Pyarelal has perfectly described the situation: 'The scene to which Gandhi was coming was thus chaotic and full of violence. He had to lead people to introspection and self examination; to turn hardened hearts to genuine repentance; to steady friends and win over foes even against what they mistook for their self-interest; to bring love where hatred and cunning ruled; and finally, to call a mighty organisation that had forgotten itself, back to the path of duty, and thereby steady the foundations of democracy shaking at its very inception. His nonviolence was called to the supreme test. Bihar became another outpost in his "do or die" mission'.
Gandhi arrived in Bihar on 5 March 1947. He was asked to detrain at Fatwa, a railway station eighteen miles from Patna, in order to avoid the large crowds and the hordes of press that had arrived. Gandhi immediately beckoned Dr. Syed Mahmud and Prof. Abdul Bari, the Muslim president of the provincial Congress committee, both of them old colleagues and staunch nationalists. 'So, you are still alive,' he remarked with joyless humour. Dr. Mahmud's home was on the banks of the Ganga. During the following weeks, the Ganga played an integral and important role in Gandhi's life. It was his constant companion when he sat down by its bank after the evening prayer to write out his daily post-prayer address or received people for interviews during his evening walks.
Dr. Rajendra Prasad, the premier of Bihar, along with his Cabinet colleagues and members of the provincial Congress committee met him at Dr. Mahmud's residence. Gandhi sat surrounded by his old and trusted lieutenants, but his head was bowed with grief and anxiety. The meeting that day was curtailed as Gandhi was extremely fatigued and needed to rest.
The next morning two workers, whom Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan had left behind in Patna, came to meet him. Their report of the situation in the interiors deeply affected Gandhi. The vice-chancellor of Patna University, C.P.N. Sinha, came to meet him next and expressed great relief at his presence in Bihar. Gandhi informed him that he had requested Khan to join them. Sinha asked Gandhi what Khan had thought of the work being done there. Gandhi replied that the ministry was happy with everything, but it was the people, rather than the officers, who would be capable of dealing with the problems. Gandhi said that Khan had further suggested that there be a non-political committee for the purpose and he himself thought it was a good idea. Dr. Rajendra Prasad joined them next. In his earlier meeting with Gandhi he had mentioned that the Muslim League with its National Guards had been preparing for the fight. Arms had been imported into the province from Aligarh even after the outbreak of disturbances. To Gandhi, these statements sounded like a justification of the Hindu violence and was incompatible with genuine repentance. Rajendra Babu went on to say that an economic boycott had been called by the Hindu Mahasabha and RSS combine, and was being imposed in many areas. To tear the two communities apart when their lives were so closely interlinked was totally unacceptable to him.
Later Gandhi visited two senior ailing leaders of the Muslim League. One was Nawab Ismail, a League member of the provincial assembly and former president of the Bihar provincial Muslim League, and the second was Syed Abdul Aziz, eminent Muslim Leaguer, champion of the Muslims and a vociferous critic of Gandhi. The latter had bitterly criticised Gandhi for his delayed arrival in Bihar. However, Gandhi was certain he had to meet them to get a complete perspective of the situation. Late in the afternoon he had a long meeting with the Bihar ministers. He suggested that a commission of inquiry be appointed. 'If we are not quick about the matter, it will lose its effect; we shall be held to have admitted the League's case.' Chief Minister Srikrishna Sinha expressed the fear that the League would make political capital out of it. Gandhi admitted that it was a possibility, but it was a chance they had to take.
Meanwhile, many Congressmen were annoyed with Dr. Mahmud for having called Gandhi to Bihar without consulting them. Gandhi tried to clear this misunderstanding by saying that, 'Dr. Mahmud's letter which has brought me to Bihar was in reply to my peremptory inquiries; he has not acted disloyally towards you.'
Rajendra Babu again met Gandhi on the morning of 5 March 1947 and Gandhi admitted that he was not yet ready with a plan. He mentioned that he was willing to allow exclusive Muslim settlements within the Indian Union, but he refused either to arm them or accede to the demand for Muslim police and military.
On the 7th, Gandhi received many delegations who wished to report on the Bihar situation. The first to do so were representatives of the Muslim Students' Federation, a student's group aligned to the Muslim League.
They told him the only way Muslims could continue to live in Bihar was by either dividing the state or resettling the Muslim refugees in contiguous settlements. Gandhi refused both the suggestions, saying that he wanted to bridge the gap between the two communities and not widen it. The next to meet him was a delegation from the Jamiat-ul-Ulema, a group representing Muslim religious leaders. Their complaint was that the Muslims were being threatened and intimidated. The Majlis-i-Ahrar, council of elders, reiterated their complaint. A Muslim landowner complained that the crops of Muslim agriculturists were being harvested and taken away by Hindus. Jayprakash Narayan's testimony was extremely critical of the government and the Congress party. An even worse indictment of the Bihar government and the Congress came from the Momin community. They were traditional Congress supporters, yet they too alleged that many senior Congressmen were actively involved in the rioting incidents.
On 8 March, Mohammad Yunus came to meet Gandhi. He had been chief minister in the stop-gap ministry of Bihar before the Congress finally agreed to accept office in 1937. He said that those who had promoted or participated in the riots could be no friends of the Congress, even though they may carry the Congress label. He complained that the Congress was responsible for the League. If the Congressmen had displayed vision and broadmindedness earlier, things would not have come to this pass. Yunus was an old friend and Gandhi felt he could be candid with him. He said, 'Could Jinnah be left out of the picture? Was it not up to those Muslims who thought that he was going the wrong way to try to correct him?' To this Yunus replied, 'That cannot be. Either you follow Jinnah or you get out of the Muslim League.' Hearing this Gandhi remarked, 'Then the future is dark indeed for Islam and for India; more for Islam than for India.'
On 9 March, Binodanand Jha, a member of the Bihar Cabinet, met Gandhi and told him that the government was being falsely accused of being slow in reacting to the riots. Immediately after the riots broke out, the chief minister had sent him to Gaya and Bhagalpur. He said the riots were due to a 'joint conspiracy' between the political opponents of the Congress, who were opposed to their programme of economic reforms, and the British officials in the services. As proof he produced a pamphlet issued by the Hindu Mahasabha and another by the zamindars. Another pamphlet asked the people to organise themselves and take revenge for Bengal, as the Congress seemed to be unconcerned about the insult to Hindu women in Noakhali and Calcutta. In Bhagalpur, the minister complained, the disturbances were precipitated by the Muslim League's propaganda. It was they who, after getting the Muslims to congregate in large numbers, had aroused passions and set off a chain reaction of violence. The government had information that the arms provided by the government to the Muslims for self-defence had reached the Muslim National Guards. The minister continued that the League had deliberately and falsely implicated prominent Hindus. They did not want things to settle down.
On 11 March, the round of interviews continued. All the Muslim delegations that came to meet him pressed upon Gandhi to accept the idea of a division of Bihar on communal lines. Even the Jamiat-ul-Ulema, which claimed to be a nationalist organisation, now advocated the implementation of the separatist solution. All the Muslim groups which met Gandhi in Bihar condemned the Congress most severely. On receiving a letter full of abuse from a Muslim League sympathiser, Gandhi said, 'The only answer to all the violence that fills the atmosphere can be pure and unadulterated non-violence.' At the evening prayer he said that innumerable saints had laid down their live
s in tapascharya, penance. But that tradition of non-violence was now dead. It was necessary to revive the eternal law of answering anger by love and violence by non-violence if humanity was to live.
To influence the Muslims who had still not thrown in their lot with the League, Jinnah had published many exaggerated reports of the Bihar riots. A pamphlet named the 'Pirpur Report' graphically listed the atrocities on the Muslims in Congress-ruled provinces of India. Barrister Sheriff of Patna compiled a similarly exaggerated report running into two volumes in Patna. Mohammad Ismail, a prominent member of the Muslim League Working Committee and former president of the Bihar provincial Muslim League, was reported to have remarked to Dr. Rajendra Prasad in the course of a conversation regarding the report that 'seventy-five per cent of it was admitted to be false on the floor of the Legislative Assembly and the remaining twenty-five per cent has been proved to be false!' When Rajendra Babu, as Congress president, offered to have the complaints of the Muslim League investigated by an impartial authority and suggested the name of the chief justice of the federal court, Sir Maurice Gwyer, for the job, Jinnah turned down the suggestion saying that 'the matter is now under His Excellency, the Viceroy's, consideration and he is the proper authority to take such action and adopt such measures as would meet our requirements and restore complete sense of security in those Provinces where the Congress Ministries are in charge of the administration'. The viceroy did not take note of Jinnah's comments, and nor did the latter make any attempts to persuade the viceroy. He was content with spreading calumny.
On 12 March, Gandhi began his tour of the interiors. The first village he visited was Kumarhar, barely three miles from Patna junction railway station. The mobs had neither spared the madrasa, religious school, nor the masjid. It was the same in the next village Gandhi visited, which was Parsa. On the way, his car was stopped by villagers of Sipara who presented a purse to him, which Gandhi discovered had some coins and a letter of repentance. Speaking that evening at Abdullah Chak, Gandhi remarked that he wanted every Indian to feel that he had a share in every evil deed committed anywhere in India, no matter by whom and against whom, and upon all lay the burden of undoing it. There were only two paths before the country, he remarked at Khusrupur, the next place he visited: the path of returning blow for blow, and that of unadulterated non-violence. The Champaran Satyagraha of 1917 was an education in the latter. But recent happenings in Bihar had forced him to the conclusion that their non-violence was that of the weak.
On 15 March a delegation of members of the Muslim League Relief Committee, led by Phulawari Sharif, met Gandhi and asked him several questions about the refugees. His answers showed that where previously he had hesitated to offer his view, after his visit to the affected areas, he had formed a very forthright opinion. The villagers asked him directly if it was safe for the Muslims to return to their villages. He replied that, if they had the courage and requisite faith in God, he would ask them to go back. As a result of his experiences during his visits to the villages, Gandhi concluded that things had so far settled down that the refugees could go back to their homes.
Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan—the Baluchi leader and former Pathan chieftain who had along with his tribe given up the path of violence and formed the brigade of Red Shirts the 'Khudai Khidmatgars', Servants of God—was prevailed upon by the Congress and several non-Congress people to visit Bihar, after the riots. Such was the respect that he had earned from one and all by virtue of his selfless service, sincerity and moral fervour, that he could speak with authority to both Hindus and Muslims alike. He did not mince words, and the Bihar ministers listened without rancour. 'India today seems an inferno of madness and my heart weeps to see our homes set on fire by ourselves,' Badshah Khan, as he was also known, remarked at a joint gathering of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs held at Gurdwara Har Mandir, the birth place of the tenth and last guru of the Sikhs, Guru Gobind Singh, in Patna city. 'I find today darkness reigning over India and my eyes vainly turn from one direction to another to see light.' He was fed up of power politics, he said, and was deeply pained at the hatred which he saw being preached all over India. As a 'servant of God' he was eager only to serve suffering humanity. Reporting on the occasion, a press correspondent wrote: 'The sincerity of the man which shows so transparently in every word he says has left a deep impression on his audiences. There was nothing new in what he said. Nevertheless, the few simple words coming from a heavy heart struck an answering chord in many of his hearers. The scenes of fraternisation which marked one of Frontier Gandhi's [another name for Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan] meetings and the coming together of all communities in places of worship are reminiscent of the Khilafat days'. When Gandhi arrived in Patna, Badshah Khan was travelling in the interiors; from there he wrote to Gandhi: 'You are right. Our Ahimsa is on test. When I see politicians surrounding us wrongly using the name of God and religion to propagate hatred, I begin to hate politics.' Immediately on learning about his whereabouts, Gandhi sent for him. From then onwards he became a constant companion, Gandhi's silent shadow, his rock-like support, till the very end.
The 16th of March was Gandhi's day of weekly silence. He requested Badshah Khan to speak on his behalf after the evening prayers. In deep anguish, Badshah Khan said he found himself surrounded by utter darkness, which increased the more he thought of the future of India. He could see no light despite his best efforts. If India was burnt down, all of them would be the losers. He was a Khuaai Khidmatgar and so he was in their midst. He reminded them that their responsibility had greatly increased, especially after the British declaration that they would quit India in fifteen months. They had to remember that what could be achieved through peace could never be achieved through hatred or force. They had Europe as an example to learn from. Addressing the Muslim Leaguers in general, he added that if they desired a Pakistan, they could have it only through love and willing consent.
The next phase of his tour through Bihar would take Gandhi through one of the worst affected areas, Masaurhi, where entire villages had been wiped out. When trouble broke out in other parts, the Muslims of Masaurhi began to congregate at their strongholds, strengthening the suspicions of an eminent attack that the Hindu Mahasabha and RSS had warned the villagers about, to instil fear. On the night of 30 October, loud cries of 'Allah-O-Akbar' rent the air. What set off this sudden outburst of provocative sloganeering was never established, but it spread panic amongst the Hindus. As the siren of a cloth mill owned by a local Hindu Mahasabha leader was sounded, Hindu 'volunteers' took to the streets shouting 'Mahabir Swami Ki Jai', a slogan in praise of Lord Mahavir the Jain saint who had founded a religious sect devoted to non-violence. The Muslims quietened down. Some Congress workers interceded, ensured a temporary peace and both sides withdrew. The next day some Muslims panicked and fled to the railway station to board any trains going to Patna. The mill owner spread a rumour that Muslims had attacked the railway station and in the skirmish that followed, some Hindus had been killed. A large mob of Hindus proceeded towards the railway station, where there were Muslims, mostly old men, women and children, waiting to board the train to Patna. Over the next few hours the station turned into an abattoir. Almost all the Muslims trapped at the station were caught and butchered. The rest survived because of the presence of mind of an engine driver. Just as the attack began, his goods train was preparing to leave. The engine driver detached the engine from the wagons and headed towards the next junction where he contacted the authorities and brought back a large group of armed forces to Masaurhi. A group of Muslims had barricaded themselves in the booking office, which had been set on fire. The armed forces were just in time to save those Muslims.
When Gandhi arrived in Masaurhi four months later, only twenty-five Muslims from the original number of a thousand remained. Gandhi remarked that in a report that had been handed to him, it had been stated that the initial aggression at Masaurhi had come from the Muslims. However, he was not concerned as to how the trouble actually started or who started it.
What he was concerned to know was how the Hindus, who were in such overwhelming majority, could indulge in the killings of innocents. The Muslims had also complained that the government was indifferent to their suffering. Gandhi added that he was not there to adjudicate; his was the humble role of a reformer and humanitarian. The government had already declared that they would appoint an impartial commission to go into the causes of the disturbances and what reparation should be made to the sufferers.
On his way to the prayer meeting that evening, Gandhi visited Andari and Gorraiakhari, two villages in Masaurhi. Andari had a population of 462 Hindus and 168 Muslims before the riots. Muslims from the surrounding villages had congregated in Andari on 30 October 1946. When news of the Gorraiakhari massacre had reached the village, they were advised by the military to evacuate. But the Muslims were confident that, armed with a gun and a pistol, they could repel any attack. The attack came on 2 November; the three constables posted there for the protection of the Muslims opened fire, killing seven attackers, but were later forced to flee in the face of a large mob, according to a government report. When Gandhi visited the village, he did not find even one Muslim there. The government reports stated that till date one case had been filed; of the twenty-nine accused, one had been arrested, another had surrendered in court, processes had been issued against the others, and thirteen persons in the area had been detained under the Bihar Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance of 1946. The Gorraiakhari village had a population of 400 Muslims and 20 Hindus. The government report stated that 119 Muslims had been killed, 11 injured and 12 were missing. The village was completely deserted. Gandhi moved through the eerily silent lanes with a heavy heart. That evening, Gandhi was so grief-stricken he could not bring himself to speak. Instead he utilised the meeting to collect donations for the Muslim victims from the congregation as a mark of penance for the grave sin they had committed.
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