Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  By offering moral and material support to Britain in its war with Germany, the Congress was abandoning its doctrinal commitment to non-violence. While Gandhi might still wish to preach ahimsa, his party (under Nehru’s urgings) had decided that the dangers of a Nazi triumph were too great for them to go along with his views in this regard. This was a significant change of perspective, a climbdown even; but the viceroy, unfortunately, did not see it this way. He rejected the Congress’s offer of cooperation since it came with the condition that independence be granted to India once the war was won.

  The industrialist G.D. Birla, who kept in close touch with both the viceroy and Gandhi’s party, thought the former bore principal responsibility for the breach between the government and the Congress. ‘Lord Linlithgow’s tragic failure to consult the Legislature before forcing India into the War immediately on its outbreak,’ he wrote, ‘was too strong a dose for the [Congress] Ministers to swallow….Had the Viceroy the wisdom to consult India I doubt not that she would have supported Britain.’ He added: ‘The blunder made by Lord Linlithgow in not even going through the motions of appearing to consult the Legislature, or Indian public opinion, before declaring India a belligerent seemed irretrievable.’9

  II

  Gandhi’s seventieth birthday by the Christian calendar fell on 2 October 1939. Some months previously, the philosopher Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan had set in motion the preparation of a collection of essays in his honour. Radhakrishnan was an admired teacher at Mysore, Calcutta, Andhra and Oxford Universities, as well as the author of many books published in India and the West. He canvassed widely for contributions to this Gandhi Festschrift he was editing. Some famous people refused; such as J.M. Keynes and H.G. Wells, the latter saying: ‘I will not write a line to boost up that old publicity bore.’10

  Other famous people sent in tributes. They included the Nobel laureates Albert Einstein, Pearl S. Buck and Romain Rolland. In his contribution, the Spanish writer-diplomat Salvador de Madariaga termed Gandhi ‘the most symbolic man of our day’, while the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi remarked that ‘Gandhi cannot find any higher way of worshipping God than by serving the poor and identifying with them’. The scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy submitted a learned disquisition on the many meanings of the term ‘Mahatma’. In his article, the Labour politician George Lansbury said Gandhi ‘has demonstrated in his own life and the lives of his many millions of friends and supporters in India and elsewhere the mighty strength of Passive, Non-violent Resistance against every form of evil and wrong-doing’.

  Quakers and Theosophists were well represented among the contributors. Gandhi’s close friends Charlie Andrews, Henry Polak and Rabindranath Tagore also sent tributes. The sole Muslim contributor was the diwan of Mysore, Sir Mirza Ismail, who called the Mahatma ‘a force for moderation, for reason, for practicality in politics’, adding that his message of peace and reconciliation should be heeded by warring communities within India, as well as warring countries elsewhere. In his own introduction to the volume, Radhakrishnan said that despite his public profile as a politician and reformer, Gandhi was ‘an essentially religious person endowed with the highest and most human qualities and made more lovable by the consciousness of his own limitations and by an unfailing sense of humour’.

  Among the longer and more perceptive pieces was one from the Liberal politician Herbert Samuel. Samuel admitted to being often exasperated by Gandhi, who had a habit of saying things that seemed ‘unreasonable and perverse’. But, since the British were ‘a self-respecting people’ who ‘respect self-respect in others’, he had to acknowledge that, notwithstanding his strange language and stranger methods, Gandhi had ‘taught the Indian to straighten his back, to raise his eyes, to face circumstance with steady gaze’. Moreover, ‘in this fuller dignity, in this stronger striving, he showed it to be vital that the women of India should also share’. As well as the so-called ‘untouchables’, for, as Samuel remarked, Gandhi had done a ‘great service…to take up, with vigour and power, the cause of the depressed classes; to bring it into the forefront of Indian politics; and to set it well on the road to success’.

  Some contributions came in from South Africa, among them a pungent piece by Jan Christian Smuts. Between 1906 and 1913, General Smuts had, as a senior minister in the Transvaal and Union governments, several times ordered the arrest of the Indian leader. Now, a quarter of a century later, Smuts recalled how Gandhi’s early satyagrahas, raising ‘a most troublesome issue’, were ‘very trying to me’, creating ‘a wild and disconcerting commotion’, to control which ‘large numbers of Indians had to be imprisoned for lawless behaviour and Gandhi himself received—what no doubt he desired—a short period of rest and quiet in gaol’.

  At first sight ‘remote from the ways of democracy and indeed of Western civilisation’, Gandhi’s technique, argued Smuts, carried echoes of ‘the Great Sufferer on the Cross’, reminding Christians of their own first martyrs and protesters. Gandhi’s ‘distinctive contribution to political method’, said his old adversary, was to make ‘himself a sufferer in order to move the sympathy and gain the support of others for the cause he has at heart. Where ordinary political methods of reasoning and persuasion fail, he falls back on this new technique, based on the ancient practices of India and the East.’11

  Radhakrishnan had hoped to present this volume to Gandhi on 2 October 1939. But shortly before that date, war had broken out in Europe. The book was published anyway, at a time when its honorand’s distinctive contribution to political method seemed increasingly irrelevant to global affairs.

  III

  On 17 October—six weeks after taking India into the war—the viceroy finally made a statement of his government’s political agenda and intentions. This was long, rambling and—from the Congress point of view—unpromising. Linlithgow praised the 1935 Act as a model of constitutional progress, and hoped that it could be built upon so that ‘India may attain its due place among the Dominions’. The viceroy had been authorized by His Majesty’s Government ‘to say at the end of the war they will be very willing to enter into consultations with representatives of the several communities, parties and interests, in India, and with the Indian Princes, with a view to securing their aid and co-operation in the framing of such modifications [of the 1935 Act] as may seem desirable’.

  Linlithgow was temperamentally disinclined to granting more political rights to India in any case. Moreover, the Congress notwithstanding, many Indians were signing up to enlist to fight on the side of Britain. The Punjab and the Frontier Province, which had provided close to 400,000 soldiers for the First World War, provided fertile recruiting ground this time too. Other volunteers came from the south and the west of India. Even the traditionally ‘non-martial’ Bengalis were sending soldiers to the front. Notably, Muslims were more likely to volunteer than Hindus, and lower-caste Hindus more likely than upper-caste Hindus.12

  The viceroy, alerted to this flow of recruits, was further encouraged to withhold the assurance of freedom the Congress had asked for. The party’s working committee, meeting in Wardha, said Linlithgow’s statement was ‘wholly unsatisfactory and calculated to rouse resentment among all those who are anxious to gain, and are intent on gaining, India’s independence’. They asked the Congress ministries to tender their resignations in protest.

  Later, speaking to the Times of India, Gandhi underlined that ‘what the Congress wants is the clearest possible acceptance of the fact that India is to be treated as an independent nation. For India to become enthusiastic about participation in this war it is necessary to speak to her in the language of precision, admitting of no other meaning.’ He was also dismayed at ‘how the minorities are being played against the Congress’. The Congress stood for a representative Constituent Assembly, in which ‘the Muslims, the Scheduled Classes and every other class will be fully represented…and they will have to decide their own special rights.’

  On 23 October—a week after
the viceroy’s declaration—Gandhi cabled a statement for the world’s press, which was carried in the New York Times, the Daily Herald, Paris-Soir and other papers across Europe and in Soviet Russia and Japan too. This clarified that the ‘Congress had demanded no constitutional change during [the] war’. Rather, it had asked for a ‘declaration that Britain’s war aims necessarily include India’s independence according to the charter framed by her elected representatives after [the] war’.

  The growing estrangement between the government and the Congress was not helped by Lord Zetland, the secretary of state for India, claiming in the House of Lords that the Congress was merely a ‘Hindu organization’. Gandhi was moved to protest, telling the Manchester Guardian that Zetland’s ‘misdescription of the Congress is untimely, disturbing and calculated to increase irritation and bitterness’ (as it did). There could not, he said, be a ‘grosser libel’ than calling the Congress a communal organization. The party had been founded by an Englishman, and since had Muslim, Christian and Parsi presidents. Even now, it had several important Muslim leaders; indeed, ‘today the Working Committee does not move without Maulana Abul Kalam Azad’s co-operation and wise guidance’.

  Gandhi insisted that ‘the Congress embodies the hope and aspirations of India….Its traditions unfit it to represent Hindus as against Muslims or vice versa.’13

  IV

  On 27 October 1939, the Congress ministries resigned. The next day, the outgoing prime minister of Madras, C. Rajagopalachari, wrote Mahadev Desai a long letter unburdening himself of a growing difference between himself and their common mentor. This concerned relations between Hindus and Muslims. Rajaji was not as sanguine as Gandhi on the subject. He believed that the Congress had in fact lost a large measure of Muslim support. As he wrote to Mahadev:

  Whatever may be the motives and the deft exploitation by the British people of the Hindu–Muslim cleft, the fact must be recognised that today the ablest and most disinterested leaders of the Muslim community have led their entire people to feel that they stand apart and must continue to stand apart from the Hindu population. It is not flatterers and office seekers, but a man like Jinnah that have made up the Muslim mind in this direction and we cannot afford to deceive ourselves by proceeding on the assumption that the Muslim leaders are tools of the British. The British may use them, but the decision is their own, and cannot be brushed aside as a corollary of British wickedness.

  How should the Congress respond to this growing Muslim consolidation? Rajaji sensed that Gandhi was considering a fresh campaign of civil disobedience against the British, a move he was decidedly against. Such a campaign, he argued, would ‘only widen the cleft. We may secure…success in the programme against the British, but it cannot solve the problem as against the Muslim leaders and their social following, unless indeed we envisage complete anarchy and civil war…’

  Rajaji hoped that Gandhi, and the Congress, would think instead of a programme that could evoke appreciation and trust instead of jealousy and fear among the Muslims.14

  Of the major leaders of the Congress, Rajaji was on this question the most alert, pragmatic and unsentimental. For Patel, Kripalani and Rajendra Prasad, Hindu–Muslim relations had never been a principal concern. Nehru’s socialism made him assume that economic interests would override communal ties, so poor Muslims would have more in common with poor Hindus than with their affluent co-religionists. Gandhi himself looked nostalgically back to the Khilafat movement and to the struggles he led in South Africa, where he had succeeded in bringing Hindus and Muslims on a common platform. True, they had since become somewhat estranged; but could they not, if he worked hard enough, come together again?

  It is not clear whether Mahadev showed Gandhi Rajaji’s letter (there is no reference to it in the Collected Works). Since it was addressed to him and not to Gandhi, perhaps he did not. Nor is it clear either, whether Gandhi saw all of the angry letters from Muslims themselves, addressed directly to him, that were pouring into Segaon. Back in the 1920s, Gandhi had read and replied to almost every letter he got; now, however, as his incoming correspondence grew ever larger, he was much more selective. He had even issued an appeal through the pages of Harijan, asking Indians not to burden him with too much correspondence. He had neither ‘the time nor the energy’ to cope with it.15

  In the circumstances, it was left to Mahadev and Pyarelal to sift through the correspondence and decide which letters to place before Gandhi. They were assisted by Amrit Kaur, and by Sushila Nayar, a medical doctor (and sister of Pyarelal’s) who had become an integral part of Gandhi’s entourage.

  Many Muslims wrote to Gandhi in these years, expressing discontent with the Congress and sometimes with him personally. The president of the Muslim League in the southern town of Bezwada wrote complaining about the installation by the local Congress of a Gandhi statue in a park in a predominantly Muslim locality, this when ‘statues [and] idols offend [the] Muslim religion’. Five of his colleagues wrote a separate letter, complaining that portraits of Gandhi had been put up in town schools, offending the ‘religious sentiments’ of Muslims whose children studied there. ‘It would amount to nothing short of religious tyranny,’ wrote the protesters, ‘if the majority community, being in possession of power, forces the Muslims to show respect and reverence to Mr. Gandhi and adopt his preachings which are opposed to Islamic religion and are injurious to the young and impressionable minds of the Muslim pupils.’16

  Even Gandhi’s attempts to positively invoke the Koran in his writings and prayer meetings invited protest. ‘Can’t you realise,’ wrote a research scholar in Aligarh to Gandhi, ‘that nothing can offend the religious susceptibilities of a Mussalman more than to see a non-Muslim citing the scriptures for his own purpose? Well, the Mussalmans have had thirteen centuries to know what the Koran teaches and to practice what it means. The Muslims, of course, do not need a Mahatma to interpret their own holy book.’17

  Muslims in Gandhi’s own party were worried about the deepening alienation of their co-religionists from the Congress. A Congressman in Lahore complained that too few Muslims were nominated to the boards of the All India Spinners Association and the Harijan Sewak Sangh. Although such representation would help in ‘politicizing the Muslim masses and bringing them into the Congress fold’, in practice, ‘the Hindu Nationalists who are managing and governing these institutions have scrupulously tried their utmost to prevent the inclusion of Muslim nationalists…’ Meanwhile, a Muslim legislator from the Central Provinces told Gandhi that in his area, the Congress was hand in glove with the Arya Samaj and the Hindu Mahasabha in taunting and provoking Muslims, by playing music before mosques, etc. ‘It is time Gandhiji that you cry a halt,’ he urged. ‘If you don’t patch up the Hindu Muslim differences I would think that your whole life of noble ideas and constructive genius was a gruesome failure.’18

  These letters were, it seems, not shown to Gandhi by his secretaries. But some others were. A League legislator sent Gandhi a news clipping about a recent firing by the United Provinces police on a meeting of a Muslim militant group known as the Khaksars. The writer bitterly complained that while ‘Hindu and Muslims fought shoulder to shoulder in the old days of freedom’, now ‘Muslims can only serve as targets for rifle practice’. Comparing the United Provinces government to the Nazis, likewise an example of ‘militant aggrandizement in action’, he asked: ‘How long is this reign of terror for Muslims to last in U. P.; is there to be any deliverance; is U. P. to remain an inferno for the Muslims, you and you alone can answer.’19

  Gandhi sent a brief reply. ‘Your letter is bad, unbalanced and full of anger,’ he began. Then, in a more conciliatory tone, he added: ‘I quite agree with you that resort to firing is not non-violent action.’ He asked the correspondent to write to the United Provinces government ‘to find out the true position’.20

  Among the many letters from Muslims that Gandhi received in this period, perhaps the most telling w
as from Dr Zakir Husain, the vice chancellor of the nationalist Muslim university, the Jamia Millia, and a man for whom the Mahatma had enormous respect. In November 1939, on returning from a long trip to Europe, Zakir Husain found that in his absence relations between Hindus and Muslims had rapidly deteriorated. Meanwhile, the stock of the Muslim League had steadily appreciated. Dr Husain urged Gandhi to recognize and deal with this changed scenario. ‘Many a lover of India,’ he wrote,

  is looking up to you for a solution of the Hindu Muslim problem which has become the central problem of our political life….If I were you, Bapuji (what an idea!) I would unhesitatingly deal with the Muslim League as the representative of Muslim interests in India and give them what they want. I could never give them too much, and there would be nothing to lose and everything to gain. All the aberrations born of mutual suspicion and deep-rooted prejudice will be brushed aside at a stroke and the whole atmosphere in the country would lose its present suffocating weight—we would all breathe more freely and be able, perhaps, to plan something really good even if not very great.

  To this anguished plea, Gandhi replied, ‘I am trying my best,’ adding: ‘But you should come and help me. It is worthwhile your coming here [to Segaon] for that one purpose!’21

  Zakir Husain did not accept the invitation. He was a scholar, not an activist. He had diagnosed the problem as he saw it; and now looked to Gandhi to solve it.

  V

  Individual Muslims complained to Gandhi in private; Muslim leaders and Muslim newspapers attacked Gandhi in public. Representative was an editorial carried in a pro-League newspaper published from Calcutta, two weeks after the Congress ministries had resigned from office. This recalled Muhammad Iqbal’s speech of 1930, which had argued that the problem in India was not national but international. Any solution must therefore ‘accord the fullest political accommodation to the Muslim Community’. However, remarked the newspaper: ‘The Totalitarian Junta of Wardha is still far from seeing this light. They have not descended from the starry heavens of sickly metaphysics.’22