Mahatma Gandhi

by Dennis Dalton

  That the recrudescence of violence in Calcutta actually began at Gandhi’s Belliaghatta bustee indicates the extent to which his experiment had become the magnet for Hindu-Muslim conflict. Late in the evening of Sunday, August 31, a crowd converged on Hydari mansion, carrying an injured Hindu who had allegedly been knifed by a Muslim. They demanded that Gandhi call for retaliation. His attempts to quiet them failed; he was almost seriously wounded when the crowd attacked his party. The police soon restored order, but Gandhi’s detailed statement of the incident to the press indicates the extent to which he himself was severely shaken. The disturbance triggered an outburst of violence the next day throughout the city; by evening fifty people had been killed and more than three hundred injured in uncontrollable rioting. Troops immediately came in, but since the demands of the United Provinces and Punjab had drastically reduced the military resources available to Bengal, the situation, in Tuker’s view, was far more critical than it had been in July or August. Major General Ranking, area commander, “acted at once with all the troops at his disposal, calling in Gurkhas” as well; yet even this, the military realized, was inadequate, and Ranking “pressed the government to impose martial law.”73

  Gandhi toured the affected areas, and then wrote to Sardar Patel, “What was regarded as the ‘Calcutta Miracle’ has proved to be a nine days’ wonder. I am pondering what my duty is in the circumstances.”74 When Rajagopalachari came to visit him on the evening of September 1, Gandhi had already made his decision. He proposed a fast. “Can one fast against the goondasi” Rajaji asked. “I want to touch the hearts of those who are behind the goondas” Rajaji replied. “The hearts of the goondas may or may not be touched. It would be enough for my purpose if they realize that society at large has no sympathy with their aims or methods and that the peace-loving element is determined to assert itself or perish in the attempt.” Rajaji urged him to “wait and watch a little,” but Gandhi was adamant. “The fast has to be now or never. It will be too late afterwards. The minority community cannot be left in a perilous condition. My fast has to be preventative if it is to be of any good. I know I shall be able to tackle the Punjab if I can control Calcutta. But if I falter now, the conflagration may spread.”75

  “The weapon which has hitherto proved infallible for me is fasting,” Gandhi announced in his public statement that evening. “To put in an appearance before a yelling crowd does not always work. It certainly did not last night. What my word in person cannot do, my fast may. It may touch the hearts of all the warring elements in the Punjab if it does in Calcutta. I, therefore, begin fasting from 8:15 tonight to end only if and when sanity returns to Calcutta.”76 The focus throughout the country was at once on Gandhi. The Times of India commented, “More than his life the peace of India is at stake.”77 Indian political leaders responded with alarm and exhortation. On the first day of the fast, however, it was clear that the city’s extremists, inflamed by this latest surge of violence, had not yet felt the impact of Gandhi’s move. Looting and rioting persisted as the casualties mounted.

  On September 3, the second day of the fast, quiet came to Calcutta. Gandhi cautiously observed that “the leaven has begun to work.”78 The positive effects of his action on the city were plain: a deputation from the Calcutta bar association came to pledge their assistance; and they were followed by a large mixed procession of Hindus and Muslims, who promised to reconcile their differences. Then peace demonstrations of students, political workers, and government officials of both communities paraded through the city to Hydari mansion. Gandhi told them all to “go out together to patrol the troubled areas and relieve the police of its arduous duties.” Meanwhile, the police force itself, European and Indian, Christian, Hindu, and Muslim, had commenced a twenty-four hour fast in sympathy while remaining on duty. This show of civic sympathy was precisely what Gandhi wanted; of less interest to him were the public broadcasts with which provincial and national Congress leaders bombarded the city.

  By September 4, the third and last day of the fast, the mass therapy had progressed still further. Scores of members of Hindu “resistance groups,” formed since direct action day, surrendered to Gandhi a small arsenal of weapons, and admitted to him their complicity in the urban violence. They were followed by a large gang of goondas who offered to “submit to whatever penalty you may impose, only that you should now end your fast.” To both groups, Gandhi replied, “My penalty for you is that you should go immediately among the Muslims and assure them full protection. The minute I am convinced that real change of heart has taken place, I will give up the fast.”79 “The function of my fast,” Gandhi explained, “is not to paralyze us or render us inactive,” but “to release our energies.”80 Release them he did: not only was Calcutta without a single incident on this day, it was mobbed with processions to Hydari mansion clamoring for an end to the fast.

  Amiya Chakravarty, then a teacher in Calcutta, described the sort of ambivalence that the fast managed to create among skeptics and then how this ambivalent response soon prompted positive action, especially among the students:

  His face and eyes, made luminous by suffering, would show little trace of the agony that his will had mastered, but the nature of his ordeal was unmistakable to the millions. Even while repudiating his method and its efficacy, the one question in peoples’ minds would be, “How is Gandhiji?” People would begin to feel uncomfortable; the grocer’s boy, the rickshaw-puller, the office clerk, the school and college students would scan the news columns early in the morning and listen to the radio throughout the day and feel more and more personally involved in the situation. I remember how University students would come up to us and ask to be excused from attending their classes because they felt disturbed and did not know what to do. But why feel disturbed? They would say that though they did not believe in such methods and in the philosophy behind it all, one thing struck them as curious; after all, if anybody had to suffer for the continued killing and betrayal in the city, it was not Gandhi. He had taken no part in it. So, while others were engaged in crime, it was he who had to suffer like this. They felt awkward and some wanted to stop his suffering, and even gathered together weapons from streets and homes at great personal risk; they wanted to return them to Gandhi.81

  Earlier The Statesman had argued (in the May editorial quoted at length above) against a fast under these circumstances. Its arguments are significant and worth repeating. The editorial had admitted that “we have never been able fully to understand these Gandhian fasts,” but this admission did not inhibit its subsequent assumptions: “the contemplated fast could not be expected to influence Muslims generally,” and since “Hindu bitterness would greatly increase the outcome would be in every way disastrous.” It contended further that the appeal of the fast is “primarily to the emotions, to the heart,” although it is also “intended to appeal to the head.” It is conceivable, the editorial conceded, that in some instances this appeal might work, “But with communal disputes it is different…once feelings are aroused to fever-pitch, there is no more possibility of subduing them by appeal to some other nobler emotion than of curing a rabid dog of his madness by talking gently. As for the intellectual factor, that is wholly absent.”

  This argument merits reiteration, not only for its suggestion of an almost fatalistic acceptance of the “mad dog” forces of Hindu-Muslim conflict, even among the most intelligent observers, but also because it reflects their confident skepticism of the efficacy of nonviolence. At the crux of this effort was the will of one extraordinary individual, a will he directed at the “rabid dogs” of Calcutta, not merely by talking gently, but through the potent force of satyagraha. This summoned a power so considerable that it persuaded even The Statesman to reconsider its position:

  On the ethics of fasting as a political instrument we have over many years failed to concur with India’s most renowned practitioner of it, expressing our views frankly. But never in a long career has Mahatma Gandhi,82 in our eyes, fasted in a simpler, worthier cau
se than this, nor one more calculated for immediate effective appeal to the public conscience. We cordially wish him unqualified success …. 83

  Now, all Calcutta was wishing him “unqualified success.” But for Gandhi, the right time to break the fast had still not come. Amiya Chakravarty observed:

  So the fast would continue. Men would come back home from their offices in the evening and find food prepared by their family, ready for them; but soon it would be revealed that the women of the home had not eaten during the whole day. They had not felt hungry. Pressed further, the wife or mother would admit that they could not understand how they could go on when Gandhi was dying for their own crimes. Restaurants and amusement centers did little business; some of them were voluntarily closed by their proprietors.84

  At 6 p.m. on September 4, what he regarded as a decisive breakthrough occurred. Gandhi was visited by another deputation: they included N. C. Chatterjee and Debendranath Mukherjee, the president and secretary, respectively, of the Bengal Hindu Mahasabha; R. K. Jaidka, a prominent Hindu Punjabi businessman; Sardar N. Singh Talib, the Sikh editor of the influential Sikh daily, Desk Darpan Dr. G. Jilani of the Muslim League; Dr. A. R. Choudhury and M. Rahaman of the Pakistan Seamen’s Union, and the ever present Suhrawardy. As Suhrawardy escorted them in to Gandhi, the deputation joined Rajagopalachari, Acharya Kripalani, and P. C. Ghosh, esteemed Congress leaders, who were already at his bedside. Gandhi, of course, appreciated that among these men were represented the most powerful interests in the city. After listening to their pleas for ending the fast, he demanded of them two promises: first, that communal violence would not recur in Calcutta; second, that if it did recur, they would “not live to report failure,” but would lay down their lives to resist it. If these pledges were given and broken then he vowed that he would begin an irrevocable fast until death. The deputation withdrew to another room, conferred, and emerged with a joint agreement: “We the undersigned promise to Gandhiji that now that peace and quiet have been restored in Calcutta once again, we shall never allow communal strife in the city and shall strive unto death to prevent it.”85 Gandhi immediately broke the fast; it had lasted seventy-three hours. Chakravarty concluded that “an immense release filled the atmosphere” at this moment. Then “release turned into rejoicing, the fast actually led up to feasts in which the warring communities joined heartily, while Gandhiji sipped his small glass of orange juice.”86

  On September 7, he left for Delhi. Communal violence, during this critical period surrounding partition, did not return to Calcutta. “Gandhiji has achieved many things,” said Rajagopalachari afterwards, “but in my considered opinion, there has been nothing, not even independence, which is so truly wonderful as his victory over evil in Calcutta.”87 Perhaps even more representative of the city’s sentiments was the acting mayor’s comment on Gandhi’s departure that “Calcutta has been spared the horrors of a strife which easily might have been as bad or worse than former disturbances.”88 This was the judgment of the moment, not only by Congressmen, but by the press and political leaders of both communities. But it was not only the judgment of the moment; it has been confirmed by sober reflection as well, nowhere expressed better than by the British historian E.W.R. Lumby in his account of the fast:

  His triumph was complete, and the peace that he brought was destined to endure. A Muslim League newspaper, acknowledging the debt Calcutta Muslims owed him, said, “he was ready to die so that they might live peacefully.” He had in fact worked a miracle, perhaps the greatest of modern times.89

  Analysis of Gandhi’s Use of Power in Calcutta

  Nicholas Mansergh, in his perceptive account of this period of Indian history, observes that:

  In this, the last year of his life. Gandhi’s influence was transcendent. By the people of India he was treated with the awe given to the great prophets and religious teachers of the past. Indeed he was already numbered with them. It was his preaching of the doctrine of nonviolence more than any other single factor that stood between India and bloodshed on a frightful scale.90

  The aim here is not to proclaim miracles or to canonize Gandhi, but rather to explain the nature of his influence; the sources and dynamics of his power, and the manner in which he used this power in the Calcutta satyagraha.

  Mansergh observes further of Gandhi that “As his inclinations seemed to lead him to withdraw more and more from the narrow political issues of the hour and to devote his efforts to the noble work of pacification, so his reputation grew.”91 While it is true that Gandhi’s popular influence increased at this time, his withdrawal from politics was accompanied by a sharp decrease in influence within the higher political circles, where the decisions on the partition of India were being made. His decline here had begun at least as early as September 1944, with his failure to reach a compromise in his talks with Jinnah. Deeply aware of this decline, and profoundly discouraged with the political trend of events, he wrote in October 1946, “I know that mine is today a voice in the wilderness.”92 As what he called the “vivisection of India” became imminent, his own sense of impotence increased. This, while, as Mansergh asserts, Gandhi’s influence “more than any other single factor stood between India and bloodshed on a frightful scale.” This apparent paradox itself illuminates, among other things, the peculiar nature of Gandhi’s power, and the extent to which it was, particularly in this last phase, trans-political in character. This is evident especially in the Calcutta satyagraha. In this instance, at least three main dynamics of Gandhi’s power emerge: his past experience with Hindu-Muslim conflict, the inclusive method which he developed in dealing with it, and his theory of fasting, which he increasingly applied to its resolution. The last of these is espedaily noteworthy, since it exemplifies both his leadership achievement as well as elements of his social thought, that is, his ideas on society and on means of social control.

  “My South African experiences had convinced me,” Gandhi recollected in his Autobiography in 1927, “that it would be on the question of Hindu-Muslim unity that my Ahimsa would be put to its severest test, and that the question presented the widest field for my experiments in Ahimsa. The conviction is still there.”93 This conviction had, throughout Gandhi’s life, much to sustain it. In September 1924, for example, Hindu-Muslim violence reached a high peak and Gandhi decided to fast, his first major fast on behalf of religious unity. “The recent events,” he announced from the home of a Muslim friend in Delhi, “have proved unbearable for me. My helplessness is still more unbearable. My religion teaches me that whenever there is distress which one cannot remove, one must fast and pray…. I am therefore imposing on myself a fast of twenty-one days commencing from today.”94 Like the Calcutta fast, undertaken twenty-three years later for the same purpose, this one was begun in a Muslim home and Muslim friends cared for him; these elements of his inclusive method, then, had already taken shape.

  The 1924 fast, however, represents only one high point in his consistent concern for religious harmony. Whatever mistakes Gandhi may have made in his later dealings with the Muslim League and Jinnah, no Indian leader gave greater attention, over a longer period, to the fundamental problems of Hindu-Muslim relations. For three decades, during his career in the Congress, he emphasized Hindu-Muslim unity as among “the three pillars of Swaraj”; and, at the end of this long career, when communal violence suddenly gained its head, Gandhi acted intuitively to meet the emergency. He turned first to Bengal. After the Great Calcutta Killing, he realized that an alternate form of “direct action” was necessary; and, when the first report of the Noakhali atrocities reached him in October 1946, he knew that this action demanded, above all, his physical presence in the disturbed areas. With this decision to wage satyagraha against large-scale rioting began developments in method which culminated a year later in the Calcutta “experiment.”

  While, therefore, the Congress working committee were passing resolutions in Delhi, finding “it hard to express adequately their feelings of horror and pain at the present happen
ings in East Bengal,” Gandhi was heading for the Noakhali villages. Had it not been for the precedent of the Calcutta killing, the early reports of casualties in Noakhali would have seemed incredible (5,000 killed and 50,000 injured). Gandhi arrived there, after a brief stopover in Calcutta, in early November 1946. He was brooding over the power left in his method and in December he wrote: “Is the Satyagraha of my conception a weapon of the weak or really that of the strong? I must either realize the latter or lay down my life in the attempt to attain it. That is my quest.”95

  The next four months were spent in a relentless effort to restore confidence among the Hindu minority. He moved slowly through the area toward his destination of Srirampur, a remote village where he spent six weeks organizing the satyagraha. Then came his renowned “a village a day pilgrimage:” a walking tour of seven weeks in which he covered 116 miles and 47 villages. During this time, Gandhi was receiving reports of the Hindu retaliation in Bihar. This eventually prompted his departure from Bengal, arriving at Patna in early March. Here it was the Muslim minority that he sought out and consoled, while the Hindus now bore the brunt of his censure. The technique, however, was substantially the same in Bengal and Bihar: a tour of the devastated villages, visiting the afflicted homes and families; then the inevitable prayer meeting, with its ingenious admixture of the traditional and the contemporary; and finally the delegation of responsibility to one individual or group in the village that order might be preserved. Occasionally, as at Srirampur, Gandhi would remain for a prolonged period in one of the most remote and ravaged of the villages, until his persuasiveness and sheer courage stabilized the area. Fundamentally, this was the method of conflict resolution that eventually directed the Calcutta satyagraha.