Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People

by Gandhi, Rajmohan

  On 1 September a young Hindu, Sachin Mitra, had been killed in Calcutta while defending Muslims, and on 3 September, another young Hindu, Smritish Banerjee, lost his life while guarding a peace march. During the fast ‘processions of young women and girls of both communities… walked across the city to Gandhi’s lodging and brought peace’. According to Martin Green, the Calcutta of September 1947 demonstrated the power of ‘the saint, the martyr and the virgin, [working] together…’59

  ‘Gandhiji has achieved many things,’ C.R. observed on 5 September, ‘but in my considered opinion there has been nothing, not even independence, which is so truly wonderful as his victory over evil in Calcutta’.60

  During the fast a British journalist asked Gandhi about his ability ‘to maintain a spirit of detachment in such a surprising manner’. Gandhi answered that ‘it was not true that he was never off his balance. Such occasions were rare, yet the long exercise of self-restraint enabled him, through God’s grace, to keep his irritation within very narrow bounds’ (96: 329).

  From the fast emerged (5 September) the Shanti Sena (Peace Brigade), a body of young persons prepared to intervene nonviolently in a clash. And when Devtosh Das Gupta, the Shanti Sena secretary, asked Gandhi for a message, he received a short sentence written in Bengali:

  My life is my message (96: 342).

  Two years earlier, when Denton Brooks Jr of the Chicago Defender had asked for a message for Americans, Gandhi had given a similar reply:

  My life is its own message. If it is not, then nothing I can now write will fulfil the purpose (87: 8).

  The Calcutta miracle notwithstanding, the man at whose call India’s prisons used to be filled, and streets emptied, was now often short of help and living an uncertain life. To Jivanji Desai, Harijan’s manager in Ahmedabad, Gandhi wrote:

  20 Aug.: I am very sorry to learn that you got the articles on Wednesday… I take the utmost care to see that you get all the material on Monday evening. With that aim, I send the material by air-mail from Calcutta on Sunday. But… I have no paid employee… Do you send anybody to the airport on Mondays? (96: 254-5)

  His situation at this time and also his business-like approach come across from a piece inviting the honest opinion of Harijan’s readers:

  Harijan, 31 Aug. 1947: My life has become, if possible, more tempestuous than before. Nor can I at present claim any place as a permanent habitation. The columns are predominantly filled by my after-prayer speeches. In the original I contribute, on an average, only one and a half columns per week. This is hardly satisfactory. I would like, therefore, the readers… to give me their frank opinion as to whether they really need their Harijan weekly to satisfy their political or spiritual hunger.

  They should send their answers to the Editor of the Harijan, Ahmedabad… In the left hand upper corner of the envelope containing the answer, the writer should state: ‘About Harijan’ (96: 270-71).

  MAN PROPOSES

  His way to the Punjab cleared, Gandhi thanked Calcutta, underlined the martyrdom of Mitra and Banerjee, and on the night of 7 September boarded a train for Delhi—en route, he informed Nehru in a telegram, to the Punjab (96: 345).

  After mid-August that province was covered in blood. A foul wind touched down in scores of places in the Punjab and set off frenzied attacks. Maj.-Gen. Rees of the Punjab Boundary Force would record that he witnessed ‘pre-medieval savagery’.

  Neither sex nor age was spared. Mothers with babes in their arms were cut down, speared or shot, and Sikhs cried ‘Rawalpindi’ as they struck home. Both sides were equally merciless.61

  Gandhi had recognized ‘the savagery of the Punjab’ (1 Sept., 96: 316), but as his train rattled across West Bengal, Bihar, and UP to Delhi he did not know that the by the end of September killings in the Punjab would amount to a quarter million or more, with equal numbers of Muslims and non-Muslims falling victim, or that a large number of women would be raped or abducted.

  Nor did he know that the two-way flow that had started in August—eastward of Hindus and Sikhs, westward of Muslims—would continue until the summer of 1948 and enter history as the Great Migration, with about five-and-a-half million Hindus and Sikhs moving to India and a similar number of Muslims to Pakistan, many of them trudging with bullock-carts in long convoys, and others packed in trains, several of which delivered only dead bodies at their destinations.

  Yet what was known by 7 September was horrific enough. Gandhi was aware that on 3 September Premier Nehru and deputy premier Patel had flown to Lahore to discuss the Punjab violence with Jinnah, who had taken over as Pakistan’s Governor-General, and Liaqat Ali, the new country’s first Premier. On his train journey of two nights Gandhi must have wondered how he would grapple with a province—now two provinces—where neighbours had turned into killers. He had not faced a bigger challenge in all his life.

  Gandhi carried a small grievance too, for he had been informed that before proceeding to the Punjab he might be put up in Delhi not with his Harijans on Reading Road (Mandir Marg) but in Birla House on Albuquerque Road (30 January Marg), not far from the houses of Nehru (York Road, now Motilal Nehru Marg) and Patel (Aurangzeb Road).62

  He had been told, moreover, to get off his train at Shahdara, ahead of Delhi’s main station, for the situation was tense even in the capital. Although Gandhi ‘knew nothing about the sad state of things in Delhi when [he] left Calcutta’,63 violence had broken out there on the morning of 5 September, hundreds had since been killed, ‘localities like Karol Bagh, Sabzimandi and Paharganj were being emptied of Muslims’, the city was under curfew, and people’s rations were exhausted.64

  Meeting Gandhi at Shahdara station at dawn on 9 September, Patel confirmed that he was being taken to Birla House, for it would be hard to protect him in the sweepers’ colony and hard also for visitors to meet him there; moreover, refugees were living in the colony. A disappointed Gandhi was troubled even more by Patel’s sombre countenance. In their long association, this was the first encounter where Vallabhbhai did not crack a joke. The police officers accompanying him also looked worried.

  In the car Patel gave Gandhi Delhi’s troubling details. Off quickly to work, Gandhi called that day at a camp near Humayun’s Tomb where Muslim Meos from Alwar and Bharatpur had taken refuge, at the Jamia Millia, where many Delhi Muslims had huddled together, and at three camps (Diwan Hall, Wavell Canteen and Kingsway) filled with Hindu and Sikh refugees from West Punjab.

  For a ‘whole day long’ he listened ‘to the tale of woe that is Delhi today’ (96: 352). Zakir Husain spoke at the Jamia of his escape on a train a few days earlier: had a Sikh army captain and a Hindu railway official not helped, Husain, who had believed all his life in a single India, would have been killed. Gandhi heard, too, that Saifuddin Kitchlew, from 1919 a national-level leader of the Congress, had been forced to flee from his Delhi home for Kashmir, the land of his forebears.

  Hindu and Sikh refugees from Pakistan told Gandhi that while they had not forgotten his services to the Punjab, he ‘had not undergone the hardships that they did… not lost [his] kith and kin… [and] not been compelled to beg at every door’ (96: 357). And his hosts at Birla House said that the city was in such disarray that even they, belonging to one of India’s richest families, had not been able to obtain fruits and vegetables (96: 356).

  In a conversation during the day with P.C. Joshi, a Communist leader, Gandhi said: ‘I do not remember an occasion in my life… when I have felt [as] baffled as I am today’ (96: 353).

  Yet, at the end of the day, Gandhi found clarity: he would not go to the Punjab but remain in Delhi until the capital ‘regained its former self’ (96: 352). ‘Man proposes, God disposes’, Gandhi said that night while announcing the latest change in his plans (96: 342).

  The next morning a Sikh taxi driver told Brij Krishna, Gandhi’s aide in Delhi from the 1920s: ‘If Gandhiji had waited some more days before coming to Delhi, all the Muslims here would have been eliminated.’65

  In the inflamed cli
mate of August-September 1947, when refugees brought ghastly accounts from Pakistan, turning Delhi into a solely Hindu city was not altogether a fantasy. An angry section of the populace would have supported such a bid, and quite a few civil and police officials would have winked at it.

  Anti-Muslim elements in Delhi had in fact hoped for word to spread that home minister Patel was secretly on their side. Very human and very Hindu, Patel was undoubtedly more disturbed by a report of Hindus or Sikhs having been killed than by similar news about Muslims. Yet the home minister’s hand was ruled not by his heart but by the law. As far back as March, after violence had first hit the Punjab, Patel had assured Gandhi that ‘here (in Delhi) of course we shall be able to deal with it’ (94: 168); and on 8 September the Hindustan Times published Patel’s warning that partisan officials would be punished.

  With Gandhi present in Delhi, and home minister Patel plainly ready to do his bidding, it became impossible for anyone high or low in the police or the bureaucracy, or indeed for anyone in the public, to separate Patel from Gandhi or from Nehru, or to claim that Vallabhbhai would condone anti-Muslim violence. The bid to expel or eliminate all the Muslims of Delhi was aborted.

  Agonizing at what was happening in the two Punjabs, in the Frontier province, and in Delhi, Gandhi was nonetheless at peace. He had found ‘a particular thing’ to ‘work at’ in Delhi. In the days to follow he would speak frequently of the city’s significance:

  13 Sept: It is said that in the Mahabharata period the Pandavas used to stay in this Purana Quila. Whether you call it Indraprastha or Delhi, the Hindus and the Muslims have grown here together. It was the capital of the Mughals. Now it is the capital of India… The Mughals came from outside. They identified themselves with the manners and customs of Delhi… In such a Delhi of yours the Hindus and the Muslims used to live together peacefully. They… would fight for a short while and then be united again… This is your Delhi (96: 368-9).

  25 Sept: If peace is not established here, the whole of Hindustan will be on fire (96: 424).

  3 Nov.: Ultimately Delhi will decide the destiny of the whole country (97: 221).

  18 Nov.: I have to do or die here. If heart unity is not restored in Delhi, I can see flames raging all over India (97: 343).

  Remembering his own Delhi links, he recalled friends who were no more: Swami Shraddhanand, Hakim Ajmal Khan, Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari, Charlie Andrews, who had taught at St Stephen’s College, Sushil Kumar Rudra, the St Stephen’s principal in whose home Gandhi had composed his non-cooperation challenge to the Viceroy, and others.

  He had indeed seen Delhi change and grow and add New Delhi to itself. Delhi was where, in 1918, he had addressed the Raj in Hindustani and in 1931 signed his pact with Irwin. It was also where, in 1924 in Muhammad Ali’s home, he had fasted for twenty-one days for Hindu-Muslim unity. And Delhi was where his grandson—Harilal’s young son Rasik—had died in 1929, and where his youngest son, Devadas, editor of the Hindustan Times, was living with his family.

  In and from this Delhi—in such teamwork as became possible with his people and with his political ‘sons’—he would serve his newly freed but also wounded and traumatized India, and also Pakistan, which too he saw as his. He would serve by standing up to hate.

  STRATEGY AGAINST HATE

  Three days after arriving in Delhi, Gandhi confronted the RSS chief, M.S. Golwalkar, with reports of the RSS’s hand in the Delhi violence. Denying the allegations, Golwalkar also said, in answer to a question from Gandhi, that the RSS did not stand for the killing of Muslims. Gandhi asked him to say so publicly. Golwalkar said Gandhi could quote him. This Gandhi did in his prayer talk that evening, but he told Golwalkar that the statement ought to come from him. Afterwards, Gandhi said to Nehru that he did not find Golwalkar convincing.66

  Four days later, at Gandhi’s instance, a number of RSS activists called on him (16 Sept.). He told them that while he had been impressed years earlier by the discipline, simplicity and absence of untouchability he had noticed in an RSS camp, ‘sacrifice without purity of motive and true knowledge has been known to prove ruinous to society’. Their ‘strength could be used in the interest of India or against it’, the RSS men were told.

  Asked by one of them if Hinduism did not permit killing an evildoer, Gandhi answered: ‘How could a sinner claim the right to judge or execute another sinner?’ Only a properly constituted government was entitled to punish an evildoer. To chasten any in the group hoping to play Patel against Nehru, Gandhi said, ‘[The two] have been colleagues for years and have the same aim,’ and added:

  Both the Sardar and Pandit Nehru will be rendered powerless if you become judge and executioner in one… Do not sabotage their efforts by taking the law into your own hands (96: 382).67

  Not taking the law into their own hands—rather than absolute nonviolence—was what he was also prescribing to the people at large, who were hearing of attacks on Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan, even as the public in Pakistan heard of attacks on Muslims in India.

  In September and thereafter, Gandhi’s team and staff in Birla House consisted of Abha, Manu, Brij Krishna, Bisen, Kalyanam (a stenographer) and, when they were in Delhi, Pyarelal and his sister Sushila, though Pyarelal was more in Noakhali than in Delhi, while Sushila was often in the Punjab. All in the team, including Gandhi, slept on thin mats on the floor in one room and/or its verandah at the western end of the house. At three in the morning Bisen roused everyone else, including Gandhi, but at times this chore was performed by Gandhi.

  The room was also where, sitting on a thin mat covered with white khadi, Gandhi wrote, span, received callers and ate his meals, and where he and the others prayed before dawn each morning. At five in the evening Gandhi and his companions walked past a lawn for multi-faith prayers held in the open at the southern end of the Birla House grounds. Anyone who wanted could attend the prayers and hear Gandhi’s post-prayer remarks: usually a few hundred did.

  Refugees from West Pakistan and Muslims feeling insecure in India constituted the majority of his callers at Birla House. Nehru and Patel frequently dropped in, as did others including Amrit Kaur, now India’s health minister, and Devadas and his family, and, occasionally, Mira, visiting from her ashram in the foothills of western UP.

  Delivered in simple Hindi (or Hindustani, as he preferred to call it), his prayer talks were relayed live over the national radio and carried by the newspapers. He prepared these talks with care, writing out, for the sake of the press, a draft in English. The remarks of 12 September, when he spoke of the pointlessness of tit for tat and of what would enable him to go to the two Punjabs, provide an example:

  The very first thing I want to tell you is that I have received disturbing news from the Frontier Province… What I think to myself I may as well convey to you, that is, we should not get angry. We can, of course, feel the pain… It is natural to feel, ‘Why not kill the Muslims because our brothers have been killed.’ But I for one cannot kill even the actual murderers of my brothers. Should I then prepare myself to kill other innocent people?..

  I have seen the terrible plight of the Hindus and Sikhs of Pakistan. I have lived in Lahore. Do you think I am not pained? I claim that my pain is no less than that of any Punjabi. If any Hindu or Sikh from the Punjab comes and tells me that his anguish is greater than mine because he has lost his brother or daughter or father, I would say that his brother is my brother, his mother is my mother, and I have the same anguish in my heart as he has.

  I am also a human being and feel enraged but I swallow my anger. That gives me strength. What revenge can I take with that strength? How should I take revenge so that they feel repentant for their crimes and admit that they have committed grave crimes?

  I had gone to the Jama Masjid today. I met the [Muslim] residents of that area. I also met their womenfolk. Some of the women wept before me and some brought their children to indicate their sad plight. Should I narrate to them the plight of the Hindus and Sikhs in West Punjab and in the Frontier Provi
nce? Will it mitigate the sorrow of the Hindus and Sikhs of the Punjab in any way?

  The people of Pakistan resorted to ways of barbarism, and so did the Hindus and Sikhs [in India]. He who does good to one who has been good to him is a mere Bania and a pseudo-Bania at that. I say that I am a Bania myself; and I am a true Bania. May you not become pseudo-Banias. [The] true human being… does a good turn for evil. I learnt this in my childhood. I still believe in the rightness of this. I would like you to return evil with good.

  The Government needs arms, what has the citizen got to do with them? None of the city people should possess arms. I would like the Muslims to surrender all the arms in their possession to the Government. The Hindus too should surrender all their arms…

  The same thing happened in Calcutta and the Hindus and the Muslims have started living like brothers… You must soon create such a situation in Delhi that I can immediately go to the Punjab and tell the people there that the Muslims of Delhi are living in peace. I would ask for its reward there. I would ask for that reward from the Nawab of Mamdot (the West Punjab chief minister). I would go to East Punjab as well… (96: 361-5)

  But the Punjab was worsening. In the middle of September the governments of India and Pakistan agreed that in the two new Punjabs ‘priority should be given to the transfer of refugees rather than the maintenance of law and order’.68 On 17 September Sushila wrote to Pyarelal in Noakhali:

  Bapu is going to have a hard time of it here (Delhi). Yesterday he was saying that he would not be surprised if some of us might have to go the way of the leaders of the French Revolution. The exchange of population is actually taking place however much we may dislike it. Will there be a mass exodus of Hindus from East Pakistan after the manner of West Pakistan? Bapu says it would be a catastrophe (96: 382).