Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  Gandhi had met Jinnah many times before, yet they had drifted further and further apart. How he hoped now to convert him with ‘trust and love’ was not clear. A lawyer who had worked closely with Jinnah for many years wrote that he had ‘never come across any man who has less humanity in his character than Jinnah. He was cold and unemotional, and apart from law and politics he had no other interests.’ The lawyer further added that ‘Jinnah’s dominant characteristic was tenacity. Once he made up his mind, nothing in the world could divert him from his chosen objective.’12

  In the event, the meeting had to be postponed, since Jinnah fell ill. This disappointed Gandhi, for, as he wrote to the Muslim League leader, ‘the whole world was looking forward to our meeting’. He now hoped that ‘God will soon restore you to health, hasten the meeting…and that the meeting will lead to the welfare of India’.13

  The meeting was now rescheduled for September. On the 8th of that month, Gandhi took the overnight train from Wardha to Bombay. The next morning he met Jinnah, spending three hours with him, the first of numerous conversations they would have over the next twenty days.

  In September 1944, Gandhi and Jinnah had known of each other for almost fifty years. Both had Gujarati as their mother tongue (though Jinnah spoke it indifferently), both were lawyers educated in London (though Jinnah succeeded at the Bombay Bar whereas Gandhi failed), both once considered themselves protégés of Gopal Krishna Gokhale. They differed substantively in their politics—Jinnah having left the Congress in 1920, and more recently leading the Muslim League in opposition to Gandhi’s Congress—and even more spectacularly, in their lifestyle. Gandhi lived in a mud hut in the middle of nowhere; Jinnah in a stately mansion on Malabar Hill, Bombay’s most exclusive locality. Gandhi wore more or less nothing, whereas Jinnah took great care over his attire.14

  Gandhi had taken, as the basis for their discussion, a proposal made by C. Rajagopalachari. This had first been discussed sixteen months ago, when Rajaji came to meet Gandhi in prison. The proposal had six clauses: first, that the Muslim League and the Congress would cooperate in the formation of a provisional government at the Centre; second, after the war ended, a commission would demarcate contiguous Muslim-majority districts in the north-west and east of India, where a plebiscite would be held (ideally, with all adults participating) on whether these regions wanted to be part of a free and united India or not; third, that all parties could freely propagate their views before the plebiscite; fourth, if the Muslim areas voted for separation, an agreement for cooperation on defence, commerce and communications would be worked out; fifth, that any transfer of population would be voluntary; and, finally, that all this was naturally contingent on the British transferring power to Indian hands.15

  Gandhi took the Rajaji proposal to Jinnah off his own bat, so to speak. He did not consult his closest lieutenants, Nehru and Patel. Or perhaps we should say ‘could not’, since those two men were still in prison, along with other members of the CWC. This was probably just as well, for it is overwhelmingly likely that Nehru and Patel would have opposed these parleys with Jinnah. Nehru distrusted Jinnah; Patel distrusted both Jinnah and Rajaji. He would not forgive Rajaji for (as he saw it) letting down the party in 1942.

  Back in January 1915, at a reception hosted by the Gujaratis of Bombay, Jinnah had urged Gandhi to help ‘bring about unanimity and co-operation between the two communities so that the demands of India may be made absolutely unanimously’. Gandhi had tried to do this ever since, albeit with mixed success. In seeking to further that cooperation he had corresponded with Jinnah and met with him on occasion too. This meeting was a last chance to heal a rift that had become as much personal as communal.

  The Gandhi–Jinnah talks began on 9 September 1944. They were held at Jinnah’s bungalow on Malabar Hill. As the car carrying Gandhi arrived there, shortly before four in the afternoon, the visitor ‘was warmly received by Mr. Jinnah at the portico. The beautiful lawn in front of Mr. Jinnah’s house was alive with a battalion of Press representatives, foreign war correspondents and camera-men who had assembled there long before.’16

  The two men went inside, and spoke for three hours. Afterwards, Gandhi prepared a long report for Rajaji to read.

  It was a test of my patience…I am amazed at my own patience. However, it was a friendly talk.

  In the middle of the talk he came back to the old ghost: ‘I thought you had come here as a Hindu, as a representative of the Hindu Congress’. I said, ‘No, I have come here neither as a Hindu nor as a representative of the Congress. I have come here as an individual’.

  …We came back to the [Rajaji] Formula. He wants Pakistan now, not after independence….He said, ‘The Muslims want Pakistan. The League represents the Muslims and it wants separation.’ I said, ‘I agree the League is the most powerful Muslim organization. I might even concede that you as its President represent the Muslims of India, but that does not mean that all Muslims want Pakistan. Put it to the vote of all the inhabitants of the area and see.’ He said, ‘Why should you ask non-Muslims?’ I said, ‘You cannot possibly deprive a section of the population of its vote. You must carry them with you, and if you are in the majority why should you be afraid?’17

  Gandhi and Jinnah met again the next day, and the next. No record was kept of their conversations, and with Mahadev Desai dead, there was no one to press Gandhi to record his impressions as soon as he came out of Jinnah’s bungalow on Malabar Hill. But we do have the letters that the two leaders wrote one another in the intervals between their talks. Writing on 10 September, Jinnah worried that, with Gandhi claiming to speak as an individual, the talks lacked a representative character. If Gandhi agreed to speak as the leader of the (Hindu) Congress, then it would be easier to come to an agreement. He was also concerned about the commission for demarcation proposed by Rajaji; how would it be set up, who would be its members, and what would be its mandate? Gandhi, in reply, assured Jinnah that he was ‘pledged to use all the influence I may have with the Congress to ratify my agreement with you’. As for the commission, this would be set up by the proposed provisional government, its membership and terms of reference based on the widest possible consultation.18

  As the talks proceeded, Gandhi and Jinnah refused to give any updates to the pressmen outside. But the journalists were hungry for details, sometimes seeing them in visual signs. One reporter kept a day-long watch on the window of the first-floor lounge where the talks were taking place. From his vigil he concluded ‘that Mr. Jinnah did most of the talking today. Framed in this window was Mr. Jinnah’s sharp profile, and one could see him raising his delicate index finger to make a point, or lurch forward to emphasise another. At least on one occasion, he was seen bringing his right fist heavily down into his left palm and straighten himself up in his seat.’19

  After this, the fourth day of the talks, Gandhi told Rajaji that Jinnah ‘drew a very alluring picture of the Government of Pakistan. It would be a perfect democracy….Sikhs would have Gurmukhi if they wanted and the Pakistan Government would give them financial aid.’ ‘On my part,’ added Gandhi, ‘I am not going to be in a hurry. But he can’t expect me to endorse an undefined Pakistan.’20

  On the 13th, the two men were closeted together for the best part of the day. After the morning session, as they emerged into the garden, a reporter asked, ‘Anything for us?’ ‘No,’ replied Gandhi, adding, ‘yesterday you read something in our faces. Here we are both. I would like you not to read anything in our faces except hope and nothing but hope.’ Gandhi then turned to Jinnah and asked, ‘Am I right?’ Jinnah answered dryly, ‘Why bother?’ (with what the press wrote, that is).21

  On the 15th, after their talks for almost a week, Gandhi wrote Jinnah a letter outlining the situation as he saw it. ‘The only real, though awful, test of our nationhood,’ he wrote here, ‘arises out of our common political subjection. If you and I throw off this subjection by our combined effort, we shall be born a po
litically free nation out of our travail.’ But if Jinnah’s idea of two separate and distinct nations was implemented, Gandhi saw ‘nothing but ruin for the whole of India’.

  Gandhi ended his letter by repudiating Jinnah’s long-standing charge that he was merely a ‘Hindu’ leader. ‘Though I represent nobody but myself,’ he remarked, ‘I aspire to represent all the inhabitants of India, for I realize in my own person their misery and degradation, which is their common lot, irrespective of class, caste or creed.’ Then, however, he appended a significant concession. ‘I know that you have acquired a unique hold on the Muslim masses,’ he told Jinnah. ‘I want you to use this influence for their total welfare, which must include the rest.’22

  That Jinnah was a genuine mass leader Gandhi would not have stated or believed as recently as 1937. The emphatic victory of the Congress in the elections held that year had, it seemed, proved that the party of Gandhi and Nehru represented a majority of Indians, among them many Muslims too. But, after the Congress ministries took office, Jinnah’s claim that they practised anti-Muslim policies acquired increasing salience. When the Congress ministries resigned in 1939, the success of the League’s ‘Deliverance Day’ celebrations confirmed that it was now the major party of the Muslims of the subcontinent.

  When the leading Congressmen were in jail, Jinnah travelled through the towns of north and east India. Once aloof and distant, cerebral and somewhat snobbish, he now worked hard to make connections with the ordinary Muslim. And he succeeded, as this account of a meeting in Allahabad in 1942 demonstrates:

  The procession [conveying Jinnah from the railway station] passed under 110 arches, each named for a person important in Indian Islamic history, beginning with the first Muslim sultan to land on India’s shores and ending triumphantly with Muhammed Ali Jinnah. He addressed the Momins, the poor of the Muslim community, descending from the truck to do so and speaking of mutual loyalty between them and the League. Honorific speeches were presented to him, including one which brought his name in the line of Prophet and the Asar saints (companions and successors of Mohammed). Oratory, lights, pageantry and general excitement reign at the League meetings. The Pakistan flag is flown, money is collected, and Mr. Jinnah’s speech—a short part in unaccustomed Urdu and a long part in English—produces a near frenzy in the audience.23

  Now, in September 1944, even Gandhi was speaking of Jinnah’s ‘unique hold on the Muslim masses’.

  The concession, or flattery if you will, did not move Jinnah. Replying to Gandhi, he doggedly defended his two-nation theory. ‘We [Muslims in India] are a nation of [a] hundred million,’ he said, ‘and what is more, we are a nation with our own distinctive culture and civilization, language and literature, art and architecture, names and nomenclature, sense of value and proportion, legal laws and moral codes, customs and calendar, history and traditions, aptitudes and ambitions; in short, we have our own distinctive outlook on life and of life. By all canons of international law we are a nation.’

  Like Gandhi, Jinnah also claimed that his proposal was for the good of all, Hindus and Muslims alike. And he offered some flattery of his own. ‘You are a great man and you exercise enormous influence over the Hindus, particularly the masses,’ wrote Jinnah to Gandhi, ‘and by accepting the road I am pointing out to you, you are not prejudicing or harming the interests of the Hindus or of the minorities. On the contrary, Hindus will be the greater gainers. I am convinced that true welfare not only of Muslims but of the rest of India lies in the division of India…’24

  Gandhi told Jinnah that unity was in the best interest of Muslims. Jinnah answered that separation was in the best interest of Hindus. Could there be any meeting ground? Gandhi thought that there could. ‘Can we not,’ he now wrote to Jinnah, ‘agree to differ on the question of “two nations” and yet solve the problem on the basis of self-determination?’ If the regions with Muslim majorities wanted to become a separate nation, he said, then ‘the grave step of separation should be specifically placed before and approved by the people in that area’.

  Jinnah was, however, not willing to put his theory to the test of popular opinion. Muslims in India, he argued, ‘claim the right of self-determination as a nation and not as a territorial unit, and…we are entitled to exercise our inherent right as a Muslim nation, which is our birth-right’. Gandhi answered that ‘mere assertion is no proof’, adding that ‘all the people inhabiting the area ought to express their opinion specifically on this single issue of division’.25

  On 21 September, with the Gandhi–Jinnah talks well into their second week, the Bombay Chronicle ran a thoughtful editorial on the question of untouchability. It noted that the central executive of B.R. Ambedkar’s Scheduled Caste Federation was soon to meet in Madras, where its leader would surely speak of the implications of the Gandhi–Jinnah talks for the position of the Depressed Classes. Ambedkar had often said that though he was born a Hindu, he would not die a Hindu. However, commented the newspaper, although ‘large sections of his community wish to repudiate Hinduism he found little response even from his known followers’. Conversion was a matter of individual choice and conscience, not of one person compelling others to follow him into a new faith.

  The newspaper agreed with Ambedkar that ‘Harijans ought to have a fair share of political power in almost every representative body and state service’. Then the editorial continued:

  Above all, the system of untouchability, the root cause of disharmony, must be destroyed root and branch without any avoidable delay. Unfortunately, however, very few persons are concentrating their efforts on this specific task. Many Harijan leaders neglect this because they fear that once their grievance is gone their prominence in championship goes with it. And many caste Hindu leaders, though they abominate untouchability, think that their main, if not sole duty is to be kind and generous to Harijans. They spend lakhs over this service to Harijans but sadly neglect the root cause of the trouble, namely, their own belief in untouchability caused by superstition or social selfishness or sheer custom. It is time Gandhi and other leaders who want to destroy untouchability consider the Harijan problem afresh in all its bearings, with a view in particular to the speedy eradication of untouchability itself.26

  As the Chronicle had predicted, Ambedkar spoke out against the Gandhi–Jinnah talks at the meeting of his followers in Madras. ‘The Hindu–Moslem problem,’ he remarked here, ‘was not the only one confronting the country. Christians, Scheduled Castes and other minorities were involved…’ He warned Gandhi not to ‘give more to Jinnah’ at the expense of the Scheduled Castes. He then launched a furious broadside against Gandhi, calling him ‘a man who has no vision, who has no knowledge, and who has no judgment, a man who has been a failure all his life…’ This prompted a puzzled editorial in a local newspaper. ‘Dr Ambedkar’s is undoubtedly one of the best causes in the world today,’ remarked the Indian Express. ‘Why is he then so keen on spoiling it by intemperate attacks on others, who have at least as much claim as he has to their own viewpoints?’27

  As it turned out, the parleys in Bombay that Ambedkar so objected to were going nowhere. Two weeks after their first meeting, Gandhi told Jinnah that ‘our talks and our correspondence seem to run in parallel lines and never touch each other’. He now suggested they call in ‘outside assistance’ to help them (he probably had Rajaji in mind). Gandhi also asked Jinnah to allow him to address the council of the Muslim League. Jinnah rejected both proposals; the second of which he characterized as ‘a most extraordinary and unprecedented suggestion’.28

  Since these talks had been on for close to three weeks now, and there was no word on how they were progressing, there was much tension among those who were following them. On the 26th, as Gandhi walked into Jinnah’s bungalow, journalists crowded around him. ‘Is there any hope?’ asked one. Gandhi answered: ‘Patience, patience, patience.’29

  As it turned out, this was the last day the two men met.
Afterwards, Gandhi wrote to Jinnah that ‘you keep on saying that I should accept certain theses, while I have been contending that the best way for us, who differ in our approach to the problem, is to give body to the demand as it stands in the [Lahore] Resolution and work it out to our mutual satisfaction’.

  The exasperation was palpable. It was answered by exasperation and anger. Thus Jinnah wrote to Gandhi: ‘If one does not agree with you or differs from you, you are always right and the other party is always wrong, and the next thing is that many are waiting prepared, in your circle, to pillory me when the word goes, but I must face all threats and consequences, and I can only act according to my judgment and conscience.’30

  On 29 September, the Bombay Chronicle ran a two-column editorial on the failure of the Gandhi–Jinnah talks. It was almost certainly written by the editor, S.A. Brelvi, a Muslim, yet a staunch Congressman who had been jailed several times in the nationalist cause. The Chronicle observed that the talks had raised ‘great and pleasant hopes’, and that their failure ‘will cause an unprecedented shock of pain and disappointment to every Indian who truly loves his country, yearns for heart-unity between Hindus and Muslims and desires national freedom’.

  The editorial argued that Jinnah was to blame for the failure of the talks, and for two reasons. First, Jinnah had suggested that Gandhi was meeting him in an individual capacity and not as a representative of the Congress, and hence he did not know how far any agreement would have validity. The Chronicle asked how Jinnah could ever have questioned, ‘in a petty, legalistic spirit, the representative capacity of Mahatma Gandhi’? Surely, Jinnah knew that if Gandhi said he could convince Congress of any agreement, his party, whose leader he had been for the past twenty-five years, would go along with him?