On the night of 8 May, some hours after the fast began, the Raj released Gandhi, not wishing to risk his death in custody. This could not have been a total shock to Gandhi. Mahadev was also set free. Declaring that he would not take advantage of release, Gandhi asked M.S. Aney, the acting Congress president, to announce a six-week suspension of disobedience.
Leaving Vallabhbhai behind in Yeravda, Gandhi, Kasturba and Desai moved to ‘Parnakuti,’ the Poona home of Lady Premlila Thackersey. Aided by Kasturba’s ‘nursing and massaging and preparing his feeds with all her devoted and loving care’ (to quote Desai), the fast, begun on 8 May, was endured fairly easily by him (61: 146).
After Gandhi had fasted for thirteen days, friend-cum-grand-nephew Mathuradas Trikamji, who also had joined to help, said in a letter:
I am writing these lines from a corner from where I constantly… look at him. He lies in his cot like a sweet child, beaming with brightness (61: 142).
As during previous fasts, a confident, demanding general had turned into a dependent, child-like, serene and adorable person. On 29 May, Gandhi thanked ‘the doctors and other friends who have poured their affection on me during these days of privilege and grace’, and added:
Within a minute or two I am going to break the fast. In His name and with faith in Him was it taken, in His name it terminates… You will not expect me to make a speech on this occasion. It is an occasion for taking the name and singing the glory of God (61: 143).
RESPONDING TO REPRESSION
Breadwinners had gone to prison for long periods in 1930 and 1932, and many were still inside. Donations to the Congress were banned, and its funds seized or dried up.
As Gandhi recognized in a letter to Andrews, Willingdon’s ordinance rule had ‘struck the people dumb’. The masses were ‘terror-struck’ and ‘the well-to-do’ were ‘trembling in their shoes’ through fear of the Raj. ‘And so there is a kind of dead calm which even in my bed, isolated though I am from contact with people through the orders of doctors, I can’t help sensing.’
But Gandhi was not giving up, for, he wrote to Andrews, ‘time… counts in our favour,’ and there was ‘a certainty of the final triumph’ (61:164).
Andrews had asked Gandhi to concentrate on untouchability removal ‘for the whole remainder of your life, without turning to the right or the left’. Recalling that Gandhi had ‘again and again’ said that with untouchability Indians were ‘not fit’ for swaraj, Andrews asked his friend not to try ‘to serve two masters’.3 This was what Ambedkar too had urged, but Gandhi turned down the advice:
To Andrews, 15 June 1933: Now for your important argument about untouchability. But there is this initial flaw about it. My life is one indivisible whole. It is not built after the compartmental system—satyagraha, civil resistance, untouchability, Hindu-Muslim unity, [etc.,]… are indivisible parts of a whole…
You will find at one time in my life an emphasis on one thing, at another time on other. But that is just like a pianist, now emphasizing one note and now other. But they are all related to one another.
Therefore you see how it is utterly impossible for me to say: ‘I have now nothing to do with civil disobedience or Swaraj!’ Not only so… Full and final removal of untouchability… is utterly impossible without Swaraj… Love. Mohan (61: 163-6).
As to how to work for Swaraj, Gandhi would try a modified strategy. During two conversations held in Poona on 1 & 2 June 1933, Gandhi and C.R. agreed that the mass struggle should come to an end.
Confirming the conclusion that Gandhi and Patel had reached in Yeravda, Gandhi and C.R. also agreed that it might be necessary at some point to ‘think of taking power in our hands’, even under ‘the constitution they (the British) are framing’. Meanwhile a small number should keep up the struggle, and Gandhi should ask Willingdon for an interview, even though ‘we will get the same reply from the Viceroy’ (61: 480-4).
Deliberating in Poona in Gandhi’s presence, Aney and other free Congress leaders endorsed the new approach.
Devadas married. On 16 June 1933, after six years of waiting during which Devadas, his father and Rajagopalachari had all gone more than once to prison, and Devadas had been on the brink of death, he and Lakshmi were married, in ‘Parnakuti’ in Poona.
Because the bride and groom belonged to different castes, the ceremony was performed by a young reformist priest from Maharashtra, Laxman Shastri Joshi. Gandhi, Kasturba, Rajagopalachari and a handful of guests attended. Gandhi addressed the couple, but it took him ‘over five minutes to gather sufficient strength to speak’, for he was not only weak from the fast, he was deeply moved:
Devadas, you know my expectations about you. May you fulfil them…Who knew that your wedding would take place under the roof of the pure-souled Lady Thackersey? Who knew that a man of great learning and spotless character like Laxman Shastri would be found to act as priest?
You have today robbed Rajagopalachari of a cherished gem. May you be worthy of it!
May God protect you! Only He protects, for He is the father, mother, and friend, everything rolled into one. Let your life be a dedication to the service of the motherland, and of humanity. May you both ever be humble, and may you both walk in fear of God always! (From The Hindu and The Hindustan Times, 17 June 1933; 61: 167-8)
A concerned father was again revealed in a letter that Gandhi sent to Mira (21 June): ‘Nothing is certain as to where Devadas is to stay in future or what he is to do. It is enough that both he and Lakshmi are very happy…’ (61: 180)
Rebuff, response & the break-up of the ashram. In the middle of July Gandhi sought an interview with Willingdon ‘with a view to exploring possibilities of peace’ and received the expected rebuff (61: 228). Gandhi’s response was two-fold. One, he would personally offer disobedience in Gujarat. Two, he would disband the Sabarmati Ashram before the Raj seized it—movables from the ashram had already been confiscated to recover fines or taxes that the ashramites had refused to pay.
With the disbandment, every inmate was expected to ‘constitute a walking ashram, carrying with him or her the responsibility for realizing the ashram ideal… in prison or outside’ (61: 274). This was a tough and painful decision, arrived at after consulting ashramites not in prison. Like Gandhi, they were willing to offer individual disobedience: when thousands across India had lost properties, Gandhi could not exempt his ashram, and its members could not play safe.
However, Gandhi freed the ashram’s Harijans from the contemplated action: he did not want them to lose their dwellings or their school. He made sure, too, that the ashram’s stock of khadi, looms and charkhas, its cattle, and its cash were transferred to trusts independent of law-breaking activities; and the 11,000 books in the ashram library were gifted to the Ahmedabad municipality. But he would vacate the Ashram’s land, buildings and crops before the Raj took them by force.
In a letter asking the home secretary in Bombay to take over the property, Gandhi indicated what the ashram, his ‘first constructive act on return to India in 1915’, had meant to him:
26 July 1933: Every head of cattle and every tree has its history and sacred associations. [The ashramites] are all members of a big family. What was once a barren plot of land has been turned by human endeavour into a fair-sized model garden colony. It will not be without a tear that we shall break up the family and its activities (61: 266-9).
At sixty-four, Gandhi was breaking up what had been his home for sixteen years, repeating previous (and always wrenching) exercises in Phoenix, Tolstoy Farm, Johannesburg, Durban, Bombay and Rajkot.
Arrests again. On 31 July he declared that he would march with Kasturba and several companions towards the Kheda village of Ras, where many peasants had lost their lands. That night he and his party were arrested and placed in Sabarmati jail. On 2 August he, Kasturba and Desai were transferred to Yeravda. On 4 August he was released but ordered to stay in Poona. When he tried to move out of Poona, he was arrested again and sentenced for a year.
Across Ind
ia several hundred individuals, including C.R. and Prasad, again defied the Raj and once more found themselves in prison. Patel and the Khan brothers were in jail continuously from January 1932. Released in August 1933, Jawaharlal was rearrested in February 1934. Within a few weeks of marriage, Devadas too was arrested near Delhi, where he had hoped to start a career in journalism, when he refused to sign a pledge forswearing disobedience.
Two prominent Congressmen not in prison, and not in India, were Vithalbhai Patel and Subhas Bose. They disapproved of Gandhi’s focus on untouchability. In May 1933 the two declared from Austria that Gandhi’s leadership had failed, but in October Vithalbhai died in a clinic near Geneva.
Fast, release and reflection. In India the new arrests did not greatly lift morale. Not that Gandhi or anybody else thought they would. The disobedience struggle seemed to be on its last legs, and Congress supporters dispirited and in disarray.
Bitterly disappointed at not finding Patel in Yeravda—the Raj had removed him to Nasik Jail—Gandhi demanded facilities in his cell for Harijan work. When these were denied, he began a fast on 16 August.
Two days later he declined an offer of conditional release. On 20 August, his condition worsening, he was moved to Sassoon Hospital, where he had had his appendix removed in 1924. Three days later, when it appeared that he would not survive, he was unconditionally released. Kasturba, along with some other women, remained confined in Yeravda.
His release, Gandhi said on 25 August, ‘is a matter of no joy for me. Possibly it is a matter of shame that I took my comrades to prison and came out of it by fasting’ (61: 339). But instead of repeating a cycle of defiance, arrest, fasting, release and rearrest, he chose ‘not to take the offensive’ until August 1934, when his one-year sentence would expire.4 Meanwhile, he would do Harijan work.
Had repression defeated satyagraha? Gandhi once more faulted himself and other satyagrahis, not satyagraha. Their satyagraha had been imperfect, he said. But the truth was that repression called for flexibility; mechanical defiance was merely ruinous. As we have seen, Gandhi was willing, if quietly at first, to examine the option that several in the Congress were now advocating: entering the Raj’s councils and capturing office in the provinces.
HMG’s scheme. This thinking was encouraged by a White Paper on political reform in India that HMG had issued in March 1933. The White Paper offered wide powers to elected provincial legislatures and proposed a new federal assembly where princes or their nominees would fill a third of the seats.
Neither Gandhi nor anyone close to him could countenance a major role by hereditary princes in a federal assembly, but provincial power merited a look. Though a provincial ministry would be circumscribed by reserve powers vested in the Viceroy and the governor, it might, among other things, restore the freedom-fighters’ lands and help with a future fight.
In September 1933, a Jawaharlal enjoying an interval between prison terms talked privately and at length with Gandhi in Poona. More upset than Gandhi by the petering out of defiance, and less willing to recognize the value of provincial office, Nehru was also troubled by Gandhi’s concentration on the Harijan question; he saw a ‘danger’ of ‘other issues obscuring’ the goal of independence.5
In a letter written after the talks, Gandhi sought to reassure his younger colleague: ‘I have no sense of defeat in me and the hope in me that this country of ours is fast marching towards its goal is burning as bright as it did in 1920.’6
A new base, and touring India again. Later in September he moved to Wardha, near Nagpur. Situated at the eastern end of the Marathi country, Wardha was Jamnalal Bajaj’s town, hotter than Ahmedabad but close to India’s geographical centre. At the end of August, after Gandhi had vacated Sabarmati, Bajaj urged Gandhi to make Wardha his base. Vinoba Bhave was already in the region—Gandhi had sent him there in the early 1920s—running an ashram and enjoying Bajaj’s support and loyalty.
Within days of arriving in Wardha, where he was put up in Bajaj’s garden guest-house, Gandhi seemed to adopt it as a home and started giving ‘Satyagraha Ashram, Wardha’ as his address on letters he wrote.
In November, after he had gained strength, Gandhi, now sixty-four, began another all-India tour, this time with an exclusive focus against untouchability. With his wife, Desai, Pyarelal and other companions in jail, he had new aides and travelling colleagues, but after her release in the new year Mira joined the party.
Between November and March he visited Nagpur and the Berar (Vidarbha) area of the Marathi country; Bilaspur and the large tribal tract of Chhattisgarh; the Hindi-speaking Mahakoshal region of central India; Bhopal and Delhi and places adjacent; Bezwada and over seventy towns and villages in the Telugu country; the Kannada and Malayalam regions; the Tamil country; the Coorg area; and Mangalore, Belgaum, Bijapur and other places in south-western India.
Everywhere he collected money for the Harijan cause, wrote for his new weeklies, visited quarters where Harijans lived, sought their entry into temples, and insisted that any welcome address presented to him in a town or village should describe the condition of its Harijans. After a huge earthquake (15 January 1934) destroyed towns and villages in north Bihar, Gandhi sought money for Bihar as well but refused, despite urgings by some, to divert Harijan funds to earthquake relief.
New debate with Tagore. A freshly-released Rajendra Prasad raised funds and organized relief in Bihar, as did the government, and Gandhi sent his associate Kumarappa to serve as the custodian of Bihar’s relief funds. In remarks in Tinnevelly and Tuticorin in the Tamil country, Gandhi observed that ‘the government and the people have become one’ in face of the calamity.
Also, however, he controversially suggested that the earthquake was ‘a divine chastisement’ for ‘the great sin’ committed for centuries by the so-called higher castes against Harijans, a ‘calamity handed down… from century to century’ (63: 38-40).
Criticizing Gandhi’s ‘superstitious’ argument, Tagore said that the logic ‘far better suits the psychology of [Gandhi’s] opponents than his own’, and that the orthodox were likely to ‘hold [Gandhi] and his followers responsible for the visitation of Divine anger’ (63: 516). But Gandhi could not resist using the earthquake to drive home the iniquity of untouchability.
[W]hilst we have yet breathing time (he said on 24 January), let us get rid of the distinctions of high and low, purify our hearts, and be ready to face our Maker when an earthquake or some natural calamity or death in the ordinary course overtakes us (63: 40).
In March and April, he spent more than four weeks in Bihar’s devastated areas, consoling victims and supporting Prasad’s relief work, and again linked the calamity to untouchability. There were angry protests from sanatanists, who came with black flags to his meetings.
These drew immense crowds, as his meetings in southern and central India had done. He interpreted the enthusiastic response of caste Hindus to his attacks on the doctrine of high-and-low as a sign that ‘untouchability has become weak and limp’.7
The ‘non-political’ tour was also reviving Congress confidence and demonstrating Gandhi’s continuing appeal. On 2 April 1934 a bolstered Gandhi made—in Saharsa, Bihar—the statement of retreat that he had been waiting to make:
[A]fter much searching of the heart I have arrived at the conclusion that in the present circumstances only one, and that myself and no other, should for the time being bear the responsibility of civil resistance…
I must advise all Congressmen to suspend civil resistance for Swaraj as distinguished from specific grievances. They should leave it to me alone… I give this opinion as the author and initiator of satyagraha… I am quite convinced that this is the best course in the interests of India’s fight for freedom (63: 247-9).
In another significant move, he summoned colleagues from the disbanded Sabarmati Ashram to Patna and told them that they should not hesitate to look for jobs, or imagine that he wanted them to court jail again. His sons Ramdas and Devadas, he said, had gone into jobs (Devadas
was freed in February 1934); he did not like it but had not objected. Others too should feel free ‘to start earning’. ‘Only those who are willing to die and get buried in jail should go there.’
Hinting that a struggle phase had ended, Gandhi however added that those ‘who are out today, earning money’ would find a future ‘opportunity’ to ‘plunge’ again into a sacrificial battle ‘of their own accord’.8 Such a battle would have to be waged again; he knew better than to hope that the British would leave India through constitutional talks. ‘This lull does not affect the march,’ he wrote to Agatha Harrison, a Quaker friend. ‘It is a precursor to the full awakening’ (63: 73).
Opening doors. Yet, without suspending disobedience the Congress could not hope for a lifting of the bans on Congress bodies, or for a chance to contest the elections, due in November that year, to the Central Assembly, or to contest provincial elections due later. With the suspension Gandhi opened doors for those in the Congress, but in an ingenious qualification that saved self-respect, his own and that of the Congress, he also reserved himself as a possible satyagrahi.
The last person elected as the Congress president, Vallabhbhai, was still in prison, and not expected to be out until mid-July. After six months of freedom, Jawaharlal, Patel’s immediate predecessor, was again in jail for no one knew how long. The Frontier’s Khan brothers too were behind bars. But Gandhi felt he had the duty to initiate an inescapable change. He knew that Patel agreed at least partially with him, and he was confident that Nehru too would come round.
In his prison Nehru was jolted, writing in a diary that Gandhi’s announcement ‘bowled him over’, and fearing he would have to break with Gandhi.9 Despite his readiness ‘to capture’ legislatures, Vallabhbhai too felt ‘puzzled’ and ‘pained’ that Gandhi had ‘snatched away the weapon with which he had armed the people’.10 But C.R. (released in February 1934), Prasad, Ansari and a great majority of the Congress acknowledged Gandhi’s realism.
Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People Page 51