Rajaji

by Rajmohan Gandhi

  That Linlithgow’s views were not very different is suggested by his assurance to the King, quoted earlier, that Congress was being denied any ‘understanding . . . that India will be given independence at the conclusion of the war.’

  Its demands rejected, Congress had to choose between losing power in the provinces and losing prestige at the grassroots, where Indian freedom seemed to matter more than the War in Europe. It was not a difficult decision. The War and its emergency provisions were reducing Ministers to the status of the Raj’s civil servants. If they did not arrest any Congressmen criticizing the War, the Governor, it was clear, would have them arrested anyway.

  The Congress Working Committee decided that the Ministries should go. According to V.P. Menon — whose drafting and administrative skills were used by the Raj and later by the government of free India and who chronicled the transfer of power — the resignation of eight Congress Ministries helped create ‘a conviction among the British that the Hindus were their irreconcilable enemies’ and paved the way for partition.17

  Before the resignation, Akbar Hydari, ICS, had privately remarked that his British colleagues were happy that the Congress Ministries were likely to be asked to go. When this word was conveyed to Nehru, the latter exploded. ‘It is none of Hydari’s business,’ said Nehru, ‘what we should decide in the Working Committee. I am going to pull out all the Ministries.’18

  The Congress withdrawal gave Jinnah a large opening. In celebration he announced a Deliverance Day. In the period that followed, the Muslim League gained in strength. Yet Congress could not have sustained a wartime partnership with the Raj without some progress towards Indian liberty. It would have been savaged as a toady party.

  The Working Committee resolution asking the Ministries to resign was, in Gandhi’s words, ‘studiedly moderate.’ It left open the door for negotiations with the Raj.

  E.V.R., the Justice Party and M.C. Rajah declared their unequivocal support for the War. But the public in Madras seemed solidly with C.R. Held at this juncture, district board elections across the Presidency went resoundingly in Congress’s favour.

  On 25 October C.R. spoke engagingly to students of Queen Mary’s College for Women. The next day he moved a resolution in the Assembly calling upon his Ministry to resign.

  The opposition criticized scathingly. The Congress did not speak for all India, said the Kumararajah. Langley attacked the summoning of the House ‘merely for registering the fiat of a caucus sitting behind closed doors in Wardha.’ Pannirselvam claimed that Congress did not represent Muslims, Christians or the Scheduled Castes. In any case, he said, ‘I have no inclination to be troubled with India. I care for my own country — and that is the Dravida Land.’

  The League MLAs were equally critical, but two independent Muslims acknowledged C.R.’s justice during his tenure, and another independent, G. Krishna Rao, said that the Ministry had protected minorities and should not go. Krishnamachari quoted the remark of Zetland, the Secretary of State, that the Madras Ministry had shown ‘grit and ability to rule.’

  ‘Thank God we have not done worse than we have,’ said C.R. in his reply, which moved beyond modesty to become a classic farewell to power as well as a text for Congress’s response to Hitler’s war against India’s rulers. Several passages deserve reproduction:

  We have tried to be just. We have tried to be careful. We have tried to set aside partisan claims of all kinds. So far as our own conscience goes, our work has been satisfactory.

  What the Muslim League says is that the minorities can only be protected by the standing army of a foreign government . . . Do I not know Mr Jinnah? Do I not know the innermost ambition of his heart that India should be free? But . . . to say, ‘Let England be always here,’ is a terrible conclusion to which this Assembly cannot possibly be a party.

  Honourable Members of the Opposition, one after another, stated, ‘Congress does not represent the people of the whole of India. This all-inclusive claim should be rejected.’ I say, why reject it? Cannot one man speak on behalf of India if he speaks rightly and truly? . . .

  The British are a democratically governed people. But they are an imperialist people . . . They do not want any other people to rule over them, but the Secretary of State is to govern India. One man is to govern India.

  Mr Langley . . . appealed to our sense of right, a very proper thing to do. He said, ‘This war is a good war. Mahatmaji has said so’. . . . But one step more is wanted, that is, we should join.

  Has [America] joined the war? No. ‘Cash and carry’—that is their formula . . . A great people, who went to civil war for the sake of the liberation of the slaves, . . . a people with a very keen sense of duty — did these people join the War? . . .

  Do we say anything so bad as ‘cash and carry’? No. We say, ‘Let us go not at the end of a leash but as a free people.’

  In the statements with which England went to war, it was stated that the world should be free; . . . that they are attacking Germany . . . because they wanted to defend liberty against aggression. Naturally, the people of India began to ask themselves, ‘Is this liberty only for Europe, for the small peoples of Europe, or is it also for the large and ancient people who have been in this land for thousands of years and who have been in friendship with Britain?’

  We could have had swaraj in the palm of our hand if the Muslim League had played the game. If it be necessary, we could even have fought afterwards among ourselves. If we had asked for that which belongs to India together, we could have got it.

  Sir, . . . We go away. We cannot confer any further benefits on the people of this country through this Assembly and through the Government. [Let] all Members say that the people of India should govern themselves in a democratic manner.

  I am too wise a politician to imagine that my advocacy will prevail. Still, every man should make his attempt . . . At least a few Members of the Opposition will vote with me, I think.

  The British had questioned, said C.R., India’s fitness for freedom. Assuming India had weaknesses, what was England’s wish? Accusing England of not declaring ‘your own desire in the matter,’ C.R. went on to quote from ‘the greatest of the plays of the greatest of poets,’ Lear:

  The eldest daughter said to the king, ‘I love you more than words can wield the matter; dearer than eyesight, space and liberty.’ Lear was pleased and said, ‘Take this vast portion of my kingdom.’ The next girl said she loved him even more; she also got an ample share.

  But the third said, ‘I love you as I should, neither more nor less. I cannot give away all my love to you. I have got to keep a portion of it for my future husband.’ Lear got angry . . .

  Congress cannot give all its love to Britain. It must reserve that which is India’s share.

  Was it reasonable to expect Britain to give India freedom at a time like this?

  Let me pause and ask, Sir, could there have been a more favourable occasion? The whole country (Britain) is moved, to a man . . . England has been asked, all the men, women and children, to think about fundamentals. It is the most appropriate time for thinking about India also.

  Admitting that Congress could be asked, ‘Is Hitler better? Are you not helping him?’ C.R. said:

  It is a very difficult question to answer. But you (Britain) are responsible. You have made India noncooperate.

  Referring to, the new measures his Ministry had plannned, including ‘a law laying down anew the relationship between the Zamindars and the tenants,’ and the ‘many things which yet remain to be done,’ he said:

  The house was bedecked. The bride was to come in. But no, we say suddenly. The pandal is to be pulled down. The festivity is to be postponed.19

  Muthiah Chettiar called it ‘a very eloquent’ address. Pannirselvam said it was ‘one of the most marvellous speeches I have ever been privileged to listen to.’ Krishnamachari thought it the Premier’s best performance in the House.20 Yet it added only a handful of opposition votes to Congress’s large majority.
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br />   On 30 October C.R. resigned. Section 93 was invoked, and Erskine commenced his long-hoped-for rule with the help of advisers.

  Though resignation was, to C.R., right and necessary, the fact was that Hitler had ruined his show, and the Raj’s rigidity prevented its salvage. Day, who went to C.R. ‘on the day the Ministry resigned . . . to collect the despatch box keys from him,’ found him ‘very angry and bitterly disappointed . . . at being diverted’ from the ‘vast amount of work waiting to be done, which he was able and willling to do.’21 However, a reporter saw the Premier cheerfully signing certificates for his drivers, clerks and peons, and noticed that C.R.’s table was clear, with files and the despatch box gone (The Hindu, 31.10.39).

  As Premier and administrator, C.R. had his defects. Early in their relationship, Erskine noticed an element of unrealism when C.R. exhorted Indian members of the Raj’s services to forgo a slice of their pay. The appeal was rejected, and C.R. learned not to be starry-eyed. There was some justice, secondly, in a comment by the writer C.R. Srinivasan that C.R. ‘should take a longer view of things’ and ‘relieve himself from routine work’ (The Hindu, 24.1.38).

  With his itchy pen, C.R. gave more attention than a Premier should to the correcting of drafts, though the process did not take much of his time; and Srinivasa Sastri for one felt that C.R. accepted unnecessary speaking engagments: ‘He must pour out his mind on every occasion, great and small.’22

  A tendency to act impulsively was another weakness. An emotion or a brainwave could dictate his position, as happened over Hindi. Also, he encroached on the roles of his Cabinet colleagues, answering questions addressed to them in the legislature, or taking over some of their work. Proceedings of the Assembly sometimes give the impression that the portfolios of education, prohibition and agriculture — assigned, we know, to others — were also his.

  The Premier’s office, where the Cabinet conferred, was referred to by some Ministers as C.R.’s classroom. The line between supervision and takeover was inevitably thin — we saw earlier that C.R. had admitted to the Mahatma that it was in his nature to mind others’ portfolios.

  This weakness was an extension of C.R.’s gifted mind. As Krishnamachari would say, C.R. ‘thought at least three steps ahead of anyone else.’23 Knowing that his answers would be more effective, C.R. had no hesitation in rising in a colleague’s place. While his centrality brightened Assembly proceedings and stabilized the secretariat, it reduced the opportunities his colleagues had to learn, grow or shine.

  C.R. ‘honestly believes,’ Pannirselvam said during a debate over Hindi, ‘that what he has set his mind upon is the will of the country,’ and Krishnamachari spoke of the Premier’s ‘overpowering personality.’24 Controlling others was far from his desire, but he could be obstinate. ‘Rajaji will not take advice, though he willl listen to you with the utmost courtesy,’ said Sastri at the time.25

  Refusing to incorporate a conscience clause in his Hindustani policy or to consign Section 7 to limbo, he lost ways of weakening the agitation against him. His contempt for escape- doors was not always wise.

  Believing that it was vanity to pay attention to one’s image, he took no steps to prevent some avoidable misunderstandings. Thus, many in the Telugu region continued to think erroneously that he was against a separate Andhra; and some radicals retained a sense that he was overgenerous with the British and unduly attached to their procedures. Jawaharlal, for instance, expressed an opinion that the Presidency’s administration was ‘perilously like the old Government.’26

  When he made the remark, Nehru could not have known that some, though not all, of the British officials thought that C.R.’s blind spot was his inability in any circumstances to condone the use of force. According to Day, C.R. was ‘sometimes induced to go some way towards exonerating the police, but never the whole way.’27 Congress radicals and the Raj’s officials were bound to differ over law and order; C.R. differed from both.

  As for his strengths, we have already noted his capacity for work, incorruptibility, intellectual brilliance, debating skill and vigilance over public spending. He was also a firm leader. In Day’s words: ‘The Prime Minister was emphatically the head of the administration. None of us could have any doubts about that.’28

  If C.R. sought to assert the autonomy of the Congress vis- a-vis the Raj, he did the same for the province vis-a-vis New Delhi, and his Ministry vis-a-vis the Congress or any supposed trend of other Congress Ministries. We saw his lack of enthusiasm for conferences of Congress Premiers convened by the party president. When he was asked in the Assembly, ‘Do you know that the (Congress-run) C.P. Government has repealed the Criminal Law Amendment Act?’ he coolly replied: ‘The question should be put to the C.P. Assembly.’29

  F.W.A. Morris, chosen to implement the sales tax law, noticed other qualities: ‘absolute courtesy, patience and friendliness’ towards civil servants, an ‘ability to listen to a complicated exposition of intricate details, seldom if ever asking for a repetition of a point,’ and the communication straightaway of ‘a clear and unambiguous decision.’30

  He was helped, too, by a healthy unconcern regarding his Ministry’s life and by his awareness that it would go out the moment a serious Congress-Raj breach occurred. As he told the Assembly in 1938, he was ‘ready to retire the next morning if necessary.’31

  If his administration was firm, it was also ready to learn. Thus, acceptance of the Horwill report was followed at once by a detailed statement, unusual by the standards of a later era, in which the government admitted inadequacies in its methods of riot-control, regretted that tear gas had not been used in Chirala, conceded that if the union leader had been sent for in time tempers might have subsided, and spelt out new guidelines for its officers (The Hindu, 19.4.38).

  Again, the inflexibility that some noted in him was not accompanied by intolerance. He asked Congress MLAs to.be brief when they spoke in the Assembly and to hear out attacks on the Ministry. Muthiah Chettiar, the Opposition leader, would recall, ‘Though [C.R.] had a comfortable majority, . . . he welcomed the criticisms of the opposition and gave them a patient hearing.’32

  Racially, too, as over politics and the Hindu-Muslim question, C.R. revealed a refreshing freedom from narrowness. Asked in May 1939 why a European had been appointed Presidency Magistrate, C.R. replied that he was ‘the most suitable person.’ ‘Government deprecate,’ the Premier added, ‘reference to the race of the officer in this or any other case.’33

  Despite his thin frame, dark glasses, austere bearing and zeal for causes like prohibition, C.R. possessed human qualities to which officials responded. He saw and made jokes. He forgot the not-so-distant past of prison-going. He put himself in the shoes of the officials he was with, whether they were veterans or trainees. They found him winningly modest as well as strong.

  After his first encounter with C.R. in a small district town, J.F. Saunders was ‘definitely a C.R. Fan,’ as he would afterwards recall. He was ‘graceful’ and ‘courteous’ to Morris, ‘a very lovable character’ to Day, and an object of ‘respect and affection’ to Indian ICS officers like Abbas Khaleeli, who later served in Pakistan, and P.A. Menon, a future ambassador to Germany.34

  Jack Munro’s response has been referred to earlier. Peter Crombie, who first met the Premier as Revenue Divisional Officer, Malappuram, would recall:

  Although he was already over an hour late on a very heavy official tour, he insisted on receiving me immediately and having half-an-hour’s private chat not only on the welfare of the people of the area (who were largely Moplah) but also my own reactions to the life of a young I.C.S. officer in the country . . . No wonder we loved to serve under him.35

  It is unlikely that the Mahatma knew in any detail of the impact C.R. had made on officials. But he had assessed that ‘like a satyagrahi’ C.R. was ‘winning victories without bluster, without wrangling but by conversion, by carrying conviction’ (Harijan, 10.9.38). C.R. himself once said in the Assembly: ‘I am a satyagrahi, using the we
apon of nonviolence even inside the government.’36

  Hostile, at this juncture, to the 1935 Act and unenthused by the Rajaji Ministry, Jawaharlal would, in time, alter his assessment of both. Shortly after independence, he told the Tory leader, R.A. Butler, that the Act ‘proved to be the organic connecting- link between the old and the new.’37 And about the C.R. Ministry he wrote in 1941: ‘It might be said that the Madras Government did more during its brief career than any other provincial government.’38

  Krishnamachari would describe the C.R. administration as ‘a model provincial government.’39 Recalling C.R.’s 1937-9 performance, K. Kamaraj, an MLA at the time, Chief Minister from 1954 to 1962, and later, as Congress President, largely responsible for the choice of two Prime Ministers of India, would speak of C.R. as ‘the greatest Chief Minister’ the southern province had had.40

  13

  Cogitation

  1939-41

  Though beginning to lean on a stick while walking, C.R. was fit at 61 and now had leisure for things he could not do as Premier. He worked on a new edition of his commentary on the Upanishads and resumed spinning. The peons returned to Fort St. George. The car was surrendered.

  There was an immediate need to cut expenses. Though the Assembly had not been dissolved and C.R. was entitled to an MLA’s emoluments, he had forsaken these. His capital consisted of what had remained of the Salem earnings and a bit saved out of the Premier’s salary. Interest on this, a monthly rent of Rs 75 from the Salem house, and royalties, as yet meagre, from his writings made up a small income that just about met the needs of C.R.’s household.