Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

VII

  Gandhi’s attitude towards the war had also alienated some Indian politicians. One was Sir Sikandar Hyat Khan, prime minister of the Punjab. Sikandar Hyat was a leader of the Unionist Party, a cross-religious alliance of landlords, Hindu, Sikh and Muslim, all utterly loyal to the British. Sikandar Hyat and the Unionists had enthusiastically supported the war effort, and tens of thousands of soldiers from the Punjab had enlisted to serve in Europe and the Middle East.

  In early October, Sikandar Hyat made a speech in Gurgaon, attacking Gandhi for opposing the recruitment of Indian soldiers. Claiming that 99 per cent of the Punjab was for the war, he charged Gandhi with ‘stabbing the British in the back’ and with ‘a betrayal of the best interests of India and the Islamic world’. A report of the speech reached Gandhi, who responded in Harijan, by saying that the Punjab had always been ‘one of the best recruiting grounds for the British rulers’. Soldiering was a profession like any other, he said, and ‘these professionals will lend their services to whomsoever will pay them good wages and enough practice for their professions’.

  Gandhi was suggesting that by enlisting for the war, the Punjabi soldier was merely doing a job, for which he was paid. Service in uniform did not in any way imply an endorsement of imperialism. As Gandhi put it: ‘The Punjabi soldier is as much interested in the issue [of British rule] as the black soldiers trained by General Franco were interested in his politics or in his ambition.’22

  Sikandar Hyat was furious with Gandhi’s suggestion that the Punjabis had enlisted not for ideals but for money. In a speech at Lahore’s Badshahi mosque on 1 November, he said Gandhi had insulted all Punjabis—Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims—by calling them mercenaries. If India was threatened by invasion, it would be the people of the Punjab and the Frontier who would have to resist them, while Gandhi would be safe in his ashram in Sevagram. ‘If Mahatma Gandhi wants to pursue the policy [of ahimsa] which is beyond the comprehension of ordinary beings,’ remarked Khan, ‘it would be better for him to go to [the Himalayan holy places of] Amarnath or Rishikesh where he can have a full play of his Mahatmaship.’23

  Meanwhile, another prominent Punjabi Muslim, a religious leader this time, had taken issue with the individual satyagraha movement. ‘A large majority of Muslims are standing out as a body from your present programme,’ wrote this divine to Gandhi, adding: ‘At the same time the present antipathy between the two communities is bound to increase and the idea of a Hindu–Muslim unity will become a still fading dream.’

  Gandhi wrote back defending his campaign. ‘If independence is obtained as a result of this struggle’, he remarked, it would be ‘obtained by all and not for Congressmen merely. And why should antipathy between the two [communities] increase because both get extended freedom soon if it be as a result of action taken by only one? Do I not deserve special credit from you if without putting you to any trouble, I secure you a mango as well as one for myself? The utmost you can do is reject the gift but surely not get angry with me.’24

  The language showed stress; the mango metaphor was strained. It seems that Gandhi, estranged from the British, and now from the Muslims too, was exasperated by the impediments to the freedom he had so long striven for, yet hoped nonetheless to inspire a fresh movement of sacrifice and struggle to achieve that ever elusive goal.

  VIII

  By December 1940, several thousand satyagrahis were in prison, arrested one by one, as each shouted slogans against the war and thereby breached the law. Now, as a gesture of goodwill, Gandhi announced that there would be no courting of arrest between 24 December 1940 and 4 January 1941, so as to allow the officials to celebrate Christmas and New Year with their families.

  On Christmas Eve, Gandhi sat down to write a letter to Adolf Hitler. Having previously urged the British to sue for peace, he now asked the German leader to do so. Hitler believed the Germans had perfected the ‘science of destruction’; but couldn’t he see that other nations might exceed them in this regard? ‘If not the British,’ said Gandhi to Hitler, ‘some other power will certainly improve upon your method and beat you with your own weapon.’

  Gandhi continued: ‘You are leaving no legacy to your people of which they should feel proud. They cannot take part in [a] recital of cruel deed, however skilfully planned. I, therefore, appeal to you in the name of humanity to stop the war. You will lose nothing by referring all the matters of dispute between you and Great Britain to an international tribunal of your joint choice.’

  Gandhi also offered a primer on Indian politics to Hitler. ‘Ours is a unique position,’ he remarked. ‘We resist British Imperialism no less than Nazism.’ Indians had long fought, non-violently, for their freedom. ‘We know what the British heel means for us and the non-European races of the world,’ said Gandhi to Hitler. ‘But we would never wish to end the British rule with German aid.’25

  This letter was better judged, and better timed, than Gandhi’s appeal to Britons. The Raj, however, decided to suppress the letter altogether, principally because Gandhi had referred to the subjugation of India by British imperialism.

  The archives have a moderately fat file on Gandhi’s ‘Open Letter to Hitler’, where various officials give free rein to their views—and prejudices. The first to comment was an arch-imperialist in the home department, who claimed this was ‘not a genuine message to Hitler, but a message to the people of India’, which ‘notwithstanding its skilful manipulation of the peace motive, the Christmas spirit and so on’, had as its ‘main object’ to ‘bring [the British] Government [in India] into hatred and contempt’.

  On 28 December, the chief press adviser to the government, an Englishman named Desmond Young, called in some Indian editors to discuss the letter. Among them was Gandhi’s son, Devadas, editor of the Hindustan Times. Devadas said he had not seen the letter, though he had been aware that his father was composing it. When shown the full text, Devadas told the chief press adviser that on balance the letter was anti-Hitler and gained in credibility by stating the case against British imperialism. He said that ‘even if the letter did not move Herr Hitler, it would help the British Government in the U. S. A. and elsewhere and damp down German propaganda about India’. Devadas suggested that Gandhi be invited by All India Radio to broadcast the appeal in full, with the broadcast relayed to the United States and Great Britain.

  Desmond Young was a former editor himself. He was convinced that there was ‘a genuine and sincere desire on the part of the great majority of Indian newspaper editors for the defeat of the Axis Powers’. Young knew that many of these editors ‘were opponents of Nazism and Fascism long before the outbreak of war and I see no reason to suppose that their views have changed’.

  Then Young added: ‘On the other hand, there is an equally genuine and sincere reluctance, not altogether discreditable, to oppose what professes to be a movement for India’s freedom, led by a man whom Indians respect and admire, perhaps beyond reason. These views may be mutually contradictory in the present circumstances but that does not prevent them being honestly held.’26

  This nuanced understanding of the predicament of intelligent and patriotic Indians was rare. It was not of course shared by most British officials in India, nor by ordinary Britons in Britain, not even by Gandhi’s old comrade Henry Polak.

  IX

  In January 1941, the viceroy expanded his executive council to include some half a dozen Indians. Among the new councillors were two former Congressmen, M.S. Aney and N.R. Sarkar, as well as several Muslim notables. Meanwhile, Subhas Chandra Bose disappeared from his house in Calcutta. After leaving the Congress he had formed a new party, the Forward Bloc, which, however, did not gain much traction. Now Bose had left India for an unknown destination. The colonial police believed his destination was Japan, from where he would smuggle arms back to India.27 (In fact, he had gone overland to Afghanistan, and from there to Germany.)

  Gandhi did not comment in public either on the expanded executive co
uncil or on Subhas Bose’s disappearance. His main concern was the deteriorating communal situation. In the first months of 1941, Hindu–Muslim riots broke out in Dacca, Ahmedabad and several other cities. Gandhi was distressed by the violence, and more particularly by the fact that, as he put it, ‘individual cases apart, the Congress produced little or no influence over either the Muslims or the Hindus in the affected areas’.28

  In the second week of June 1941, the senior Congress leader Rajendra Prasad came to Sevagram to discuss the communal situation with Gandhi. Prasad told Gandhi that:

  (a) I am losing my hold over Bihar.

  (b) The Muslims are frankly aggressive.

  (c) The Hindus are equally aggressive, and are organizing themselves.

  (d) The Hindu Mahasabha is gaining ground.29

  The emergence of communal blocs was disturbing. Clearly, the Pakistan resolution had consolidated a sense of communal pride among young, militant Muslims, giving them a concrete ideal to fight for—that of a Muslim homeland. On the other side, the Hindu Mahasabha was also increasing its influence. The Mahasabha’s leader, V.D. Savarkar, was a bitter critic of Gandhi, whom he claimed had ‘loaded the Moslems with favoured treatment’. Now, he was encouraging young, militant Hindus to pick up the sword to settle their disputes with Muslims.30

  X

  On 22 June 1941, Germany invaded Russia, breaking the non-aggression pact the two countries had signed two years previously. Russia had now joined the Allies. In India, communists who had previously disparaged the ‘Imperialists War’ began supporting the British, since this had become a ‘Peoples War’. To better understand what all this meant, Gandhi sent Mahadev to the sub-Himalayan town of Dehradun, where Jawaharlal Nehru was incarcerated.

  In late June, Gandhi received an anguished letter from Jayaprakash Narayan, a prominent young socialist in the Congress. Narayan was in a detention camp in Deoli, after being arrested for offering individual satyagraha. From here he wrote to Gandhi in Hindi, urging a more widespread struggle against the Raj. A translation follows:

  One feels like weeping at the slow pace of the struggle. And you used to say that the fight will now be carried on more intensively. The state and the lack of purpose of the Congress have together made us helpless. In future we must endeavour to rid ourselves of this helplessness.31

  Gandhi’s reply is unavailable. Some part of him certainly wanted to intensify the struggle. But another part urged caution. The war had entered its critical phase. In India itself, Hindus and Muslims were becoming ever more estranged.

  Not long after Narayan wrote asking him to take on the British more directly, Gandhi received a letter from a Muslim friend, Shwaib Qureshi, an associate from the Khilafat days and the son of one of his South African comrades. Qureshi, who was now working for the nawab of Bhopal, wrote beseechingly to Gandhi to take the lead in reducing Hindu–Muslim tensions, growing across India. If ‘the present dangerous drift in communal relations is allowed to continue much longer’, he warned, ‘anything might happen. It may be that Fates have decreed otherwise and that renewed efforts are doomed to failure but he will be taking too great a responsibility in history who would take the deluge for granted and resigning himself to it in a pathetic, almost tragic, spirit of fatalism refuses to make any effort. If an effort is to be made there is only one man who can make it. I need not tell you who. Will you?’

  Gandhi, in reply, said it was unfair to put ‘the whole burden’ on him. He reminded his Muslim friend that ‘I have gone down on my knees to Quaid-e-Azam as I had to your knowledge to the Aga Khan and Co. in London’ (during the Round Table Conference). He would, he said, ‘gladly give my life for settling the question’. But he needed help. ‘If you simply throw the burden on me,’ said Gandhi to Qureshi, ‘you will break me. If you shoulder it with me even if it means leaving Bhopal for a time, it can be done, God willing.’32

  XI

  Rabindranath Tagore died on 7 August 1941. He had been ailing for some time. Since Harijan was no longer being published, Gandhi issued a short statement calling Tagore ‘the greatest poet of the age’, an ‘ardent nationalist who was also a humanitarian’. There ‘was hardly any public activity on which he has not left the impress of his powerful personality’, he remarked.33

  The man who had brought Gandhi to Tagore was Charlie Andrews. Andrews had died in April 1940; now Tagore had passed away, a year and a few months later. These twin losses must surely have hurt Gandhi greatly. Andrews was by some distance his closest friend. And, after Gokhale (who died in 1915), Tagore was by some distance the Indian whom Gandhi most admired. Now both had gone.

  Gandhi had been in Sevagram from the beginning of the year. Through the first half of 1941, he monitored the progress of the individual satyagraha programme. He had deliberately kept Mahadev out of the campaign, for he needed him to travel between provinces, carrying messages and bringing back reports. By late 1941, some 2500 Congressmen had been arrested.

  Mahadev also kept Gandhi up to date with the progress of the World War. It was through him, and the clippings he brought to his notice, that Gandhi learnt of the fierce fighting between the Germans and the British in North Africa, of the German conquest of Greece and Yugoslavia, of the freezing of German and Italian assets in the United States, and, most momentously, of the German invasion of Russia.

  Except for one brief trip to Allahabad, Gandhi had stayed put in Wardha since October 1940. A year later, in October 1941, he wrote a long and most interesting letter to his Quaker friend Agatha Harrison on how he saw the world, from his own particular vantage point. Within India, he noted, ‘distrust of the Rulers is growing and spreading. The distance is increasing. We here perceive no difference between Hitlerism and British Imperialism. Hitlerism is a superfine copy of Imperialism and Imperialism is trying to overtake Hitlerism as fast as it can. Democracy is nowhere.’

  Gandhi saw the war as an ‘unholy duel’ between two immoral antagonists. The British, naturally, saw it very differently. If many Indians distrusted their white rulers, they, in turn, were increasingly exasperated with the inability of Gandhi and the Congress to recognize the fight for life and death the British were engaged in. Henry Polak had told Agatha Harrison that if their friend Gandhi was (like them) living in London, his non-violence would not survive the stress of bombs falling near his feet and his loved ones being crushed to death. When Harrison passed on this criticism, Gandhi replied in a somewhat defensive tone. ‘I rehearse such situations,’ he remarked. ‘I pray that the faith might not break under such strain.’ He reminded his Quaker friend that ‘I did shed a silent tear when I read about the damage done to the Houses of Parliament, the Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s’.34

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Towards ‘Quit India’

  I

  On 7 December 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbour, and the United States finally entered the war on the side of Britain and Russia. Asked to comment, Gandhi said he did ‘not know whether America could have avoided the entry’. He himself wished it had stayed neutral, thus to play ‘its natural part’ as an ‘arbitrator and mediator between the warring nations’.

  Gandhi believed that by her ‘territorial vastness, amazing energy, unrivalled financial status and owing to the composite character of her people’, America was ‘the one country which could have saved the world from the unthinkable butchery that is going on’. Now, with her entry into the war, ‘there is no great Power left which can mediate and bring about peace for which I have no doubt the peoples of all lands are thirsting’.1

  In the last week of December 1941, the CWC met in Bardoli, Gandhi making the overnight trip from Wardha to attend. The other CWC members who had been arrested the previous year were now out of jail, having completed their sentences. With the Soviet Union and the United States entering the war, this had become a truly global conflict; meanwhile, Japan was advancing on British possessions in South East Asi
a, bringing the war closer to India itself. The gravity of the situation was grasped by the working committee’s more internationalist members such as Nehru and Rajagopalachari. They thus decided to make a fresh move for compromise.

  In a resolution passed at Bardoli, the working committee chose to offer cooperation with the war effort in exchange for a clear commitment to independence for India once the conflict had ended. In Gandhi’s words, the Congress had ‘made a small opening for violence just with a view to shaking hands with Britain’.2 Following the Bardoli resolution, Gandhi formally suspended the individual civil disobedience movement, and wrote to the viceroy of his decision. He also decided to restart his three weeklies to give public expression to his views.

  In January 1942, Gandhi travelled to Banaras to deliver the Silver Jubilee Convocation address at the Banaras Hindu University. He had come at the invitation of the vice chancellor, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the philosopher who, some years previously, had edited a festschrift of tributes to Gandhi.

  Gandhi’s address was given extempore. A previous speaker had boasted that the university’s new engineering faculties were its pride and joy. Gandhi, characteristically, said that this did not, and would not, distinguish BHU from universities in the West. But the BHU could make a special contribution if it actively fostered harmonious relations between India’s two major communities. A good way to begin would be to pursue closer ties with a university that carried ‘Muslim’ rather than ‘Hindu’ in its name. And so, Gandhi asked his audience:

  Have you been able to attract to your University youths from Aligarh? Have you been able to identify with them? That, I think, should be your special work, the special contribution of your University. Money has come in, and more will come in if God keeps Malaviya ji in our midst for a few more years. But no amount of money will achieve the miracle I want—I mean a heart-unity between Hindus and Muslims.3