Rajaji

by Rajmohan Gandhi

  Problems of succession and partition claiming priority, the ministerial work of C.R. and his colleagues inevitably suffered. In C.R.’s case, the position was made more difficult by changes in his portfolio. After shifting from Industry to Education when the League came in, he reverted to Industry and Supplies when Asaf Ali was sent as Ambassador to the USA and Azad, replacing Ali, desired Education.

  Within days of assuming office, C.R. called upon scientists working for the government and civil servants not to ‘subordinate themselves to the whims and fancies of politicians, however illustrious they may be’ (Hindustan Times, 18.9.46). Dharma Vira, then a young official and later Governor of West Bengal, would recall:

  With his pleasant, paternalistic manners he put me at ease . . . He encouraged his officers to express their views fearlessly and if he did not agree with them he did not try to coerce or browbeat them but convinced them through discussion and reasoning.25

  Most Britons in the Indian administration were now leaving. C.R. tried without success to convince a few that ‘there would still be a career’ for them in India. W.G. Lamarque, a district officer in the South during the Rajaji Ministry and now a deputy secretary in New Delhi, was one of them:

  I had a long talk with my Minister C. Rajagopalachari, wisest and kindliest of Indian statesmen. He strongly advised me to stay . . . I replied with complete honesty that if it was just a question of continuing to work for him, I would readily stay, but that one day there would arise a new king, which knew not Joseph, and then my future would be uncertain.26

  Education was in C.R.’s care for just over two months: he had no time to do much for it. He hoped that schools might ‘introduce song and dance’ into children’s lives (Hindustan Times, 10.1.47) and felt that university education in Indian languages was quite feasible. To his Clive Road neighbour, the civil servant B.K. Nehru, who had pleaded for high-quality schools for talented children, C.R. replied:

  You want, young man, a new Brahminism. This country will not take it. It wants equality, not excellence.27

  As Minister of Supplies, he held charge of controls over the distribution of some commodities, necessitated by the War. He disliked them. While conceding that controls did not ‘convert an orthodox democracy into a Communist or Nazi state,’ he felt that giving to some ‘the exclusive right of dealing in certain articles’ was ‘a monopoly system’ and ‘merely another form of patronage.’ It was a view he would stress forcefully — and in opposition to Nehru — in the sixties.

  He thought foreign capital needed regulation but ‘a total ban could not be accepted,’ for ‘narrow nationalism’ was out of date. Nationalization was ‘not practicable at the present time’; if carried out later, ‘compensation will go along with it.’28

  Besides Industry, C.R. was responsible for Science and Technology. Anticipating future innovations, C.R. argued for adopting a decimal system, the metre instead of the yard, and the kilogram rather than the pound. Money was sanctioned for six national laboratories; the Indian Standards Institute was launched; and a Board of Atomic Research was formed, with Homi Bhabha as chairman. But C.R. disavowed any attempt towards an atomic bomb.

  The opening signature in the Book of Members of the Constituent Assembly is that of C.R., who was elected to the body by the Madras Assembly. But the ministerial offices he held and the positions he occupied later prevented any substantial role by C.R. in the Constituent Assembly’s deliberations.

  In the Central Assembly, which he faced as a Minister, he was helped by his clear voice. ‘Mr Rajagopalachari has the best microphone voice on the Government benches,’ observed the Hindustan Times on 13.4.47, adding, ‘He particularly shines in answering supplementaries.’

  Invitations to inaugurate a conference or deliver a talk poured in at a great rate. C.R. accepted many of them. His enjoyment of speaking — and capacity to give pleasure and illuminate — was undiminished.

  In December 1946 there was a blow. His second son Ramaswami, a doctor, died in a Madras hospital at the age of 43. Namagiri heard her father sobbing in the bathroom after he had received the news. The death of Ramaswami, of whom he was very fond, added to C.R.’s responsibilities. Along with her five children, his widow Thangam joined Namagiri and Narasimhan as part of C.R.’s household.

  In childlike phrases C.R. gave expression to his thrill on the day of freedom (Hindustan Times, 15.8.47):

  The independence of India is a settled fact! I have seen it with my own eyes! I wish I were young again.

  His dream, first dreamt unshaped in the nineties of the previous century, was being fulfilled. Vindication made C.R.’s joy doubly sweet — the 1947 transfer of power seemed based on his 1942 proposals, which at that time had been termed traitorous. To his old friend Rama Rao, C.R. wrote (8.6.47):

  A great incubus is off India’s chest. Yet it is what I asked them to do . . . I find a mischievous pleasure in watching and enjoying my colleagues’ studied silence on the subject. Vanity all over.

  As 15 August approached, joy was overlaid with terrible pain and fear in many Indians and soon-to-be Pakistanis. Millions were uprooted, and a great many — Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs — were slain.

  With the League’s Ministers leaving for Pakistan, the Cabinet had to be formed afresh. Also, many British Governors were returning home and needed to be replaced. Nehru and Patel made most of the selections, seeking Gandhi’s advice at times but also often consulting C.R.

  On 30 July 1947 Patel and C.R. were discussing the importance of Bengal, which needed a new Governor, and recalling the Great Calcutta Killing of August 1946, when, unexpectedly, the Sardar said to C.R.: ‘You should handle Bengal. You are one of the few who can.’29 Patel also said that Nehru and the Mahatma agreed with him, and that West Bengal’s Chief Minister, Prafulla Chandra Ghosh, wanted C.R. in Calcutta.

  So he was being eased out of Delhi! Governors in free India would have little power. But C.R. did not argue or protest. He agreed. A week later the papers announced a revival of disturbances in Calcutta. Ten were killed and 85 injured on 7 August.

  At a farewell occasion in New Delhi, Pattabhi Sitaramayya, who was to become Congress President the following year, said:

  Let me make a prophecy. When Members of the Lower House have to elect the President of the Indian Republic, I have no doubt that the legislature’s choice will be that of C.R.

  Replied C.R.:

  I do not know what job I am going to do, or what work is expected of me. But harmony and peace in West Bengal has to be restored (Hindustan Times, 14.8.47).

  One of those who saw C.R. off at the airport on 14 August was N.V. Gadgil, who had been named to the new Cabinet. He has recalled:

  Rajaji took me aside and said, ‘Your main task in the Cabinet will be to see that the two important persons (Nehru and Patel) do not fall out.’30

  17

  Calcutta

  1947-48

  The appointment of C.R. as Governor of West Bengal was not welcomed by all. Subhas Bose’s brother Sarat, who had moved away from the Congress after being dropped from the Interim Government, reminded Bengal that C.R. had opposed her favourite sons, Chittaranjan Das and Subhas.

  Nonetheless, ‘a large crowd that surged round the plane’ greeted C.R. on his arrival on 14 August. There were cheers at several places along the route to Government House, but at Sham Bazar a group of young men displayed placards that asked C.R. to ‘Go Back’ and shouted ‘Leaky Boat!’ as his car drove past. They were throwing at him the phrase he had employed in the 1939 debate over Subhas’s Presidentship of the Congress.

  Until midnight C.R. was the retiring Governor, Burrows’ guest in Government House; from midnight until Burrows’ departure at dawn, the latter would be C.R.’s guest.

  Fireworks lit the night sky. The curfew which for nearly a year had emptied Calcutta’s streets in the later hours was completely ignored. From trucks, cars, taxis, bicycles and tramcars came shouts, hoots or bells of joy. Steamboats turned on their sirens. Students too
k out a torchlight procession. As dawn broke, a huge throng pressed against the gates of Government House. Soon the gates were flung open and the masses flooded in.

  Thirty seconds before 8.00 a.m. C.R. mounted a pavilion that had been set up on the lawns. At the first boom of a 17- gun salute fired from Fort William, he unfurled the national flag. This triggered, as The Statesman put it, ‘a wild outburst of joy which swept Government House and its environs for hours together.’

  At least 200,000 people swarmed into Government House, many pushing their way into its halls and rooms, handling the portraits and dancing on the sofas. C.R. instructed that all were. to be allowed in. The revellers greeted British officers who responded with ringing cries of ‘Jai Hind!’ As C.R. appeared on a window, lusty shouts of ‘Rajaji-ki-jai’ went up.

  But the reality of Partition stabbed rejoicing hearts. Addressing the West Bengal Assembly on 15 August, C.R. expressed the fond hope that the bars of division would ‘ere long melt away’ and that ‘the two free States will come together once again into a wise and lasting union.’1

  From 9 August the Mahatma had been in Calcutta. He had intended to go to Noakhali in what was now East Pakistan, but, importuned by the city’s Muslims, had stayed on in Calcutta — in Hydari Manzil, a dilapidated Muslim house in the Hindu- majority locality of Beliaghata. Also living in that house, at Gandhi’s instance, was Suhrawardy, whose Premiership of Bengal had ended with the province’s partition — he had been replaced by Ghosh in West Bengal and Nazimuddin in East Bengal.

  Aided by the efforts of Gandhi and Suhrawardy, peace had returned to Calcutta by 15 August. The next day C.R. called on the Mahatma — their first meeting in free India. C.R. took Gandhi’s hands in his and held them, neither saying a word.

  Then they talked of possible violence and refugees — and also of how the Mahatma could not possibly live in the sort of house that C.R. tenanted. Suhrawardy, who had joined the meeting, said, ‘Gandhiji likes to live with the people. He has no fascination for palaces.’

  ‘That’s why he was put in the Aga Khan’s palace,’ said C.R. The Mahatma laughed. The Governor’s military secretary noted that after ninety minutes the two old friends simultaneously picked up their large pocket-watches, consulted them, looked at each other, and parted.2

  In the Punjab, killings were turning gladness to dust. Mercifully, Calcutta seemed to remain peaceful. Towards the end of August, Mountbatten wrote to C.R.: ‘You and Gandhiji have achieved miracles in Calcutta.’3

  Luckily for C.R., Chief Minister Ghosh and his colleagues wanted C.R. to play more than a Governor’s merely constitutional role. The Governor was asked to preside over some Cabinet meetings, and the Chief Secretary and other Secretaries called regularly on him with files. These practices no longer obtained in other provinces, and Governors elsewhere who sought similar privileges were told by Patel, the Union Home Minister, that a voluntary decision of the West Bengal Cabinet had conferred exceptional privileges on C.R.

  Having been commissioned by Nehru, Patel and the Mahatma to keep the communal peace in West Bengal, C.R. asked military and police chiefs to report regularly to him, advised them and helped ensure support for them. Thus he wrote to Mountbatten: ‘I hope you will not draw away any more troops from here. Calcutta is doing well so far, but there are mischief-makers with illicit arms.’4 Ghosh, a bachelor with a reputation for integrity and an admirer of C.R. from the 1922 Gaya days, did not mind the Governor’s activism.

  To regard Calcutta’s Government House as home required effort. With C.R. were Namagiri and Narasimhan, Thangam and her five children. Yet a full month after moving in he wrote to Burrows: ‘I am still trying to familiarise myself with your late residence.’5 To Colonel Chatterjee, his military secretary and surgeon, C.R. complained about the size of his bedroom: ‘It is not convenient for a man of my eyesight to grope about in the darkness in search of a distant switch.’6

  It was not a home designed to encourage self-reliance. Skilled servants seemed needed at every turn: to shut the massive windows, bring down the huge velvet curtains, remove the heavy embrodiered bedcovers, work the geysers . . . The number of attendants bothered C.R., who wrote to Devadas: ‘I feel like living in a cage here with people all round peeping through the bars.’7

  Some Gandhians wanted to convert the House at once into a hospital or handicraft centre. Calcutta’s National Library needed more space; on its behalf some looked covetously at Government House. Cool to the proposals, C.R. pointed out that the question concerned not Calcutta alone but also Government House in New Delhi and Governor’s residences in all provincial capitals; it called for thought, not hasty gestures.

  Yet the Governor of West Bengal had two additional houses: one in Darjeeling, and another in Barrackpore, twenty miles west of Calcutta on the banks of the Hooghly. At C.R.’s instance, the Barrackpore establishment was handed over to the police.

  A Governor’s life had its compensations. One childhood ambition he fulfilled was a ride in the engine of a train — the Governor’s special train.

  On three issues, C.R.’s personal convictions seemed to conflict with what was apparently expected of a Governor. All his life, in line with his ancestors, he had been a vegetarian. His children and grandchildren had followed the tradition. Meat had never been served or cooked under his roof — in Salem, in the Ashram, in Madras, or at 1 Clive Road, New Delhi. Would he allow it now for his guests at Government House? Overcoming a feeling that meat at their table would constitute too drastic an innovation for his family and himself, C.R. gave guests a choice of vegetarian and non-vegetarian food.

  But he would not serve alcoholic drinks. Whether foreign or Indian, distinguished, common or radical, his guests had to be teetotal in his presence. ‘You see, my house is dry,’ C.R. would explain. There were, however, a few occasions when C.R. allowed his staff to assist particularly ‘needy’ house guests — in their rooms.

  Racing was the third issue. In the past, C.R. had opposed it as a form of gambling. But when the British and Indian representatives of the Calcutta Turf pressed that the Governor’s Cup should continue and that he should present it himself, C.R. yielded. He was in part influenced by his desire to retain the confidence of the British mercantile community in Calcutta, which ran the Turf.

  The Press publicized C.R.’s presentation of the Cup. From Poona, the Gandhian, Valji Desai, wrote protesting that Rajaji was ‘making our independence ugly’ by lending his prestige to racing. Though C.R. argued that ‘the presentation of a prize to the owner or trainer of a horse which wins’ was like giving medals to ‘boys who come first in a university examination,’ he was not really sure of his stand. ‘I may be even wrong with regard to horses,’ he said to Desai.8

  While C.R. relied upon the deterrent effect of soldiers to maintain communal peace, he also strove to spread a philosophy of non-retaliation. To Liaqat Ali Khan, now Premier of Pakistan, who in a letter to C.R. had deplored ‘the situation in East Punjab,’ C.R. wrote of ‘the vanity of retaliation and the worthlessness of hatred.’ He sent a similar text to Baldev Singh, who had underlined the West Punjab killings. ‘Retaliation,’ C.R. said, would ‘only mean a steady increase in difficulties.’9

  He praised Bengal’s Press for displaying restraint, which, C.R. conceded, was never easy: ‘A man is usually fonder of his opinion than even of his child.’ When one of Calcutta’s Muslim newspapers, Morning News, wrote a constructive leader, the Governor sent the editor a warm note: ‘It gave me great pleasure to read your editorial. This is to express my appreciation.’

  In a speech to Calcutta’s Muslim Chamber of Commerce, C.R. made a personal pledge:

  Whatever may be my defects or lapses, let me assure you that I shall never disfigure my life with any deliberate acts of injustice to any community whatsoever.10

  Within three weeks of Independence, however, Calcutta saw a setback, and Gandhi responded with a fast. Several Muslims had been slain in the city, and an angry crowd of Hindus had hurled abuse, a b
rick and a lathi at him. The Mahatma was accused of overlooking what Hindus had suffered.

  The brick and the lathi missed him, but Gandhi declared that until sanity returned to Calcutta he would eat or drink nothing save water — with, if necessary, some drops of sour lime juice to counter nausea.

  For three hours C.R. argued with the Mahatma against the fast. When Gandhi said he wished to be ‘wholly in God’s hands,’ C.R. asked, ‘Why the provision then about sour lime?’ The Mahatma said he would do without it.11 In the end C.R. found himself with a familiar task — persuading the public to create conditions for Gandhi to break his fast.

  ‘This time,’ C.R. said, ‘we can throw the blame on no outside or foreign government if his precious life ebbs away.’ Calcutta, he pleaded, should send Gandhi ‘with the laurel of victory round his aged brow’ to the Punjab, which needed him (The Statesman, 2.9.47).

  Addressing policemen, soldiers and officials, the Governor, who shuttled between disturbed areas and enforcers of the law, said:

  It is your sacred duty to protect the person, property, and the honour of everyone. You should strike down the offender even though he belongs to your own community. If you betray any communal partiality, it will break even my stony heart, not to speak of him who is crucifying himself for our sake in Beliaghata (The Statesman, 5.9.47).

  Five hundred policemen in North Calcutta, including some British and Anglo-Indian officers, fasted for 24 hours in sympathy with Gandhi, while remaining on duty. On the evening of 5 September, C.R., Chief Minister Ghosh, Kripalani, the Congress President, and Suhrawardy told Gandhi that peace had returned. Brought by Ram Manohar Lohia, the Socialist leader, five young men entered Gandhi’s room, confessed their complicity and surrendered arms.