India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

by Ramachandra Guha

  The peace held, prompting Lord Mountbatten to remark famously that one unarmed man had been more effective than 50,000 troops in Punjab. But the Mahatma and his admirers might have treasured as much this tribute from the Statesman, a British-owned paper in Calcutta that had long opposed him and his politics: ‘On the ethics of fasting as a political instrument we have over many years failed to concur with India’s most renowned practitioner of it . . . But never in a long career has Mahatma Gandhi, in our eyes, fasted in a simpler, worthier cause than this, nor one calculated for immediate effective appeal to the public conscience.’25

  On 7 September, having spent four weeks in Beliaghata, Gandhi left for Delhi. He hoped to proceed further, to the Punjab. However, on his arrival in the capital he was immediately confronted with tales of strife and dispossession. The Muslims of Delhi were frightened. Their homes and places of worship had come under increasing attack. Gandhi was told that no fewer that 137 mosques had been destroyed in recent weeks. Hindu and Sikh refugees had also forcibly occupied Muslim homes. As a Quaker relief worker reported, ‘the Muslim population of Delhi of all classes – civil servants, businessmen, artisans, tongawallahs, bearers – had fled to a few natural strongholds’ – such as the Purana Qila, the greathigh-walled fort in the middle of the city, and the tomb of the Mughal emperor Humayun. In the Purana Qila alone there were 60,000 refugees, huddled together in tents, ‘in the corners of battlements and in the open, together with their camels and tongas and ponies, battered old taxis and luxury limousines’.26

  Gandhi now put his Punjab programme on hold. He visited the camps in the capital and outside it. In the plains around Delhi lived a farming community called Meos, Muslims by faith, but who had adopted many of the practices and rituals of their Hindu neighbours. In the madness of the time this syncretism was forgotten. Thousands of Meos were killed or driven out of their homes, whether these lay in Indian territory or in the princely states of Alwar and Bharatpur.27

  Through September and October, writes his biographer D. G. Tendulkar, Gandhi ‘went round hospitals and refugee camps giving consolation to distressed people’. He ‘appealed to the Sikhs, the Hindus and the Muslims to forget the past and not to dwell on their sufferings but to extend the right hand of fellowship to each other, and to determine to live in peace . . .’ He ‘begged of them all to bring about peace quickly in Delhi, so that he might be able to proceed to both East and West Punjab’. Gandhi said ‘he was proceeding to the Punjab in order to make the Mussalmans undo the wrong that they were said to have perpetrated there [against the Hindus and the Sikhs]. But he could not hope for success, unless he could secure justice for the Mussalmans in Delhi.’28

  Gandhi also spoke at a camp of the Rash triya Swayamsevak Sangh. Founded by a Maharashtrian doctor in 1925, the RSS was a cohesive and motivated body of Hindu young men. Gandhi himself was impressed by their discipline and absence of caste feeling, but less so by their antagonism to other religions. He told the RSS members that ‘if the Hindus felt that in India there was no place for any one except the Hindus and if non-Hindus, especially Muslims, wished to live here, they had to live as the slaves of the Hindus, they would kill Hinduism’. Gandhi could see that the RSS was ‘a well-organized, well-disciplined body’. But, he told its members, ‘its strength could be used in the interests of India or against it. He did not know whether there was any truth in the allegations [of inciting communal hatred] made against the Sangha. It was for the Sangha to showby their uniformbehaviour that the allegations were baseless.’29

  Unlike Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru was not inclined to give the Sangh the benefit of doubt. ‘It seems to me clear’, he told his home minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, ‘that the RSS have a great deal to do with the disturbances not only in Delhi but elsewhere. In Amritsar their activities have been very obvious’. Nehru’s feelings about the RSS stemmed from his deeper worries about the communal situation. He thought that there was ‘a very definite and well-organized attempt of certain Sikh and Hindu fascist elements to overturn the government, or at least to break up its present character. It has been something more than a communal disturbance. Many of these people have been brutal and callous in the extreme. They have functioned as pure terrorists.’30

  The worry was the greater because the fanatics were functioning in ‘a favourable atmosphere as far as public opinion was concerned’. In Delhi, especially, the Hindu and Sikh refugees from Pakistan were baying for blood. But the prime minister insisted that India must be a place where the Muslims could live and work freely. An Englishman on the governor general’s staff wrote in his diary of how ‘to see Nehru at close range during this ordeal is an inspiring experience. He vindicates one’s faith in the humanist and the civilised intellect. Almost alone in the turmoil of communalism, with all its variations, from individual intrigue to mass madness, he speaks with the voice of reason andcharity.’31

  At the initiative of Gandhi and Nehru, the Congress now passed a resolution on ‘the rights of minorities’. The party had never accepted the ‘two-nation theory’; forced against its will to accept Partition, it still believed that ‘India is a land of many religions and many races, and must remain so’. Whatever be the situation in Pakistan, India would be ‘a democratic secular State where all citizens enjoy full rights and are equally entitled to the protection of the State, irrespective of the religion to which they belong’. The Congress wished to ‘assure the minorities in India that it will continue to protect, to the best of its ability, their citizen rights against aggression’.32

  However, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was actively sceptical of this viewpoint. Its sarsanghchalak,or head, was a lean, bearded science graduate named M. S. Golwalkar. Golwalkar was strongly opposed to the idea of a secular state that would not discriminate on the basis of religion. In the India of his conception,

  The non-Hindu people of Hindustan must either adopt Hindu culture and language, must learn and respect and hold in reverence the Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but of those of glorification of the Hindu race and culture . . . in a word they must cease to be foreigners, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment – not even citizens’ rights.33

  On Sunday 7 December 1947 the RSS held a large rally at the Ramlila Grounds in the heart of Delhi. The main speech was by M. S. Golwalkar. As the Hindustan Times reported, Golwalkar denied that the RSS aimed at the establishment of a Hindu Raj, but nevertheless insisted: ‘We aim at the solidarity of the Hindu society. With this ideal in view, the Sangh will march forward on its path, and will not be deterred by any authority or personality.’34

  The authorities being alluded to were the Congress Party and the government of India; the personalities, Nehru and Gandhi, towards whom there was much hostility among those sections of the refugees sympathetic to the RSS. Gandhi had his meetings disrupted by refugees who objected to readings from the Quran, or who shouted slogans asking why he did not speak of the sufferings of those Hindus and Sikhs still living in Pakistan. In fact, as D. G. Tendulkar writes, Gandhi ‘was equally concerned with the sufferings of the minority community in Pakistan. He would have liked to be able to go to their succour. But with what face could he now go there, when he could not guarantee full redress to the Muslims in Delhi?’

  With attacks on Muslims continuing, Gandhi chose to resort to another fast. This began on 13 January, and was addressed to three different constituencies. The first were the people of India. To them he simply pointed out that if they did not believe in the two-nation theory, they would have to show in their chosen capital, the ‘Eternal City’ of Delhi, that Hindus and Muslims could live in peace and brotherhood. The second constituency was the government of Pakistan. ‘How long’, he asked them, ‘can I bank upon the patience of the Hindus and the Sikhs, in spite of my fast? Pakistan has to put a stop to this state of affairs’ (that is, the driving out of minorities from their territory).

  G
andhi’s fast was addressed, finally, to the government of India. They had withheld Pakistan’s share of the ‘sterling balance’ which the British owed jointly to the two dominions, a debt incurred on account of Indian contributions during the Second World War. This amounted to Rs550 million, a fair sum. New Delhi would not release the money as it was angry with Pakistan for having recently attempted to seize the state of Kashmir. Gandhi saw this as unnecessarily spiteful, and so he made the ending of his fast conditional on the transfer to Pakistan of the money owed to it.

  On the night of 15 January the government of India decided to release the money owed to the government of Pakistan. The next day more than 1,000 refugees signed a declaration saying they would welcome back the displaced Muslims of Delhi and allow them to return to their homes. But Gandhi wanted more authoritative assurances. Meanwhile, his health rapidly declined. His kidney was failing, his weight was dropping and he was plagued by nausea and headache. The doctors issued a warning of their own: ‘It is our duty to tell the people to take immediate steps to produce the requisite conditions for ending the fast without delay.’

  On 17 January a Central Peace Committee was formed under the leadership of the president of the Constituent Assembly, Rajendra Prasad. Other Congress Party members were among its members, as were representatives of the RSS, the Jamiat-ul-Ulema and Sikh bodies. On the morning of the 18th they took a joint declaration to Gandhi which satisfied him enough to end his fast. The declaration pledged ‘that we shall protect the life, property and faith of Muslims and that the incidents which have taken place in Delhi will not happen again’.35

  Would the ‘miracle of Calcutta’ be repeated in Delhi? The leaders of the militant groupings seemed chastened by Gandhi’s fast. But their followers remained hostile. On previous visits to Delhi Gandhi had stayed in the sweepers colony; this time, however, he was put up at the home of his millionaire follower G. D. Birla. Even while his fast was on, bands of refugees marched past Birla House, shouting, ‘Let Gandhi die'. Then, on 20 January, a Punjabi refugee named Madan Lal threw a bomb at Gandhi in Birla House while he was leading a prayer meeting. It exploded at some distance from him; luckily no one was hurt.

  Gandhi was undaunted by the attempt on his life. He carried on meeting people, angry refugees included. On 26 January he spoke at his prayer meeting of how that day was celebrated in the past as Independence Day. Now freedom had come, but its first few months had been deeply disillusioning. However, he trusted that ‘the worst is over’, that Indians would work collectively for the ‘equality of all classes and creeds, never the domination and superiority of the major community over a minor, however insignificant it may be in numbers or influence’. He also permitted himself the hope ‘that, though geographically and politically India is divided into two, at heart we shall ever be friends and brothers helping and respecting one another and be one for the outside world’.

  Gandhi had fought a lifelong battle for a free and united India; and yet, at the end, he could view its division with detachment and equanimity. Others were less forgiving. On the evening of 30 January he was shot dead by a young man at his daily prayer meeting. The assassin, who surrendered afterwards, was a Brahmin from Poona named Nathuram Godse. He was tried and later sentenced to death, but not before he made a remarkable speech justifying his act. Godse claimed that his main provocation was the Mahatma’s ‘constant and consistent pandering to the Muslims’, ‘culminating in his lastpro-Muslim fast [which] at last goaded me to the conclusion that the existence of Gandhi should be brought to an end immediately’.36

  IV

  Gandhi’s death brought forth an extraordinary outpouring of grief.There were moving tributes from Albert Einstein, who had long held Gandhi to be the greatest figure of the twentieth century, and from George Orwell, who had once thought Gandhi to be a humbug but now saw him as a saint. There was a characteristically flippant reaction from George Bernard Shaw – It shows you how dangerous it is to be good’ – and a characteristically petty one from Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who said that the death of hi sold rival was a loss merely to ‘the Hindu community’.

  However, the two most relevant public reactions were from Gandhi’s two most distinguished, not to say most powerful, followers, Vallabhbhai Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru. Patel who was now home minister in the government of India, was a fellow Gujarati who had joined Gandhi as far back as 1918. He was a superb organizer and strategist who had played a major role in making the Congress a national party. In the Indian Cabinet, he was second only to the prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru had come to Gandhi a couple of years later than Patel, and could converse with him in only two of his three languages (Hindi and English). But he had a deep emotional bond with the Mahatma. Like Patelhegenerally called Gandhi ‘Bapu’, or ‘Father’. But he was, in many ways, the favourite son (dearer by far than the four biological children of the Mahatma), and also his chosen political heir.

  Now, in an India caught in the throes of civil strife, both men told the nation that while their master had gone, his message remained. Speaking on All-India Radio immediately after Gandhi’s death, Patel appealed to the people not to think of revenge, but ‘tocarry the message of love and non-violence enunciated by Mahatmaji. It is a shame for us that the greatest man of the world has had to pay with his life for the sins which we have committed. We did not follow him when he was alive; let us at least follow his steps now he is dead.’37 Speaking at Allahabad after immersing Gandhi’s ashes in the Ganga, Nehru observed that ‘we have had our lesson at a terrible cost. Is there anyone amongst us now who will not pledge himself after Gandhi’s death to fulfil his mission . . .?’ Indians, said Nehru, had now ‘to hold together and fight that terrible poison of communalism that has killed the greatest man of our age’.38

  Nehru and Patel both called for unity and forgiveness, but as it happened the two men had recently been involved in a bitter row. In the last fortnight of December Nehru had planned to visit the riot-hit town of Ajmer. At the last minute he called off his trip and sent his personal secretary instead. Patel took serious offence. He felt that since the Home Ministry had sent its own enquiry team to Ajmer, the tour of the prime minister’s underling implied a lack of faith. Nehru explained that he had been forced to cancel his own visit because of a death in the family, and had thus sent his secretary – mostly so as not to disappoint those who had expected him to come. But in anycase, as the head of government he had the right to go wherever he wished whenever he wished, or to send someone else to deputize for him. Patel answered that in a cabinet system the prime minister was merely the first among equals; he did not stand above and dominate his fellow ministers.

  The exchange grew progressively more contentious, and at one stage both men offered to resign. Then it was agreed that they would put their respective points of view before Gandhi. Before a suitable time could be found the Mahatma began his final fast. The next week Patel was out of Delhi, but the matter lay very much on his mind, and on Nehru’s. Indeed, on 30 January Gandhi met Patel just before the fateful prayer meeting and asked that he and Nehru sort out their differences. He also said he would like to meet both of them the next day.

  Three days after Gandhi’s assassination Nehru wrote Patel a letter which said that ‘with Bapu’s death, everything is changed and we have to face a different and more difficult world. The old controversies have ceased to have much significance and it seems to me that the urgent need of the hour is for all of us to functionas closely and co-operatively as possible . . .’ Patel, in reply, said he ‘fully and heartily reciprocate[d] the sentiments you have so feelingly expressed . . . Recent events had made me very unhappy and I had written to Bapu . . . appealing to him to relieve me, but his death changes everything and the crisis that has overtaken us must awaken in us afresh realisation of how much we have achieved together and the need for further joint effortsin our grief-strickencountry’s interests.’39

  Gandhi could not reconcile, in life, Hindu with Muslim, but he did reconc
ile, through hisdeath, Jawaharlal Nehru with Vallabhbhai Patel. It was apatch-up of rather considerable consequence for the newand very fragile nation.

  2

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  THE LOGIC OF DIVISION

  It was India’s historic destiny that many human races and cultures should flow to her, finding a home in her hospitable soil, and that many a caravan should find rest here . . . Eleven hundred years of common history [of Islam and Hinduism] have enriched India with our common achievements. Our languages, our poetry, our literature, our culture, our art, our dress, our manners and customs, the innumerable happenings of our daily life, everything bears the stamp of our joint endeavour . . . These thousand years of our joint life have moulded us into a common nationality . . . Whether we like it or not, we have now become an Indian nation, united and indivisible. No fantasy or artificial scheming to separate and divide can break this unity.

  MAULANA ABUL KALAM AZAD,

  Congress Presidential Address, 1940

  The problem in India is not of an intercommunal but manifestly of an international character, and must be treated as such . . . It is a dream that Hindus and Muslims can evolve a common nationality, and this misconception of one Indian nation has gone far beyond the limits, and is the cause of most of our troubles, and will lead India to destruction, if we fail to revise our actions in time. The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs, and literature. They neither intermarry, nor interdine together, and indeed they belong to two different civilizations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions. Their aspects on and of life are different.