There were tangible gains also. Apart from the salt compromise, these included a clarification that as long as the public was not coerced or obstructed, picketing would be allowed — ‘under the eye,’ as Sitaramayya would record, ‘of the very policeman who was till yesterday jumping upon [those picketing] like a wolf on a fold.’5 Also, all prisoners were to be released, apart from the Garhwalis who had disobeyed their officers in the NWFP and some men in Sholapur who had briefly ‘taken over’ the city. And the bans on Congress committees were to be lifted.
While acknowledging that ‘Swaraj was not won’ by the Pact, Gandhi felt that a ‘second door to Swaraj was opened’ by it.6
Congress met in Karachi in April. Following Gandhi’s advice, C.R. and his Working Committee colleagues elected Patel as President. Karachi ratified the truce and authorized Gandhi’s participation as Congress’s sole representative in the Round Table Conference scheduled in London for later in the year.
When C.R.’s name was missing from the Working Committee announced by Patel, some southern delegates publicly protested. Addressing one of them, Patel said: ‘I withdrew it on his behalf. I know Mr Rajagopalachari more than you do.’7 Vallabhbhai was implying that C.R. did not need the distinction of membership to assist the Working Committee.
C.R.’s stock was in fact high. In Masulipatam on the Telugu coast, where C.R. addressed ‘a vast gathering’ in June, Sitaramayya, a future President of Congress, said of C.R: ‘He is recognized by one and all to be the foremost of Gandhi’s lieutenants’ (The Hindu, 28.6.31).
At Vedaranyam, where residents now made their own salt, victory was celebrated. Pointing to an old woman who had brought food for the satyagrahis a year earlier and whose pot had been seized by the police, C.R. said: ‘Today she comes again with joy and pride . . . We have won the battle’ (The Hindu, 3.6.31).
For a short while after the truce it almost seemed as if Congress had obtained a say in the Government, and in a letter to the Mahatma, C.R. even spoke of a ‘Gandhi-Irwin Pact administration.’8
Senior officials showed a new courtesy. When C.R., who had resumed the presidentship of the TNCC, complained to the Madras Chief Secretary that mail addressed to the party office was being censored and delayed, Cotton, the province’s top civilian, answered the letter the day after receiving it, signing himself — to the previous year’s ‘notorious agitator’ — ‘I have the honour to be, sir, your obedient servant,’ and stating that the complaint ‘will be enquired into.’9
In July 1931 the Madras Government indicated that it would view favourably a plea for reduced taxes from small landholders affected by a fall in agricultural prices. When C.R. argued that the distance of 100 to 150 yards that picketers of liquor and foreign-cloth shops in Tanjore were being asked to keep was unreasonable, the Collector of Tanjore agreed not to enforce it.
Yet C.R.’s hope of an emerging Raj-Congress partnership that might lead to a transfer of power proved to be illusory. Powerful segments of the Raj resented the Pact and regarded it as a blunder. They received full support from Irwin’s successor as Viceroy, Lord Willingdon.
Encouraged by his outlook, officials tried to rescue the Raj from the implications of the Pact. The Collector of Madras, a man called A.R. Cox, assailed picketing. Said C.R.:
If Mr A.R. Cox had been Viceroy of India, he would never have signed the Gandhi-Irwin settlement and permitted picketing, . . . however peaceful it might be promised to be. But Mr Cox is not Viceroy, he is only Collector of Madras, a responsible subordinate administrator (The Hindu, 21.7.31).
After Cotton, the Chief Secretary, died at his post, C.R. felt, as he wrote to Gandhi, that the successor seemed ‘determined to put me down’ and ‘push all representations on behalf of the Congress to the district magistrates.’10
The Excise Commissioner of Madras claimed that the unaggressive picketing allowed by the Pact could not include the picketing of auctions where the Government sold licences for liquor vendors. C.R. challenged this interpretation and, before the Government backed down, asked the public to defy it. Gandhi conveyed C.R.’s protest to the Government of India, which advised Madras to yield.
At lower levels, village headmen were warned against giving ‘lodging and food and other conveniences to Congress volunteers who come to picket toddy and arrack shops in the villages,’ because ‘it has come to our notice that by reason of this . . . shopkeepers have no sales.’11
When liquor vendors tried to defeat picketing by selling outside the prescribed hours and at places other than their stalls, officials connived at the illegalities. But picketing was winning the day. A single volunteer, national flag in hand, could stop sales at a liquor shop merely by standing near it.
In June, C.R., with a sense of triumph, wrote to his friend ‘Pussyfoot’ Johnson of ‘desolate public houses, mere ghosts of their former selves.’ ‘Tavern after tavern [is] being abandoned,’ he informed Mary Campbell, an American missionary and temperance worker.12
Despite the Government’s auctioneering, about 3,000 out of the 9,000 liquor licences in the presidency were still unsold in September 1931. Against an estimated Rs 150 lakhs, liquor licences fetched only Rs 50 lakhs in 1931.
Yet C.R. did not merely want shrunken drink revenues and deserted liquor stalls. He wanted these without disorder or violence. Firm with his own side, he instructed picketers to ask for Swaraj but, in view of the truce, not attack the Government; to boycott foreign cloth, ‘German and Italian’ as well as British, and not British goods as such; and ‘whenever there is a doubt’ as to the rules of peaceful picketing, to ‘err in favour of the Government.’13
In the Congress leadership there was none keener than C.R. to work the Pact, which to him was an example of ‘what two God-fearing men could achieve though history places them in opposite camps.’14
But Willingdon was different. Enjoying the company of Indian princes but disliking Gandhi and the Congress, he seemed determined to stamp out what he felt the Pact had condoned: the mentality of disobedience.
By August Congress had lost faith in the Raj’s sincerity towards the Pact. Its experience in Gujarat contributed to the disillusionment. Hardship was in store for the peasants there who had withheld taxes during the struggle and whose lands had been seized.
In many cases seized fields had been sold by Government to third parties. Original owners sought the help of officials in negotiations to buy back their lands. This was denied. C.R. charged: ‘Not only is there no assistance from officers, but actually incitement is offered to resist negotiations’ (The Hindu, 17.4.31).
With the truce crumbling, the Mahatma wondered whether there was any point in his attending the Round Table Conference (RTC) in London, the more so since Willingdon had vetoed the participation of Dr M.A. Ansari, who headed the Nationalist Muslims. Irwin had earlier said that Ansari could join.
Anxious that Gandhi ‘goes to the London conference with the Hindu-Muslim problem solved,’ C.R. had advised: ‘If the Mussalman community wants protection, the Hindus must give all that is demanded’ (The Hindu, 20.4.31). What, prodded by C.R., Congress offered was rejected by Muslim leaders like Jinnah.
Nonetheless, and despite the enfeebled truce, C.R. saw merit in Gandhi going, if only to influence the British public. At talks in Simla, Gandhi found the Viceroy ‘bereft of all grace.’15 Willingdon offered nothing beyond a small concession over an inquiry on the treatment of the Gujarat peasants.
Even so Gandhi agreed to sail for London. He would woo the people of England. Many assumed that he would take C.R. with him. But the Mahatma wanted C.R. to serve from India. In a letter to C.R. he said (28.8.31):
There are two men whom I would like by my side in London, you and Jawaharlal. But I feel that even if both of you were available I must not have you by me. You will both help me like the others by being here. Only, your presence with me would have lightened my burden.16
Young India was once more placed in the care of C.R., who was asked to assume the title of editor i
f absence from India disqualified Gandhi. Significantly, Gandhi also instructed that if ‘opinion among our own coterie differs, C.R.’s should be the final voice.’17 C.R. received a letter (30.8.31) from Patel, the Congress President:
Bapu has gone and I feel so terribly lonely that I don’t know what to do. In his absence the burden of carrying on negotiations with Government . . . falls on me and I am so ill- equipped for that kind of work that the burden is too much for me.
I suggested [to Bapu] that if you could stay with me for the short period of his absence from India, it would be a great relief. He agreed with me, but was in doubt about your being able to leave your province, but asked me to write to you about it.18
C.R. felt unable to act as requested. Picketing had spread all over his province. Without vigilance it could easily slide into disorder. Also, he had his daughter Namagiri, who was ill with lung and nervous ailments, to look after; in July he had fetched her from Rangoon. He wrote to Patel:
Just like the province I am in charge of, my family also has no second-in-command. You must not be angry with me but forgive.19
He looked after Young India, and carried on tussles with the Raj, from his Ashram. When the salt concession was suddenly withdrawn from two taluks of Ramnad district on an allegation of ‘extensive removals of large quantities of salt to distant places,’ he demanded to know why the public had been denied a chance to disprove the charge.20
And he prepared a prohibition manual for Congress and a drama on drink, censured a temple that had leased its trees for tapping toddy, attacked the devadasi custom (‘I detest the practice of attaching woman servants to temples, pledged to, celibacy, who have become by accepted practice prostitutes’21), and shot arrows at untouchability.
In June 1931 he joined in a demand that ‘at least . . . all streets, places of worship and sources of drinking water’ be opened to ‘the so-called untouchable castes.’22 And in December he went to Guruvayur in the Malayalam country to assist a non- violent bid to open for all the doors of its famed temple, closed for centuries to the ‘untouchables.’
To a proposal for a postponement of the battle against untouchability until freedom was achieved, C.R. replied:
I would like to know if any persons quarrelling over the ownership or enjoyment of any piece of land would postpone their suit until the Swaraj fight is finished.23
Tamil Nadu responded to C.R.’s leadership with discipline. There were virtually no incidents of which the Raj could complain. In Madura, in October, picketers were hit by lathis. To prove that the assaulted volunteers had kept to the agreed code, C.R. at once proposed an inquiry by Robert Foulkes, an English resident of Madura.
Simultaneously, he wrote to Vaidyanatha Iyer, president of the Madura district Congress committee:
The men in Madura, I fear, do not know how to do a thing quietly . . . I fear you must have started with a flare of trumpets. I wonder if you did not have a procession and shouts and demonstration (The Hindu, 7.10.31).
The letter to Iyer and the offer of arbitration by Foulkes were published in the Press. When Iyer protested, C.R. explained that he had raised his ‘severe’ questions in order to obtain ‘a conclusive denial.’24 The Raj rejected the offer relating to Foulkes. To C.R., and many others in the province, this was proof that his picketing volunteers had been wrongfully beaten.
C.R. was proud of their type. They were, in his words, ‘mostly poor workmen’ who ‘get nothing out of this . . . and are not paid salaries.’ With ‘every kind of corrupt influence and temptation around them, no one,’ said C.R. ‘dare utter the calumny that they have been bribed or corrupted’ (The Hindu, 29.8.31).
In a letter he sent to the editors of the South in November 1931, C.R. claimed that the Congress movement was ‘stronger in our province now than anywhere else in India.’25
The RTC failed as expected. Indian divisions were magnified at it. The British Press portrayed the Mahatma as a caste Hindu leader who could not speak for Muslims or the ‘untouchables’.
Ambedkar demanded separate electorates for the ‘untouchables’. Claiming that such a move would split Hindu society and solidify prejudice, Gandhi said he would resist it with his life.
Several seas away, C.R. wrote that Ambedkar’s demand was the ‘most unkindest cut of all,’ adding, ‘Well might our Caesar cry, “Et tu, Brute,” and his mighty heart burst in grief at this’ (The Hindu, 17.10.31).
British elections held while the RTC was on made the Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald, Premier once more but heading a coalition where Conservatives were powerful. C.R., who had speculated whether Irwin would be made Secretary of State for India (he was not), wrote:
I do not think it matters what British Cabinet is in power. The conflict is British interests against Indian interests . . . The British occupation came and developed uniformly under all parties. The retirement must also be [of] the same sort (The Hindu, 25.8.31).
Before the RTC dissolved, C.R. wrote: ‘Whatever might happen, Mahatmaji’s visit to England will not have been a waste’ (The Hindu, 17.10.31). The effort was not in fact wasted. Independently of the conference at St. James’s Palace, Gandhi held a dialogue with the people of England, meeting them in an unending sequence of gatherings, visiting them in their homes, and getting through to a large number. Even in Lancashire, hurt by the Indian boycott, there were cheers for him.
In November 1931, Patel led a move to make C.R. Congress President. ‘It is your turn this time,’ he wrote to C.R., adding, ‘You must be prepared to bear the burden.’26 C.R. said that Gandhi should combine the de facto and de jure positions and take the chair. When he found that Gandhi was opposed to this, C.R. proposed Prasad’s name. A diffident Prasad wrote to C.R.:
I really feel that we have very difficult times ahead and we want a man at the helm of affairs who will not waver or falter. I do not find that I can do it and am anxious to serve under another like you.27
The TNCC proposed C.R.’s name. The session was due to be held in Puri in Orissa, where too the provincial Congress committee recommended C.R.’s election. Discouraging the idea, C.R. said he felt disqualified ‘on account of my ignorance of Hindi.’28 Moreover, Gandhi had not asked him to preside.
Willingdon saved Gandhi the task of choosing. The Puri convention was not held, and it was not until October 1934 that a Congress session was again allowed. By Gandhi’s choice, it was chaired by Prasad.
To return, however, to the end of 1931: the Indian scene had worsened during Gandhi’s absence. In Bengal there was a sequence of repression and violence. In the UP it looked as if a ‘no rent’ campaign would start. In the NWFP there were restrictions on Ghaffar Khan and his brother. Finding the Gujarat inquiry one-sided and superficial, Patel broke off from it.
The spirit of the Pact was dead. Willingdon and Willingdonites were in control. As C.R. wrote to Patel: ‘All over, Government has tightened the reins or rather let go the reins and have asked officials to do whatever they like.’29
C.R. disfavoured the ‘no rent’ campaign in the U.P. and opposed the terrorist methods used in Bengal by some of the Raj’s foes. But the repression that India was soon to experience was wholly out of proportion to Congress indiscretions or excesses in Bengal.
Even while Gandhi, returning, was on the high seas, Ghaffar Khan and Jawaharlal Nehru were arrested. Ordinances virtually ending civil liberties were imposed in the NWFP and the UP.
Along with Kasturba and Patel, C.R. went to the Pilsna that brought Gandhi to Bombay and gave him the news. Immense crowds welcomed Gandhi back but his days of freedom were numbered.
Swift and sharp the blows fell. The Mahatma was arrested before dawn on 4 January. After a few hours Patel and the Working Committee were taken. C.R. was not a member but would not wait long.
With a series of ordinances the Government sought to silence all opposition. Congress organizations were banned. Meetings were forbidden. Press censorship was imposed.
India hit back. Thousands defied the ordi
nances; by the end of February 1932, the 1930 figure of political imprisonments had been crossed. The lock had replaced the Pact.
For all concerned, including the Mahatma and C.R., the six-day interval in Bombay between Gandhi’s return and his arrest had been fateful, exacting and void of leisure. But in it time had been found for the two friends to reach a decision on the future of Devadas and Lakshmi.
The young persons had now waited for more than four years. During this period they had faithfully observed the conditions of no meetings and no letters. Gandhi and C.R. agreed to permit and bless their marriage. But wedding day was distant yet. Lakshmi and Devadas would not marry while their fathers were in prison, and in any case Devadas was soon to be arrested himself.
On 9 January 1932, C.R. courted arrest. Accompanied by S. Satyamurti, he cruised slowly in a taxi along crowded streets in Madras and distributed a Tamil leaflet, The Satyagraha Fight. As the leaflet called for a boycott of foreign cloth, C.R. was violating Ordinance V of 1932, which prohibited picketing and ‘molestation.’
When a police inspector asked C.R. what he was doing, C.R. handed him a copy of the leaflet. Four vans filled with police emerged. One of them blocked C.R.’s taxi, and C.R. was told that he and Satyamurti were under arrest. After they were removed, police dispersed the crowds that had gathered by opening a water-hose on them — a tanker too had been brought on the scene.
Two days later C.R. and Satyamurti were tried. In his statement to the court C.R. said:
I molested no one and loitered nowhere. I did distribute handbills asking the public not to help economic exploitation by a power that refuses us our national right to rule ourselves.
He was sentenced for six months. Over a thousand Tamils followed him and Satyamurti into prison.
Lodged, to begin with, in the Madras Penitentiary, C.R. found that the jail officials had a harsher spirit than what he had previously encountered. Soon, however, he was shifted to Vellore — his third sojourn there.
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