Rajaji

by Rajmohan Gandhi

  At this get-together twenty-one principles for a new party were agreed upon, including equal opportunity for all Indians, anti-statism and encouragement of thrift and individual initiative — but a suitable name seemed to elude the ‘midwives.’ Rajaji suggested the Conservative party, but Ranga preferred an Agrarian party and Masani a Liberal, Centre or Democratic one.

  J.P. was in Madras on that day, and C.R. made another attempt to enlist him as the new party’s first president. Though declining the offer, J.P. expressed his goodwill.

  In the evening, those gathered at Vivekananda College to hear Masani were happily surprised to see Rajaji and J.P. too step on to the dais. What Rajaji said was a greater surprise.

  ‘This morning,’ he said, ‘a new political party was formed.’ Stunned for a moment, the audience then gave a terrific round of applause. Continued C.R., ‘And the name of the party is’ — and it was the turn of Masani, Ranga and the other midwives to be surprised — ‘Swatantra Party!’ He had settled on the name while being driven to the meeting! This time the loud applause was instantaneous.

  ‘I had never seen Rajaji more radiant,’ wrote Monica Felton. Following the declaration, she added,

  He was no longer the frail old man I had met when I first came to Madras. His eyes were brilliant. His skin was like gold, and the fringe of hair around the back of his head was not silky, like the hair of an old man, but wiry and strong, with the dense gleam of aluminium.

  Half-disconcerted (thinking of the biography she hoped to write) and half-delighted, Monica asked C.R.: ‘Do you think you are going to succeed in your enterprise?’ Rajaji laughed and said, ‘It will be all right if I can live to be a hundred.’5

  Ranga was the Swatantra Party’s first president and Masani soon became general secretary, but it was clear that C.R. had agreed to lead the party. His clash with Nehru was now formalized. Yet theirs was a strange confrontation. ‘We are positive friends and love each other,’6 he had said after Jawaharlal charged him with a total lack of charity and a year earlier he had written:

  Some dear people have the jitters because Rajaji and Nehru are quarrelling . . . Yes, I have differed and have spoken harsh language for the sake of clarity. But can’t friends differ and yet continue to love one another? (Swarajya, 3.5.58)

  On his part Jawaharlal would continue to speak of his ‘respect and affection’ for C.R., but the two did not talk their differences over. Perhaps each waited for the other to make the first move; perhaps, too, each thought the other to be unbudgable. It was C.R.’s further belief that only the pressure of public opinion would affect Nehru.

  He had expressed this belief in a letter to Nehru after the latter had publicly lamented (Indian Express, 19.3.58) C.R.’s ‘cold war’ on the language issue. Claiming that ‘ten years ago, as an integral part of our freedom,’ he had ‘pledged’ himself to the ‘duty to warn you as elder brother,’ C.R. added (21.3.58):

  I am aware of your love . . . I assure you my affection for you is unchanged. But I have found in recent times that my advice carries no weight with you . . . I see that you are moved only by ‘public opinion’ — indeed often moved by public pressure against your own conviction . . . Hence this what you call ‘cold war.’

  C.R.’s warmth for Nehru withstood the launching of Swatantra. A small framed picture of himself with Nehru that for years stood on a shelf near his bed remained where it was — it would stay undisturbed until his death.

  Some critics quipped that the elder statesman had become an aged iconoclast, while others lamented C.R.’s loss of detachment. A more serious question was whether he could not have fought Nehru from within Congress. Yet Congress seemed inhospitable to a dissenter, the more so after Nehru told partymen opposed to his land policy: ‘If you do not agree with us, you can get out of the party.’7

  Thereafter, Ranga had left Congress and another critic, Charan Singh, had resigned from the UP cabinet. On his part C.R. had too much pride and too little patience for a long-term exercise of converting humiliating defeats in successive Congress meetings into ultimate victory.

  To some, opposing Nehru seemed treason. In Swarajya C.R. defended himself (28.2.59). He began with an expression of ‘great satisfaction’ at ‘the general resistance’ to any ‘attack’ on Nehru, for there was ‘no unifying force so effective as loyalty and affection.’ It was ‘God’s grace,’ C.R. added, ‘that there is a good man in India who deserved to be idolised as [Jawaharlal] is.’

  ‘Yet,’ C.R. continued, ‘there is nothing more important for the ruler of a great, big nation as independent, fearless advice.’ Gandhiji and Patel were no longer living to give that advice. ‘I, who remain, would be untrue to the trust and love that they had been bestowing to me if, preferring quiet and ease, I kept silent over what I felt.’

  The charge that frustrated ambition was his motive was dismissed with the reminder that he had ‘held and finished with the highest offices open to anyone’ and the assertion, ‘God knows that I do not want any office.’ (Swarajya, 16.9.59).

  Alluding to C.R.’s frequent references to the Almighty, Jawaharlal joked that God seemed to be the senior partner of the new party. Also, though Nehru must have been aware that Congress was receiving vastly greater sums from the wealthy, he suggested repeatedly that Swatantra was a party backed by the rich.

  This smear was one that C.R. and his Swatantra colleagues sought times without number to remove, but Jawaharlal had chosen an early moment to fasten it, and it stuck. Nehru claimed, too, that it was difficult to know what Swatantra stood for. C.R. urged him to read the 21 points.

  So the debate went on, now heated, now reasoned, now fair, now unfair. But the human relationship survived. On C.R.’s first visit to Delhi after the formation of Swatantra, Jawaharlal, a fit 70, ran up the stairs to the second-floor flat where C.R., 81, was staying, and said, ‘Rajaji, I have come to see how young you are.’ Nehru was naturally curious about the health of his aged but influential foe.

  For all its sadness, the Rajaji-Nehru clash had an inevitability to it. Thus far, their decades’ old ideological differences had been suppressed — first in the interest of the common struggle for independence and, later, because of the problems that followed Independence and Partition. But the cleavage had to come. Two years after the formation of Swatantra, C.R. gave his version of the root of the ideological disagreement:

  Mr Jawaharlal Nehru returned from Cambridge with notions of how an all-governing interventionist state can force people into happiness and prosperity through socialism.

  He sticks to this bias in spite of the demonstration of world experience against it (Swarajya, 21.10.61).

  From Nehru’s viewpoint, C.R. stood for ‘merely perpetuating the traditional structure . . . leaving the industrialists to go ahead and do what they like.’8

  Fearing that in confronting Nehru and Congress C.R. was taking on an impossible task, Rama Rao tried to caution him. Replied C.R. (20.6.59):

  We would have been still a British colony had not the Spanish knights come forward in 1920. We were just Don Quixotes then and many were the good men who thought so and kept back. I hate the present folly and arrogance as much as I hated the foreign arrogance of those days.

  By now Rama Rao was ill again. In a letter, C.R. said to him, ‘May your fingers continue writing my name and your love for me for yet many more years.’ Sending books, money and a doctor from Madras, C.R. encouraged Rama Rao’s effort to skip salt. C.R. also informed him of an attempt on his life at the start of a Madras meeting:

  Your dear delightful letter just received proves that salt-free diet improves writing capacity. I was in Allahabad on April 4 and saw [Purshottamdas Tandon] in his sick bed. He talked very cheerfully. ‘I have prohibited salt in my food the last 20 or more years’ (18.4.60).

  His anger against salt was tremendous. I thought of you all the time and wished you had half that emotion against this enemy of man, salt. But I know how sweet salt is . . .

  Live, live as long as yo
u can . . .

  Somebody will have told you about a man trying to put a knife into me last night. I have not told people, but I have been living long spells wherein every moment I was in danger of being stabbed this way . . . It is so easy to do the thing.

  The man was caught immediately by a policeman. The incident happened just behind me as I was trudging on the loose sand amidst din and enthusiastic crowds . . .

  Rama Rao was failing. C.R. wanted to help with his treatment.

  Who would say you were old or ill seeing your beautiful clear and firm handwriting? Please permit me to pay for the Sanatogen and Protinex supplied at Bangalore. I would like to have the feeling that I helped you eat some food now when you need it so much. (18.8.60)

  But Rama Rao was beyond nutrients and drugs. When C.R. called on him in the second week of November, the poison had entered his head, and he was incoherent. C.R. asked one of Rama Rao’s daughters-in-law to sing a kirtana by Purandaradasa. As Rama Rao heard the song of praise, his eyes glistened, and he struggled weakly to bring his palms together in prayer. C.R. helped him do it, and saw peace spreading on his friend’s face.

  Word that all was over came on 28 November while C.R. was in Belgaum. Travelling by car through the night, C.R. reached Bangalore at dawn, but by then his friend was just a heap of ashes. C.R. walked thrice round that heap.

  Their attachment had remained unbroken for 68 years. In a Swarajya piece (17.12.60), C.R. recalled its early days:

  We read a lot together, . . . his taste was superb and he guided me like a mesmerist . . . We swore to ourselves, each in his own mind, that we should be friends for life. And so we were, one soul in two bodies and two lives in each body.

  The political field to the right of the Congress was not vacant. The Jan Sangh, founded by Shyama Prasad Mookerjee in 1951 and espousing a militant Hinduism, had occupied parts of it, specially in North and Central India. But Swatantra had some advantages. Apart from Rajaji, notable southerners such as Ranga and Menon had joined it. In Masani it had an effective spokesman. Veteran Congressmen such as K.M. Munshi had entered its ranks.

  Moreover, its tone being liberal as well as conservative, the new party reached out to moderate Hindus and non-Hindus in ways not available to the Jan Sangh. C.R.’s identification of statism as the menace seemed to click with a number of traders, businessmen and farmers. In Congress’s Nagpur resolution the party had an issue which could be exploited, and in Rajaji a leadership that other opposition parties could not rival.

  Held in Bombay on 1 August 1959, the first party convention showed several regional parties or factions casting their lot with Swatantra: the Indian National Democratic and Tamilnad Toilers’ parties of Madras; the Krishikar Lok Party of Andhra; the Janata and Jan Congress parties of Bihar; a UP Congress faction led by S.K.D. Paliwal and a Punjab one led by Udham Singh Nagoke; and Orissa’s Ganatantra Parishad, which was a contender for provincial power.

  Aristocrats joining included the Maharawal of Dungarpur, the Raja of Ramgarh in Bihar, the Raja of Manakpur in UP, the Maharajas of Patna and Kalahandi in Orissa, and — the star recruit — the beautiful Maharani Gayatri Devi of Jaipur. The great majority of the former princes, however, sided with Congress, which had the power to remove their privy purses — or, as with the Maharajas of Jaipur and Patiala, to make them ambassadors.

  Other eminent recruits to Swatantra included leading businessmen Homi Mody and A.D. Shroff, old warriors like Dahyabhai Patel, the Sardar’s son, and the engineer-educator, Bhailalbhai Patel; N.C. Chatterjee, the Bengal lawyer formerly with the Hindu Mahasabha; M. Ruthnaswamy of Madras, once in the Justice party; and outstanding veterans of the civil service such as H.M. Patel, Narayan Dandeker and J.M. Lobo Prabhu.

  The comment that Swatantra’s leaders were more distinguished than popular9 was valid. True, Rajaji himself possessed a continuing appeal. As Humayun Kabir, member of Nehru’s government, conceded while attacking the new party, ‘The only rallying point of the Swatantra party is the personality of Rajagopalachari.’10 Yet that appeal did not match the magnetism with the masses with which the fates had endowed Jawaharlal.

  Apart from lacking in mass appeal, Swatantra was heterogeneous, even if not to the same extent as Congress. Agreement on the evil of statism could not conceal differences. If Rajaji and Munshi proclaimed their roots in Indian culture, and Rajaji unhesitatingly called himself a conservative, Masani and Mody were westernized liberals. Again, Munshi, a Hindi enthusiast, could scarcely warm to Rajaji’s campaigns against Hindi, which many of Rajaji’s North Indian supporters also found hard to defend.

  New Delhi’s dismissal of Kerala’s Communist ministry, following popular demonstrations against it, showed up a fresh difference. Masani welcomed the centre’s decision but Rajaji, unable to disregard the Communists’ continuing majority in the Kerala legislature, termed the dismissal unconstitutional. ‘I do not like the Communist party but this is not the way to deal with it,’ he wrote (Swarajya, 20.6.59).

  The differences did not trouble C.R., who frequently cited everyone’s opposition to statism as well as the party’s ‘21st principle,’ conceived by him, which gave members freedom to hold any position on questions not covered by the previous twenty points. As he had said at the opening convention,

  I am totally opposed to giving up English as the official language of our country . . . But I want the majority opinion to prevail . . . Mr Mody will say, ‘I am against the prohibition of alcoholic drinks.’ I am for state prohibition. But it is not in the Swatantra party [charter]. You are free to hold any opinion on that.11

  Another lack was of funds, which galled all the more in the context of Nehru’s well-publicized charge that Swatantra was ‘the rich man’s party.’ C.R. and his colleagues vigorously advocated a ban on company donations to political parties but Nehru rejected the suggestion: almost all the contributions were going to Congress. In addition, Nehru asserted that he would reject any gifts from a company that also gave money to the Swatantra. Moreover, in a crucial steer, Ghanshyamdas Birla declared, ‘Swatantra politics were not good businessmen’s politics.’12

  Most companies became too frightened to give anything to Swatantra. The ones contributing also gave, in almost every case, a much bigger sum to Congress — but, despite Nehru’s assertion, no money was in fact returned by Congress. Howard Erdman, an American scholar who made a detailed and critical scrutiny of Swatantra, would state in a 1967 study:

  No one who has seen the party’s financial records would conclude that it was generously supported by India’s richest men.13

  Apart from accusing Swatantra of being a party of the wealthy, Nehru also said that it belonged to ‘the middle ages of lords, castles and zamindars,’ and likely to become ‘fascist in outlook.’14 It was impossible to match Jawahrlal’s media reach or to undo the damage his true, false or exaggerated charges caused.

  In Swarajya’s columns C.R. could argue that fascism’s distinctive features were the appeal to the mob and disregard for the constitution, or ask his readers to decide ‘who really are the fascists.’ (22.8.59). But All India Radio did not broadcast his comment, and the daily Press did not reproduce it.

  Nehru was closer to the truth when he said that Rajaji saw virtue in traditional arrangements. Admitting the charge, C.R. argued, ‘Survival is a proof of fitness, not of worthlessness,’ and added:

  Mr Jawaharlal Nehru used to tell me that he knew the crowd mentality better than I or any of our other colleagues did. This is probably true — not in the sense that he knows what the people want but in the cruder sense of what would please them (Swarajya, 4.2.61).

  C.R.’s ‘principled position’ was, however, not likely to attract those, politicians or the moneyed, who were looking for a possible winner.

  The creation of Swatantra freed C.R. for verbal jousting.

  Parrots all over, they all shout at the Swatantra party: ‘You are only negative, what is your positive?’ I have studied some mathematics and I do not much fancy this m
isuse of important mathematical words . . . Read chapter 20 of the Book of Exodus in the Bible. The famous commandments are all there, all ‘negative’ (Swarajya, 10.9.60).

  Then there is the cheap word reactionary. If to oppose the Congress and the Communist parties is reaction, Swatantra is reactionary. If to fight for fundamental rights is reactionary, Swatantra is reactionary (Swarajya, 25.2.61).

  When Nehru wondered aloud why Rajaji ‘was speaking so much in anger,’ C.R. replied (Swarajya, 21.10.61):

  Does [Nehru] not realise that a fine cadre of officials have now been made into spineless flatterers and partisans? I see fear enveloping everywhere like a poisonous fog . . .

  I see Chief Ministers, finance and food ministers going about extorting money for the party without fear or shame . . . I happen to remember a time when such things could not be thought of. I see waste on a stupendous scale. Our foreign liabilities are pyramiding up . . .

  I can’t help being sad. I am not entirely hopeless. So my grief looks like anger.

  The first big test of Swatantra would be the 1962 elections, but its significance was immediately obvious. Noting, from Rashtrapati Bhavan, C.R.’s severe attack on Congress’s Nagpur decisions, Prasad wrote in his diary (26.1.59): ‘Rajaji commands a respect and hearing which hardly anyone else does in the country.’

  Fifteen months later, after a brief meeting with C.R. in Delhi, the President seemed to marvel at C.R.’s passion and to approve of Rajaji’s views:

  Rajaji is wonderfully energetic even at the advanced age of 81. He contributes regularly to two Tamil papers. He writes regularly for an English paper also. Besides, he is constantly issuing statements, holding press conferences and addressing large public meetings. Within the last weeks he has toured Bihar, the Punjab, U.P., Delhi and also Calcutta. All that he writes and speaks is as acute and penetrating, as bright and scintillating, as anything that he has ever written or said. There is no sign of any looseness or illogicality anywhere (8.4.60).15