Gandhi

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by Ramachandra Guha


  Gandhi was present at the working committee meeting, which was held in Delhi. Writing afterwards in Harijan, he explained how, and why, he and his most trusted followers of the past twenty years ‘were drifting away from each other in our outlook upon the political problems that face us’. He could not carry the Congress, which meant, as he told his readers, that ‘Rajaji’s resolution represents the considered policy of the Congress’. As ‘a disinterested but staunch friend’ of the British, he now advised them that they ‘should not reject the hand of friendship offered by the Congress’.

  A month after the CWC’s (albeit awkwardly worded) hand of friendship, the viceroy made a statement rejecting any idea of a national government. He suggested, as he had done before, that the authority of the Congress to speak for India was ‘directly denied by large and powerful elements in India’s national life’. All he would, or could, offer was an expanded executive council. Those fighting in Europe for freedom had, once again, declined to commit themselves to freedom in and for India.

  The Congress replied ‘in deep pain and indignation’. To the ‘friendly offer’ they had held out, said the working committee, the viceroy had in effect responded that ‘the present autocratic and irresponsible system of Government must continue so long as any group of people or the Princes…or perhaps even foreign vested interests raise objections’.

  The Congress made its statement public; meanwhile, Gandhi wrote a private note to Linlithgow, more in sorrow than in anger. He had read the viceroy’s statement, and ‘it made me sad. Its implications frighten me. I cannot help feeling that a profound mistake has been made’ (in spurning the Congress offer).

  Gandhi also sent a cable to the British press, saying the viceroy’s statement had ‘widen[ed] the gulf between India, as represented by the Congress, and England. Thinking India outside the Congress, too has not welcomed the pronouncement.’ He then asked once more the question that he, and others like him, had asked a hundred times since the beginning of the war. How could Britain ‘claim to stand for justice, if she fails to be just to India’?8

  IV

  In the second week of September 1940, Gandhi travelled to Bombay for a working committee meeting. Back in July, the mood was all in favour of a settlement; now that the government had spurned their offer, the mood had swung back towards opposition. Gandhi played a leading part in the meeting, advocating a programme of graded and guided satyagraha, to be offered by individuals in the first instance.

  Even in the midst of his political preoccupations, Gandhi still found time to offer advice on health to his friends. Saraladevi Chaudhurani had come down to Sevagram. After their aborted ‘spiritual marriage’ now twenty years in the past, they had settled down to an amicable (if mostly distant) friendship, with Kasturba not standing in the way.

  Saraladevi had not been well. While in Bombay for the Congress meeting, Gandhi consulted the Poona-based naturopath Dinshaw Mehta, who thought Sarala might wish to try his methods of cure. Gandhi passed on the advice to the patient, via a letter to Amrit Kaur. Dr Mehta, he said, ‘was ready to take charge of her [Sarala] whenever she can go to Poona. If she will not go, he is of opinion that she will not be cured except by quinine taken under observation. The spleen must be reduced. She ought not to trifle with her body.’9

  In the last week of September, Gandhi travelled to Delhi, to meet the viceroy in a last bid to avoid confrontation. Gandhi had been receiving more letters on the exactions levied by British officials, who were—often against the popular will—collecting money and materials for the war. India had been dragged into the war against its wish; now, if the Congress wanted to preach against these forcible exactions, why should it not be allowed to do so?

  Linlithgow said the restrictions on press freedom would not be removed; nor could the Congress be allowed to peacefully preach against the war. For his part, Gandhi made it plain that ‘the Congress is as much opposed to Nazism as any Britisher can be’; at the same time, the people of India made ‘no distinction between Nazism and the double autocracy [of the British and the Princes] that rules India’. He was disappointed that they were not even able ‘to arrive at an agreement on the single issue of freedom of speech’.10

  Later, in a press statement, Gandhi spoke in despair of ‘a certain cold reserve about the British official world which gives them their strength and isolation from surroundings and facts’. This remark was based on forty years of talking with British officials—in South Africa, in India and in Britain itself. Of all the representatives of the ruling race Gandhi had dealt with, Linlithgow was in many ways the most unsympathetic. When India needed a viceroy who could understand how Indians felt, it had been given one who could think only of his own country and his own countrymen.

  Three weeks after his failed meeting with the viceroy, Gandhi announced that the Congress would commence a programme of restricted civil disobedience. One by one, individuals nominated by Gandhi would peacefully preach against the war and the war effort, and thus court arrest.

  Gandhi wanted to put pressure on the British, but not to embarrass them unduly. Hence the decision to launch a movement of individuals, and not a popular mass upsurge like those he had led in 1920–21 or in 1930. He wrote to the viceroy that he was ‘taking extraordinary precautions to ensure non-violence’, to which end he was ‘restricting the movement to the fewest possible typical individuals’. He, and the Congress, hoped that, by protesting in this restrained and controlled fashion, they might be able to bring the government back to the path of dialogue and negotiation.

  Since he was now seventy-one, Gandhi believed that ‘this will perhaps be the last civil disobedience struggle which I shall have conducted. Naturally I would want it to be as flawless as it can be.’ The individual chosen to start the campaign was Vinoba Bhave, the austere scholar who had joined Gandhi as far back as 1916, a man who, in his abolition of ‘every trace of untouchability from his heart’, his readiness to take part ‘in every menial activity of the Ashram from scavenging to cooking’, was the model ashramite, more so since, as Gandhi added, ‘for perfect spinning probably he has no rival in all India’.11

  Writing to Gandhi’s son Devadas, Mahadev Desai said Vinoba was selected as the first satyagrahi because he understood his master’s principles so thoroughly. ‘The uppermost consideration in Bapu’s mind, throughout these anxious days,’ wrote Mahadev, ‘has been that of non-violence, and though he seems to have now lost caste with Government, no one thinks of Government’s interests more than he.’12

  From 17 October, Vinoba Bhave began going from hamlet to hamlet, preaching against the war. Speaking in Hindi and Marathi, he said, ‘The soldiers of the British are full of vices. It is not seen what character a recruit in the Army possesses. It is considered enough if he has a chest measuring 36 inches. For them it is always considered a qualification if they are devoid of human considerations.’13

  On 18 October, Harijan received a letter from the government forbidding it from reporting speeches made by Vinoba. On the 21st he was arrested. Three days later, Gandhi announced that in view of the press censorship he was suspending publication of Harijan and its Gujarati and Hindi counterparts. At the same time, he exhorted every patriot to ‘become his own walking newspaper and carry the good news [of the ongoing satyagraha] from mouth to mouth….This no Government can overtake or suppress. It is the cheapest newspaper yet devised and it defies the wit of Government, however clever it may be.’

  The second satyagrahi nominated by Gandhi was Jawaharlal Nehru, a man he had described to the viceroy as ‘one who will be the future leader of all India’. Nehru was detained on the last day of October, before he could begin making speeches on the ground.

  Gandhi now contemplated going on a fast himself. But the working committee dissuaded him from doing so; instead, it advised that the programme of individual satyagraha be extended. Since his letters were read by the censor, Gandhi sent Mahadev Desai on a tour of th
e provinces, asking Congress leaders to prepare their own lists of which individuals would offer satyagraha, and in what order.

  Mahadev carried with him a charter of instructions prepared by Gandhi. Each protester had to inform the district magistrate of where, when and how he would offer satyagraha. The method followed was to shout, in the appropriate regional language, this message: ‘It is wrong to help the British war effort with men or money. The only worthy effort is to resist all war with non-violent resistance.’ The satyagrahis should say ‘they sympathize with the British in their effort to live, but they want also to live themselves as members of a fully free nation’.

  Slowly, the satyagraha spread. One by one, designated Congressmen in different provinces began to court arrest, among them Patel, Rajaji, Azad and other stalwarts. Once the movement had gathered momentum, Gandhi also allowed women, likewise carefully chosen for their credibility, to become satyagrahis.14

  Through the second half of 1940, the individual satyagraha campaign gathered pace. A table compiled by the government was involuntary proof of its success. This showed that a large proportion of Congress members of provincial legislative assemblies had courted arrest; fifty out of ninety-nine in Bihar, fifty-six out of ninety-seven in Bombay, 109 out of 164 in Madras, eighty-six out of 151 in the United Provinces.15

  The government now deliberated as to whether to arrest Gandhi himself. Higher officials in Delhi and Bombay were keen that he be detained. Those closer to the ground advised caution. ‘As regards Mr. Gandhi’s arrest,’ wrote the deputy commissioner of Wardha, ‘I am strongly against this being done at the present time….So far, he has guided the movement so as to cause the least amount of embarrassment and there are no signs that he proposes to do otherwise. Such being the case, it would be a great mistake to arrest him.’ His colleague in the neighbouring district, Nagpur, concurred, saying that if they did go ahead and detain Gandhi, ‘the moment he is arrested and the controlling hand is removed, there will be indiscriminate satyagraha….[L]eftists are looking forward to his arrest, so that they may get an opportunity to lead the movement.’16

  V

  Gandhi had chosen the method of individual satyagraha to avoid a total confrontation with the British. He still hoped that they would be amenable to a compromise. In November, he sent Mahadev Desai to Delhi, to meet the viceroy’s private secretary, Gilbert Laithwaite. Mahadev told Laithwaite that Gandhi’s desire was to convert all mankind to non-violence; but this did not mean that he was in any way anti-British. In fact, the Congress was anti-Fascist as well as anti-Nazi. If Hitler came to India, said Mahadev, Gandhi would launch a non-violent struggle against him. He added that if India was granted independence now, the Congress would most likely help the British in the war, even if Gandhi himself would step aside and continue to preach ahimsa.

  In Delhi, Mahadev held a press conference, where he said that Gandhi himself ‘thinks all the twenty-four hours of the British people and the British rulers and how best to help them, and yet knows that these regard him as their enemy’.17 Before returning to Sevagram, Mahadev left with Laithwaite a draft of a statement he hoped the viceroy would issue, to the effect that since Gandhi had made it clear that he did not intend ‘to paralyse [the] war effort’, but merely ‘to prevent people from being dragged into helping the war against their will’, the government was now ‘pleased to announce that those who are opposed to the prosecution of war on conscientious grounds, whether of a political or ethical character, are free to express their views, provided they do not prevent those who are inclined to help the war and provided they do not in doing so transgress the bounds of restraint or non-violence’.

  Mahadev was heroically trying to find a face-saving formula, that is to say, to save the face of the Imperial Government and his master at the same time. Laithwaite noted of their talks that ‘Mr. Desai’s good temper and good will were obvious’. However, the statement proposed by Mahadev could not be issued by the government since ‘we could not and would not have any anti-war propaganda, and that our determination not to do anything which might impede or reduce [the] war effort was complete and unalterable’.18

  The secretaries to Gandhi and Linlithgow got along far better than their bosses did. After Mahadev returned to Sevagram, Laithwaite wrote thanking him for coming all the way to Delhi to see him. However, the envelope in which the letter was posted was under-stamped. Mahadev wrote back enclosing the envelope, saying that ‘although we are “at war”, we might have fun occasionally’. Surely, he asked, the private secretary to the viceroy was ‘supposed to know and obey the law better than the ignorant public’? Mahadev had to pay eight annas to the postman ‘for the ignorance of “Government”!’

  Laithwaite, in reply, guiltily enclosed one rupee. Mahadev now joked: ‘To wreak “vengeance” on you I was half inclined to send the amount on to the Civil Disobedience Fund! But lest you should take it as vengeance, I am sending it on to a Red Cross Fund in your name (using your initials). I hope you will not mind that.’19

  The regard that Laithwaite had for Mahadev was atypical. For, most British officials in India distrusted Gandhi and the Congress. The war had intensified their dislike; and now, the individual satyagraha campaign had turned distrust and dislike into something akin to hatred. Representative here was a pamphlet issued in October 1940 by an ICS official in the Central Provinces named E.S. Hyde entitled ‘Why We Should Support India’s War Effort’. Addressed to Indians, this stated that ‘what Mr. Gandhi and the Congress leaders of all grades, none of whom have had the courage or the patriotism to join the fighting forces, are asking you is to stab in the back your own countrymen, the cream of India’s manhood, who with their comrades in arms of Britain, the Dominions and the Colonies are all that stand between you and the predatory totalitarian powers’.

  Hyde’s immediate superior was an Indian, C.M. Trivedi. He thought the pamphlet and its wording improper. In any case, said Trivedi to Hyde, ‘it is not the business of District Officers to become propagandists in attacking Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress’. Hyde was unrepentant. The Congress, he insisted, ‘must be shown up for what it is; a treacherous organisation stabbing in the back its own countrymen who are fighting India’s enemies; an ally of Hitler and Mussolini’.20

  The war had, it seems, opened up a racial divide even within the ranks of the Indian Civil Service. Note that Trivedi used the honorific ‘Mahatma’ in referring to Gandhi, whereas Hyde preferred the plain ‘Mr’. The average Indian ICS officer must surely have had some sympathy with the aspirations for freedom of his compatriots; the average British ICS officer, none at all.

  VI

  Gandhi’s campaign had angered the British in India, and it had also alienated one of his closest friends in England. This was Henry Polak. Through the 1920s and 1930s, Polak had moved closer to the position of liberals like V.S. Srinivasa Sastri, which was that self-government should be won step by step, by constitutional means, not sought to be seized by mass protest. Polak and Gandhi remained friends, but, over the decades, their correspondence grew more erratic.

  Polak was Jewish, and also British. These twin claims, of community and nation, made him intensely hate Hitler and the Nazis, whose prime ambitions, of course, were to subjugate Britain and exterminate the Jews. When, in October 1940, Gandhi asked Congressmen to court arrest, one by one, Polak was dismayed. He wrote to an Indian friend that ‘the resort to civil disobedience in certain quarters and the circumstances in which it has been undertaken, have been regarded as entirely without justification in this country, and disastrous if they were to have any serious consequences’. The ‘kind of stuff’ that Vinoba Bhave and Jawaharlal Nehru had been saying, remarked Polak, ‘could not be allowed for a moment in this country, nor could even strict pacifists here justify it’.

  Polak was living, as he had long done, with his family on the outskirts of London. The bombs were falling all around them. ‘We are still getting daily attacks on London,�
� wrote Polak to his friend, ‘but, notwithstanding the mischief and inconvenience, it is astonishing how little damage has been done upon the whole. Even the loss of life and injuries, painful as they are to note, are regarded with comparative equanimity. The spirit of the public is amazingly firm, courageous and determined. There will certainly be no collapse of morale here, whatever may happen elsewhere. Indeed, I seem to detect a growing uplift and an increased sense of ultimate triumph in the cause for which we are fighting. The personal risks are not even being considered.’21

  The letter was heartfelt, and accurate. The British had, through all the raids and bombs, sustained their morale. They were determined to defend their island, their nation, to the end. Yet, the irony was that the traits that Polak ascribed to his people were also displayed by nationalists in India. The spirit of Gandhi, Nehru et al. was likewise ‘firm, courageous, and determined’. Despite the hostility of the British, despite the decades of struggle, their morale remained high, as did the ‘sense of ultimate triumph’ in the cause for which they were fighting.

  The incommensurability of viewpoints was striking, even tragic. Locked in their respective fights for freedom, neither Indian nor Briton could properly recognize or empathize with the other. This was true even of the most intimate friends. That Polak could not understand why Gandhi, in the evening of his life, would wish to launch a final struggle for freedom, or Gandhi appreciate why his campaign would cause such hurt and anguish to Polak, was symptomatic of a much wider and much deeper misrecognition.

 

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