The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.
I look upon an increase of the power of the State with the greatest fear, because although while apparently doing good by minimizing exploitation, it does the greatest harm to mankind by destroying individuality, which lies at the root of all progress (65: 316-319).
Central Assembly elections. ‘So far as I can see the future,’ Gandhi said in a letter at the end of October 1934 to his Quaker friend, Agatha Harrison, ‘there is no likelihood of my initiating or precipitating mass civil disobedience for some years to come’ (65: 276). And in November he openly asked voters to send Congress candidates to the largely symbolic Central Assembly. The results gave sixty-one seats to the Congress and its allies, including a dozen won by the Malaviya-led Nationalist Party.
This was close to a sweep of ‘general’ and ‘untouchable’ seats, and a delighted Gandhi referred (23 Nov.) to ‘the wonders [the Congress] has worked with the least amount of expenses’ (65: 395). In a house of 146, the so-called ENO group (Europeans plus Nominated members plus Officials) had forty-seven plus the support of around sixteen loyalists, representing landholding or other privileged interests. Led by Jinnah, a bloc of eighteen legislators elected from Muslim seats formed a third group.
Barred from the Frontier. Released in August 1934 after more than thirty months of detention but not allowed to return to their province, the Khan brothers provided Gandhi enjoyable company in Wardha in the last quarter of 1934, strengthened his hopes of Hindu-Muslim partnership and produced in him a wish to ‘bury [him]self’ in a Frontier village. However, on 7 December, while Ghaffar Khan and all his four children were together for the first time in years, he was rearrested for alleged sedition.
Via a letter sent by his private secretary, Willingdon barred Gandhi from entering the NWFP. Some months later (June 1935), when a violent earthquake ravaged Quetta in Baluchistan and Gandhi asked for permission to visit that province, permission was again denied.
HARILAL
In September and October 1934, Harilal, now forty-six, wrote unexpected letters to his father. Saying that he wished to start a new life, Harilal added that he was learning spinning and other khadi processes from his daughter Manu, and wanted to settle down and remarry. Several letters were exchanged.
Afraid and yet willing to believe his son (Kasturba was skeptical), the father said he would be glad if Harilal married a widow, and offered to ask friends to help Harilal if he was serious about a fresh start. On 17 October Gandhi wrote to his son:
I can’t stop thinking about you all the time…You are constantly in my thoughts. If I had time, I would go on inflicting long letters on you. If the change that you have described endures… I would be extremely happy in this the last stage of my life (65: 187-8).
In February 1935 Gandhi invited Harilal to stay with him in Wardha, and the son came, his body looking ravaged, the face thin and stained, his hair dishevelled. For a while it looked as if the son would recover, and he and his parents enjoyed one another’s company. Apparently, Harilal told Gandhi that he wanted to stay in a village and serve. In that case, Gandhi responded, ‘I would love to die in your lap.’16
When Harilal repeated that he wanted to marry again, Gandhi did not express objection. Margarete Spiegel, a German schoolteacher who had lost her job in Berlin, being a Jew, and was in India because of an interest in Gandhi’s lifestyle, thought she might marry Harilal, who seemed willing, but the idea came to nothing, and in May Harilal returned to Rajkot.
To Narandas Gandhi, who was now Rajkot-based, Gandhi wrote: ‘God knows where Harilal’s destiny will lead him. We must ask only this favour from God that our prodigal son should not be lost again.’17 But Harilal found it hard to stay in a job or in one place, or without liquor or borrowed money.
In April 1936 he met his parents in Nagpur and told them ‘how he was amused by the attentions that were being paid to him by the missionaries of rival faiths’. Some weeks later, on 30 May, while Gandhi and Kasturba were in Bangalore, the newspapers announced that Harilal, now forty-eight, had secretly converted to Islam and had been accepted on Friday 29 May as a Muslim in one of Bombay’s main mosques, and now bore the name Abdulla. A shattered Kasturba conveyed her reaction in a letter to Harilal’s daughter Rami:
I am very unhappy, but what to do? In fact I feel very ashamed… We have lost a jewel. The jewel has gone into the hands of Musalmans.18
Gandhi thought the conversion stemmed from compulsive habits. ‘He must have sensation and he must have money,’ he wrote to Amrit Kaur (1 June 1936: 69: 75). But the publicized conversion to Islam of Gandhi’s son was more than a personal or family matter. It demanded a public response. On 2 June Gandhi issued a press statement:
The newspapers report that about a fortnight ago my eldest son Harilal, now nearing fifty years, accepted Islam and that on Friday last… he was permitted to announce his acceptance amid great acclamation and that, after his speech was finished, he was besieged by his admirers who vied with one another to shake hands with him.
If his acceptance was from the heart and free from any worldly considerations, I should have no quarrel… But I have the gravest doubt about this… Everyone who knows my son Harilal, knows that he has been for years addicted to the drink evil and has been in the habit of visiting houses of ill-fame.
God can work wonders. He has been known to have changed the stoniest hearts and turned sinners into saints, as it were, in a moment. Nothing will please me better than to find that… he had… suddenly become a changed man… But the Press reports give no such evidence…
Harilal’s apostasy is no loss to Hinduism and his admission to Islam is a source of weakness to it if, as I apprehend, he remains the same wreck that he was before.
My object in addressing these lines to my numerous Muslim friends is to ask them to examine Harilal in the light of his immediate past and, if they find that his conversion is a soulless matter, to tell him so plainly and disown him, and if they discover sincerity in him to see that he is protected against temptations so that his sincerity results in his becoming a God-fearing member of society.
I do not mind whether he is known as Abdulla or Harilal if, by adopting one name for the other, he becomes a true devotee of God, which both the names mean (Harijan, 6 June 1936; 69: 76-8).
Harilal’s son Kanti visited his father and wept at his state. Soon there were stories of Abdulla Gandhi preaching Islam in different parts of the country but also of disorderly conduct by him and proceedings against him. A humiliated Kasturba ‘gave vent to her feelings one morning in Delhi’ before Devadas, who reduced pain’s flow into ‘An Open Letter from a Mother to her Son’ that newspapers published on 27 September. The letter also offered a glimpse into Gandhi’s heart, piercing its steel casing, and into her own:
Dear son Harilal, Now it has become hard for me even to live. How much pain you are inflicting on your parents in the evening of their life, at least think of that a little.
Your father does not speak anything about this before anybody. But the shock that your behaviour causes breaks his heart to pieces. God has given him strong willpower… But I am a weak, aged woman, and I am unable to endure the mental torture caused by you.
Your father daily receives letters from many persons complaining against your behaviour. He has to gulp down the bitter drink of all this infamy. But for me you have not spared a single place where I can go. Out of shame I cannot move with ease among friends or even strangers. Your father has always forgiven you; but God will never tolerate your behaviour.
Every morning when I wake up I have a fear in my heart what if there are reports about your new evil doings in the newspapers. I long ardently to meet you; but I do not know your whereabouts. You are my eldest son, and you are now fifty years of age. Perhaps you may insult even me.
You have c
hanged your ancestral religion. That is your personal affair. You like those who give you money but you spend the money on drinking and after that you deliver discourses from the pulpit…
Addressing Muslims who celebrated the conversion, Kasturba added:
The powerless voice of a wounded mother will surely stir someone’s heart… What you have been doing would not be reasonable in the eyes of Khuda.19
Harilal’s first reaction (not wholly inaccurate, as we know) was that his mother ‘didn’t write this letter. Someone else wrote it and signed her name.’20 He also claimed he would stop drinking if his parents embraced Islam.21 But the conversion was not real, and before the end of the year he reconverted to Hinduism in an Arya Samaj ceremony and adopted a new name, Hiralal.
Mahadev Desai’s son Narayan has left a first-hand account of an encounter at about this time, in the company of the Gandhis, with Harilal:
One day when our train stopped at a station on our way back to Wardha, we heard a cry from the crowd different from the usual: ‘Mata Kasturba ki Jai.’
It was Harilalkaka. He was emaciated. His front teeth were gone. His hair had turned gray. From a pocket of his ragged clothes he took an orange and said, ‘Ba, I have brought this for you.’
Breaking in, Bapu said, ‘Didn’t you bring anything for me?’
‘No, nothing for you… All the greatness you have achieved is only because of Ba. Don’t forget that!’
‘Oh, there is no doubt of it! But now, do you want to come with us?’
‘Oh, no. I only came to see Ba. Take this orange, Ba. I begged for it and now I give it to you. It’s only for you, all right? If you are not going to eat it yourself, give it back to me.’
Ba promised to eat the orange. Then she too pleaded with Harilalkaka to come with us.
Harilalkaka’s eyes were full of tears. ‘Leave off such talk, Ba. There is no way out of this for me.’ Our compartment had pulled away from him when Ba realized, ‘I didn’t even ask the poor boy if he wanted anything to eat. We have a basket full of fruits. My dear child must be dying of hunger.’
But by then the train had left the platform. Amidst the cries of ‘Gandhiji ki jai!’ we could still hear the faint cry, ‘Mata Kasturba ki jai.’22
AMBEDKAR AND CONVERSION
It was Ambedkar who had made conversion a hot topic. On 14 October 1935, shortly after reports of atrocities against Harijans in Kavitha village in Gujarat’s Ahmedabad district, he announced at a Depressed Classes conference in Yeoli in Maharashtra that though born a Hindu he did not intend to die one.
He had been speaking in this vein from 1933. Hindu society, he said, was resisting reform; Gandhi had rejected his plea to become ‘a dictator like Kemal Pasha or Mussolini in social and religious matters’23; and there was no future for the ‘untouchables’ within Hinduism. The Yeoli conference resolved to look for a religion that gave them equality. Gandhi offered an immediate comment:
I can understand the anger of a high-souled and highly educated person like Dr Ambedkar over the atrocities as were committed in Kavitha and other villages. But religion is not like a house or a cloak which can be changed at will…
[C]hange of faith by him and those who passed the resolution will not serve the cause which they have at heart; for millions of unsophisticated, illiterate Harijans will not listen to him and them… especially when it is remembered that their lives, for good or for evil, are intertwined with those of caste Hindus (68: 65).
Yet Gandhi concluded that on his part he should now criticize the caste system directly. Thus far, in order to demonstrate his loyalty to Hindu tradition, Gandhi had defended an ‘ideal’ caste system (the so-called ‘varnashrama’ dharma) as a division of occupations based on equality and aptitude, while admitting that the ideal did not exist in practice.
On 16 November 1935, in a noteworthy shift, Gandhi said of the caste system, ‘The sooner public opinion abolishes it, the better.’ The Harijan article in which he wrote this was entitled, ‘CASTE HAS TO GO’. As for Ambedkar, though Christian, Muslim and Sikh groups made eager approaches to him, he seemed in no hurry to choose a new religion.
A year later, in November 1936, Andrews again brought up the question of conversion. While (he said) he himself had ‘discarded the position that there is no salvation except through Christ long ago’, he nonetheless wanted to know what Gandhi would ‘say to a man who after considerable thought and prayer said that he could not have his peace and salvation except by becoming a Christian’.
G: I would say that if a non-Christian, say a Hindu, came to a Christian and made that statement, he should ask him to become a good Hindu rather than find goodness in change of faith.
A: I cannot in this go the whole length with you, though you know my own position. But supposing the Oxford Group Movement people changed the life of your son, and he felt like being converted, what would you say?
G: I would say that the Oxford Group may change the lives of as many as they like, but not their religion… If a person wants to believe in the Bible let him say so, but why should he disregard his own religion? This proselytization will mean no peace in the world. Religion is a very personal matter.
We should, by living the life according to our light, share the best with one another, thus adding to the sum total of human effort to reach God… My position is that all the great religions are fundamentally equal. We must have the innate respect for other religions as we have for our own. Mind you, not mutual toleration, but equal respect (Harijan, 28 Nov. 1936; 70: 58-60).
Extremely reluctant to endorse changes in faith, and apprehensive of violence from competition for souls and numbers, Gandhi however acknowledged, as we have seen, that persons like his son Harilal and Ambedkar were entitled to choose their religious home.
That mass conversions might be flawed was admitted by some Christian missionaries, and John R. Mott, the American founder of the YMCA, told Gandhi in November 1936 that he regretted ‘unseemly competition’ among missionaries to baptize ‘untouchables’. Still, Mott asked whether it was wrong to ‘preach the Gospel with reference to its acceptance’.
Gandhi’s reply betrayed a preconception regarding the ‘untouchables’ similar to an earlier bias about Africans that he had grown beyond. He asked:
Would you, Dr Mott, preach the Gospel to a cow? Well, some of the ‘untouchables’… can no more distinguish between the relative merits of Islam and Hinduism and Christianity than a cow… If you must share [the Gospel] with the Harijans, why don’t you share it with Thakkar Bapa and Mahadev? Why should you go to the ‘untouchables’ and try to exploit this upheaval? (Harijan, 19 and 26 Dec. 1936; 70: 77-8)
Reported in Harijan, the comment drew protests, including one sent by a gifted young Congressman in Bihar, Jagjivan Ram, who came from an ‘untouchable’ caste.24 Explaining, Gandhi said that no offence was meant (‘the cow is a sacred animal’), and he added that it was the caste Hindus’ fault that ‘thousands of Harijans’ had been left in a state where they could not ‘understand the merits and demerits of different religions’ (Harijan 9 Jan. 1937; 70: 258-9).
It is unlikely that Jagjivan Ram’s feelings were assuaged. Did Gandhi really think that Dalits were incapable of clear or independent thinking? Part of him certainly carried this prejudice, but we have also seen Gandhi’s references to talented ‘untouchables’ worthy of occupying India’s highest offices; and he was well aware of the abilities not only of Ambedkar but also of Jagjivan Ram and several other Dalit leaders. What Mott’s remark brought out was not Gandhi’s calm view but a reaction of fear-cum-resentment, typical of many Hindus, at the thought of ‘losing’ some of their numbers.
Act of 1935. In July 1935 the British Parliament passed a new statute for India, the Government of India Act. In line with the 1933 White Paper, the Act of 1935 gave substantial autonomy to soon-to-be-elected provincial legislatures, while retaining British control over the Central Assembly.
At the end of August 1935, Gandhi cabled the Viceroy aski
ng for the unconditional release of Jawaharlal, whose wife Kamala lay critically ill in Europe. Nehru was freed, and a Gandhi who had ‘retired’ from the Congress asked Jawaharlal to succeed Prasad as president.
Convinced that it was Rajagopalachari’s turn to take the chair, Vallabhbhai had pressed Gandhi to nominate the southerner, and Gandhi had sent C.R. a feeler. Claiming fatigue, and aware in any case of Gandhi’s wish, Rajagopalachari demurred, and Gandhi informed Patel that he had ‘asked Jawaharlal with [C.R.’s] consent’.25
Held in Lucknow with Nehru in the chair, the Congress plenary of March-April 1936 witnessed ‘an acrimonious verbal duel’ between Jawaharlal (whose wife had died in February) and Patel.26 Two issues sharply divided them: in his presidential address, Jawaharlal spoke of socialism as a vital creed in which he believed with all his head and heart; and he also made plain his dislike of office-acceptance. Patel was skeptical of socialism and open to provincial office, positions that C.R. and Prasad shared.
Unwilling to divide the Congress, Nehru went along with Lucknow’s decision not to reject provincial office in advance, and he also refrained from joining the Congress Socialist Party. In fact Lucknow lived up to Gandhi’s hope, which was that Nehru should have his head but the others should not lose their voices.
Present but silent in Lucknow, an unwell Gandhi in effect chose the Working Committee. Led by Patel, Prasad and C.R., the old guard comprised a majority in the new team, and the three socialists included in it (Jayaprakash, Narendra Deva and Achyut Patwardhan) ‘owed their appointment not to Jawaharlal but to Gandhi,’ as Patwardhan would put it.27 Also included was Subhas Bose, who was in prison again, this time for returning to India against the Raj’s wishes. Kripalani was retained as general secretary, a position to which (on Patel’s urging) he had been appointed in 1934.
Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People Page 53