C.R.’s successful dissent. The months from March to August in 1940 saw a serious division in the Congress high command, with Rajagopalachari dissenting from Gandhi and marshalling impressive support. At issue was the impact on India of Allied reverses in Europe. In the spring and summer of 1940, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and even France fell before Hitler’s blitzkrieg.
While C.R. thought the reverses would persuade the British to settle with the Congress, Gandhi did not think the British wanted an honourable deal. At Ramgarh (March 1940) he had told the Working Committee that he was now ‘stiffer’ towards the British and that selective disobedience was unavoidable. ‘I do not find any honest response from the other side,’ he said.28 Rajagopalachari’s reaction was that the British would crush wartime disobedience.
But divide-and-rule had put Gandhi off. His sympathy had drained away. Nine months after it had started, Gandhi looked at the war with an Indian rather than an English heart.
Churchill at the helm. In May 1940, some weeks before the fall of France, Churchill replaced Chamberlain as Britain’s Prime Minister. More than his colleagues, Gandhi was aware of the intensity of Churchill’s attachment to the Empire. Unlike them he had interacted with Churchill, meeting him in 1906 and being rebuffed by him in 1931.
Later, in 1935 in London, Churchill had told Gandhi’s industrialist friend Birla that ‘Mr Gandhi has gone very high in my esteem since he stood up for the untouchables.’ Informed of the remark, Gandhi authorized Birla to write to Churchill that Gandhi retained ‘a good recollection of Mr Churchill when he was in the Colonial Office’.29 Meeting Birla again in 1937, Churchill asked him to ‘give your leader my greetings’.30
But Gandhi was too seasoned to imagine that those earlier niceties would matter with the War Premier. Though Churchill’s famous remark that he had ‘not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire’ was two years away, Gandhi knew what not to expect from Premier Churchill. And he knew that Churchill would use the Pakistan cry, a proof of Indian disunity, to justify the status quo.
In the third week of June, a day after France appealed to Hitler for peace, the Working Committee met in Wardha. C.R. imagined that Britain might want, as an ally, ‘a free India when she has lost France’.31 If the Congress offered to prosecute the war, it might gain its goals of independence and, immediately, a share in the government.
He argued his case gently, clearly, persuasively. He argued it in the name of nonviolence, saying that fighting a war was on occasion the best way of ending violence, and he recalled Gandhi’s 1918 bid to recruit soldiers for the British.
‘I don’t want to be instrumental in militarizing the masses,’ Gandhi told his colleagues.32 Yet could nonviolence work in a war between nations? Could it work in Europe?
Meeting to formulate its approach to the Raj in India, the Working Committee found itself debating the feasibility of nonviolence in the war in Europe. Unwilling to acknowledge any weakening in his faith, Gandhi declared that European nations and, if it came to that, India, should defend liberty not ‘with the force of arms’ but ‘with the force of nonviolence’ (Harijan, 22 June 1940; 78: 343-5).
When a majority in the Working Committee, including President Azad and Patel, disagreed with him, Gandhi asked to be absolved from its decisions. His wish was granted. After four days of deliberations, the members said they had
come to the conclusion that they are unable to go the full length with Gandhiji. But they recognize that he should be free to pursue his great ideal in his own way, and therefore absolve him from responsibility for the programme and activity which the Congress has to pursue… in regard to external aggression and internal disorder (78: 350).
Influenced by Rajagopalachari, Congress leaders seemed willing, for a price, to switch from Gandhi to the Raj, from the charkha to the gun. Glimpses of power and the passage of time were factors with them: Patel was now sixty-five, Rajagopalachari sixty-two, Prasad fifty-six, Azad fifty-two, Nehru fifty-one.
When, at the end of June, Gandhi went to Simla for a previously made appointment with Linlithgow, he told the Viceroy that ‘this was [his] last interview’. Henceforth the Viceroy ‘should send for the president of the Congress if he must have an offer on behalf of the Congress’33 (78:393).
To the Working Committee meeting in Delhi in early July, Gandhi recounted what Linlithgow told him in respect of the new Congress policy:
You want to defend India, you want aeroplanes, battle-ships, tanks, etc. We will give you all these. This will serve our purpose and also yours. This is the golden opportunity. You should come and get equipped. Under pressure we will go forward double speed.34
Dismay. What pleased the Viceroy dismayed Gandhi. Was his nonviolent struggle going to end in India’s militarization, and that under the Empire’s aegis? This strike against his vision, coming from his closest Congress colleagues, felt even worse than the blow Jinnah had delivered. Gandhi told the Working Committee: ‘I cannot do this. This is not for me.’
He also asked his colleagues to see the pressure the Raj was applying to mobilize Indian resources:
This process… was gentle and not much felt till the French capitulation. I cannot conceive my remaining silent or sitting at ease with this coercion going on unhampered.35
He knew that tens of thousands of Indians were recruiting for the war, which offered much-needed employment in a poor country with a large population. Asked about ‘Harijans who voluntarily want to enlist as recruits’, he said that no attempt should be made to dissuade them.36 But recruits were joining England’s war, not India’s.
In Europe Britain’s allies were collapsing—the sun was setting, he said, on the Empire.37 Time was on their side. Was this the moment to appeal to the British?
As for Hitler’s success, Gandhi wrote in Harijan: ‘What will he do with his victory? Can he digest so much power?.. [The Germans] will not be able to hold all the conquered nations in perpetual subjection.’38 To the Working Committee Gandhi also said that Indians would offer nonviolent resistance if Japan, Germany’s eastern ally, were to move across Asia into India.39
C.R. was not persuaded. Said Gandhi: ‘I had not in the past the slightest difficulty in carrying Rajaji with me, his intelligence as well as his heart, but since this office question cropped up, I saw that our thoughts were running in different directions.’40 But he also failed to carry most of the others.
Before long even Nehru agreed with C.R.’s reasoning. Among the prominent leaders, only Ghaffar Khan and Kripalani remained with Gandhi.
A remark he made in the summer of 1940 reveals the disturbance that the war’s trends, the Pakistan demand and his colleagues’ interest in the Empire’s armaments had caused in Gandhi:
I sometimes feel like taking shelter in flight, not to seek cloistered peace, but in the stillness of utter isolation to know myself, to see where I stand, to catch more effectively the faint whispering of the ‘still small voice within’.41
Let AICC ratify. Though disappointed that his words ‘lacked the power of convincing the Sardar and Rajaji’42, Gandhi asked the AICC to endorse the Working Committee’s offer to Britain. Its members, he said, were the Congress’s leaders, as sincere as he was, and possibly wiser. C.R. had shown ‘persistency, courage and skill’ (The Hindu, 9 July 1940), and Vallabhbhai had held ‘fast to his convictions’.43 Despite the knock he had taken, Gandhi was not going to disown his team, divide the Congress or risk its break-up.
Simultaneously, he advised the British, in a Harijan piece, ‘not [to] reject the hand of friendship offered by the Congress’.44
Unreal appeal. In another Harijan article, ‘To Every Briton’, he elaborated his faith in nonviolence in the war in Europe. Claiming that the war was ‘brutalizing man on a scale hitherto unknown’, he proposed nonviolent non-cooperation as an alternative and added:
All distinctions between combatants and noncombatants have been abolished. No one and nothing is to b
e spared. Lying has been reduced to an art. Britain was to defend small nationalities. One by one they have vanished, at least for the time being…
I appeal for cessation of hostilities, not because you are too exhausted to fight, but because war is bad in essence…
You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions. Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds…
This process or method, which I have called non-violent non-cooperation, is not without considerable success in its use in India. Your representatives in India may… tell you that our non-co-operation was not wholly non-violent, that it was born of hatred.
If they give that testimony, I won’t deny it. Had it been wholly non-violent… I make bold to say that you who are India’s masters would have become her pupils and, with much greater skill than we have, perfected this matchless weapon and met the German and Italian friends’ menace with it… (Harijan, 6 July 1940; 78: 386-8)
On Gandhi’s request the Viceroy conveyed this ‘appeal’ to HMG in London. On 10 July Linlithgow wrote to Gandhi:
I have now heard from them that with every appreciation of your motives they do not feel that the policy which you advocate is one which it is possible for them to consider, since in common with the whole Empire they are firmly resolved to prosecute the war to a victorious conclusion (78: 389).
An offshoot of Gandhi’s debate with the Working Committee, the appeal was not a serious initiative. Its writer made an academic case for nonviolence, whereas the Gandhi who conducted India’s nonviolent campaigns had his feet on the ground. And when the British led by Churchill fought back not only with determination but also with weapons, Gandhi acknowledged their valour.
AICC endorses. Subhas Bose and Jayaprakash, both opposed to overtures to the British, were in jail by this time. Before his arrest Subhas had asked for mass defiance and for the formation of a provisional national government. In August a prominent leader of the Congress socialists, Rammanohar Lohia, was jailed. Always on the lookout for younger leaders he could buttress, Gandhi made several positive references to Jayaprakash and Lohia in Harijan.
From prison, Jayaprakash made an unsuccessful appeal to Nehru to oppose C.R.’s line and work for mass disobedience. Gandhi was not willing to go that far, but he acknowledged that Subhas and Jayaprakash were more representative than C.R. of ‘the smouldering discontent’ (Gandhi’s phrase) of the Indian people.45
On 27 July, in Gandhi’s absence but as urged by him, the AICC, meeting in Poona, endorsed the Rajagopalachari proposal. In protest, Ghaffar Khan resigned from the Congress. He did not want to associate himself with any support for a violent war.
Britain’s reply. On 8 August the response to ‘the Poona offer’ came through a Viceregal statement. Provided, it said, the Raj, the Congress, the Muslim League and the princes reached an agreement, some politicians would be included in an expanded Viceroy’s Council in which the Viceroy would retain his veto. At the end of the war, a body to be set up ‘with the least possible delay’ would ‘devise the framework of a new constitution’.
The statement assured Muslims and other minority ‘elements in India’s national life’ that Britain would never allow ‘their coercion into submission’ to a majority government. Indeed, the British would not permit a government ‘whose authority is directly denied by large and powerful elements in India’s national life’ (79: 466-8).
Rather than the Congress, Jinnah and the princes had been placated. A shocked C.R. said he was ‘angry’,46 and Patel remarked that the British government ‘has begun to show itself in its true colours’.47 To Gandhi Patel said, referring to his secession, ‘It shall never happen again in our lifetime.’48
Limited satyagraha. Quickly pressed to resume guiding the Congress, Gandhi revived the idea of disciplined disobedience by selected individuals. Anything larger would ‘embarrass… the British people or the British government when their very existence hung in the balance’,49 could spark off Hindu-Muslim disturbances and perhaps bring the Raj and the Muslim League closer to each other. Anything smaller would ‘kill the Congress’50 by divorcing it from mainstream India, now increasingly restive against tightening British control.
What imperial order would chosen satyagrahis flout? That which curbed free speech, said Gandhi. A resolution that Gandhi drafted for the AICC declared that while the Congress could not ‘withhold their admiration for the bravery and endurance shown by the British nation in the face of danger and peril’, it would insist on ‘the free expression of public opinion’.51 With Nehru’s help he devised a restrained yet unlawful two-sentence slogan:
It is wrong to help the British war effort with men or money. The only worthy effort is to resist all war with non-violent resistance.52
Calling on the Viceroy, Gandhi asked that Indians be given the right to recite the slogan. Linlithgow rejected the plea, and the stage was set for the campaign of individual civil disobedience (ICD).
Between October 1940, when ICD commenced, and the summer of 1941, more than 15,000 Indians courted prison, receiving terms ranging between nine and fifteen months. Recommended in the first instance by provincial Congress committees, ICD candidates were finally chosen or approved by Gandhi personally, mainly on the basis of their support of nonviolence, spinning, caste equality and Hindu-Muslim friendship.
Each resister recited the slogan as he or she walked until arrested by a police officer, who was often informed in advance. Some recited the words because they opposed violence, more because they opposed the Empire. Generally, the first sentence was uttered with greater conviction. No violence occurred, and over Christmas no satyagraha was offered. The most disciplined of the several all-India campaigns that Gandhi had initiated, and dramatic in its restraint, ICD preserved the Congress and the spirits of its members and supporters.
For inaugurating ICD, Gandhi picked Vinoba Bhave, thereby bringing to national and global attention the most gifted individual, perhaps, among his ‘non-political’ associates. From the 1920s, Vinoba had been conducting an ashram of his own near Wardha. Throughout his association with Vinoba, which began in 1916, Gandhi had thought the younger man his superior in self-control and learning.
A scholar of religious texts and of languages, Vinoba had quietly taken part in all previous satyagrahas, spending several hard terms in prison. This time Gandhi wanted him to lead. In Harijan he explained why:
For perfect spinning probably he has no rival in all India. He has abolished every trace of untouchability from his heart. He believes in communal unity with the same passion that I have. In order to know the best mind of Islam he gave one year to the study of the Koran in the original. He therefore learnt Arabic…
He has an army of disciples and workers who would rise to any sacrifice at his bidding. He is responsible for producing a young man53 who has dedicated himself to the service of lepers. Though an utter stranger to medicine this worker has by singular devotion mastered the method of treatment of lepers and is now running several clinics for their care…
This will perhaps be the last civil disobedience struggle which I shall have conducted. Naturally I would want it to be as flawless as it can be…54
On this occasion Gandhi kept himself out, for his arrest could trigger what he was keen to avoid: mass participation and unrest. Also, he wanted to remain available in case the Viceroy wished to negotiate.55 On 21 October Vinoba was arrested. Ordered not to report the arrest in his journals, Gandhi suspended their publication and said:
Let everyone become his own walking newspaper and carry the good news from mouth to mouth… The idea here is of my telling my neighbour what I have authentically heard. This no Government can overtake or suppress. It is the cheapest newspaper yet devised and it defies the wit of Government, however clever it may be.
Let these walking newspapers be sure of the news they give. They s
hould not indulge in any idle gossip. They should make sure of the source of information, and they will find that the public gets all the information that they need without opening their morning newspaper… (Harijan, 3 Nov. 1940; 79: 330)
Jawaharlal was chosen to follow Vinoba but before he could utter the two sentences he was arrested on 31 October, charged with sedition in earlier speeches, and sentenced for four years. This was a severity that Gandhi wanted to protest with a fast but in the end did not. Before the year ended, Azad, Patel, C.R., Prasad, all other nationally known Congress leaders and hundreds more were also in jail.
During their incarceration, Hitler invaded his supposed ally, the Soviet Union (June 1941). In India this meant support hereafter for Britain’s war from the small but not insignificant Communist party and some other leftist groups.
Bose and JP. Earlier, on 27 January 1941, Subhas Bose had dramatically escaped from the house in Calcutta where he was interned, secretly made his way to Afghanistan, and thence to Germany. In October 1941 Jayaprakash Narayan, jailed in Deoli, was caught trying to slip, via his wife visiting him, a sheet that allegedly encouraged followers outside to commit acts of sabotage. The Raj publicized the incident.
Bose’s escape thrilled many in India. Despite conflicts with him, Gandhi too seems to have been impressed. This was Azad’s assessment, apparently based on remarks that Gandhi later made to Azad. 56 Though Azad did not quote Gandhi, we know what Gandhi had said earlier, shortly after Subhas’s arrest the previous summer. Giving an account of a conversation in June 1940 with Subhas, who espoused mass disobedience, Gandhi wrote in Harijan (13 July 1940):
He told me in the friendliest manner that he would do what the Working Committee had failed to do… I told him that, if at the end of his plan there was Swaraj during my lifetime, mine would be the first telegram of congratulation he would receive… But I warned him his way was wrong…
Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People Page 61