The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  Since the League also wanted to promote understanding between Muslims and other Indians, it did not bar Muslim members of the Congress Party from its membership. It soon became a common practice for the League and the Congress Party to convene annual conferences in the same city and around the same time to enable Muslim delegates to attend both assemblies. Among those who did so in 1913 was Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948), an elegant but skeletal British-trained lawyer with an austere, tapering face—an Edwardian gentleman in hand-tailored suits and starched collars—who had joined the Congress Party seven years earlier.

  Those sponsoring Jinnah’s membership in the League declared that “loyalty to the Muslim League and the Muslim interest would in no way and at no time imply even the shadow of disloyalty to the national cause to which his life was dedicated.”9 Jinnah was elected to the League’s council, where he came to play a leading role.

  By then, however, the India Councils Act, amended in 1909, had incorporated the Muslim League’s demand for separate Muslim electoral constituencies with reduced franchise qualifications. This concession was made because of the historical reluctance of upper-crust Muslims to discard Persian and learn English, resulting in their reduced socioeconomic standing vis-à-vis their Hindu counterparts. To qualify as voters, Hindus were required to have a minimum taxable income of Rs 30,000, whereas the requirement for Muslims was only Rs 3,000. On the education franchise, a Hindu had to be a university graduate of thirty years’ standing, while the figure for a Muslim was only three years. Qualified Muslims were entitled to vote in the general constituencies as well.10

  Until 1913 the Congress Party, led by lawyers and journalists, had limited itself to petitioning the British government in India, based in Delhi from that year onward (the earlier capital being Calcutta), for modest administrative-political reform. It had welcomed London’s concession of letting a minority of the provincial and central legislative council members be elected on a franchise of a tiny 2 percent of the population. It and the Muslim League backed Britain and its allies in their war, which broke out in 1914, against Germany and Ottoman Turkey, whose sultan was also the caliph of Muslims worldwide. Almost 1,441,000 Indians volunteered to join the British Indian army, with 850,000 serving abroad.

  They were shipped out from Bombay and Karachi, the main ports on the west coast, to fight in the Middle East and Western Europe. While Delhi was the center of the imperial power exercised by Britain, Bombay, the capital of Bombay Presidency, had emerged as the focal point for domestic politics in which lawyers played a vital role. And it was to this city that Jinnah returned after studying law in London in 1896, and not to Karachi, his birthplace.

  Five years earlier, another lawyer, after having been called to the bar in London, arrived in Bombay. He shared with Jinnah Gujarati his mother tongue but not his religion. He was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Jinnah and Gandhi would rise to become titanic public figures and dominate the country’s political landscape for three decades.

  1: The Modish Dresser Meets the Mahatma

  Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the only son of Jinnahbhai Poonja, an affluent, Gujarati-speaking Ismaili Muslim importer and exporter in Karachi, and Mithi Bai. Poonja had dealings with British trading companies, one of which was headed by Sir Frederick Leigh-Croft. The avuncular Sir Fredrick arranged a business apprenticeship in London for the sixteen-year-old Muhammad Ali. After a brief period of learning the basics of shipping, the young Poonja decided to study law. He qualified as a barrister in 1896 at the age of twenty. He clipped the suffix “bhai” (Gujarati: brother) from his father’s name and made Jinnah his surname.

  During his time in London, he became an acolyte of Dadabhai Naoroji, a luxuriantly bearded, Gujarati-speaking Parsi Indian businessman and politician who was elected a Liberal member of parliament from a north London constituency in 1892. Jinnah assisted him in his job as an MP and often attended House of Commons sessions.

  On his return to India, Jinnah enrolled as an advocate in Bombay’s High Court. He rented a room at the Apollo Hotel near the court but struggled to make a living. Recalling those days, he said, “For two or three years before I became a magistrate [in May 1900] I had a very bad time, and I used to go every other day to the Watson’s Hotel down the road. It was a famous hotel in those days, and I used to take on to a game of billiards for a wager, and that is how I supplemented my otherwise meager resources.”1 To be appointed a Bombay Presidency magistrate at the age of twenty-four was a remarkable achievement for Jinnah. But he quit that job and returned to his legal career.

  He came under the influence of Justice Badruddin Tyabji. Given Tyabji’s background as a former Congress Party president, Jinnah came to view the organization with an approving eye. At the 1904 Congress convention, he met and worked with Professor Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866–1915), a moderate figure in the party. A mustached, spectacled Hindu Brahmin sporting a flat, round hat, Gokhale won the party’s presidency in 1905. As in the past, Muslim delegates were thin on the ground: only 20 out of 756, or about 4 percent.2

  In 1906—when Jinnah’s thriving legal practice enabled him to purchase a spacious bungalow in Bombay’s upscale Malabar Hills—he attended the Congress Party session in Calcutta (later Kolkata). He acted as private secretary for the aging Naoroji, who, after his return to India, had been elected president of the Congress. In that role, Naoroji explicated the ideal of swaraj (Hindi: home rule) for Indians for the first time. As an opponent of separate electoral rolls and seats for Muslims, then being advocated by some Muslim leaders, Jinnah established himself as a noncommunal politician.

  In 1909, however, the British government introduced separate Muslim constituencies with reduced franchise qualifications for voters than those for non-Muslim constituencies, classified as “general.” Later that year Jinnah defeated Maulavi Rafiuddin, president of the Bombay Muslim League, to represent the Muslims of Bombay Presidency in the viceroy’s Imperial Legislative Council. He thus demonstrated his popularity among Muslims while maintaining his opposition to separate Muslim electoral rolls. He attended the Congress session in 1910 but not the ones in the next two years.

  However, he remained close to Gokhale. Together with Gokhale, as part of an Indian delegation, he sailed for London in April 1913 to press the case for self-rule for India. After his return home in October, he joined the All India Muslim League at its seventh session in Agra in December. “Jinnah had by now truly come into his own,” writes the Indian politician-author Jaswant Singh in his book Jinnah. “At this juncture, not only was he taking steps to bring about unity between the League and the Congress, he was also striking a balance between the moderates and the extremists [within the Congress]. In politics now all factions gave him recognition.”3 Jinnah rightly saw himself taking up the legacy of Naoroji and Gokhale as a nationalist leader representing all major communities of the subcontinent.

  A year earlier, Gokhale, described by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, as “the most perfect man in the [Indian] political field”4 had been invited to the Union of South Africa to help invigorate the Indian settlers’ protest against racist rules and laws. While there, Gokhale urged Gandhi to return to India to further the cause of home rule there.

  Once South Africa had passed the Indian Relief Act in July 1914—abolishing the tax on former Indian indentured laborers and permitting free Indians to enter South Africa as part of the British Empire—Gandhi returned home. When World War I erupted in Europe the next month, he supported the British Empire against Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which were later to be joined by the Ottoman Empire. Also on Britain’s side were the Congress Party, Jinnah, and the Muslim League.

  Jinnah and Gokhale were the leading members of the group formed to welcome Gandhi and his unsmiling, diminutive, snub-nosed wife, Kasturbai, on their arrival in Bombay on January 9, 1915. Given his popularity, the local Gurjar Sabha, a Gujarati community counci
l, invited Jinnah to host a garden reception for the Gandhis on the grounds of the spacious mansion of Mangaldas Girdhardas, a leading textile magnate, five days later.

  The Condescending Gandhi

  Speaking in English, Jinnah welcomed Mohandas and Kasturbai Gandhi “not only on behalf of Bombay but of the whole of India.” He said that the greatest problem facing them all was “to bring unanimity and cooperation between the two communities [of Hindus and Muslims] so that the demands of India [made on imperial Britain] may be made absolutely unanimously.” He added, “Undoubtedly, he [Gandhi] would not only become a worthy ornament but also a real [political] worker whose equals there are very few.”5

  Gandhi replied in Gujarati. He said that in South Africa when anything was said about Gujaratis, it was understood to refer to the Hindu community only, and Parsis and Muhammadans were not thought to be part of it. He was therefore glad to find a Muhammadan a member of the Gurjar Sabha and the chair of the reception.6

  Leaving aside his mention of the popular perception prevalent in South Africa, Gandhi conveniently overlooked a critical turn of events in his own life. It was a Muslim legal firm, Dada Abdulla & Company, based in the North Gujarat town of Rajkot that had given him a year-long contract in early 1893 to work in their office in Durban, the capital of Britain’s Colony of Natal.7 In any case, to point out the religious minority status of the keynote speaker at an occasion brimming with promise and goodwill was in bad taste, to say the least. It did not augur well for a cordial relationship between him and Jinnah.

  Unfortunately, Gokhale died suddenly a month later. His loss grieved Jinnah—“an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity” in the words of Gokhale—as much as it did Gandhi, who likened the departed leader to “the Ganges in whose refreshing, holy waters one longed to bathe.”8

  Unlike Jinnah, Gandhi, a novice on his arrival in Durban, had re­invented himself a few times during his twenty-one years in South Africa: a campaigner for Indian settlers’ equality with British colonizers, an ally of the British Empire in the 1899–1902 Boer War, an associate of the Natal government’s brutal quashing of the Zulu rebellion with an iron hand, the leader of the passive resistance movement against the Asiatic Registration Bill in Transvaal, a political lobbyist in London, the founder of a rural commune to train civil resistors, and the instigator of an Indian miners’ strike.

  Gandhi’s transformation was captured by the way he dressed. In 1893 he arrived in Durban as an attorney, wearing a tight-fitting business suit with a tie around a winged collar and shining shoes. Two decades later, he appeared in a knee-length white shirt, dhoti, turban, and sandals as the leader of the coal miners’ strike. In between, he acquired a flair for self-dramatization, a tactic that would serve him well in the struggle for Indian independence. Overall, his South African experiences furnished him with a successful campaigning template he would later deploy on a much larger scale in British India.

  Attorney Gandhi Turns into a Satyagrahi

  Born in 1869, Mohandas hailed from the trading caste. He was the last and fourth child of Karamchand Gandhi, chief minister of the small princely state of Porbandar within Bombay Presidency, and Putlibai. While still at school, the thirteen-year-old Mohandas was married off to Kasturbai Makhanji, an unlettered girl of the same age. He became a father two years later. But the infant died soon after birth. Mohandas scraped through the matriculation examination in 1888, the year when the couple’s first healthy baby boy, Harilal, was born. Soon after, his elder brother, Laxmidas, sent Mohandas to London to study law.

  A 1889 mug shot of Gandhi shows a young face with jug ears, big, pointed nose, full, sensuous mouth, and eyes dulled by apprehension, the overall impression being of a man without direction. He studied Indian law and jurisdiction. A strict vegetarian, he joined the Vegetarian Society, whose members included the Anglo-Irish playwright and political radical George Bernard Shaw. He introduced the young Gandhi to the works of Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), a liberal American author and philosopher, and Count Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), the eminent Russian writer-thinker who was also a vegetarian. Gandhi was called to the bar in June 1891.

  On returning to India, he registered as an advocate at the Bombay High Court, five years before Jinnah did. Like Jinnah, he had to struggle to make ends meet. But unlike Jinnah, he soon gave up and left Bombay for Rajkot. There he made a modest living drafting petitions for litigants. That stopped when he ran afoul of a British officer. An offer of a paid job in the Durban office of a local legal firm came as a welcome relief for him.

  In June 1893 while he was on his way to Pretoria by rail, a white man, boarding the train at the mountainous Pietermaritzburg station, objected to his presence in the first-class carriage. When he refused to move to the van at the end of the train, he and his luggage were thrown off the compartment. The station staff confiscated his luggage and overcoat. Shivering through the night in the waiting room, Gandhi resolved to stay on in the Colony of Natal beyond his yearlong contract and fight racial discrimination against Indians.9

  A cofounder of the Natal Indian Congress in 1894, Gandhi was elected its secretary. This gave him an opportunity to build up the institution from the grassroots and in the process develop his organizational skills. Later he would deploy these on a far wider scale in his native land to broaden the base of the Congress Party.

  During his visit to India in 1896 to bring his family to Durban, he addressed a meeting in Madras (now Chennai), where he railed against the Natal government for treating Indians as “beasts.”10 Yet he actively sided with the British Empire in its fight with the Dutch settlers in the Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic in the Boer War: he raised the 1,100-strong Indian Ambulance Corps. The subsequent victory of the British Empire raised his social and professional status. His legal practice thrived to the extent that in 1903 he shifted his successful law firm to Johannesburg, capital of the province of Transvaal.

  Despite his material prosperity an element of early asceticism remained part of his character. It came to the fore when he read the book Unto This Last by John Ruskin, a British essayist and art critic. That inspired him to live simply. In 1904 he bought a thousand-acre farm among large sugar cane estates near Phoenix, twelve miles north of Durban. Named the Phoenix Settlement, it became the head office of the weekly magazine Indian Opinion, founded a year earlier in Durban.

  He continued to believe in the benevolence of Britain’s imperial rule administered from London. When the Natal government declared martial law in February 1906 to curb a Zulu rebellion led by Bambatha kaMancinza against oppressive British rule, Gandhi urged the colonial government to recruit Indians as a reserve force. In his Indian Opinion column he argued that “the British Empire existed for the welfare of the world” and reaffirmed “a genuine sense of loyalty” to it.11

  In essence, he wanted Indians to ingratiate themselves with the British Empire to win the same rights as white settlers and thus place themselves above the indigenous Africans. The government made a minor concession and let him command a platoon of twenty-one Indian volunteers as stretcher bearers and sanitary aides to treat wounded British soldiers. By the time the ferocious military expedition ended, some three thousand to four thousand Zulus lay dead. In stark contrast, the British lost only thirty-six men.12

  Across the provincial border, in Transvaal, the government published the draft of the Asiatic Registration Bill in August 1906. It required all Asiatic people to register and carry a registration card, called a “pass,” under pain of fine or imprisonment. Gandhi opposed the proposed legislation and urged fellow Indians not to register, but his efforts altered nothing.

  The bill became law a year later. Gandhi refused to register and was jailed for two months in January 1908. In his talks with Gandhi, colonial secretary general Jan Smuts promised that if Indians registered voluntarily, he would repeal the law. Gandhi agreed to cooperate. He and other lawbreakers were released. Most Indians followed Gandhi�
�s advice and registered. But Smuts reneged. The law remained on the statute books.

  This was the pivotal turning point in Gandhi’s political evolution. He decided to dramatize noncooperation with the unjust laws of the government in a nonviolent way. On August 16, 1908, some two thousand Indians of different faiths gathered outside the Hamidiya Mosque in Johannesburg in a protest rally. Gandhi made a bonfire in a cauldron filled with burning paraffin and encouraged the protestors to throw their passes into the roaring flames. The fact that they did was a tribute to his organizational skills.

  At the same time, Gandhi remained active at the Phoenix Settlement, which was run on a cooperative basis. There he and his associates in Natal decided to defy the Transvaal Immigration Restriction Act, which banned Indian immigration into Transvaal. Defiance had to be done passively, though. At the same time Gandhi rejected using the adjective “passive,” since it resonated with the white settlers’ image of “rice-eating” Indian immigrants as weaklings.

  That led Gandhi to coin the term “satyagraha,” which translates as “truth force” or “force of truth.” Those who resorted to satyagraha were called “satyagrahis.” What Gandhi did was to synthesize the Hindu concept of dhama13—squatting in front of a house or office to apply moral pressure on the occupants—with the concept of civil disobedience. Thus satyagraha combined nonviolent resistance against, and noncooperation with, unjust authority.