Two Bengali leaders of the Hindu Mahasabha, a Muslim, a Punjabi Hindu and a Sikh signed an undertaking that C.R. dictated. At 9.15 p.m. that evening, Gandhi broke his fast, drinking from a glass of lime juice offered by Suhrawardy.
In C.R.’s evaluation, nothing that Gandhi had achieved, ‘not even independence,’ was ‘so truly wonderful as his victory over evil in Calcuta.’ Gandhi had ‘been the successful one-man Boundary Force in Bengal, when forces numbering 50,000 have failed elsewhere’ (The Statesman, 6.9.47).
Obtaining his laurel, Gandhi left for Delhi en route to the Punjab, where communal killings had reached fiendish proportions.
C.R. felt that ‘India has gone back three centuries to reach independence.’12 In a letter to C.R., Nehru wrote from Delhi:
There is indecency abroad. All grace, pity and standards of behaviour have vanished. The best of us are affected by this prevailing mania . . . There is something elemental about this phenomenon, something in the nature of a Greek tragedy . . . Many people criticise me. We are living in a war atmosphere and the only thing permitted . . . is to curse the enemy and to cover up one’s own errors and sins . . . Fortunately for us Gandhiji has been here like a tower of light and a rock of strength. (9.10.47)
Moved by Nehru’s spirit, C.R. returned encouragement and a tribute:
I agree with every word of what you have written . . . You are great and are doing your best. Be courageous and do not yield to that against which your inner spirit protests . . . Is it not wonderful that Gandhiji has been spared for us all during this great crisis? (18.10.47)
A distant event now affected C.R.’s fortunes. The heir to the British throne, Princess Elizabeth, was getting married to Philip, nephew to Mountbatten. The latter was attending the London wedding, and an acting Governor-General was required in New Delhi. Mountbatten, Nehru and Patel discussed possible candidates, and it became ‘absolutely clear’ — Mountbatten would afterwards recall — ‘that the only possible choice was Rajaji.’ By stature if not by seniority, he was the most eminent among the Governors. The Mahatma was consulted; his reaction to C.R.’s name ‘was entirely favourable.’13 After C.R.’s agreement was obtained, it was announced that he would function as Governor- General from 10 to 24 November.
Accompanied by Namagiri, C.R. arrived in Delhi on 9 November by an IAF Dakota. At ten the next morning he was sworn in by the Chief Justice of the Federal Court, Hiralal Kania. In the evening he called on Gandhi, who was living as the guest of Ghanshyamdas Birla at Birla House, his Punjab visit put off because of Delhi’s troubled state.
During the two-week tenure, Ministers, diplomats, politicians and officials called on C.R. As acting head of state, he launched the Constituent Assembly’s first session as the provisional Parliament.
On the evening of 20 November C.R. threw a party to mark the royal wedding that was taking place in London. This was a splendid affair, with Nehru, Patel, the rest of the Cabinet, and the diplomatic corps present, and the Ballroom decorated with the Union Jack and the Tricolour.
But the high point had come earlier that afternoon — when Gandhi called on C.R. at Government House. Over the years the Mahatma had visited Government House often enough — to sign his pact with Irwin and talk with Linlithgow, Wavell and Mountbatten. But this was the first and last occasion when an Indian head of state was receiving him.
C.R. had wanted to welcome his old chief, and relation, in his latest temporary home, and Gandhi too was curious to see how his independent-minded disciple looked in his role as a successor in the line of Warren Hastings. When C.R. called on him at noon on the 20th, the Mahatma asked if he could drop in at Government House to see Sarojini Naidu, the UP Governor, who was convalescing there, and then spend some minutes with the Governor-General.
C.R.: ‘Of course. When?’
G.: ‘At 2.30 p.m. today?’ The Governor-General showered the Mahatma with rose petals when he turned up with his entourage at the South Court entrance. The two spent half-an- hour with Mrs Naidu and then walked to a drawing room where they sat on a sofa and chatted for another thirty minutes.
C.R.: ‘Will you try an idli?’
G.: ‘Idli? In Gujarat the sambandhi offers sweets.’14
C.R. was with the Mahatma seven times during his sixteen- day spell in Delhi. The final meeting, lasting an hour, took place just before C.R. left on 26 November for Calcutta, where he uttered prophetic sentences:
I saw Gandhiji just before I got into the plane . . . He is sad beyond words. It is not an exaggeration to say that in his own way he is suffering as Christ suffered on the eve of the great tragedy recorded in the Gospels (Amrita Bazar Patrika, 29.11.47).
On 13. January Gandhi started yet another fast. His aim, the Mahatma said, was communal peace in Delhi and justice for minorities in India and Pakistan. C.R., who had protested against every fast thus far by Gandhi, did not argue against this one. Asking for prayers in temples, mosques, churches and synagogues throughout Bengal, he added:
The only sane man today is Gandhi. I have wrangled with Gandhiji on similar occasions in the past. But this time I confess I am not inclined to wrangle (The Statesman, 15.1.48).
On the fourth day of Gandhi’s fast, C.R., wearing a turban to respect Sikh custom, spoke at a Calcutta gurdwara:
Gandhiji has become insolvent because he has taken upon himself all the debts of our people. Today he has gone to a great banker, God, in order to repay the money (The Statesman, 17.1.48).
Leaders and citizens in Delhi met Gandhi’s conditions, as did the Indian Cabinet. He ended the fast on 18 January. ‘Death draws back,’ wrote The Statesman. ‘No longer creeps it closer, hourly, to a great man, frail and aged.’
Writing to the Mahatma, a relieved C.R. said: ‘I was speaking to you without speaking.’ Replied Gandhi (21.1.48): ‘Of course you were right in speaking to me through your silence . . . From calm I have entered storm . . . I observe you have lighted upon the fittest job for you.’ The Mahatma had written his last letter to C.R.
C.R. was about to enter his car for a function in Calcutta when Singaravelu, an ADC, shouted that the Press Trust of India (PTI) had just phoned to say that Gandhi had been assassinated.
Mountbatten confirmed the news over the phone. To PTI C.R. offered three sentences:
We have been robbed of our greatest possession by a senseless lunatic. May God help India in this hour of her greatest distress. May all hatred, all suspicion end with this sacrifice of our dearest leader.
His plane for Delhi the next morning was delayed several hours by fog. By the time it touched down, most of Delhi was at Rajghat. Tears flooded down C.R.’s face as he embraced his daughter Lakshmi — the Mahatma’s daughter-in-law —, who met him at the airport. By the time C.R. reached Rajghat, flames had enveloped Gandhi’s body. Around the flames C.R. met Nehru, Vallabhbhai, Azad and Sarojini Naidu, comrades bereaved like him. As he was to recall subsequently, ‘We could do nothing but clasp one another in our arms and weep.’
Carrying an earthenware pot which contained a portion of Gandhi’s ashes, C.R. returned to Calcutta on 4 February. On the ride from the airport to Government House he ‘held on lovingly to the urn.’ On his instructions the ashes were kept near his study and guarded over the next eight days by a relay of sentries.15
During C.R.’s absence, a letter from Pyarelal, Gandhi’s secretary, had arrived. Posted in Delhi on 29 January, it said, ‘Bapu is O.K. in every respect.’ On 5 February C.R. made one of his most memorable speeches:
Mahatmaji was very dear to me, but I do not grieve for him. No man can find a death so glorious. He was walking to join and lead a prayer . . . He was a few minutes late and so he was walking fast . . . How many of you would not like to die when running to pray?
Mahatmaji did not die in bed, he did not call for hot water or doctor or nurses. He did not die mumbling incoherent words in sickness, unable to identify the relatives and friends around him. He died standing, not even sitting down. The man who did him to death emptied
a bullet into his belly and two into his chest, so that the pain lasted only one moment. He made up for his lost five minutes by going straightaway to his Ram. He was a friend and lover of all the men and women he met. Indeed he was like Krishna and Krishna died when a hunter’s arrow pierced and sucked his life away. So also our Krishna has died.
On 12 February, standing on a barge in the sacred Ganga at Barrackpore, C.R. emptied the urn into the river. Watched by a million men and women gathered on the embankment or filling countless steam launches, motor boats and country craft, C.R. seemed to sway perilously; Chatterjee and Singaravelu held him. ‘The ashes were pulling me,’ C.R. later said.16
The Gandhi-C.R. relationship is one of the romances of the freedom movement. With the exaggeration that is often a symptom of love, C.R. would claim that he had ‘admired and loved [Gandhi] throughout twenty-eight rich years of intimate joint labour as never man admired and loved another’ (Harijan, 30.1.49). It was a love that could overcome the pang of a sharp difference and the guilt of a disloyalty. With the Mahatma’s going a part of C.R.’s life had ended. On the night of 12 February, C.R. spoke over the radio:
So it is all over! The world feels so empty! Dreadfully empty! Devotion made us see Bapu in the ashes. But the solemn wisdom of our ancestors called us to consign the ashes to the elements . . .
Do not demand love. Begin to love and you will be loved. This is the law and no statute can alter it. If we do not follow the law, and let the law die with the teacher, we shall indeed become accomplices to the murderer. But if we follow the law with our hearts, [Bapu] will live in us and through us.17
Patel, the Home Minister, and Premier Nehru were criticized for not protecting Gandhi’s life. C.R. powerfully defended them:
Have there not been scores of occasions when he was in the greatest of danger during these 40 years, in South Africa and India? Did the Government of India protect his life? During the last few years did not the greatest anger and highest passion develop like a storm, and did he not live? Did the Government of India protect him? Is it not idiotic to blame the Government of India because God has taken him away?18
The physician-politician, Dr Bidhan Chandra Roy, had replaced Ghosh as Chief Minister in January. With Roy’s installation, C.R.’s ‘special’ role ended and secretaries stopped bringing files to him: Bengal had fallen in line with the rest of the country. The communal troubles that had necessitated an exceptional role from C.R. were over, and in any case Roy, surer than Ghosh of his political base, did not feel that he needed to lean on the Governor.
A Governor in Calcutta can feel the pulse of some of India’s neighbours. The Nepalese Premier, Sir Padma Shumshere Rana, called on C.R., and the Burmese Foreign Minister, U Tin Tut, was C.R.’s house-guest more than once, as was Khwaja Nazimuddin, Premier of East Pakistan.
Also in the stream of guests and callers at Calcutta’s Government House were Eamon de Valera, President of Eire, M. Visvesvaraya, Mysore’s modernizer, C.V. Raman, the Nobel laureate, and the Mountbattens.
In a speech after the dinner given by C.R. in his honour, Mountbatten recalled that his engagement to Edwina had taken place in India — in 1922 in Room 13 of the Viceregal Lodge in Simla. Replying, C.R. said, ‘I asked myself where I was at that time. The answer was, in Room 65 — of Vellore Jail.’19
Almost every speech by C.R. had quotable phrases — wise, pithy, epigrammatic and original.
To girls in a school: ‘Do not depend on powder and rouge, depend upon your laughter. It will improve your beauty and character.’
To Anglo-Indians: ‘In a sense every modernized Indian is an Anglo-Indian. If you speak Bengali with the proper intonation, Bengalis would hug you.’
On the communal killings, to students of Calcutta University: ‘May the blood that flowed from Gandhiji’s wounds and the tears that flowed from the eyes of the women of India serve to lay the curse of 1947, and may the grisly tragedy of that year sleep in history.’
On Vande Mataram versus Jana Gana Mana as the national anthem (his own preference was for the former, the song that had spelt freedom when he was young): ‘If Rabindranath and Bankimchandra had come down here today, they would have shaken hands, but disciples are more fanatical than gurus.’
On Partition: ‘By reason of the partition of the province there is a great deal of loss, but there is also some profit. You cannot get a Hindu-majority government for Bengal except by partition. If you do not want partition you must have the courage to accept a government run by the Muslim majority.’
And there were the parables: ‘Those claiming special rights as they had made sacrifices for freedom are like cooks who say that they have sweated near the fire and will therefore eat all the food themselves. The dishes of independence are for the enjoyment of everybody.’
On American-Soviet relations, in the presence of Henry Grady, the US ambassador: ‘Let us hope that the caustic soda of Russia and the oil of America will one day mix and give the world the soap she requires.’
On being addressed as Dr Rajagopalachari: ‘Some universities have been good enough to confer on me honoris causa degrees . . . A mother has the liberty to call her child a good boy. But that does not mean that others should also call him a good boy. Please address me as Mr or Shri Rajagopalachari.’20
Driving down to a soccer game on the Maidan (the roars of its crowds were heard in his study), he asked Chatterjee, ‘Do they play football or bootball here?’21 He was alluding to the players’ transition from bare feet to shoes.
On 1 April a courier brought a letter from Nehru:
You know that Lord Mountbatten is leaving his office about the 22nd June. We have to find a successor for him, and inevitably our eyes turn to you . . . I hope you will agree. Your presence in Delhi will be a great help to all of us, and especially to me. (30.3.48)
It was obvious that the name of C.R. would occur to anyone thinking of a replacement for Mountbatten (who, it was known, wanted to rejoin the Admiralty), if not as the only name, then as one on a short list. Rajendra Prasad, President of the Constituent Assembly, and Sarojini Naidu, Governor of the UP, were also possible successors. Still, while C.R. was doubtless delighted by the invitation, it did not astonish him. To Jawaharlal he wrote:
It is very pleasant to be told . . . that my presence at Delhi will be of great help to you all. The proposal has been threatening to come for some time past . . . I should like to have a few days to think it over.
C.R. added that it had often occurred to him to return to Madras, ‘which you know I intensely love,’ as ‘a private citizen and be of some help as an elder.’ (2.4.48)
Nehru pressed. Making explicit what he had implied in the first letter, he said that Patel and he were united in their desire to have him. And on 11 April he wrote:
I am waiting for your reply . . . We want you here to help us in many ways. The burden on some of us is more than we can carry.
‘The language of your communications leaves me no room to resist,’ C.R. replied (15.4.48). Thanking Jawaharlal ‘for the honour’ and ‘for the confidence,’ he added, ‘I hope I shall be of some help in spite of my misgivings.’
Behind C.R.’s misgivings were several factors. One, simply, was his modesty. While he was ready, in a sense, for anything, it had never been his belief that nature or destiny had constructed him for the country’s highest office. Secondly, a Governor- General’s position had considerable responsibility but not much power. Thirdly, Nehru and Patel were likely on occasion to have conflicting expectations of him.
What overrode the doubts, apart from the distinction of what had been offered, was the plea that he was needed. Confirming Nehru’s word, Patel wrote: ‘You would be of great help to us . . . After Bapu’s death it is all the more essential that the remnant of his circle should pull its weight together and the counsels of each should be available to all.’ Though confessing to Patel his ‘serious doubts,’ C.R. added that he did not mind ‘being compelled to undergo the ordeal of Government House in Ne
w Delhi’ if ‘I can be of any use to you and Jawaharlalji’ (4.5.48).
In perspective, of course, the idea that he would become free India’s first Indian head and, simultaneously, a successor in the line of Governors-General was more than startling to C.R. He smiled at fate’s latest turn. ‘It is very funny,’ he wrote in answer to a congratulatory letter, ‘how I have been knocked about from place to place without my wanting it.’22
The replacement of a dashing young white Admiral by a bald old teetotaller with a stick and a stoop, a brown face and an affinity with Gandhi made news the world over. The Times of London thought that C.R. would ‘carry on the work of his old friend Mahatma Gandhi.’ ‘There is nobody in India today,’ observed The Statesman, ‘who seems so directly heir to Mahatma Gandhi’s wisdom as the first Indian Governor-General-to-be.’
Some commentators suggested that Hindu-Muslim and India- Pakistan relations stood to gain by his choice. The Hindusthan Standard said that ‘men of all communities find it easy to repose their trust in him,’ and The Times wrote of ‘the respect he enjoys in Pakistan as well as in India.’ ‘People in Pakistan,’ said the Pakistan Times, ‘will welcome Rajaji’s appointment because in C.R. India will have a shrewd, level-headed and non-communal leader.’
Kingsley Martin wrote in the New Statesman: ‘Over a wide field he is the wisest and most level-headed person in India.’ The Louisville Courier-Journal thought that C.R.’s ‘humility, kindliness and generosity’ might help ‘offset the excess sophistication of the world of power.’ The News Chronicle decided that ‘the world will be a better place for his presence in one of the seats of power.’
London’s Daily Express predicted that there would be ‘no more cocktail parties’ at New Delhi’s Government House and the Daily Graphic, also of London, termed C.R. ‘a violent prohibitionist.’ Sub-editors, the world over, struggled with the spelling and length of C.R.’s name and were grateful for the initials and for ‘Rajaji.’
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