Decades later, reflecting on Gandhi’s kindness towards him, Symonds marvelled at how ‘this great man at a time of acute anxiety, pressure and sadness, had found it possible every day to nurse and chat and joke with a man of no importance’. In truth, Gandhi probably found the experience nourishing too; despite his hostility to British imperialism, he was enormously fond of the British, and in this time of tension and stress, conversations with a sensitive young Englishman would have been a relaxation.49
Another young white man in Delhi in the winter of 1947–48 was Alan Moorehead, a tough and hard-nosed war correspondent originally from Australia. In the first years of the World War, Moorehead had met Gandhi several times, and had several arguments with him about the respective merits of violence and non-violence. Now, back to cover Partition and Independence, Moorehead found Gandhi, in essence and in spirit, unchanged: ‘He was still getting up at four in the morning to exercise, he was still the nimblest (and I think the gayest) good brain in India, and he was still talking in parables on precisely the same theme’ (of combating violence with non-violence). When the Australian went to hear him address his daily prayer meeting at Birla House, he thought Gandhi ‘looked like some great gaunt bird with long, bare legs, and his little dark bird-like head poking out of his white cotton dhoti. His voice was tired, but he spoke with the mind of a mental athlete.’50
On the first day of 1948, one Gandhi disciple in Delhi wrote to another in Calcutta: ‘Bapu is extraordinarily well and I feel that his influence is permeating slowly but surely.’51
At his prayer meetings in Delhi, Gandhi now wore a straw hat. Asked about this, he answered that he valued the hat for three reasons: that it was presented to him by a Muslim peasant in Noakhali; that it doubled up as an umbrella; and that it was made of local materials.52
Not all questions were so harmless. During the prayer meeting on 10 January, a sadhu clad in saffron got up and said he wanted to read a note he had written criticizing Gandhi. When Gandhi said he could hand the note over, to be read later, the sadhu insisted on reading it out aloud to the gathering. After some argument with the crowd, he finally agreed to sit down.53
The public mood in Delhi remained angry, and soon rioting broke out once more in the city. Gandhi further postponed his plans to visit Punjab. This was just as well, for the trouble escalated. In Mehrauli, a village on the outskirts of Delhi, there was a celebrated Sufi shrine, visited by tens of thousands of people, including Hindus and Muslims. Now the Muslims whose families had tended the shrine for hundreds of years were hounded out by a Hindu mob.54
On 12 January, Gandhi informed his prayer meeting that he was commencing a fast the next day. The recent riots had been contained by police and military action, but there was yet a ‘storm within the breast. It may burst forth any day.’ So, he had decided to go on a fast, which would end when he was ‘satisfied that there is a reunion of hearts of all communities brought about without any outside pressure, but from an awakened sense of duty’.55
The Hindustan Times, edited by Gandhi’s son Devadas, reported that the decision to fast had come ‘as a complete surprise to his colleagues and the members of the Government’. Gandhi’s close associates ‘cannot conceal their anxiety’ at his decision, said the paper, as his health was still frail, after the fast in Calcutta. But Gandhi disregarded them, for ‘he had been very much affected by the all-round misery and chaos, thousands of refugees streaming to him with tragic tales’.
Meanwhile, in a private letter to his father, Devadas Gandhi wrote: ‘By your strenuous efforts [for communal harmony] lacs of lives were saved and lacs more would have been saved. But all of a sudden you lost patience. What you can achieve while living, you cannot achieve by dying.’56
Gandhi would not be moved. On the morning of the 12th, he went to the Viceregal Palace to inform Mountbatten of his fast. Later, Nehru came to Birla House and sat with Gandhi for two hours. Although the stated reason for the fast was the deteriorating communal situation, it seems Gandhi was also upset with the government’s decision to withhold from Pakistan its share of the sterling balances owed by Britain to (undivided) India after the Second World War. Because of Pakistan’s invasion of Kashmir, the Indian government had delayed the payment. But in Gandhi’s view of the world, financial debts to another person or entity, whether friend, enemy, or neither, had to be discharged immediately.57
On the 13th, Gandhi had his usual morning meal of goat’s milk, boiled vegetables and fruit juice. Then he had a long conversation with Vallabhbhai Patel. The fast formally began at 11.15 a.m., after which some prayers were said.
On the 13th itself, Rajendra Prasad, now president of the Congress, issued a statement urging citizens to restore communal peace and thus save Gandhi’s life. The Congress president appealed to citizens to desist from violence, since to let Gandhi die as a result of his fast would be ‘an eternal blot on the name of Delhi’. The prime ministers and assemblies of Bengal and Madras urged the re-establishment of peace so that Gandhi could call off his fast.
Another report noted that ‘the most pleasant surprise caused in the capital today apropos Mahatma Gandhi’s fast was the news of reactions in Pakistan’. One Pakistani politician, Ghazanfar Ali Khan, said Gandhi’s decision to fast should make the leaders of the two countries come together and sort out their differences. Another, Mumtaz Daultana, said Gandhi had ‘rendered noble services in the cause of Hindu–Muslim unity’. A third, Feroz Khan Noon, remarked—during a session of the West Punjab assembly ostensibly devoted to discussing the budget—that ‘Mahatma Gandhi’s services in restoring peace in Calcutta during the recent past are only a small example of his great achievement towards restoration of sanity and peace’.58
On the evening of the first day of his fast, Gandhi attended the daily prayer meeting and gave his address as usual. He spoke of, among other things, the perception that Indian Muslims trusted both him and Nehru, but not Patel. Gandhi thought this slightly unfair. ‘The Sardar is blunt of speech,’ he remarked. ‘What he says sometimes sounds bitter. The fault is in his tongue.’ He asked his Muslim friends to ‘bring to the Sardar’s notice any mistakes which in their opinion he commits’.59
On the 14th, the second day of his fast, Gandhi met members of the Indian Cabinet, a deputation of refugees from the NWFP, and a large number of other visitors, including the maharaja of Patiala and G.D. Birla. Elsewhere in the city, the violence continued. Hindu and Sikh refugees attacked Muslims in the Ajmeri Gate area, whereupon a group of Congress volunteers came and took the victims to the safety of a nearby mosque. In another incident, a group of Muslims, returning to their temporary camp in Humayun’s Tomb after a train they hoped to take to Pakistan had no place for them, were stopped and beaten up.
On the evening of 14 January, a batch of angry men arrived on bicycles at Birla House and raised what were described as ‘communal and anti-Gandhi slogans’. Inside the house, speaking with Gandhi, were Patel, Azad and Nehru. When the trio came out and heard the demonstrators say, ‘Let Gandhi Die’, Nehru shouted: ‘How dare you say that. Come and kill me first.’ At this, the demonstrators dispersed, but no sooner had Nehru’s car sped away, than they reassembled. One of Gandhi’s doctors, Jivraj Mehta, tried to reason with them. They told him that the slogans were on behalf of the refugees who needed food, homes, clothes and jobs.60
At the prayer meeting that day, Gandhi spoke of reports of attacks on Sikhs and Hindus in Pakistan; if these ceased, they would have a beneficial effect on India. He then turned to his present ordeal. ‘They tell me I am mad,’ he said, ‘and have a habit of going on fast on the slightest pretext. But I am made that way.’ When he was a boy growing up in Kathiawar, he had a dream ‘that if the Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis, Christians and Muslims could live in amity not only in Rajkot but in the whole of India, they would all have a very happy life. If the dream could be realized even now when I am an old man on the verge of death, my heart would dance.’61
was asleep, lying on his side in an embryo position. He was completely covered in a khaddar cloth, including his head, and framing his face….An old man’s face and not attractive. In his sleep, he seemed to have lost control and it showed what he perhaps was feeling—suffering, intense suffering…Somehow we never think of a Gandhi fast as a terrible physical experience. We think of it as a political manoeuvre, a strike, a gesture. But here it was in human terms, a process. Here was a 79 year old man deliberately killing himself in the most difficult and excruciating way.62
Elsewhere in the city, a young student from Gorakhpur, walking through Connaught Circus, came across a group of men in khaki shorts, white shirts and black caps, exercising while vigorously waving sticks. They were volunteers of the RSS. As they walked and jumped, these RSS men shouted at the top of their voices, ‘Boodhé ko marné do’ (Let the old man die).63
At evening prayers on the 15th, Gandhi was visibly weak. From his bed, with a microphone next to him, he spoke in a barely audible voice for a minute. The rest of his speech, read out for him by Pyarelal, explained that his fast was on behalf of the minorities both in Pakistan and India. Conducted in the first instance ‘on behalf of the Muslim minority in the [Indian] Union’, it was ‘necessarily against the Hindus and Sikhs of the Union and [against] the Muslims of Pakistan’.64
After the meeting, the crowd filed past him, one by one, bowing with folded hands, first the children, then the women, finally the men.
Meanwhile, news reached Birla House that the government had agreed to pay the sterling balances owed to Pakistan, as their contribution ‘to the non-violent and noble effort made by Gandhiji, in accordance with the glorious traditions of this great country, for peace and goodwill’. The Government of India had bowed to Gandhi’s will; when would the city of Delhi do likewise?65
IX
On 16 January, Prime Minister Nehru spoke to a crowd of over a lakh in Delhi, urging them to maintain peace and save their leader’s life. ‘We must not allow Gandhiji to suffer for our sins,’ he said. The post office in Delhi was now marking all letters they received or sent with the words ‘Communal harmony will save Gandhiji’ written in English, Urdu and Hindi.
Political parties and civil society organizations made appeals of their own. A statement by the Sikh political party, the Akali Dal, said: ‘No Sikh should at any cost, in a state of excitement or under stress of provocation, do anything which may endanger the peace of the country or Hindu–Sikh–Muslim unity.’ Syed Muttalabi, secretary of the Mewati Conference, wired Jinnah that Indian Muslims were ‘determined’ to save Gandhiji’s life, since his life was ‘a bedrock against inhuman barbarities committed in both the Dominions’. The Meos had suffered greatly during the riots, but had decided to stay back in India because of ‘Gandhiji’s untiring efforts’ on their behalf. The Meo leader appealed to Jinnah and the people of Pakistan ‘to stop the killing of the minority community and create conditions for the return and resettlement of Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan’.66
Following these developments from Calcutta was C. Rajagopalachari, the governor of West Bengal. He wrote anxiously to Devadas Gandhi: ‘I hope Jawaharlalji will do something and get Bapu to give up his fast. No one else can do this now.’67
On Saturday the 17th, Gandhi entered the fifth day of his fast. His doctors issued a bulletin saying he was ‘definitely weaker and has begun to feel heavy in the head’. Besides, ‘the kidneys are not functioning well’.
Meeting Maulana Azad in the morning, Gandhi laid down seven conditions for breaking his fast. These were: 1. The annual fair (the Urs) at the Khwaja Bakhtiyar shrine at Mehrauli, due in nine days’ time, should take place peacefully; 2. The hundred-odd mosques in Delhi converted into homes and temples should be restored to their original uses; 3. Muslims should be allowed to move freely around Old Delhi; 4. Non-Muslims should not object to Delhi Muslims returning to their homes from Pakistan; 5. Muslims should be allowed to travel without danger in trains; 6. There should be no economic boycott of Muslims; 7. Accommodation of Hindu refugees in Muslim areas should be done with the consent of those already in these localities.
Gandhi’s influence was finally permeating across the city of Delhi, ‘slowly but surely’. Two lakh people signed a peace pledge, which read: ‘We the Hindu, Sikh, Christian and other citizens of Delhi declare solemnly our conviction that Muslim citizens of the Indian Union should be as free as the rest of us to live in Delhi in peace and security and with self-respect and to work for the good and well-being of the Indian Union.’
In Subzi Mandi, Paharganj and Karol Bagh, residents said they were willing to welcome Muslims back in their midst. Muslim villagers of Mehrauli sent their representatives to Birla House to tell Gandhi that conditions for peacefully holding their Urs now existed.68
On the 17th evening, Gandhi somehow summoned the strength to speak at his prayer meeting. He thanked all those who had written or wired their good wishes (many from Pakistan). But he insisted that his fast was not ‘a political move in any sense of the term. It is in obedience to the peremptory call of conscience and duty.’69
On the morning of 18 January, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh leaders met at Rajendra Prasad’s house. Here they signed a pledge assuring Gandhi that the seven conditions he had stipulated would be fully met. The Urs would be held at Mehrauli as usual, Muslims would be able to move freely all across Delhi, the mosques taken away from Muslims would be returned to them, and so on. They all then trooped over to Birla House to present the undertaking to Gandhi. Reassured and convinced, shortly after noon, Gandhi accepted a glass of lime juice.
When Gandhi broke his fast, the room he was in was
filled with Ministers of the Cabinet, leaders of the various communities, inmates of Gandhiji’s camp, Pressmen and photographers.
Reclining on the pillow, Gandhiji chuckled aloud when Maulana Azad handed him a glass of lemon juice sweetened with glucose. The room rang with shouts of ‘Gandhiji-ki-jai’. A smile appeared on the face of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru who had worn an anxious look all these days.
Outside, the city of ‘Delhi was jubilant: its efforts to convince Gandhiji that the era of communal madness in the capital was over had succeeded’. The news that the fast had been broken brought thousands of people to Birla House, despite it being a rainy day.70
Over the past thirty-five years, Gandhi had gone on fast every other year. The provocations had been various: sexual transgressions in the ashram; violence committed in the name of nationalism; the oppression of ‘untouchables’; and, of course, the need for communal harmony.71 On 16 January 1948, he wrote to a disciple now living in the Himalaya, who had been at his side in several previous fasts, that this latest yajna in Delhi was his ‘greatest fast’.72 It was, with the possible exception only of the fast that immediately preceded it, undertaken in Calcutta in September 1947.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Martyrdom
I
When he broke his fast on 18 January, Gandhi told those who had signed the pledge presented to him that while it bound them to keep the peace in Delhi, this did not mean that ‘whatever happens outside Delhi will be no concern of yours’. The atmosphere that prevailed in the capital must prevail in the nation too.1
That same evening, Jawaharlal Nehru addressed a large public meeting at Subzi Mandi, where he remarked that ‘there is only one frail old man in our country who has all along stuck to the right path. We had all, some time or the other, strayed away from his path. In order to make us realize our mistakes he undertook this great ordeal.’ Congratulating the people of Delhi for taking the pledge to restore communal harmony, Nehru said the next step was to ensure peace ‘not merely in Delhi but in the whole o
f India’.
Later that evening, a group of Muslims returned to Subzi Mandi, where they ‘were given a hearty welcome in the vegetable market where they [had] felt somewhat insecure’.2
Monday the 19th was a day of silence for Gandhi. He spent it attending to his correspondence and writing articles for Harijan. In their daily report, the doctors attending on him said: ‘There is considerable weakness still. There are signs of improvement in his kidneys. The diet is being slowly worked up. He is still on liquids.’
Also on the 19th, the general secretary of the Hindu Mahasabha issued a statement saying that while they were relieved that Gandhi was out of danger, the Mahasabha had not signed the peace pledge, since ‘the response to his fast has been wholly one-sided, the Pakistan Government still persisting in its attitude of truculence…The net result of the fast has been the weakening of the Hindu front and strengthening of the Pakistan Government.’ The statement went on: ‘What we oppose is the basic policy of Mahatma Gandhi and the followers of his way of thinking that whatever might be done to the Hindus of Pakistan, Muslim minorities in India must be treated equally with other minorities. This is a policy that the Hindu Mahasabha can never accept…’3
At his prayer meeting on the 20th, Gandhi said he hoped to go to Pakistan, but only if the government there had no objection to his coming, and only when he had regained his strength. As he was speaking, there was a loud explosion. This scared Manu Gandhi, sitting next to him, as well as members of the audience. Gandhi, however, was unruffled. After the noise died down, he continued his speech.4
The explosion was the sound of a bomb going off behind the servants quarters of Birla House, some 200 feet from the prayer meeting. Inquiries revealed that a group of men had come earlier in the evening in a green car and ‘moved around in a suspicious manner’. After the explosion, watchmen arrived on the scene, and apprehended a young man who had a hand grenade. His accomplices had meanwhile fled. The man, named Madan Lal Pahwa—who was ‘well dressed, of fair complexion and of medium height’—said he was opposed to Gandhi’s peace campaign since he ‘had lost everything he had in West Punjab’. A refugee from Montgomery district, he was living in a mosque in Paharganj from where he had just been evicted (as it had been restored to the Muslims).
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