Welcoming a resolve at Lahore to recover women abducted in the two Punjabs, Gandhi said (26 Dec.):
The number could be in hundreds or even thousands… Muslims have abducted Hindu and Sikh girls… I have [also] received a long list of [Muslim] girls abducted from Patiala. Some of them come from very well-to-do Muslim families. When they are recovered it will not be difficult for them to be returned to their parents. As regards Hindu girls it is still doubtful whether they will be accepted by their families.
This is very bad… Even if the girl has been forced into marriage by a Muslim, even if she has been violated, I would still take her back with respect… If my daughter has been violated by a rascal and made pregnant, must I cast her and her child away?.. (98: 117-8)
Looking from September for a ripe moment to visit Pakistan, he cultivated different channels. These included the shuttling Suhrawardy, who was in touch with Jinnah; Parsi friends with Karachi links such as Bombay’s Jehangir Patel and Poona’s Dinshaw Mehta; and Lahore’s Mian Iftikharuddin and his wife Ismat. Until 1946, when he joined the League, Iftikharuddin had been in the Congress and headed its Punjab unit for a term. Learning that Iftikharuddin’s wife Ismat had been ill, Gandhi wrote to her:
9 Dec.: I was sorry that you were so ill and glad to hear that you were better. You should get quite well quickly, so as to do the very necessary work of reclaiming the poor abducted women in both the parts of the Punjab. Tell Iftikhar it was naughty of him to cease to write to me after his transfer of loyalty (98: 16).
Yet reports of continuing attacks on Pakistan’s minorities made him ask (30 Dec.) whether the new country had ‘become Islamistan where no non-Muslim may live or where he can only live as a slave’ (98: 141).
Sending letters to ‘sisters’ and ‘daughters’ remained part of his life. To Lilavati Asar, who had spoken of a demanding professor supervising her medical studies, he wrote (21 Dec.):
You should not be put out by his severity. You should welcome it and benefit from it… If a doctor makes a mistake, the patient has to pay for it—at times with his life. One should therefore look for a teacher who does not condone mistakes… Ponder and digest what you read. The student who is given to cramming is considered a fool of the first water (98: 90).
When Sharda Chokhawala, daughter of Chimanlal Shah (manager of the Sevagram ashram), wrote that she was seriously ill and might die, Gandhi wrote back (23 Dec.): ‘But how can you die before I do? The very thought is unbearable to me’ (98: 101). He wrote to Sharda again on 30 December, 31 December and 12 January.
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In the middle of December Pyarelal rejoined him. Though he had valued Pyarelal’s work in Noakhali, Gandhi was glad to have his company again.
‘I am taking Pyarelal home for dinner,’ Devadas said to Gandhi one evening. ‘Do you ever think of inviting me?’ answered Gandhi with a great laugh that sizzled with the energy of sixty years of self-denial.82 It was true that Devadas had never asked the father over to his second-floor apartment on Connaught Circus—he had assumed that Gandhi would not have the time or the inclination. On his visits to Delhi Gandhi had put up at the sweepers’ colony or at Birla House, not at Devadas’s. In fact the only son with whom Gandhi ever stayed was Harilal, who had hosted his father in Calcutta in 1920.
As a new year commenced, Gandhi recognized his restiveness. His most earnest—and most careful—toil had not made much of a difference. When a Thai visitor complimented him on independence, Gandhi remarked (1 Jan.): ‘Today not everybody can move about freely in the capital. Indian fears his brother Indian. Is this independence?’83
He longed to visit Pakistan, where faithful friends like Ghaffar Khan and his older brother Dr Khan Sahib faced persecution, and Hindus and Sikhs lived in fear. On 6 January 120 Sikhs were killed in Karachi in a gurdwara where they had sought shelter. Yet could he go and counsel Pakistanis when Delhi’s Muslims felt threatened?
Another disturbance was caused by a Cabinet decision to withhold the transfer of Pakistan’s share (Rs 55 crore) of the ‘sterling balance’ that undivided India held at independence. The conflict in Kashmir was cited as the reason: Patel said (3 or 4 January) that India could not give money to Pakistan ‘for making bullets to be shot at us’.84 But Gandhi was not convinced that a violent dispute entitled India to keep Pakistan’s money.
On 11 January he was shaken afresh when a group of Delhi’s ‘nationalist’ Muslims asked him to arrange their ‘passage to England’ as they felt unsafe in India but were opposed to Pakistan and did not wish to go there.85
That Swaraj felt like a curse was the message also of a letter arriving at this time from Konda Venkatappayya of the Telugu country, a veteran freedom fighter whom Gandhi called an ‘aged friend’. Saying that he was ‘old, decrepit, with a broken leg, slowly limping on crutches within the walls of my house’, Venkatappayya referred to the moral degradation of Congress legislators who made money by protecting criminals. His last sentence was: ‘The people have begun to say that the British government was much better.’ Gandhi found the letter ‘too shocking for words’ (98: 213-21).
He had to do, or give, more. But what, and how? On the morning of 12 January he found complete peace. Every unease, sense of shame, and feeling of inadequacy left Gandhi as the ‘conclusion flashed upon’ him that he must fast and not resume eating until and unless firm steps were taken.
That afternoon, while ‘sitting out on the sun-drenched spacious Birla House lawn’,86 Gandhi wrote out a statement announcing and explaining the fast. Sushila translated it into Hindustani and read it out at the 5 p.m. prayer-meeting: Gandhi could not speak himself as it was Monday, his ‘silent’ day.
Having made the strategic decision to fast, Gandhi also gave thought to his tactics. In 1932, after resolving to fast against separate electorates for Dalits, he had told his jail companions, Patel and Desai, that he wanted the news to ‘come upon everybody suddenly’, that he wanted ‘to give a shock’. It was the same this time. Nehru and Patel separately called on him on 12 January, but Gandhi gave no inkling of his plan to either. Like the rest of India, they received a shock that night from Gandhi’s statement:
12 Jan. 1948: Though the voice within has been beckoning for a long time, I have been shutting my ears to it lest it might be the voice of Satan… I never like to feel resourceless; a satyagrahi never should. Fasting is his last resort in the place of the sword… I ask you all to bless the effort and to pray for me and with me.
The fast begins from the first meal tomorrow (Tuesday 13 January). The period is indefinite and I may drink water with or without salts and sour limes. It will end when and if I am satisfied that there is a reunion of hearts of all communities brought about without any outside pressure, but from an awakened sense of duty.
The reward will be the regaining of India’s dwindling prestige… I flatter myself with the belief that the loss of her soul by India will mean the loss of the hope of the aching, storm-tossed and hungry world…
If the whole of India responds or at least Delhi does, the fast might be soon ended. But whether it ends soon or late or never, let there be no softness in dealing with what may be termed as a crisis.
Death for me would be a glorious deliverance rather than that I should be a helpless witness of the destruction of India, Hinduism, Sikhism and Islam. That destruction is certain if Pakistan does not ensure equality of status and security of life and property for all professing the various faiths of the world and if India copies her. Only then Islam dies in the two Indias, not in the world. But Hinduism and Sikhism have no world outside India…
I would beg of all friends not to rush to Birla House nor try to dissuade me or be anxious for me. I am in God’s hands. Rather they should turn the searchlight inwards… (98: 218-20)
In another tactical move, Gandhi went to Mountbatten immediately after the prayer-meeting and asked for the Governor-General’s support for his step. Accepting Gandhi’s decision, Mountbatten said that if things in India were rect
ified as a result of the fast, improvement in Pakistan would inevitably follow. He added that he agreed with Gandhi’s view on the 55 crore. 87
Writing to his father late at night on 12 January, Devadas pleaded against the fast:
You have surrendered to impatience…Your patient labour has saved thousands of lives… By your death you will not be able to achieve what you can by living. I would therefore beseech you to pay heed to my entreaty and give up your decision to fast.88
Admitting that the son’s final sentence had touched him, Gandhi however asked Devadas to join in the prayer that ‘the temptation to live may not lead me into a hasty or premature termination of the fast’ (98: 231-2). Others also sought to dissuade Gandhi. One who did not was C.R., who said in Calcutta:
I have wrangled with Gandhiji on several occasions in the past. But this time I confess I am not inclined to wrangle. The only sane man today is Gandhiji.89
Also expressing support, Arthur Moore, former editor of The Statesman, started a fast of his own on the 13th.. Informing Gandhi of his gesture, the Briton wrote: ‘You did much in Calcutta. But far more is needed here; you are the only hope.’90
A ‘very much upset’91 Vallabhbhai repeated (13 Jan.) his offer to resign and thought that his departure might end the fast, but by now Gandhi had returned to the view that Patel and Nehru had to stay together. However, Gandhi raised the question of the Rs 55 crore with Patel. On the afternoon of 14 January the Cabinet met and decided to release the money, but not before Patel broke down and wept.
Gandhi likened this revocation by the Indian Cabinet to the change he had secured in 1932, in prison, from HMG (98: 246). Referring again to Delhi’s significance, he also recalled a boyhood dream:
14 Jan.: Delhi is the capital of India… It is this city which was Indraprastha, which was Hastinapur… It is the heart of India… All Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Parsis, Christians and Jews who people this country from Kanyakumari to Kashmir and from Karachi to Dibrugarh in Assam… have an equal right to it… Therefore, anyone who seeks to drive out the Muslims is Delhi’s enemy number one and therefore India’s enemy number one…
When I was young I never even read the newspapers. I could read English with difficulty and my Gujarati was not satisfactory. I have had the dream ever since then that if the Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis, Christians and Muslims could live in amity not only in Rajkot but in the whole of India, they would all have a very happy life. If that dream could be realized even now when I am an old man on the verge of death, my heart would dance. Children would then frolic in joy… (98: 229-235)
At this juncture, while our fasting subject of seventy-eight years hopes for a melting of the fears and hates around him, we may reflect on his connection to those fears and hates. Since Gandhi more than any others had led the Indian people over the preceding thirty years, the historian must ask whether or not his impulses and strategies contributed to the wounds of 1946-8.
The criticism that Gandhi put Muslims off by frequently invoking a Hindu vocabulary (Rama, God, Ahimsa) and Hindu-sounding phrases (satyagraha, Ram Rajya) is balanced, and perhaps cancelled, by another charge that he was not Hindu enough, that he appeased Muslims. There is also the more serious complaint that he injured India’s climate by bringing religion into politics.
A striking criticism of Gandhi’s use of religious metaphors comes from Arundhati Roy, who says that Gandhi ‘rubbed the magic lamp and invited Ram and Rahim to partake of human politics and India’s war of independence against the British’. The result, according to Roy, was not only ‘a sophisticated, magnificent, imaginative struggle’ that won freedom, but also ‘the carnage of Partition’. In ‘the hands of lesser statesmen,’ she adds, ‘it has won us the Hindu Nuclear Bomb’.92
We know, however, that the India that Gandhi entered in 1915, and soon thereafter led, was hardly indifferent over religion. Ram and Rahim were not Gandhi’s gifts to India. Occurring before he was born, the chilling events of 1857 had much to do with both Hinduism and Islam, and also with Christianity. About thirty years later, Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s charge that reforms sought by the Indian National Congress (created in 1885) would benefit Hindus and harm Muslims showed that religion and politics were already intertwined.
By the end of the nineteenth century, at least three crucial provinces, the Punjab, Bengal and Bombay, were sharply communal. We have touched already on the Punjab’s history. In Maharashtra, Muslims felt frightened in the 1890s when Tilak mobilized Hindus around religious festivals. In 1905, when Bengal was partitioned into Muslim-majority and Hindu-majority portions, and again in 1911, when this division was annulled, politics in that province bore a fiercely religious face. In between, in 1909, the Muslim League (founded in 1906) had obtained the promise of a separate electorate for Muslims in any elections the Raj might conduct.
Between a politics that pretended that religion was absent from India and a politics that squarely faced religion’s hold, Gandhi chose the latter, and tried to remind all concerned that true Hinduism taught goodwill, and that true Islam, Sikhism and Christianity did the same. Our survey suggests that he made the right choice, and also that without him intolerance would have been even stronger in both Hindu India and Muslim India.
Nobody could banish religion from India’s polity, let alone from Indian society, but thanks to Gandhi’s effort religion was invested—or reinvested—with the task of spreading goodwill between Hindus and Muslims, even though other hands used it to foment hate, and would so use it in the future. India’s tragedy in 1946-48 was not that Gandhi had brought religion into politics; it was that despite every effort he failed to overcome the hate and fear that many an Indian nursed and spread at the time.
If not to blame for the religious tensions of 1946-8, did he not pave the way for violence through his disobedience campaigns? Wasn’t lawlessness the other side of his satyagraha coin? Yet the choice for Gandhi’s India was not simply between a ‘constitutional’ path and disobedience. A third route was on offer: insurrection.
If the first path was unpromising at best, the third tempted many Indians. Yet it was capable of inviting devastation, as it had done in 1857. By providing nonviolent alternatives, Gandhi may have prevented an unknown number of disastrous eruptions, even if incidents of violence occurred while he was at the helm, including a few linked directly to his campaigns.
More to the point, we saw no evidence that a purely ‘lawful’ struggle for independence would have removed the fear of a Hindu majority on which the Muslim League built its successful campaign for Partition. After all Sayyid Ahmad Khan opposed a ‘constitutionalist’ Congress three decades before Gandhian satyagraha showed its face.
The carnage of 1947 was produced not by Ram or Rahim or satyagraha but by a failure of trust between Hindus and Muslims, or, more specifically, between the Congress and the League. Since there was no Congress-League understanding that might have prevented Partition, or made it orderly and peaceful, Gandhi, the Congress’s undisputed leader between 1919 and 1945, has to take some responsibility.
We have seen that the British did not help him, and at times his close colleagues let him down. Over the Jinnah idea, as we saw, his colleagues and the British worked together against him.
A bitter and in fact impossible dilemma faced Gandhi. His heart, and his people, wanted to oust the British, but only this enemy could prevent Partition. You wanted someone you were ousting to hand you all the keys. The one being ousted naturally preferred to give some of the keys to your rival (Jinnah), and to prevent any deal between you and the rival.
Though he tried his best with Jinnah, with the British and with his colleagues, Gandhi could not square the circle, or straighten out the triangle. It was a failure all would regret in the end—Hindus, Muslims and the British.
At least for the short term, there was an incurable contradiction in Gandhi’s great goals. As long as Indians harboured rage at the British, Swaraj and nonviolence were bound to clash. As long as Hindus and Muslims distrusted one an
other, Swaraj and Indian unity would clash.
The pertinent question is about Gandhi’s success in managing the contradictions, and in setting the stage for their eventual resolution. We have to conclude that this success was remarkable.
Repudiating stories that his fast was aimed at Patel, Gandhi said (15 January) that Vallabhbhai’s critics were wrong to isolate him, ‘a lifelong and faithful comrade’, from ‘Pandit Nehru and me, whom they gratuitously raise to the sky’. Added Gandhi: ‘The Sardar has a bluntness of speech which sometimes unintentionally hurts, though his heart is expansive enough to accommodate all’ (98: 237). Earlier, on 18 September, Gandhi had told Delhi’s Muslims that whatever his biases Patel did not ‘let his suspicion colour his actions’ (96: 385).
For all his grievance about the fast and the reversal of the 55-crore decision, Patel said on 15 January: ‘Let it not be said that we did not deserve the leadership of the greatest man in the world.’ The next day, in a public talk in Bombay, Patel remarked, ‘We take a short-range view while he takes a long-range one.’ 93
Asked what he wanted Delhi to do, Gandhi gave precise answers. Muslims should be allowed to hold their annual fair at the mausoleum of Khwaja Qutbuddin. Mosques converted into temples and gurdwaras should be returned. Muslims should be ensured safety in their homes and on trains. The economic boycott imposed against them should be lifted.
Hosting hundreds of thousands of refugees who carried bitter memories, Delhi was tougher than Calcutta, yet here too a tide of concern about the fasting Gandhi lifted people beyond their usual selves. The Sikh ruler of Patiala, which had seen large-scale attacks on Muslims, asked Delhi’s Sikhs to help end Gandhi’s fast. Some of the city’s Hindus and Sikhs invited a batch of Muslims who had left for Karachi to return to Delhi. Prasad, the Congress president, and Azad, India’s leading Muslim politician, strove to mobilize Delhi’s citizens, officials and organizations to meet Gandhi’s terms.
Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People Page 87