But somehow in spite of my being all alone, in my thoughts, I am experiencing an ineffable inner joy and freshness of mind. I feel as if God himself was lighting my path before me. And it is perhaps the reason why I am able to fight on single-handed.
People now ask me to retire to Kashi or go to the Himalayas. I laugh and tell them that the Himalayas of my penance are where there is misery to be alleviated, oppression to be relieved.
There can be no rest for me so long as there is a single person in India whether man or woman, young or old, lacking the necessaries of life, by which I mean a sense of security, a life style worthy of human beings, i.e., clothing, education, food and shelter of a decent standard…
But maybe all of them are right and I alone am floundering in darkness (95: 182-3).
The last sentence was a dig at colleagues, not a confession of confusion.
Last-minute fight? ‘I am after all a gambler,’ he said to himself on 4 June (95: 206). Prepared not to ‘worry about anarchy’, he looked for likely allies and any groundswell of support for a possible fight against the 3 June plan. But no promising signs appeared. Some socialists were indeed willing to stand up, as were Hindu nationalists like Purshottamdas Tandon in the UP, Hindu politicians in Sindh, and a few Muslim leaders in north India who for years had opposed the League.
These elements did not add up to a strong force. Moreover, they had little in common with one another, and some of them differed sharply from Gandhi. ‘How can love and enmity go together?’ he asked on 9 June (95: 245). Gandhi thought of the inhabitants of the Pakistan-to-be as part of ‘his’ people and did not want to lose them. The Hindu nationalists’ opposition, on the other hand, was to the loss of territory, not to the exit of Muslim inhabitants.
A group of leading politicians in Bengal including Suhrawardy and Sarat Bose sought a united and independent Bengal. Nehru, Patel and the Working Committee rejected the idea, as did many in the Bengal Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha’s Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, but Gandhi was willing to explore it.
In May he visited Bengal, held long discussions with Suhrawardy and his colleagues, and made a remarkable offer in writing to the premier:
13 May: I recognize the seriousness of the position in Bengal in the matter of the partition. If you are absolutely sincere in your professions and would disabuse me of all the suspicion against you and if you would retain Bengal for the Bengalis—Hindus or Muslims… I am quite willing to act as your honorary private secretary and live under your roof till Hindus and Muslims begin to live as [the] brothers that they are.
Terming it a ‘mad offer’, Suhrawardy ignored it. Thereafter Gandhi viewed the project of an independent Bengal with caution. Remembering the League’s nomination of Mandal into the interim government, Gandhi also seemed to fear a possible deal between the Muslim League and some of the province’s Dalit leaders that might take all of Bengal into Pakistan. Nursing an opposite fear, Jinnah thought that a united Bengal might join India. With no support from the Congress, Gandhi or Jinnah, and with only modest backing from within Bengal, the project petered out.
Many Hindu critics attacked Gandhi for not fasting to death against partition, not because they expected such a fast to prevent Pakistan, but because seven years earlier (in September 1940) Gandhi had said, ‘Cut me to pieces first and then divide India.’ Since Pakistan was to appear, they wished Gandhi to disappear. At his 9 June prayer meeting Gandhi addressed the sentiment:
Lately I have been receiving a large number of letters attacking me. A friend points out how ineffective were my words when I said that vivisection of the country would be the vivisection of my own body… When I said that the country should not be divided, I was confident that I had the support of the masses. But when the popular view is contrary to mine, should I force my own view on the people?.. I must step aside and stay back (95: 245).
In 1947, the League’s demand for a Muslim homeland was joined by demands for a non-Muslim space by the Hindus and Sikhs of the Punjab and by many of Bengal’s Hindus. Gandhi was unwilling to oppose the widespread preference for separation with a fast unto death.
AICC endorses. Aware that Gandhi’s bond with India’s masses was strong enough even if nowhere near its earlier levels, the Congress leadership wanted Gandhi’s acquiescence to be formally and publicly declared. Nehru and president Kripalani therefore urged him to attend the 14-15 June AICC meeting called to ratify the Working Committee’s acceptance of the 3 June plan. At this meeting Gandhi asked the Committee’s critics whether they had the strength to defy the leaders:
No one could be as much hurt by the division of the country as I am. And I don’t think that anyone can be as unhappy today as I am…
[I]f you feel that the Working Committee is in the wrong you should remove it, you should revolt and assume all power. You have a perfect right to do so, if you feel that you have the strength. But I do not find that strength in us today. If you had it I would also be with you and if I felt strong enough myself I would, alone, take up the flag of revolt. But today I do not see the conditions for doing so…
Would Gandhi have revised his stance of non-defiance if at this point delegates had cried, ‘We are ready to revolt’, or ‘Give us a lead, and we will fight’? There was no such cry, nor did Gandhi expect it. He added:
When now the responsibility of Government has devolved on us we have gladly accepted it and we have detailed some of our best workers for the job. There they have to grapple with some very intricate problems. They have to attend to the affairs of the millions of our countrymen.
I criticize them, of course, but afterwards what? Shall I assume the burdens that they are carrying? Shall I become a Nehru or a Sardar or a Rajendra Prasad?..
He brought up the Ramayana story as a reminder that good could come out of evil, but he was, in addition, suggesting that he too had been ‘exiled’—and that from his ‘exile’ he would fight the Ravana of ill will and cruelty:
[Rama’s] father went mad and his mother became foolish and Rama was exiled. The people of Ayodhya were grieved but it all led to something glorious coming out at the end… It was [not the ten-headed Ravana] but…the Ravana that was adharma… that Rama killed during his exile and saved dharma. This is what we have to do today…
I am not the one to be upset by defeat. From my childhood up I have spent my life fighting and my struggle has been to extract good from evil… We should draw out gold and diamonds even from mud.
He expressed awareness that for all their words against Pakistan some Hindu nationalists were secretly happy that large Muslim populations were being detached from India:
If, therefore, the Hindus present at this meeting claim that India is their country and in it Hindus will have a superior status, then it will mean that the Congress has not made a mistake and that the Working Committee has only done what you secretly wanted…
In this speech of less than ten minutes, more forward-looking than the utterances of younger colleagues, the old man underlined three challenges that a free if truncated India would immediately face: Hindu-Muslim relations, the caste and ethnic divide and the question of the princely states:
In the three-quarters of the country that has fallen to our share Hinduism is going to be tested. If you show the generosity of true Hinduism, you will pass in the eyes of the world. If not you will have proved Mr. Jinnah’s thesis that Muslims and Hindus are two separate nations…
And what about the ‘untouchables’?.. If you say that ‘untouchables’ are nothing, the Adivasis are nothing, then you are not going to survive yourselves. But if you do away with the distinction of savarna and avarna, if you treat the Shudras, the ‘untouchables’ and the Adivasis as equals then something good will have come out of a bad thing…
[T]hat some States should [want to] secede from India… is a very serious thing… [The princes] must recognize the paramountcy of the people as they recognized the paramountcy of the British Government… (95: 286-7)
Apart from feel
ing that Nehru, Patel and company comprised ‘our best workers’, there was also, of course, a personal bond, built during three decades of shared exertions, imprisonments, joys and sorrows. ‘I have to do many things out of the love that binds me to Jawahar and Sardar,’ he would say on 22 July. ‘They have tied me up with the chains of their love’ (96: 106). Thanks to his call, these two and others had made large sacrifices. To foreign visitors calling on him he would say (also on 22 July):
Jawahar and his colleagues appear old. The struggles of satyagraha and frequent incarcerations have reduced their expectation of life by twenty to twenty-five years (96: 111).
Aware that desire for power had influenced their acceptance of Partition, he yet refused to obstruct his ‘sons’ while they collected crowns or medals for their faithful toil of three decades, and he knew that the trophies were thorny.
At the AICC meeting, Nehru, Patel, Azad, Pant and president Kripalani defended their acceptance of the 3 June plan. Resisting the temptation to point out that he had proposed an identical plan in 1942, C.R. remained silent.
Tandon opposed the resolution endorsing the Working Committee decision, as did Choithram Gidwani of Sindh, whose remark on the ‘ultimate sacrifice’ of Hindus in Muslim-majority areas brought many to tears.40 Maulana Hifzur Rahman and Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew spoke of a surrender to communalism.
The resolution was carried by 157 votes to twenty-seven, with thirty-two remaining neutral. Yet a delegate, N.V. Gadgil, noted, ‘It was the only resolution other than a condolence resolution approved in total silence during my forty years in Congress.’41
NEW TASKS
How he should tackle ‘the very big job’ before him, or where he should base himself, was not quite clear. While not always relishing his advice, Nehru and Patel urged him to remain in Delhi. Reluctant to defy their wishes, Gandhi was nonetheless wary of making Delhi his home.
He gave many of the summer’s weeks to Bihar and Calcutta. On 15 May, in Patna, he wore a surgical mask and watched a surgery on Manu for appendicitis—twenty-three years earlier, a similar surgery had been performed on him. Manu quickly regained strength and resumed taking down letters that Gandhi dictated in Hindi or Gujarati, as well as his public utterances.
With Bose returning to Calcutta from Bihar and Pyarelal remaining in Noakhali for most of the time, her secretarial role was crucial. Dev Prakash Nayar (Pyarelal’s cousin) assisted with Gandhi’s English letters. For part of this time Sushila too was on Gandhi’s personal staff, as was, from July, Abha, and, joining a little later, Shivbalak Bisen, sent by Kaka Kalelkar.
Earlier, in the middle of March, two men arrived in Patna to speak to Gandhi on behalf of all colleagues troubled by his yagna, which had been suspended at the end of February: Kedar Nath Kulkarni, or Nathji, as he was known, who was Mashruwala’s guru, and Swami Anand, one of Gandhi’s earliest and closest associates in Sabarmati. Despite long talks with Kulkarni and Anand, Gandhi did not concede any error. He said to them:
I am not so lost as you seem to think. You do not seem to regard a lapse in respect of truth, nonviolence, non-stealing etc. to be so serious a matter. But a fancied breach in respect of brahmacharya… upsets you completely. I regard this conception of brahmacharya as narrow, hidebound and retrograde. To me truth, ahimsa and brahmacharya are all ideals of equal importance (94: 121).
Disappointed and saddened, the two returned whence they came. On 29 April Gandhi said to Manu:
I do feel that I have come nearer to God and Truth. It has cost me quite a few of my old friends but I do not regret it. To me it is a sign of my having come nearer to God. That is why I can write and speak frankly to everyone. I have successfully practised the eleven vows undertaken by me. This is the culmination of my striving for the last sixty years. You have become an instrument in this (94:412).
Translatable as ‘the way of greatness’, brahmacharya was, apart from anything else, Gandhi’s bid to recover the innocence of childhood and a renunciation of sexuality in line with Christ’s call for eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. It was also seen as a response to, and in Gandhi’s hopes a weapon against, the unmerited suffering he saw around him.42 Noting that Gandhi’s renunciations were ‘unsettling’ but also ‘effective’, a European scholar, J. C. Heesterman, has written of Gandhi as ‘the archetypal dissenter [who] disturbs the settled order… Yet it is precisely the disturbing quality that is the outward sign of the ultimate value he stands for.’43
Later in the summer—in June or July, it would seem—Gandhi resumed the practice he had suspended, with Manu alone as his partner.44
On 8 June Manu jotted down Gandhi’s remarks about Kasturba, made to an unidentified ‘relative visiting from South Africa’, possibly Sita, Manilal’s daughter:
Ba was in no way weaker than I; in fact she was stronger. If I had not had her cooperation, I would have been sunk. It was that illiterate woman who helped me to observe all my vows with the utmost strictness and kept me ever vigilant. Similarly in politics also she displayed great courage and took part in all the campaigns…
She was a devout Vaishnavi, used to worship the tulsi, religiously observed sacred days and continued to wear the necklace of holy beads right up to her death. I have given that necklace to [Lakshmi]. But she loved [this] Harijan girl as much as she loved Manu or Devadas’s Tara.
She was a living image of the virtues of a Vaishnava described by Narasinha Mehta in his bhajan. It is because of her that I am today what I am… In the fast of 1943… I was nearly at death’s door, but she never cried or lost courage but on the contrary kept up other people’s courage and prayed to God. I can see her face vividly even today (95: 233-4).
Dalit head of state. On the Dalit question Gandhi proposed a strong symbolic move: appointing a Dalit woman or man as free India’s first President. His objective was to pre-empt a polarization over caste as destructive as the polarization over religion.
The proposal was sparked off by the death, at the end of May, of Chakrayya, a talented young Andhra Dalit who had been with the Sevagram ashram from its inception. Gandhi had nursed high hopes for Chakrayya. ‘I feel like crying over his death,’ he said, ‘but I cannot cry. For whom should I cry and for whom should I refrain from crying?’ (95:179) On 2 June he said at his prayer meeting:
[T]he time is fast approaching when India will have to elect the first President of the Republic. I would have proposed the name of Chakrayya, had he been alive (95: 193).
On 6 June he repeated the thought in a conversation with Rajendra Prasad, suggesting at the same time that some prominent leaders should stay out of the government:
If all the leaders join the Cabinet, it will be very difficult to maintain contact with the people at large…That is why I suggested even in my prayer speech that a Harijan like Chakrayya or a Harijan girl should be made the nation’s first President and Jawaharlal should become the Prime Minister… [S]imilar arrangements [can be] made in the provinces too… (95: 217)
Three weeks later he returned to the idea:
27 June: [I]f I have my way the President of the Indian Republic will be a chaste and brave Bhangi girl. If an English girl of seventeen could become the British Queen and later even Empress of India, there is no reason why a Bhangi girl of robust love of her people and unimpeachable integrity of character should not become the first President of the Indian Republic…
By electing a Harijan girl to that office we shall… show to the world that in India there is no one high and no one low… She should be chaste as Sita and her eyes should radiate light… We shall all salute her and set a new example before the world. After all she does not have to concern herself with running the Government of India. She will have a cabinet of ministers and she will act on its advice. She will merely have to sign papers.
If such a girl of my dreams becomes President, I shall be her servant and I shall not expect from the Government even my upkeep. I shall make Jawaharlal, Sardar Patel and Rajendra Babu her ministers and therefore her s
ervants (95: 417-18).
In identifying chastity as a key quality and selecting from different Dalit groups the ‘Bhangi’ or ‘cleaning’ jati, Gandhi revealed long-held predispositions, and we should mark that once again (as over Suhrawardy) Gandhi expresses willingness to be a servant.
His radical suggestion of a Dalit head of state was not considered because Nehru, Patel and company wished to retain Mountbatten as Governor-General. (The Congress had decided, with Gandhi’s agreement, that after independence India would remain in the British Commonwealth, and Jinnah had decided similarly for Pakistan.)
Nehru and Patel thought that the princely states would be more likely to opt for India if the King’s cousin continued as Governor-General. Gandhi agreed on Mountbatten staying on—‘because we have to negotiate with the Princes’—but added that ‘when democratic rule is firmly established then it will be possible’ to have an ‘untouchable’ head of state (96: 174).
His plea that some of the best-known leaders should remain out of the Cabinet was also turned down, but Nehru and Patel accepted an earlier suggestion from Gandhi regarding Ambedkar, who had been a member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council in the mid-1940s.45
One of Ambedkar’s biographers, C.B. Khairmode, refers to a conversation in December 1946 between Ambedkar and Muriel Lester, Gandhi’s friend and his hostess during the Round Table Conference in London, when Gandhi and Ambedkar had clashed sharply. Lester evidently informed Ambedkar that ‘Gandhi was keen that the Congress should include Ambedkar in the central Cabinet and use his learning and leadership…’
According to Khairmode, Ambedkar gave an encouraging response, which Lester conveyed to Gandhi, who then asked Nehru and Patel to invite Ambedkar to join free India’s first cabinet.46 Nehru and Patel extended the invitation at the end of July 1947. Accepting it, Ambedkar became India’s law minister, chaired the committee that drafted the Constitution, and piloted the Constitution Bill into law. The invitation and acceptance were gestures of wisdom and magnanimity.
Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People Page 81