The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  In his book Hind Swaraj, written originally in Gujarati in 1909—and later translated by him into English with the same title, which means Indian Home Rule—he argued that India was one nation long before the British Raj. To support his thesis, he referred to “those far-seeing ancestors of ours who established Shevetbindu Rameshwar in the South, Juggernaut (aka Jagannath) in the South-East, and Haridwar in the North as places of pilgrimage,” thus outlining the geographical reach of Vedic Hinduism.12 These are exclusively Hindu holy sites. Gandhi made no mention of the ancient Buddhist pilgrimage places, much less the shrines of Muslim Sufi saints, scattered all over the subcontinent, some of which are frequented by both Muslims and Hindus. Their shared belief is that by praying at the shrine they will be blessed by the spirit of the departed holy man, who is capable of interceding on their behalf with the Almighty to resolve their worldly problems. (This practice was condemned by orthodox Muslims.)

  It is worth recalling that the striking miners in Natal marching behind Gandhi had shouted, “Dwarakanath ki jai [Victory to Lord Krishna],” and “Ramchandra ki jai [Victory to Lord Rama].” Between the two leading Hindu gods, Rama and Krishna, Gandhi preferred the story of Rama’s life, captured in the Hindu epic Ramayana, rendered into Hindi by the seventeenth-century poet Tulsi Das. “I regard the Ramayana of Tulsi Das as the greatest book in all devotional literature,” he asserted in 1919.13 His fasting during the textile workers’ strike in Ahmedabad in March 1918 had given him an aura of a Hindu saint. On the second day of that strike he referred to his gleaning from “the ancient culture of India,” which represented Vedic Hinduism before it reformed itself to meet the challenge of Buddhism.14

  Gandhi’s veneration for the cow was legendary. “Cow protection is the outward form of Hinduism,” he declared. “I refuse to call anyone a Hindu if he is not willing to lay down his life in this cause. It is dearer to me than my very life.”15

  His lifestyle was saturated with religious practices and pieties. At his ashram near Ahmedabad listening to Hindu devotional songs, called bhajans, sung by his co-religionists was part of his morning prayer routine. His saintliness and overt religiosity won him the moniker of Mahatma (Sanskrit: Great Soul). Though documentary evidence is lacking, it is widely attributed to Rabindranath Tagore, the eminent writer-philosopher-educationalist.16 Tagore won the Nobel prize for literature in 1913 and was knighted two years later. A patriot, he would renounce his title in August 1920, responding to a boycott call by Gandhi. In their correspondence, Gandhi addressed him as Gurudev (Hindi: Godly Master), and Tagore returned the compliment by calling him Mahatma.

  Gandhi’s religious persona was reassuring to the leadership of the Khilafat movement, dominated as it was by the ulema. During the Central Khilafat Committee meeting on June 3, 1920, chaired by Shaukat Ali, Gandhi explained that under his sole guidance noncooperation, starting at a low level, would reach its apex of nonpayment of taxes in four to five months.

  He asked to be put in charge of a special noncooperation committee, operating independently—he would be a virtual dictator.17 Deeply impressed by the success he had achieved with this tactic in South Africa, the attendees agreed.

  The equivocal Hunter report provided Gandhi a chance to sharpen his attack on the British Raj. “If we are worthy to call ourselves a nation we must refuse to uphold the government by withdrawing cooperation with it,” he declared on June 9.18 Two weeks later he called on Viceroy Lord Chelmsford to get the humiliating peace terms for Turkey changed by August 1 or resign. He started blending the domestic issue of the continued unrest in Punjab with the demands of the Khilafat movement concerning Turkey, while stressing that the caliphate had priority. But the Allied powers’ stance on Turkey remained unchanged.

  On August 1, Gandhi inaugurated the noncooperation struggle by returning the three war medals he had been awarded between the Boer War and World War I.

  When the Treaty of Sevres, a suburb of Paris, was signed by the Allied powers and Sultan-Caliph Mehmet VI on August 10, keeping the Ottoman dynasty but severing all of the empire’s territories in the Arab world, Gandhi condemned it as “a staggering blow to the Indian Mussalmans.”19

  Gandhi and the Khilafat leaders then focused on the upcoming special session of the Congress Party in early September in Calcutta. To underscore their sincerity about forging Hindu-Muslim amity, Khilafat leaders appealed to Muslims to refrain from slaughtering cows for Bakri Eid (Urdu: Festival of Goat)—the Indian term used for Eid al Adha (Arabic: Festival of Sacrifice)—when it is customary to celebrate by killing a goat, sheep, or cow. Determined by the lunar calendar, the festival was due to fall a few days before the Congress convention.20

  At the special session, Gandhi’s resolution was opposed by such stalwarts as Annie Besant, former Congress president, Madan Mohan Malaviya, and Jinnah. Among the weighty arguments Gandhi mobilized was that the Central Khilafat Committee had already launched its noncooperation campaign, and how could the thirty-five-year-old Congress be seen lagging behind the newly born body? He defeated the opposition by 1,886 to 884 votes.

  At the simultaneous extraordinary session of the Muslim League on September 7 in Calcutta, Jinnah condemned the Hunter report and Dyer. But his opposition to unconstitutional means remained intact. Though he and Gandhi were in the same nationalist column, they were poles apart on tactics.

  During its five-day session in late December in Nagpur, at Gandhi’s behest, Congress delegates changed the party’s aim to attaining swaraj (“home rule”) for the people of India by all legitimate and peaceful means. Gandhi forecast that the noncooperation struggle, if conducted non­violently, would yield swaraj within a year. Jinnah struck a note of discord, saying there was no clarity about what swaraj meant in practice. “This [noncooperation] weapon will not destroy the British Empire,” he predicted. “It is neither logical nor is it politically sound or wise, nor practically capable of being put into execution.” He added that though he had no power to remove the cause of India having become Britain’s colony, he warned fellow Indians of the dire consequences of such an extreme act as wholesale noncooperation.21

  But, to his chagrin, even the Muslim League did not agree with his views. At the simultaneous session of the League in Nagpur chaired by its president, Ansari, it also decided to support noncooperation. Its other equally weighty resolution changed its aim to achieving self-rule. The banners at the convention summed up the League’s updated ideology: “Be true to your religion” and “Liberty is man’s birthright.”22

  Jinnah lost but did not give up. In a letter to Gandhi, he argued that this kind of unconstitutional program appealed only to the illiterate and inexperienced youth and that it was bound to lead to disaster.23

  Gandhian Noncooperation Unleashed

  Urged by Gandhi, Congress leaders in Nagpur opened party membership to all Indians for a nominal annual subscription of a quarter rupee (equivalent at the time to a quarter British pence or four American cents). They also adopted a new constitution drafted by Gandhi. It set up a hierarchy of committees from the top—the Congress Working Committee—down to the village level, thus turning their amorphous movement into a disciplined organization.

  In April 1921 Gandhi launched a campaign to enroll ten million Indians of all classes as Congress members and raise a national fund of 10 million rupees (£1 million) to advance the noncooperation struggle. His cordial relations with Rajasthani finance and industrial capitalists in Calcutta and textile magnates in Ahmedabad helped to shore up the party’s coffers.

  These efforts led to a vastly enlarged constituency ready to express their feelings against the British Raj in dramatic ways. While Congress officials’ withdrawal of their lucrative law practices made newspaper headlines, what caught the popular imagination among urban Indians was the boycott of foreign—primarily British—goods.

  Accompanied by Jauhar, Gandhi undertook a six-month-long, nationwide tour by train, surviving on a daily d
iet of a few slices of toast, grapes, and goat’s milk. He stopped at various places to urge his audience to shun foreign clothing and footwear. If they signaled agreement through applause, he urged them to strip off and make a pile of the discarded apparel and shoes. Then, in a repeat of the gesture he first made in Johannesburg on August 16, 1908, he would set the heap alight. He called on the audience to wear homespun clothes to help the swadeshi (Hindi: of one’s own country) movement. The public burning of foreign textiles extended to unsold stocks of local drapers. As a teetotaler, he preached temperance, which went down very well with Muslim leaders, since Islam forbids consumption of alcohol.

  Ad hoc local committees sprung up. Volunteers were deployed to enforce the boycott of courts and British-supported educational institutions. Protestors skirmished with the police. This couldn’t have come at a worse time for the British. The victorious Allied powers and their colonies after World War I were experiencing a severe economic downturn—with deflation reaching 15 percent in Britain in 1922. Soon the Congress Party was emboldened with its own volunteer corps, dressed in white homespun uniforms, and the Khilafat movement had one as well.

  The newly arrived viceroy, Lord Reading (aka Rufus Daniel Isaacs, First Marquess of Reading), a former chief justice of England and a practicing Jew, was ill-prepared to tackle the turmoil. So for the first half of 1921 he did nothing. Then, to test the waters, he arrested the Ali Brothers for making seditious speeches. The court sentenced them to two years in jail. The subsequent protest was mild, encouraging Reading to focus on suppressing the Khilafat movement.

  Gandhi protested. In the September 19, 1921, issue of the weekly Young India, he argued, “I have no hesitation in saying that it is sinful for anyone, either soldier or civilian, to serve this government. . . . Sedition has become the creed of Congress. . . . Non-cooperation, though a religious and strictly moral movement, deliberately aims at the overthrow of the government and is therefore legally seditious.”24 In other words, if the Ali Brothers had been seditious, so had been the many thousands who had participated in the noncooperation campaign.

  He underscored his alliance with the Ali Brothers in another Young India article on October 20: “I claim that with us both the Khilafat is the central fact, with Maulana Muhammad Ali because it is his religion, with me because, in laying down my life for the Khilafat, I ensure the safety of the cow from the Mussalman’s knife, that is my religion.”25

  In London, the government decided in July 1921 to send the twenty-six-year-old, handsome Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII) on a tour of India to let the people express their loyalty to the empire by welcoming him with unbounded enthusiasm and reverence. The viceroy continued to suppress protest. By early November, more than ten thousand Indians, mainly part of the Khilafat movement, were in prison.

  On his arrival in Bombay on November 17,the prince was greeted with strikes, rioting, and arson. To restore order during four days of turbulence, police used live ammunition, killing fifty-three people. There were shutdowns in all major cities. In Calcutta, the uniformed members of the Congress and Khilafat volunteer forces took charge of the city, ensuring a total, violence-free strike. At night Calcutta fell into self-imposed darkness—it became the “city of the dead” as described by the British writer Rudyard Kipling.26

  In early December Jinnah interceded with the viceroy to find a solution to the deteriorating situation. The viceroy expressed his willingness, but Gandhi demanded the release of all prisoners associated with the Khilafat movement as a precondition. The viceroy refused.27 Indeed, he went on to outlaw the recruiting and organizing of Congress and Khilafat volunteers and the assembly of more than three persons in cities. Defiance of these bans doubled the number of political prisoners to twenty thousand.

  Fight to the Finish—Suspended

  “Lord Reading must understand that the Non-co-operators are at war with the Government,” said Gandhi in a manifesto he published in Young India on December 21. “We want to overthrow the Government and compel its submission to the people’s will. We shall have to stagger humanity, even as South Africa and Ireland, with this exception—we will rather spill our own blood, not that of our opponents. This is a fight to the finish.”28

  The Congress session on December 27–28 in Ahmedabad, presided over by Hakim Ajmal Khan, was like no other. Chairs and tables gave way to carpets on the ground of a huge tent, with most delegates dressed in homespun cotton and donning white, folded-cloth caps, called “Gandhi caps.” Sartorially, Jinnah and Gandhi were poles apart. Jinnah appeared in his usual three-piece suit with a stiff collar and a silk tie, his watch firmly in his vest, chain-smoking his fifty Craven-A cigarettes a day. In his continuing drive for a Spartan life, Gandhi had recently discarded his shirt, dhoti, and white cap for a homespun loincloth and a shawl.

  Semiclad Gandhi introduced a resolution calling for “aggressive civil disobedience to all Government laws and institutions; for non-violence; for the continuance of public meetings throughout India despite the Government prohibition, and for all Indians to offer themselves peacefully for arrest by joining the [Congress] Volunteer Corps.” After much debate, it was passed, with only 10 out of 4,728 delegates dissenting.29 The conference named Gandhi as the sole executive of the civil disobedience movement.

  The most prominent among the dissenters was Jinnah. His speech was interrupted by cries of “Shame, shame” from the audience. When he referred to “Mister Gandhi,” many delegates shouted “Mahatma Gandhi.”30 But he stood his ground then—and thereafter, never veering from his “Mr. Gandhi” protocol, as did all British officials. For the moment, though, crestfallen, he left Nagpur on the next train, accompanied by his young wife, Ruttie (Maryam), who had become the mother of their daughter, Dinah, two years earlier. This was to be his last Congress session. In his undeclared competition with Gandhi, he lost by a humiliating margin.

  Gandhi chose the Bardoli district, 150 miles north of Bombay in Gujarat, as a testing ground for his civil disobedience movement. On February 1 he announced that he would initiate a refusal to pay taxes in this overwhelmingly rural district. Land revenue was the financial lifeline of the British Raj in the subcontinent’s predominantly agrarian society.

  A week later the news reached him of a violent episode in the small town of Chauri Chaura in United Provinces, eight hundred miles from Bardoli, on February 5. A long column of marchers protesting rising food prices had passed without incident when some stragglers were hit by armed policemen. When they shouted for help, the protestors turned around to confront the cops. The lawmen fired, killing three men, and then rushed to the police station when their ammunition ran out. There they barricaded themselves. The infuriated mob set the building ablaze. When the terrified twenty-one policemen and their head constable emerged to escape incineration, they were captured and hacked to pieces; and their bodies were fed to the raging flames. Later, of the 225 accused protestors, 72 would be found guilty, with 25 of them hanged.31

  On hearing the news, Gandhi was horrified. “Suppose . . . the Government had abdicated in favor of the victors of Bardoli, who would control the unruly elements that must be expected to perpetrate inhumanity upon due provocation?” he asked. He said he was unsure he could. He suspended the civil disobedience campaign in Bardoli. And as the sole authorized executive of the noncooperation campaign, he forbade defiance of the government anywhere in India.

  Among those who were flabbergasted by his decision and questioned its wisdom were not only the imprisoned Ali Brothers but some of the members of the Congress Working Committee, including Motilal Nehru, former president of the Congress Party and a fabulously successful barrister in Allahabad, United Provinces, whose only son was Jawaharlal. It would later emerge that Viceroy Lord Reading had sent a despairing report to London. “The lower classes in towns have been seriously affected by the non-cooperation movement,” he wrote to Edwin Montagu, secretary of state for India, in early 1922. “In certain ar
eas, the peasantry has been affected. . . . The Muhammadan population throughout the country is embittered and sullen.”32

  Responding to the criticism at home, Gandhi said, “The drastic reversal of practically the whole of the aggressive program may be politically unsound and unwise, but there is no doubt it is religiously sound.”33 When push came to shove, Gandhi invoked Hinduism. Who was there to judge whether or not his decision was “religiously sound”? It was all subjective, the judgment resting solely with him. As he once remarked, “Those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.”34 In any case, a quarter century later, his injection of religion into politics would lead to undermining the unity of the Indian subcontinent.

  Undoubtedly, at the core of Gandhi’s faith was orthodox Hinduism, with its prohibition on beef and the killing of cows as an integral part of daily life. His view was aptly summed up by the remark “I yield to none in my reverence for the cow.”35 Like all pious Hindus, he aimed to achieve moksha (Sanskrit: liberation) from the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, thus ending the suffering inherent in this cycle. “I am impatient to realize myself, to attain moksha in this very existence,” he wrote in Young India in 1924. “My national service is part of my training for freeing my soul from the bondage of flesh. Thus considered, my service may be regarded as purely selfish. I have no desire for the perishable kingdom of earth. I am striving for the Kingdom of Heaven, which is moksha.”36 Elsewhere he said that the path toward moksha was “crucifixion of the flesh,” without which it was impossible to “see God face to face” and become one with him. But if such perfection could be attained, the divine would walk on earth, for “there is no point in trying to know the difference between a perfect man and God.” Then there would be no limit to his command of his countrymen: “When I am a perfect being, I have simply to say the word and the nation will listen.”37 Around this core of Hinduism was wrapped a layer of Jainism, an offshoot of Hinduism, with its stress on nonviolence, or the nonhurting of any life form.