Patel then continued:
Of course, I am always willing to meet you and be convinced of any error of judgment the Congress may have made. No human institution can claim infallibility for itself. I can, however, give you this assurance that the Congress has never wished wilfully to damage the interests of the Scheduled Castes but I must not conceal from you the suspicion with which I and other Congressmen have viewed your activities. Your language has often been highly provocative and inflammatory and you have been reckless in your statements against the Congress and its great leader, Mahatma Gandhi. So far as I am aware, hardly any of the charges hurled by you against the Congress would bear impartial scrutiny.
Patel was here unburdening himself of years of suspicion and anger. That Ambedkar had opposed and vilified the Congress; that Ambedkar served in the viceroy’s executive council during the Quit India movement; that Ambedkar had often spoken disparagingly about his Mahatma, Gandhi—all this weighed on Patel’s mind. He did, however, end his letter on a conciliatory note: ‘If therefore, you can convince me to the contrary, please do come. I am willing to listen and discuss. Naturally the Congress would be glad to enlist your great ability for the promotion of what must be and is common cause between you and the Congress.’
Ambedkar did not reply to Patel for more than a month, doing so only when he was just about to leave for the United Kingdom. His letter started by complaining that the Congress press had represented his approach to Patel ‘as an act of surrender’. Then he came to the main point of disagreement, evidently personal rather than political, namely, Patel’s veneration of the Mahatma which Ambedkar could not and did not share. So, Ambedkar now wrote:
Your reference to my quarrel with Mr. Gandhi is, to say the least, in my judgment, quite out of place. This is not the first time that you have known that I ‘abuse’ Mr. Gandhi. Whether you agree or not, I have reasons to be angry with him. I have written a whole book giving my reasons why I am opposed to Mr. Gandhi on the issue of the Scheduled Castes….Many agents have been engaged to refute the allegations contained in my book. Unfortunately for Mr. Gandhi, they have all failed ignominiously. You seem to think that I am the only one who ‘abuses’ Mr. Gandhi. I know hundreds who do the same….The only difference between them and me is that they ‘abuse’ Mr. Gandhi privately and praise him publicly. My misfortune is that I have not learnt the art of double-dealing, say one thing in public and quite opposite of it in private. Since you have taken my attack on Mr. Gandhi to heart in a manner which shows that but for the ‘abuse’ there would have been a settlement, I must say that you think Mr. Gandhi is greater than the country. My view is different. I think the country is greater than the greatest man. You think to be Congressmen and to be nationalists are synonymous. I think a man can be a nationalist without being a Congressman. If you will forgive me, I will cite my own case. I am a greater nationalist than any Congressman and if on occasions I have not been able to present the full front of a nationalist, it is because men like Mr. Gandhi have been stabbing me in the back by their opposition to the demand of the Untouchables for political safeguards.
Ambedkar ended by saying that though Patel had ended his letter by offering to meet, he was sure ‘it can serve no purpose’.6
Ambedkar’s dislike for Gandhi was intense. In 1946, his Bombay publishers, Thackers and Co. brought out a book by the Gandhi-worshipping journalist Krishnalal Shridharani, entitled The Mahatma and the World. Climbing the stairs to his publisher’s office, Ambedkar was outraged to see a poster advertising this book. ‘The number of books that people write on this old man takes my breath away,’ he grumbled, pointing at the display board. Not long afterwards, he met the journalist Vincent Sheen, and told him that if Americans loved Gandhi so much, they should import him to the United States so that Indians would at last be rid of him.7
III
Meanwhile, Gandhi’s other long-standing rival, M.A. Jinnah, was making his most daring move yet. After the Cabinet Mission failed, Jinnah decided to take the case for Pakistan to the streets. A meeting of the League’s leaders on 29 July resolved that ‘the Muslims of India will not rest content with anything less than the immediate establishment of an independent and full sovereign state of Pakistan’. The ‘time has come for the Muslim nation’, it added, ‘to resort to direct action in order to achieve Pakistan and assert their just rights and to vindicate their honour and to get rid of the present slavery under the British and contemplated future of Caste Hindu domination’.
The Muslim League, said Jinnah, had never done ‘anything except by constitutional methods and by constitutionalism. But now we are obliged and forced into this position. This day we bid good-bye to constitutional methods.’ The League had, he said, to change its methods to combat the ‘authority and arms’ of the British Raj and the ‘mass struggle and non-co-operation of the Congress’. As Jinnah bluntly put it: ‘To-day, we have also forged a pistol and are in a position to use it.’8
Sixteenth August was designated Direct Action Day. On this day, Muslims were asked to organize processions all over India, shut down shops and schools, and in other ways press the case for Pakistan.
Jinnah had a lifelong faith in constitutional methods. Indeed, he had broken with Gandhi and the Congress in 1920 on precisely this question. He had wanted a continuing dialogue with the British, not a programme of ‘non-co-operation’ with them. Long comfortable only in the law court and the assembly chamber, he had in recent years become more of a mass leader. Still, the call for ‘direct action’ was utterly inconsistent with his temperament, and his public career so far.
In abandoning constitutional methods, Jinnah may have been acting in part out of frustration (at the Congress’s rejection of the Cabinet Mission’s grouping plan). But he was also responding to the signals from his own rank and file. This was the view of Penderel Moon, the ICS man who arguably knew India better than any of his colleagues. In the first week of August 1946, Moon wrote to an English friend that ‘extremist Muslims are as crazy, irrational and fanatical as their leaders. The more moderate elements are in a “nobody loves me” mood of self-pity. Fear of being eaten up by the Hindus is becoming a quite widespread obsession.’ In a second letter, he added that ‘the Muslims are deeply, however irrationally, stirred….They are likely to act desperately and impulsively.’9
On 16 August, followers and cadres of the Muslim League took to the streets. Their largest show of strength was in Calcutta, where, with their own party in power, winking at their violations of the law, they had, for a full twenty-four hours, the run of the place.
A large meeting of Muslims had been called in the Calcutta Maidan. On their way to the maidan, Muslim League activists forced shopkeepers to close their shops, and threw burning rags into houses en route. On their way back, drunk with the power that comes from hearing heady speeches, they attacked more homes and shops. The riot spread across the city, with stabbings and murders in localities across north Calcutta, the weapons used including knives, iron rods and fire bombs.
The next day, the Hindus retaliated, led by their own communal organization, the Hindu Mahasabha. ‘As people came back home from different parts of the town they brought back tales of maimed women, burnt houses, looted shops and so on. Some of these were later on found to be wrong; but people had become panicky and were eager to believe every atrocity story.’ Through the 17th and 18th, the riots intensified and spread, as ‘people lost their senses from fright and reacted violently in the hope of self-defence. The police were nowhere, and the only chance of living, they thought, must be through extermination of Muslims—as if that were possible or desirable.’
On the 19th, detachments of the British Indian Army were called in, and slowly the city became calm. A teacher in Calcutta University, walking around the city, saw ‘dozens of corpses lying about. They swelled in a day or two, the air became foul, and vultures for a whole week littered the roofs of Calcutta, and fea
sted on the corpses until they could do no more.’ Soon ‘relief works sprang up everywhere and have been doing a splendid amount of work. Money, services, clothes, vegetables started coming in profusely, but the sting has remained. There is hardly any centre where you find both Hindu and Muslim refugees. There is a clear-cut division.’ As the teacher talked to people, ‘numerous cases of Hindus sheltering Muslims and Muslims sheltering Hindus have come to light; but, taken as a whole, the fear and distrust on both sides is intense. People are shifting from one quarter to another; but God knows if that is any solution.’10
As details of the violence in Calcutta and elsewhere reached him in Sevagram, Gandhi issued an anguished appeal for peace. In a statement dated 19 August, he noted that Muslim League leaders were ‘preaching violence in naked language’. The road to ‘Pakistan of whatever hue’, he remarked, ‘does not lie through senseless violence’. Rather ‘what senseless violence does is to prolong the lease of the life of British or foreign rule’.
‘Would that,’ Gandhi hoped, ‘the violence of Calcutta were sterilized and did not become a signal for its spread all over.’ He added that ‘this depends on the leaders of the Muslim League of course, but the rest will not be free from responsibility. They can retaliate or refrain. Refraining is easy and simple, if there is the will.’11
In the last week of August, Gandhi travelled to Delhi, for discussions with the viceroy on the formation of an interim government. Nehru and Gandhi met Wavell on the 28th, with the viceroy asking them to accept the Cabinet Mission’s ‘grouping’ scheme so as to smooth the path for a Congress–League coalition at the Centre.
On 2 September 1946, the members of an interim government were sworn in. Jawaharlal Nehru headed it, with the (interim) designation of vice president. Patel was home minister, Rajaji minister for education, Rajendra Prasad minister for food and agriculture, the Delhi Congressman Asaf Ali railway minister. The Sikhs had sent a representative, Baldev Singh, as defence minister, but the Muslim League had kept away. Gandhi advised the new ministers to ‘ever seek to attain communal harmony’, and ‘resolve never to use British troops’.12
With the Muslim League refusing to join the government, and with its leaders (including Jinnah) making incendiary speeches, the subject of religious harmony figured often in Gandhi’s prayer meetings. On 7 September, he said: ‘I am not a Muslim but I venture to say that Islam does not preach enmity towards anyone. I think I am as much a Christian, a Sikh and a Jain as I am a Hindu. Religion does not teach one to kill one’s brother however different his belief.’13
In the last week of September, Gandhi met the viceroy at the latter’s request. Wavell told him: ‘The League must be brought in somehow’ (into the interim government). Gandhi answered that the Congress was happy to facilitate this—why not Jinnah meet Nehru and discuss the matter? The viceroy then said that the ‘stumbling block’ was the inclusion by Congress of Asaf Ali, a Muslim, as a minister, since Jinnah and the League claimed the exclusive right to represent Muslims. Gandhi replied that while he was all for a Congress–League collaboration, the Congress could not disown non-League Muslims who had stayed loyal to them for so long.14
In a fresh attempt at a Congress–League compromise, the nawab of Bhopal met Gandhi in Delhi in the first week of October. They then jointly signed a statement, the first part of which represented a significant climbdown on the part of the Congress. This read: ‘The Congress does not challenge and accepts that the Muslim League now is the authoritative representative of an overwhelming majority of the Muslims of India. As such and in accordance with democratic principles they alone have today an unquestionable right to represent the Muslims of India.’ Then came a caveat: ‘But the Congress cannot agree that any restriction or limitation should be put upon the Congress to choose such representatives as they think proper from amongst the members of the Congress as their representatives.’15
This agreement paved the way for the Muslim League to join the interim government. In this new coalition, Congress had six ministers, the League five, with three posts for other parties. Gandhi’s party retained Asaf Ali in the Cabinet. On the other side, Jinnah retaliated by nominating a non-Muslim as minister. This was the Scheduled Caste leader from Bengal, Jogendra Nath Mandal.
Since Nehru was now heading the interim government, he gave up the Congress presidency. The veteran nationalist J.B. Kripalani, Gandhi’s friend from the days of the Champaran struggle, was chosen to replace Nehru as head of the party.
IV
On 2 October 1946, Gandhi turned seventy-seven. As ever, he received many letters from friends and well-wishers. The Vietnamese nationalist Ho Chi Minh conveyed his ‘warmest compliments on your seventy eighth [sic] birthday and wish you live twice seventy eight years’. The Burmese nationalist Aung San sent a telegram addressed to ‘Mahatma Gandhi Care Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru New Delhi’, reading: ‘On the occasion of your eightieth [sic] birthday I send you on behalf of our people respectful felicitations. May you live long to usher in and enjoy full freedom of India.’
The British Labour leader Stafford Cripps wrote a letter in red ink, wishing Gandhi on his ‘double-seven’ birthday on behalf of his wife Isobel and himself. Since Gandhi had ‘devoted so many years’ to the freedom of his people, remarked Cripps, he must be happy that ‘at last Jawaharlal, Vallabh[bh]ai, and others are where they ought to be, at the head of Indian Government. A few short steps and the final act will have been completed and then we can all rejoice together in the accomplishment of Indian Freedom.’
The file in the Gandhi Papers containing these letters from the Great Men of History also has a lovely letter from an unknown American, who wrote:
Today at lunch I got the urge to tell you that small towns, like Forty Fort [in Pennsylvania] where I live, all over the world have been made better because of your life.
Perhaps it is not so strange after all that you, Hindu leader, should remind the world and Palestine to adopt the methods of Jesus, our Christ. Jesus lives today and perhaps he speaks through you.
To me it is one of my great blessings that I have lived in the same generation with you.
You feel and know, I am sure, that the world is getting better; and, that we are drawing closer to the people of India and China.
Gandhi’s secretary, Pyarelal, surely showed him the telegrams from Ho and Aung San, and the letter from Cripps. One hopes he showed Gandhi the letter from Forty Fort too.16
V
While Gandhi was in Delhi, the situation in Bengal was rapidly deteriorating. In Calcutta, the Direct Action Day had started with a show of strength by the Muslim League. But as the rioting spread in what was a Hindu-majority city, Muslims themselves became victims of the mayhem their leaders had unleashed. When the violence finally subsided, hundreds of Hindus had lost their lives, but a greater number of Muslims had perished in the conflagration.
As news of the violence spread through rural Bengal, calls for revenge were heard. These were loudest in Noakhali, a district where Muslims were more than 80 per cent of the population, and which housed many Islamic seminaries, which trained preachers who went on to lead congregations in all parts of Bengal. Hindus were a small minority in Noakhali, but they owned large tracts of land, as well as shops, making them obvious and visible targets.
On 29 August, thousands of Muslims gathered in Noakhali town, calling for ‘a revenge of Calcutta’. A local League leader named Ghulam Surwar led a mob through the Hindu localities of the town, looting and torching shops and homes. The violence then spread out into the countryside. Hindu men were made to shout ‘Pakistan Zindabad’; Hindu girls were taken away and married to Muslim boys. Many Hindus were forcibly converted to Islam. Those who protested or resisted were killed.17
The Muslims of Noakhali were mostly poor peasants and artisans, whose already fragile economic condition had been worsened by the war and the famine. Now, wrote one contemporary observer: ‘Th
eir bitterness was skilfully exploited by the propagandists of the Muslim League. The Hindus, specially the zamindars and the merchants, became the target of their virulent attacks. The starving Muslim peasants were asked to kill rich Hindus and loot their property. They were told that they would enjoy untold blessings in Pakistan, but Pakistan could not be established before the extermination of Hindus.’18
The news of the bloodbath in East Bengal reached Gandhi in Delhi. In a prayer meeting on 15 October, he wondered aloud ‘where his duty lay’. Should he rush to Noakhali, or stay on in the capital? ‘God would show him the way.’ Meanwhile, he insisted ‘that it was the duty of every Hindu not to harbour any thoughts of revenge on Muslims in spite of what they did in Noakhali’. Two days later, he spoke about how, more than the killings, what hurt him ‘was the fact that women were being carried away, abducted and converted to Islam’. But there was still ‘no inner call’ to go to Noakhali. ‘When it comes,’ he told his co-workers, ‘nothing will hold me back.’19
Amidst the deepening gloom, there was some good news from Bombay, where the new Congress government had passed a comprehensive law removing social disabilities for the ‘untouchables’. They would now have access to all wells, temples, schools, shops, playgrounds, cremation grounds, etc., where caste Hindus had previously denied them entry. Those who prevented them from exercising these rights would be sentenced to a term in prison or made to pay a heavy fine.
Gandhi welcomed the new Act, but warned his readers not ‘to be over-sanguine about it. Unfortunately for us, we know that we pass resolutions by acclamation and allow them to become [a] dead letter. The greatest vigilance will have to be exercised by the Government and the reformers in the strict enforcement of the law.’20
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