Rajaji

by Rajmohan Gandhi

  Following her success, Indira moved to amend the Constitution and abridge the fundamental right to property. When the Old Congress, which was fighting a property case against the Indira Congress, supported the amendment in the name of the poor, C.R. commented:

  The Old Congress is content with defending its ownership and possession of house properties . . . It does not mind what happens to the fundamental property rights of citizens in general (Swarajya, 8.1.72)!

  Swatantra, declared C.R., would remain ‘unalterably loyal’ to all the fundamental rights laid down:

  We should defend the Constitution as Winston Churchill defended Britain against Hitler, not surrendering to fear or the prospect of defeat (Swarajya, 18.9.71).

  The amendment went through, but not without some resistance. Wrote C.R.:

  I am glad the small band of Swatantra party members in the Lok Sabha as well as in the Rajya Sabha voted against the wreckers of the Constitution, undaunted by the massive numbers ranged on the other side (Swarajya, 18.12.71).

  After another birthday made him ninety-three, he hinted at a revival of the kind of battles he had joined more than half a century earlier — and anticipated the J.P.-led movement of 1974-5:

  We must depend upon ways and means not linked to elections and the hope therefore lies in preparing for non-violent direct action . . . It is the probability of direct action which will bring about the change that we desire in Smt. Indira Gandhi’s convictions (Swarajya, 18.3.72).

  Recalling some of the men who had had a role in drafting or incorporating the guarantees to citizens, the old soldier vowed:

  Even if all others conspire against the Constitution, I shall not ever let Vallabhbhai Patel, Rajen Babu, K.M. Munshi, Alladi Krishnaswami Iyer and others down, but will protest against the desecration and unwisdom of it as long as my breath lasts (Swarajya, 25.9.71).

  At 93 he was still the responsible parent. When Lakshmi, 59 at the time, was stricken in the eye, it was C.R. who escorted her to the specialist. After her recovery, Narasimhan, 62, went down with pneumonia and the old father worried intensely until the son was well again.

  But life was not only being assailed; it was being renewed. By the end of 1971 he had ten great-grandchildren. And he retained a youthful taste. Finding pleasure in re-reading David Copperfield, Old Curiosity Shop and Great Expectations, he also enjoyed suggesting cartoons for Swarajya:

  Cartoon: Indira aiming gun at the clouds, not at the tiger in front, saying, ‘I am tackling the social causes that produce communist crimes.’7

  His brain and nose continued to reach out. Thus, he sent the Tamil Nadu Chief Secretary a formula for resolving a dispute over a mosque coming up in T. Nagar, and educated a joint secretary in the use of honorifics. When a communication from this official referred to the Chief Minister as Dr M. Karunanidhi, C.R. — recipient himself of a dozen honorary doctorates — wrote back:

  It is not the custom to use the appellation Doctor or its abbreviation Dr. when the doctorate is conferred honoris causa and not earned in the regular way . . .8

  His opinions were as unpredictable as ever, his defence of them as elegant as ever. After reading a large-type edition of Animal Farm, he wrote:

  I cannot admire the much-boosted book of George Orwell . . . Filling up a whole book with animals does not make a fable. Aesop knew his animals and knew also how long, ox rather how short, a fable should be (Swarajya, 5.6.71).

  He would look back, of course, and on occasion betray a wish to reconstruct the past:

  When the independence of India was coming close upon us and Gandhiji was the silent master of our affairs, he had come to the decision that Jawaharlal, who among all the Congress leaders was the most familiar with foreign affairs, should be the Prime Minister of India, although he knew Vallabhbhai would be the best administrator among them all . . .

  Undoubtedly it would have been better . . . if Nehru had been asked to be Foreign Minister and Patel made the Prime Minister. I too fell into the error of believing that Jawaharlal was the more enlightened person of the two . . . A myth had grown about Patel that he would be harsh towards Muslims. This was a wrong notion but it was the prevailing prejudice (Swarajya, 27.11.71).

  On the heels of the 1971 electoral defeat had come another blow — the repeal of prohibition. On a day when uncommonly heavy rains pelted Madras, the aged foe of liquor asked to be driven to Karunanidhi’s residence, where he pleaded, ‘on behalf of the people,’ that the drink ban may continue. As he put it, he returned home ‘not with hope but with mental unrest’ and took steps to have the withdrawal legally challenged.

  The ancient brain was active and sharp. To some of Madras’s best advocates C.R. pointed out — with, in his words, ‘due diffidence’ — the errors in the text of the repeal. For a day or two there was anxiety in the government’s camp and the annulment had to be reworded. Then, a massive majority behind him, Karunanidhi crushed C.R.’s resistance.9

  Put together with love and toil by Sadasivam and his friends, Rajaji 93 came out as 1971 ended. The volume of recollections by many who had encountered him in the distant or recent past pleased C.R., but he took care, in a Dear Reader para, to reject any implication that his life’s work was done:

  The great fuss over Rajaji 93 seems to order me out of the public scene with this December! But I do not propose to do this and terminate my life of protest, exceptionally long though it has been. We are not masters of our lives in length of days. But when I see the spreading abuses . . . I do not feel inclined to run away from the struggle to improve things, old, weak and incapacitated though I am (Swarajya, 13.11.71).

  Noticing C.R.’s frustration over Indira’s seemingly insurmountable political strength and her apparent disregard for opposing views, a grandson once asked him, simple-mindedly maybe, ‘Have you prayed for Indira’s change?’ Rajaji was silent for some moments and moisture collected in his eyes — perhaps he was reminded of hurts taken and given, or of associations with Jawaharlal and Motilal. Then he changed the subject. But in a subsequent Swarajya issue he wrote:

  I have said harsh things about how Smt. Indira Gandhi has come to hold dictatorial power. But . . . let us pray that she may be blessed with strength and purity of spirit and wisdom. There is nothing God cannot bring about if He chooses. Did not Saul of Tarsus became Paul the apostle? (Swarajya, 13.11.71)

  There was no danger, however, of Rajaji yielding his convictions. In March 1972, dismissing ‘climbers’ who were willing to ‘jump on [Indira’s] bandwagon’ and ‘desert the fight to defend the Constitution,’ he added: ‘But surrender is not in my book of words and it shall never be’ (Swarajya, 11.3.72). Three months later he wrote about Indira:

  It appears as if she is in two minds, one being the dictatorship mind and the other crystallizing towards her father’s constitutional temperament (Swarajya, 3.6.72).

  The god of death seemed to be working overtime. Krushchev, Kelappan of Kerala, Syed Mahmud of Bihar, Sri Prakasa of Benares and other servants of the cause of Indian liberty went. C.R.’s trudge into the future was increasingly lonely.

  As 1972 began he was weaker. The little washing to exercise his fingers was discontinued, and he ceased giving himself a shave — a Gurkha watchman now did the job every morning. One day in March he fell in the bathroom but all bones including the femur were intact.

  He asked himself why he was alive and unharmed. His answer was, to assist ‘friendliness between India and what remains of Pakistan’ (Swarajya, 11.3.72). In four months an Indo- Pak summit took place in Simla and Indira and Bhutto signed a partial agreement. A delighted C.R. called it the Pact of Good Hope and asked for an early second summit for resolving the unsettled issues.

  In June he was ill: the skin burned and there was an odd feeling in the stomach. Again he recovered, but he wrote, ‘It is God’s grace that I continue to live’ (Swarajya, 30.9.72). He was writing and receiving less than before but Dear Reader unfailingly appeared, even if consisting only of two or three short paragraphs
, and callers continued to encounter the chuckle and the grin.

  ‘Ah, you are talking cricket,’ he said to Gopala Ratnam, a sports writer, when the latter said he hoped C.R. would live to be a hundred.

  In October he said he had ‘the fullest confidence in Masani’; after receiving Piloo Mody, Swatantra’s new president, the gracious old gentleman wrote, ‘Sri Piloo Mody was good enough to call on me.’ Also in October, he spoke in his column of his unchanged affection for Ranga, who had joined the ruling party and whose wife had just died.

  That month Jayaprakash spoke about the need for a new politics. Rajaji, who for years had tried to involve J.P. politically, was delighted. ‘I most warmly welcome Sri Jayaprakash Narayan’s statement,’ he wrote (Swarajya, 14.10.72).

  That human nature abounds in contradictions was remarkably proved in C.R.’s case. Humble of heart as he was — Crocker, the Australian diplomat, found in him ‘an utter lack of vanity’10 — he was not humble of mind. Obstinacy was his trait and he knew it. ‘I prefer to go down as did Don Quixote,’ he had said (Swarajya, 24.5.58). Astute in his efforts against both the Raj and its Indian successors, he was also naive (even if sane and farsighted at the same time) in his appeals against the Bomb and for Indo-Pak harmony; and he was simple too in imagining that Indira might exchange the Premiership for Rashtrapati Bhavan. Kind, tender even, in his emotions, he was harsh beyond the call of probity to a friend as close as A.V. Raman.

  Very Tamil (‘Have you seen Ooty?’ was his reaction in Simla when Parasuram, the journalist, remarked on the beauty of the snow-clad Himalayas11) but also very universal; frail for decades and going strong in his nineties; a very old man who was very young in curiosity; now despairing, now full of faith, quoting, ‘The best is yet to be/ The last of life for which the first was made’ (Swarajya, 12.1.66); a lover of life resigned to its insignificance; parsimonious (‘I never pay for newspapers’) — and over-generous, giving a Rs 1,000 tip to a cook Sadasivam had supplied12; a closed book, often, to his sons and daughters but opening out without reserve to visitors like Louis Fischer and Monica Felton; a cultivator of detachment who sorrowed deeply; coldly indifferent to hostility and hurt when a short story of his was criticized in an American review — ‘I am so sensitive behind all the outward semblance of equanimity,’ he had written to son-in-law Varadachari back in 1928; a considerable talker whom General Cariappa found to be ‘one of the very few top men of our country who is a good listener’13; conservative in belief and theory, impulsive, reckless even, in office; a loyal Hindu accused of a bias in favour of other communities; assailed by orthodox Brahmins and also by anti-Brahmins; passionate advocate of the balanced budget — and proponent, during a seemingly critical moment, of a huge army to which every Indian family would contribute a son; at home in office but a disdainer of votes, too civilized to play to the gallery; a lover of freedom who suspected democracy; a man with no doubts over any issue but with several different opinions on it; the most persuasive opponent of the Raj’s legislatures and later their most persuasive champion; scorning theories of nuclear deterrence but trusting in the deterring influence of capital punishment; matching the enemies he made in the South justifying Hindi with the enemies he made in the North resisting Hindi; Congress’s great defender who became its leading debunker — C.R. was all that.

  ‘Our dear land’ was a phrase that recurred in his Swarajya and Kalki pieces; it rang true; yet this lover of India was to some ‘anti-national’ for his opinions on subjects like Hindi, Pakistan, Kashmir, the Nagas and the Sikhs. In 1966, with Nehru dead, Mountbatten referred to C.R. as ‘India’s greatest living statesman’ and Fischer called him India’s ‘greatest man’14; C.R.’s doings reminded Ruthnaswamy, parliamentarian and former vice- chancellor, of the role the Hebrew prophets played; and Lionel Fielden, ex-chief of AIR, wrote that Rajaji was ‘the nearest human being to a saint that I have ever known.’15 Yet there were also those who alleged foxiness and opportunism in C.R.

  He could be brusque and tactless. Questioning by the dull and the inquisitive irritated him and he stopped their mouths, and sometimes he made bruising remarks. Yet, as Burke pointed out, ‘It is well if when a man comes to die he has nothing heavier upon his conscience than having been a little rough in conversation.’ Surely, however, there were additional weights including qualms about the Chief Ministership exercised from a nominated seat and resentment over the 1954 ouster. Then there was the charge that he was ‘ever the lawyer.’ As Sri Prakasa put it, ‘Rajaji . . . can forcibly and convincingly propound an opinion and convincingly establish the opposite only a few months later.’16 ‘Rajaji can convince you against your will,’ Rajendra Prasad is said to have remarked.17

  ‘C.R. to seeyar hai’ — ‘C.R. is after all a fox’ — was a Hindi comment invented against him in the thirties, if not earlier, and used by a few ever since. Some amended the epithet to ‘sly fox.’ C.R.’s habit of ‘retiring’ from active politics only to return to office annoyed those benefiting from his ‘retirement,’ but the initiative to ‘return’ was, every time, someone else’s. While he was pleased to be summoned, it was beyond his or anyone’s manipulative capacity to create the necessity for his return. Those grudging his re-entry and charging him with supreme cleverness were in truth foxed by circumstances, not by C.R.

  He was independent; he obtained key roles without trying and, at least once, on his own debatable terms; and he was clever. These factors explain why some resented him but do not make him a fox, sly or non-sly. And he was not an opportunist. Though he disconcertingly altered his opinions — notably on Congress, Hindi and the DMK —, the changes in his stance widened rather than narrowed the distance between him and power.

  That there was a personal element in his opposition to Congress has to be granted. According to Indira Gandhi, Rajaji’s Swatantra phase was an instance of ‘a great man giving to a small party what was meant for a great nation.’18 If there is some truth in the assessment, it has to be asked whether Congress, and in particular Mrs Gandhi and her father, did not in some measure propel Rajaji towards playing the supposedly smaller role. Moreover, it would be illogical to suggest that in opposing Congress, Nehru and Indira, Rajaji was being unpatriotic or unethical. He may have waged the imperfect fight of an imperfect man, but he also waged what became an essential fight, and did so in memorable style.

  He had his share of human limitations and, as we have seen, more than his share of human heterogeneity, but four qualities combined to place him among the uncommon. Firstly, and simply, he was a good man. As Crocker noted, he was free of vanity. In the copy someone gave him of Johnson’s life of Alexander Pope, C.R. highlighted a short sentence: ‘But let no man dream of influence beyond his life.’ ‘In twenty-five years’ time,’ he once said to Monica Felton, ‘people will be asking, “Who was Rajagopalachari?”’19 He was amused by the possibility that troubles many of the great.

  There were other facets to this goodness. He made no ill- gotten rupee and concealed no opinion. ‘I have kept my record clean,’ he claimed, ‘and led life honestly throughout. I say what I feel and what appears to be just and right.’20 He stayed true to his Manga during the fifty-seven years that had passed since she died. He kept greed at bay, as when the doctor in Salem wanted to buy C.R.’s land and house at Salem. And unless we agree with C.R. that reading books was a form of gluttony, we must mark his near-total involvement with public work.

  Along with goodness, kindliness. The hurtful remarks that occasionally escaped his lips misrepresented the man who essentially if not uniformly was warm towards friends and gracious to callers. Also, he was punctual with audiences, courteous to correspondents and gentle to his household. He had not once lifted an arm against his children; now they were, some of them, grandparents; in all the intervening years, he had not raised his voice against a servant.

  If a dhobi, tailor, cobbler or carpenter was kept waiting at his door, C.R. hated it. ‘Time is his only asset. Don’t rob him of it,’ he would say. Some h
eard him more attentively than others, but he himself practised what he urged.

  The third quality was daring. He had dared orthodoxy in Salem; then, apparently defying commonsense, he had given up his practice; he opposed the Raj when it was powerful, the Mahatma when all of India seemed to lie at his feet, Jawaharlal when Nehru was deemed unassailable and C.R. too old, and finally Nehru’s daughter, as securely-placed as her father and as daring as Rajaji himself. In addition, C.R. had coolly asked the White House and the Kremlin to dismantle their Bombs. To him politics was as much the pursuit of the necessary as the art of the possible.

  Finally, he sparkled. Jawaharlal’s friend and biographer, Chalapati Rau, calling himself C.R.’s ‘consistent critic,’ also called the subject of his criticisms ‘incandescent and magnetic.’21 Goodness, kindliness, daring and sparkle added up to a greatness made more fascinating by an array of contradictions.

  On 8 October the old speechmaker went to Gandhi Mandapam and delivered what was to be his last address, consisting of thirteen short sentences. He asked for ‘turning our hearts to humble prayer’ (Swarajya, 14.10.72). That month the DMK split. M.G. Ramachandran, popular actor and party treasurer, was expelled for opposing the Karunanidhi policies, including the repeal of prohibition. In what would be his last political move, the veteran player backed M.G.R.; and in a final prediction C.R. said that the DMK would be ‘the loser in this business’ (Swarajya, 21.10.72).

  Pothan Joseph, who had given valuable support to Swarajya, died in November. C.R.’s mind went back to the days of Khilafat and Gaya when Pothan’s brother George had been one of his closest colleagues. ‘The world is for me more lonely even than it had been,’ he wrote. ‘How can I ever find tears enough for George Joseph and Pothan Joseph?’ (Swarajya, 11.11.72) This characteristic obituary reference would be his penultimate one. In his last obit, on 18 November, C.R. consoled one of the South’s leading Swatantrites, G.K. Sundaram, who had lost his mother.