Rajaji

by Rajmohan Gandhi

  Though what Gandhi called C.R.’s ‘ingenuity’ (Young India, 28.3.29) was evident in Tamil Nadu’s lead in khádi production — in 1927-8 it supplied more than a third of the national output — the drink demon had drawn a greater share of C.R.’s energy. He used two platforms — Congress, and the Prohibition League of India, of which he became honorary general secretary, succeeding a Briton, Revd Herbert Anderson. At the instance of G.D. Birla, the industrialist, Gandhi had asked C.R. to accept the post.

  By April 1929 a national scheme for prohibition prepared by C.R. had been adopted by the Congress executive. Under this scheme every province would have a prohibition unit, attached to the provincial Congress Committee, and every taluk an organizer who would create anti-drink sabhas in towns and villages. A sabha could picket liquor shops or dissuade bidding at auctions where liquor vendors bought licences, and also sponsor healthy entertainment to draw off the tempted.

  Against liquor, C.R. drafted pledges, composed lyrics, designed a flag and arranged demonstrations. He trained a team and countered objectors. Political moderates, cautious about Congress, joined C.R. on the platform of the Prohibition League. He linked up with Lord Clwyd, the British temperance enthusiast, and welcomed to Madras ‘Pussyfoot’ Johnson, famed for his silent nocturnal raids on liquor joints in America.

  He brought out two magazines for the cause, Prohibition, the League’s quarterly, and Vimochanam (Release), a Tamil monthly. Though Vimochanam came out only ten times, it left a mark on Tamil journalism, presenting the poor man’s misery ‘vividly and with infinite pathos’ and becoming, at least for one reader, ‘the symbol of how large the human spirit could be, and how good.’19

  In his 1929 engagements diary, C.R. recorded the dates, places and serial numbers of his prohibition talks. There were 62 speeches in all, the last delivered by him as president of the Temperance Conference held along with the Lahore Congress of December 1929, which was chaired by Jawaharlal Nehru. Jawaharlal called C.R. ‘the unquestioned leader of the prohibition movement in India.’20

  The Raj blew hot and cold over prohibition. While a village munsiff in Salem district, accused of taking pledges against drink from ‘untouchables’, was suspended for a year, the Madras Government, pressed by public opinion; allotted Rs 5 lakhs for temperance education. Informing the Raj of his Ashram’s anti- liquor credentials, C.R. coolly asked for a share of this sum. Of course, he did not get it, and had not expected to.

  Late in 1929, however, Madras’s Excise Commissioner, E.B. Cotterell, visited the Ashram and recommended to Government the creation of a dry area around it. This had been C.R.’s demand for some time. The Government agreed to close 53 toddy and arrack shops in the Tiruchengode and Rasipuram taluks.

  The dry zone experiment lasted three years. The area’s ‘untouchables’, whom liquor had hit the hardest, were weaned. But by April 1933 all the shops that were closed down were reopened in retaliation for the civil disobedience that C.R. would lead in 1930 and 1932.

  Someone had written that Gandhi’s southern India collections had been made over to C.R. who was maintaining idle Brahmins with them. Seated on the veranda of his hut, C.R. was working on a suitable reply to the calumny when he was disturbed by a woman in rags. Crying ‘Swa-a-mi, my Swa-a-mi,’ the woman, clearly an ‘untouchable’, fell prostrate before him.

  C.R. thought she would beg. She did not. Her husband, she said, had borrowed five rupees from a moneylender, paid ten as interest, and died. Now the moneylender was threatening that if she did not return the five rupees he would break up her daughter’s wedding, to take place in a few days.

  ‘Go on with the wedding,’ C.R. told the woman. ‘If the moneylender interferes in any way, come and tell me at once. Do not fear.’ After the woman left, C.R. sent a warning that restrained the moneylender.

  He also tore up the article he was writing in self-defence. The libel against him, he wrote in Young India (11.7.29), was nothing against ‘the miseries of these defenceless people.’

  On occasion, however, he felt obliged ‘to sing my own heroism’ and to tackle those who charged that he was not going far enough in reform. In October 1929 he wrote:

  I claim to be a greater changer than many that now beat up a great deal of dust. I have been an out caste among my relations for the last twenty years. I have done and am doing things which my clamorous friends have not, I believe, in their own persons attempted.

  The lines occur in a postscript to a short story by him about the hazards of a ‘two-anna, two-minute’ court marriage. Reformism was tinged with caution. While agreeing that ‘to stand still is death; change alone is life,’ and ‘wanting Hindu marriage reform in many desirable respects,’ C.R. held out for ‘the continuance of the religious form,’ which made for ‘strength and durability in the marriage tie.’

  ‘I confess,’ he continued in the postscript, ‘that I have discovered in myself a strong element of Conservatism.’21

  On 31 October 1929 Lord Irwin announced that a Round Table Conference (RTC) of British and Indian statesmen on India’s future Constitution would take place in London, and conveyed what appeared to be a commitment from Britain:

  I am authorised on behalf of His Majesty’s Government to state clearly . . . that the natural issue of India’s constitutional progress . . . is the attainment of Dominion Status.

  Welcoming the Irwin declaration in a joint manifesto, Gandhi, Malaviya, Mrs Besant, Motilal Nehru and some others asked whether the proposed RTC would result in India acquiring Dominion Status. On 23 December, a few hours after escaping unhurt from a bomb explosion, Irwin informed the Mahatma and four others calling on him in Delhi that the promise sought could not be offered.

  The ball was back with Congress, now gathered in Lahore for its annual session.

  7

  Vedaranyam

  1929-31

  At the Lahore Congress, where a fight was in the air, C.R. watched with approval the return of the Mahatma as an active general and was pleased at the council-believers’ admission of failure. Jawaharlal, 40, presided.

  C.R. had wanted Gandhi to take the chair. However, resolved to give it to the younger Nehru, Gandhi turned down the idea. He also secured the withdrawal of Vallabhbhai, favoured by five oí the Provincial Congress Commitees. Conscious of Subhas Bose’s and Jawaharlal’s leftist inclinations, the Mahatma expected Nehru’s nomination to help Congress unity and to keep Jawaharlal in check.

  He extolled Jawaharlal’s qualities but added that youth had to let its energy ‘be imprisoned, controlled and set free in strictly measured’ quantities. And he assured the older men that a Congress President was ‘not an autocrat . . . He can no more impose his views on the people than the English King.’

  Moved by Gandhi, Lahore’s cardinal resolution defined the goal of Congress as complete independence, asked the Swarajists to resign their legislature seats, and authorized the AICC to launch civil disobedience when it thought fit. This was comfortably passed, but when Gandhi asked Congress to conngratulate Irwin on his escape and to appreciate the Viceroy’s efforts, Subhas Bose opposed him. Losing narrowly in a vote, Bose walked out and, with the support of Srinivasa Iyengar, formed the Congress Democratic Party.

  C.R. and Patel were lodged next to each other in tents. It was bitterly cold, especially for those from the South, but, as Sitaramayya would record, ‘the heat of passion and excitement, . . . the flushing of faces on hearing the beat of the war-drums, . . . was in marked contrast with the weather.’

  At midnight on New Year’s Eve, 300,000 men and women, including C.R. and his son Narasimhan, now twenty and a delegate from Tiruchengode, gathered on the banks of the Ravi to watch Jawaharlal hoist free India’s tricolour.

  Congress was to unleash an attack, but how? How would it sponsor nationwide disaffection against a system still extremely powerful, and keep the rising nonviolent? A new Working Committee, which included C.R. and Patel, considered the question and named Sunday 26 January as independence day. On that
date the people of India were asked to take a pledge which termed submission to alien rule ‘a crime against man and God.’

  In Wardha, on his way back from Lahore, C.R. said that India would shortly ‘pronounce talaq to Britain.’ He spoke also of ‘two great sins’ — one, ‘the Government’s sin,’ the sale of liquor, which made beasts of men, and the other, ‘the people’s sin,’ untouchability, which treated some as worse than beasts (The Hindu, 11. & 15.1.30).

  On 26 January, the appointed day, no speeches were made anywhere. This was in accordance with Gandhi’s instructions. The flag was hoisted, the pledge read out, and audiences asked to raise hands if they subscribed to it. Place upon place that Sunday morning was a forest of hands.

  The councillors were getting the message. Though a few Swarajists were hesitant still, 172 members of legislatures, including 30 at the centre, resigned by February.

  All over the South, C.R. drew huge crowds. He advised: ‘Do nothing wrong in the eyes of God, but resist injustice. Resist, not by bringing a heavy stick down on your opponent’s skull, but by suffering the penalties imposed by him for your resistance.’

  He ridiculed: ‘The British say, “Swaraj is good for us, not for you, and because you are so wicked as to ask for it, we must cure you by locking you up.” ’

  And he challenged: ‘The hour is struck for all of us to cast away our dearest attachments and to make a supreme effort again.’

  ‘We must all die, but let us not leave the struggle to our children,’ he said in Tiruppur; and in Salem in early February he spoke of freedom ‘in our lifetime.’1

  Gandhi, meanwhile, had been ‘furiously thinking’ for a plan of action. It had to be defiant and sacrifice-demanding to attract the ‘secret, silent, persevering band’ of young men lured by violence. It had to be nonviolent; he was sworn to the creed. And it had to be uncomplicated so that all freedom-desiring Indians could adopt it.2

  Suddenly it came to him: break the salt law. By taxing the manufacture and sale of salt the government was hurting ‘even the starving millions, the sick, the maimed and utterly helpless.’ To deny the Government this inhuman tax, the people, he felt, should make their own salt.

  Some like Jawaharlal were mystified by the choice of salt, but C.R. harboured no doubts. He told a big gathering in Sholapur:

  You may say, ‘Hello, this is a funny thing. All along he was telling that if we made khaddar we will get swaraj, now he says we must make salt also.’ Buying salt means accepting this government and owing allegiance to it. Making salt is refusing to owe allegiance to government.

  At Tuticorin he said:

  A people [who] rise in revolt . . . cannot attack the abstract constitution or lead an army against proclamations and statutes but have to capture a stronghold here, a stronghold there, seize an arsenal here and destroy a fortification there.

  As in armed conflicts, so also in civil resistance, you must give up the general and apply yourself to the particular. Civil disobedience has to directed against the salt tax or the land tax or some other particular point . . .

  Moreover, the salt tax was a cess on necessity, bloating the price of a gift of nature that should not cost more than ‘the cost of removal.’3 To no one’s surprise, Congress asked C.R. to organize disobedience in the Tamil country.

  The Mahatma moved. He wrote to the Viceroy, asking not for complete independence, not even for early Dominion Status, but simply for a repeal of the salt tax, adding that if the law was not reconsidered, he and his Ashram co-workers would break it.

  At Gandhi’s request, a young English Quaker called Reginald Reynolds, dressed in khadi, delivered the Mahatma’s letter at Viceroy’s House. This was Gandhi’s way of showing that his attack was aimed at British rule, not at Englishmen.

  The Viceroy’s four-line reply said that Gandhi was inviting ‘danger to the public peace.’ ‘On bended knees I asked for bread,’ the Mahatma commented, ‘and I have received stone instead.’ Gandhi added that it was his ‘sacred duty’ to break ‘the mournful monotony’ of the ‘prisonhouse peace’ that India enjoyed.

  He would perform this duty, Gandhi declared, by marching the 241 miles from his Ashram at Sabarmati to Dandi, a village on the West coast, and breaking the salt law there. He would take with him 78 colleagues, all ready for suffering and pledged to nonviolence.

  Early on 12 March, the Mahatma and his fellow-marchers prayed and set forth.

  So began what a Briton has called ‘the weirdest and most brilliant political challenge of modern times.’ Adds Geoffrey Ashe: ‘The English laughed, their Indian flatterers echoed them, the intellectuals of Congress were bewildered . . . and the great motionless crust of India began trembling.’4

  ‘It is not salt but disobedience that you are manufacturing,’ C.R. perceptively wrote to Gandhi (8.3.30)5.

  Adding that he had been considering a different focus for the South — liquor — C.R. raised with Gandhi the possibility of a dramatic ‘march from Cape Comorin to a single picketting centre, getting volunteers on the way.’ In the end, however, he conceded the advantage in ‘a unified attack all over India.’

  After touring the province ‘to see how the land lies,’ he announced (The Hindu, 18.3.30): ‘I have decided that we should start the campaign in this province on the salt issue.

  The crowds at C.R.’s meetings were unusually large and his speeches were going down very well, one in Madura producing, in The Hindu’s words, a ‘great impression on the public mind.’ (15.3.30)

  Before launching the southern campaign, he went to Gujarat for Congress meetings and to see the walking Mahatma. There were no waverers left in Congress. The response to Gandhi’s march had converted them. The satyagraha was ratified. Now it had to be spread. A pledge framed by C.R. for Tamil Nadu satyagrahis was circulated for use in other provinces. It said:

  I believe in nonviolence as an article of faith for the achievement of Swaraj . . . I shall patiently and willingly undergo all penalties including imprisonment . . . May God help me (The Hindu, 27.3.30).

  On 23 March C.R. joined the trekking Mahatma in the village of Buwa, north of the town of Broach and almost halfway to Dandi. C.R. was not sure that the Mahatma, at his age, would survive the physical exertion of the march and of the imprisonment that would follow. Fully expecting to earn a fair prison term himself, C.R. thought that this meeting with Gandhi in a rough hut in the hot hamlet of Buwa might prove to be his last. When it ended, C.R. found himself reluctant to leave.

  On 5 April the Mahatma reached Dandi with his followers and camped near the shore. Next morning, early, he bathed in the ocean, walked to where the salt lay thick and ‘scooped some of it up with his fingers’ and then he ‘straightened and held it over for all to see: the treasonable gift of God.’6

  Indians now knew what they should do — make, sell or buy salt illegally. In large numbers they proceeded to do so. The person who did not know what to do, to arrest Gandhi or to ‘ignore’ his defiance, was the Viceroy. Meanwhile revolt erupted in the far North and the deep South.

  A complacent Madras Government had informed Delhi that ‘very few people . . . seem to have definitely committed themselves to take part’ in C.R.’s march and that ‘the question of funds may prove an additional stumbling block.’7

  C.R. had decided that his marchers would walk about 150 miles from Trichy to a town on the Tanjore seaboard, Vedaranyam, which possessed convenient salt swamps and had a merchant called Vedaratnam Pillai who was willing to host a battle.

  Ten days before the march, the Tamil Nadu Congress Committee unanimously made C.R. its president. Though he had made it clear that only those ready for long prison terms, even for death, qualified to join, he had to turn down volunteers; the Raj’s assessment was wrong.

  The eventual regiment — the ‘hundred gems,’ as they came to be called — included a man from each Tamil district, seven youths resigning jobs in Bombay, eight from C.R.’s Ashram, an engineering college lecturer and a railway official, the last two als
o sacrificing their posts.

  Tanjore’s astute and energetic Collector, J.A. Thorne, promised the Raj an ‘ignominious failure’ of the march provided he was authorized to arrest all those feeding or housing the marchers for ‘harbouring criminals,’ and to arrest C.R. as soon as he entered the district. ‘I apprehend no great difficulty dealing with the sheep once their shepherd is gone,’ he wrote to Madras.8

  The Collector’s game plan was to cut off food and shelter for the marchers. ‘I shall take pains to see that they meet with increasing difficulties and discomforts,’ he asserted. If somehow they managed to reach Vedaranyam, there he would ‘prevent their getting accommodation.’

  Assessing C.R. as ‘probably the ablest and certainly one of the most intransigent’ of the South’s leaders, the Raj nonetheless reasoned that arresting C.R. before he violated any law would ‘confer on him the cheap martyrdom that he and Mr Gandhi desire.’9 But Thorne was authorized to arrest ‘harbourers.’

  His warning that ‘harbouring’ would invite a six-month sentence and a fine was carried on Tamil leaflets, declared by beat of drum and in the Press. Retorted C.R.: ‘The satyagrahis are prepared to lie under the sky or starve on Tanjore soil . . . We pursue our advertised plans’ (The Hindu, 11.4.30).

  Precisely at 5.00 a.m. on 13 April, the day of the Tamil New Year, a figure of medium height with a bald oval head, a staff in his right hand and a haversack across his shoulder, emerged outside a house in Trichy cantonment. He was joined on the road by 96 others who stood in rows of two, most of them in caps and holding staves. As they stood in silent prayer, C.R.’s daughter Lakshmi and another girl applied the vermillion mark of blessing and luck on each forehead.