Freedom at Midnight (35 page)

In New Delhi, every new day thrust a score of major and minor decisions on the harried Viceroy and his staff. There were interminable discussions over the responsibility for paying the pensions of thousands of Britishers being prematurely retired by independence and the condition under which hundreds of other civilians and officers, staying on at India and Pakistan's request, would labor.

His interim government, composed largely of Moslem League and Congress ministers, was already beginning to break down under the strains imposed by the forthcoming partition. To keep it functioning until August 15, Mount-batten devised an ingenious arrangement. Congress was

given all the ministries, but each minister was assigned a Moslem League delegate to look over his shoulder and make sure that he did nothing injurious to Pakistan's interest. Mountbatten assigned a British general, Sir Robert Lockhart, to supervise the referendum that would determine whether the Northwest Frontier Province, where he had faced 100,000 tribesmen, joined India or Pakistan.

Most vexing problem of all was that posed by Mount-batten's impetuous selection of August 15 as the date for Indian independence. A congeries of astrologers finally advised India's politicians that if August 15 was a wholly inauspicious day on which to begin their nation's modern history, August 14 represented a considerably more favorable conjuncture of the stars. A relieved Viceroy accepted with alacrity the compromise that the Indian politicians, to propitiate the celestial bodies, proposed: India and Pakistan would become independent dominions on the stroke of midnight, August 14, 1947.*

For thirty years, the tricolor sash of homespun cotton khadi, soon to replace the Union Jack on India's horizons, had flown over the meetings, marches and manifestations of a people thirsting for independence. Gandhi had designed that banner of a militant Congress himself. At the center of its horizontal bands of saffron, white and green, he had placed his personal seal, the humble instrument he had proposed to the masses of India as the instrument of their nonviolent redemption, the spinning wheel.

Now, with independence at hand, voices in the ranks of Congress contested the right of what they called "Gandhiji's toy" to occupy the central place in what was about to become their nation's flag. To a growing number of party militants his spinning wheel was a symbol of the past, a woman's thing, the hallmark of an archaic India turned inward upon herself.

At their insistence, the place of honor on the national flag of India was assigned to another wheel, the sign the

* At a staff meeting shortly after his press conference, the Viceroy had noted with a smile that there was "a complete ladk of high-level advisers on astrology on his staff." Insisting that this be "remedied forthwith," he assigned his able young press attach6 Alan Campbell-Johnson the additional responsibilities of viceregal astrologer.

conquering warriors of Ashoka, founder of the Hindu empire, had borne upon their shields. Framed by a pair of lions for force and courage, Ashoka's proud symbol of strength and authority, his dharma chakra, wheel of the cosmic order, became the symbol of a new India.

Gandhi learned of his followers' decision with deep sadness. "However artistic the design may be," he wrote, "I shall refuse to salute a flag which carries such a message."

That disappointment was only the first in a harvest of sorrows awaiting the elderly leader in the nation he had done so much to create. Not only was Gandhi's beloved India being divided, but the partitioned India soon to be born would bear little resemblance to the India that Gandhi had dreamed of.

Gandhi's dream had always been to create a modern India that would offer Asia and the world a living example of his social ideals. To his critics, those ideals were a heterogeneous collection of a cranky old man's obsessions. To his followers, however, they constituted a lifebuoy thrown out to mankind by a strangely sane old man in a world going mad.

The Mahatma was wholly opposed to those who argued that India's future lay in imitating the industrial and technological society that had colonized her. India's salvation, he argued, lay "in unlearning what she has learnt in the past fifty years." He challenged almost all the Western ideals that had taken root in India. Science should not order human values, he argued, technology should not order society, and civilization was not the infinite multiplication of human wants but their deliberate limitation to essentials that could be equitably shared by all.

The Western industrialization that was admired by so many of his followers, he said, had concentrated power in the hands of the few at the expense of the many. It was a doubtful blessing to the poor in the West and a menace to the nonwhite races of the underdeveloped world.

Gandhi's India would be built on her 600,000 villages, those multitudinous facets of the India that he knew and loved, an India unstained by technology, a haunted India marking the passage of her years with the cycle of her religious feasts, her decades with the memory of her failed

crops, her centuries with the specter of her terrible famines.

He wanted each of those villages to become a self-sufficient unit, able to produce its own food, cloth, milk, fruit and vegetables, to educate its young and nurse its ill. Proclaiming that "many a violent war in Asia could have been prevented by an extra bowl of rice," he had constantly sought the perfect food to nourish India's hungry peasants, experimenting with soya, peanuts, mango kernels. He attacked machine-polished rice, because it removed the hard husk rich in vitamin B.

He wanted to close down India's textile mills and replace them with his spinning wheel as part of a program to give work to the villages' underemployed, to provide activities that would hold the population in those villages.

His economic manifesto was: "The traditional old implements, the plow and the spinning wheel, have been our wisdom and welfare. We must return to the old simplicity." When man invented a tractor that could produce milk, ghee and dung, he said, he would recommend it as a replacement to the cow to India's peasants.

His nightmare was a machine-dominated industrial society that would suck India's villagers from the countryside into her blighted urban slums, sever their contact with the social unit that was their natural environment, destroy their ties of family and religion, all for the faceless, miserable existence of an industrial complex spewing out goods that men really didn't need.

He was not, as he was sometimes accused, preaching a doctrine of poverty. Grinding poverty produced the moral degradation and the violence he loathed. But, so too, he argued, did a surfeit of material goods. A people with full refrigerators, stuffed clothes closets, a car in every garage and a radio in every room could be psychologically insecure and morally corrupt. Gandhi wanted man to find a just medium between debasing poverty and the heedless consumption of goods.

He also wanted man to live in a classless, egalitarian society, because social and economic inequality, he held, bred violence. All labor, physical or intellectual, would carry the same reward in Gandhi's India. It was not property qualification that would earn a man the right to vote in his state, but labor qualification. To get it, everybody would have to contribute physical labor to the state.

Nobody, including saints or sages, would be exempt. The ditch digger would get his right to vote almost automatically, but the lawyer or millionaire would have to earn it with calluses.

Most important for Gandhi was the example that leaders set for their followers. He had not been indulging in idle metaphor when he stunned the Viceroy by proposing that he abandon Viceroy's House for a simple bungalow. The way to abolish privilege, he had always maintained, was to renounce it yourself.

Indeed, none of the other great social prophets of his century—Lenin, Stalin, Mao—had led their lives in such utter conformity to their ideals.* Gandhi had even held his daily food intake to the barest minimum that he needed for staying alive, so as not to abuse the resources of his famished land.

Gandhi's advocacy of his theories had been accompanied by a number of piquant contradictions. He had denounced the machine age at prayer meetings across India with the aid of one of its most recent manifestations, a microphone, and the 50,000 rupees a year that sustained his first ashram had been a gift of an industrialist, G. D. Birla, whose textile mills represented the most splendid incarnation imaginable of the Mahatma's industrial nightmare.

Now, with independence approaching, his continuing espousal of his ideas was becoming an embarrassment to Fabian socialists like Nehru or ardent capitalists like Patel. Their faith was in machines, industry, technology, all the apparatus that the West had brought to India and that was such an anathema to Gandhi. They longed to build the giant factories and industrial complexes he loathed, to gird India's future in five-year plans. Even Nehru, the beloved son, had written that to follow Gandhi's ideas was to step backward into the past, to submit India to the most confining autarchy imaginable, that of its villages. To their chagrin, the Mahatma insisted on proclaiming publicly the

* Gandhi and the Marxists had little use for each other. To most Marxists, Gandhi was unscientific. He, in turn, regarded Communism with its atheistic overtones and its inherent violence as an anathema. Most Socialists, he felt, were "armchair socialists" unwilling to alter their own life style or sacrifice any of their own comforts while they awaited the arrival of Socialist Nirvana.

canons by which he hoped they and the other leaders of the new India would live.

Every minister, he said, should wear khadi exclusively, live in a simple bungalow with no servants. He should not own a car. He should be free of the taint of caste, spend at least one hour a day in physical work, spinning, or growing food and vegetables to ease the food shortage. He should avoid "foreign furniture, sofas, tables and chairs," and go around without bodyguards. Above all, Gandhi was sure "no leader of an independent India will hesitate to give an example by cleaning out his own toilet box."

Naive yet unassailably wise, his words were poignantly revealing of the dilemma inherent in all of Gandhi's ideals. They were a perfect schema cast for imperfect actors. A quarter of a century after his death, India's gravest political ill would be the corruption and venality of the very Congress ministers whom Gandhi had hoped would follow in his footsteps.

Despite his concern for India's future, Gandhi's day-today preoccupations in July 1947 remained the communal violence which continued to plague the subcontinent. Taking Nehru with him, he insisted on seeing the first Hindu and Sikh refugees spilling out of West Punjab.

It was a staggering confrontation. Thirty-two thousand people, the survivors of a hundred Kahutas, the village whose horrors had so struck the Viceroy, had been assembled 120 miles from Delhi in the heat and the dirt of India's first refugee camp.

Shrieking their anger or wailing their grief, they engulfed Gandhi's car in a sea of misery, their hands and fingers gesticulating, beseeching; their faces contorted in anger or hate; their dark eyes begging for some solace to their despair. Buzzing swarms of flies hovered over them, alighting in black, wriggling patches on their still open wounds. A great pall of dust stirred by their running feet invaded their nostrils and parched throats and left its powdery veil everywhere. From all sides, they pressed on Gandhi and Nehru, a smelly, sweaty, foul-breathed wall of miserable human beings.

All day Gandhi worked with them, trying to bring some order to their improvised camp. He showed them how to dig latrines, lectured them on sanitation and hygiene, or-

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ganized a dispensary, nursed as many of the sick as he could.

Late in the afternoon, they started back to Delhi. His seventy-seven-year-old body worn out by strain, his spirit saddened by so much misery, Gandhi stretched out in the back seat of the car and fell asleep with his gnarled feet resting in the lap of the disciple who had turned his back on him just two months before.

Eyes straight ahead, his usually expressive face a mask, Nehru rode for a long time in silence, pondering, perhaps, what future the sights they had witnessed portended for the India he would soon be called upon to govern. Then, slowly, tenderly, as though to expiate with his gentle touch the pain he had caused him, he began to massage the cal-lused feet of the sleeping man to whom he had devoted so much of his life.

At sunset, Gandhi awoke. From each side of their speeding car, the broad fields of sugar cane, wheat, paddy, flat as a man's hand, ran down to a horizon so distant that it might seem the edge of the world. A fine haze stood above the vast plain, filtering through its screen the last roseate glow of the sinking sun. It was the cow-dust hour, an hour as ancient, as unforgettable as India itself. From a thousand, tens of thousands of mud-brick huts speckling the great Punjab plain it came, the smoke of India's mealtime fires. Everywhere, squatting on their haunches, faded saris clutched to their shoulders, bangles clanking on their bare arms, the women tended those fires, fussing over the chapaties and channa they were cooking, stoking them with the round flat patties of dried dung that fueled them, the last of the many gifts of India's sacred cows. The mantle of Indian night, the smoke from those numberless cow-dung fires drifting through the evening sky, permeating it with the distinctive, pungent smell that was the body odor of Mother India.

There in the gathering darkness Gandhi stopped the car and sat down by the side of the road for his evening prayer. His stooped, shriveled figure was at one with that vast and mournful plain, the neem and pipal trees folding over him. In the back of the car, Nehru, his eyes closed, his fingers pressed to his eyelids, listened as the high, wavering voice of a brokenhearted man beseeched the God of the Gita to deliver his beloved India from the fate he foresaw for her.

"WE WILL ALWAYS REMAIN BROTHERS

3?

London, July 1947

The solemn thumps of a black ebony stave on an antique floor had heralded the accomplishment of every great legal act in the elaboration of the British Empire. For centuries, the stave of the King's Messenger, the gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, had summoned a delegation of the Commons to the Lords, there to witness the Royal Assent, the final sanction for the, edicts that had carried Britain's imperial power to the ends of the earth. The ancient ritual had not changed, but this summer day the metronomic beat of the ebony stave rang out a funereal knell—a knell marking the death of the British Empire and with it white man's rule over three quarters of the globe. One of the bills awaiting the Royal Assent on Friday, July 18, 1947, would extend freedom to a fifth of the world's population and sever forever the British connection with India.