I will still have it in my hand and in my heart’ (96:112), his pain was apparent. Since the original design was largely his, the change was a personal rebuff. Moreover, the charkha symbolized nonviolence, and its removal from the flag seemed an explicit rejection of nonviolence.
Defending the ‘refinement’, Nehru argued that the charkha was represented by the Asoka chakra or wheel replacing it, but it was obvious that he thought the wheel more artistic than the charkha. This Gandhi was unwilling to concede, but he underlined Emperor Asoka’s pluralism and nonviolence:
24 July: There is not much difference between the new and the old flag except that the old one was a little more elegant (96: 129).
27 July: Looking at the wheel some may recall that prince of peace, King Asoka, ruler of an empire, who renounced power. He represented all faiths; he was an embodiment of compassion. Seeing the charkha in his chakra adds to the glory of the charkha. Asoka’s chakra represents [the] eternally revolving divine law of ahimsa (96: 152-3).
INDEPENDENCE DAY
Remarks he made in a talk in Delhi on 8 July with Aruna Asaf Ali and Sushila Nayar reveal his uncertainty about where he should be as India approached independence:
At one time I feel that Bihar is calling me, at another time I hear the call from Noakhali where I succeeded to some extent in establishing peace. When I came here from Patna a month ago, I imagined that I would be back at my work in a week. But in the course of this one month so many changes have taken place in the country that a family wouldn’t have seen… in a generation. I am rotting in Delhi. However, I have not at all given up Noakhali and Bihar work. I am very keen to go to the Punjab also (96: 11).
On 10 June he had said:
[I]f I go to the Punjab I shall live there regarding it as my home and if I am killed I shall accept death (95: 252).
Well aware, as we have seen, of preparations for renewed violence in the Punjab, and urged by many to go there, he however felt the absence of ‘a call from within’ (96: 199). Fearing that Gandhi might be killed in the Punjab, Nehru and Patel opposed his going there.
In the first week of August he found clarity. After completing his Kashmir foray, he entrained in Lahore on 6 August for Patna: he would rather be in Bihar and Bengal than in New Delhi, and plan to reach Noakhali before mid-August.
Choosing to spend independence day in Noakhali, and thus in Pakistan, he had also concluded that the day called for appropriate celebration. On the eve of his Kashmir trip he had said in Delhi (29 July):
[W]e should fast and pray on August 15. I
may say that I do not intend to mourn. But it is a matter of grief that we have no food and no clothes. Human beings kill human beings. In Lahore, people cannot leave their houses for fear that they will be killed. These are not the conditions in which we can rejoice and feast. I shall, therefore, say that we must celebrate the day but by fasting, praying and spinning. Yes, we should not mourn (Delhi, 29 July; 96: 174-5).
Nine days earlier he had said:
20 July: Unfortunately the kind of freedom we have got today contains also the seeds of future conflict between India and Pakistan. How can we therefore light the lamps? (96: 92)
On the train to Patna he again acknowledged, in a note for Harijan, the possibility of being killed. But that would not be the end of the story:
7 Aug.: I shall be alive in the grave and, what is more, speaking from it (96: 202).
On arrival in Patna (8 Aug.) he said he ‘wanted to live both in Hindustan and Pakistan and both were his homelands. Similar was the case with Jinnah Saheb. Muslims had got Pakistan. Now it was incumbent on the people of both Hindustan and Pakistan to live like good human beings and bring peace to the country’ (96: 204-5).
The next day he said he ‘must reach Noakhali two or three days before August 15 as the people there were extremely nervous’ (96: 204). On 9 August, en route to Noakhali, he arrived in Calcutta, where Muslim and Hindu friends urged him to ‘to tarry in Calcutta’.
Suhrawardy was on his way out as premier, and Prafulla Chandra Ghosh of the Congress was about to take over as the chief minister of West Bengal. ‘Muslim police and officials were almost withdrawn and replaced by Hindus, and the Hindus had begun to believe that they were now free to do what they liked, as the Muslims were reported to have done under the League Ministry.’
Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People Page 82
