Gandhi & Churchill (102 page)

The truth was, it had been a dream all along. The truth was, his power over the Indian masses had lasted only as long as he kept them on the path to independence. Now that independence had arrived, he seemed more an obstacle than a help. Like Churchill in 1945, Gandhi became an inconvenience to the very people whom he had led to freedom.

This was true of his closest followers as well. Vallabhbhai Patel had been his most indispensable apostle, almost his Saint Peter. But, years of power-seeking had turned the progenitor of the Salt March into a callous
Realpolitik
nationalist, “silent, husky…with eyes of steel.”
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As home minister, “Sardar” Patel repeatedly told Gandhi that stories of mass murder, even genocide, against Muslims were exaggerated (even though Gandhi had seen the evidence with his own eyes).
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Privately, Patel had no problems with expelling Muslims from the Punjab and United Provinces. To his mind, they were all potential traitors. He even boasted that Congress had acceded to partition only as a temporary expedient: once the British left, he said, Indian troops would put an end to Pakistan by military force.
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Even as he spoke, the British Indian Army was being divided in two, as its units now swore homage either to Pakistan or to India. Mountbatten had made sure that the bulk of resources and equipment went to India.
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In the midst of the chaos Patel and Nehru realized that in the military they had a formidable tool not only for reimposing civil order but for “revising” partition’s boundaries at will.

The test case was Kashmir. On July 26 Mountbatten had cajoled and persuaded the remaining Indian princes to accept the reality of partition and incorporation into one or the other of the new sovereign states. Only two princely states held out. One was Hyderabad, the largest state in India’s south, whose prince insisted on outright independence.
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The other was Kashmir. Tucked deep in the mountains between Chinese Turkestan and the Northwest Frontier, Kashmir’s population was more than two-thirds Muslim. Its ruler, however, was Hindu and could not decide which state to join. In October 1947 Nehru and Patel decided to make the decision for him.

As early as June Nehru had said that the normal and obvious course was for Kashmir to join the Constituent Assembly for India: “It is absurd to think that Pakistan would create trouble if this happens.”
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After all, the new Pakistani government had its hands full. Jinnah and his ministers were busy setting up their new capital in Karachi, handling the floods of refugees from East Punjab and central India, and trying to establish order in their most distant province, East Bengal, where Hindus and Muslims were at one another’s throats. They had little time and few resources to worry about Kashmir.

However, Jinnah could not ignore this flagrant
Anschluss.
By the end of September talk of war between India and Pakistan was widespread. Nehru convinced himself that if he did not move on Kashmir, Jinnah would beat him to the finish line. On October 25 he ordered the First Sikh Battalion to be airlifted into Srinagar, claiming falsely that Afridi tribesmen were crossing the border and massacring non-Muslims.
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It was the Great Game all over again, except that the enemy was not Russia anymore but Pakistan’s Muslims. The Indian Army’s first independent military operation got under way. The first war between Pakistan and India over Kashmir began.

Gandhi was horrified. Just that month he had crossed verbal swords with his old opponent, Winston Churchill, one last time over whether India could ever live at peace. In a thundering speech on September 27 Churchill had delivered his verdict on partition. “The fearful massacres which are occurring in India are no surprise to me,” he told an audience at the Royal Wanstead School. “I shall always remember with gratitude how my constituents here supported me…when for four years between 1931 and 1935, we fought against the India Constitution Bill.” His predictions then of terrible carnage and chaos were being fulfilled.

“We are of course only at the beginning of these horrors and butcheries,” he declared, “perpetrated upon one another, men, women, and children, with the ferocity of cannibals, by races gifted with the capacities for the highest culture and who had for generations dwelt side by side in general peace under the broad, tolerant, and impartial rule of the British Crown and Parliament.” India’s descent into chaos was, Churchill said, “one of the most melancholy tragedies Asia has ever known.”
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Gandhi knew those horrors firsthand, but he could not let this judgment go unchallenged. He brought up Churchill and his speech at his daily prayer meeting the next day. The result was a final drawing of the battle lines between them, and a final tribute by Gandhi to his old antagonist.

“You are aware that Mr. Churchill is a great man,” he told his listeners. “He belongs to the blue blood of England. [The] Marlborough family is very famous in British history. He says it is folly that Britain should have lost India,” and warns the same will now happen in Burma.

Gandhi paused. “But how can I tell Mr. Churchill that we are all too familiar with British history, how they acquired Burma and how they consolidated their power in India. I do not think anyone can be proud of such a history.”
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Gandhi was more than willing to concede the importance of Churchill’s leadership in the recent war. “No doubt he saved the British Empire from a great danger,” Gandhi said. “Who else except a man of Mr. Churchill’s sharp political diplomacy could have brought all the [Allies] together” in order to defeat the Axis powers? But then at war’s end the British people chose a Labour government. “It is the working class that is ruling Britain today,” not Winston Churchill. And the British people decided “to end the Empire and establish instead an unseen and more glorious empire of hearts.”
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Gandhi confessed that this selfless act of renunciation touched him deeply: “In modern history there is no instance that can be compared with the transfer of power by the British.” Gandhi could compare it only to Ashoka’s act of renunciation of empire in favor of his Buddhist faith. And Gandhi pointed out that Churchill and his party had consented to that transfer of power.

Now, however, “by his speech Mr. Churchill has harmed his country which he greatly served.” If tragedy had struck once India became free, did Churchill not consider the possibility that the blame lay with the builders of that empire, not with those who were subjected to it?

“In my view, Mr. Churchill has been too hasty,” Gandhi concluded, in calling the transfer of power a failure. He invited Churchill to put “honor before party” and work to make partition succeed, instead of rejoicing at its failure.
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To Gandhi’s mind, Churchill was more interested in regaining power in Westminster than in saving lives in the Punjab—or in saving Britain’s reputation. But Gandhi had to concede that his own former allies, including Nehru, were putting party before honor as well.

“If the people of Kashmir are in favor of opting for Pakistan,” he said at a prayer meeting, “no power on earth can stop them from doing so. But they should be left free to decide for themselves.” Meanwhile Pakistani troops in British Army trucks were crossing the border. Jinnah declared that India had seized Kashmir by “fraud and violence” and informed Mountbatten (who was secretly orchestrating the entire Indian operation) that Pakistan would never accept the coup. As the fighting escalated, a reporter asked Gandhi if he supported Nehru’s deployment of troops to Kashmir. Gandhi replied softly and sadly; “If I could have my way of non-violence and everybody listened to me, we would not send our army as we are doing now…People say that the Sardar is my man and Panditji [i.e., Nehru] also is mine.” In fact, Gandhi said with infinite sadness in his voice, “I am a nobody and no one listens to me.”
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As the fighting dragged on and Mountbatten tried in vain to convince both Pakistan and India to submit the case to a plebiscite under United Nations supervision, Gandhi passed December and the New Year in a kind of internal exile in his residence in Delhi, lent by his businessman friend G. D. Birla. According to Pyarelal, “He was the saddest man one could picture.”
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His mood was indeed gloomy but not despondent. He told an audience on the evening of December 11, “My eyes have now been opened…Today, everyone in the Congress is running after power. That presages grave danger.”
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To prevent the collapse of all hopes for India’s future Gandhi resolved on what would be his final fast. On January 12, 1948, he held a tense meeting with Nehru and Patel. They tried to explain why it was impossible to stop the continued lynching of Muslims in Delhi, and why they could not pay Pakistan its share of the cash reserve balances in the Reserve Bank of India—nearly 550 million rupees. It would bankrupt the country, they insisted. Pakistan and the Muslims were to blame for all the violence, anyway.

Gandhi said nothing. It was his day of silence. But he had told the loyal Manubehn that he was contemplating a major change in his life, a change connected with the ongoing violence and hopes for peace. On January 9 he said of the massacres in the Punjab, Calcutta, and elsewhere: “I am responsible for all this.” Perhaps God had deliberately blinded him to the consequences of his actions, he said, but now at the end of his life he had awakened to his mistake. That afternoon, on January 12, he drew up a long statement on why he was embarking on another fast. If Hindus and Muslims could come together to pledge to live in peace instead of at war, he would break it. If they could not, he would not. “I ask you all to bless the effort and to pray for me and with me.”
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That evening his son Devadas asked him if the fast was directed against Pakistan.

“No,” Gandhi answered, “it is directed against everybody.”
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The fast began at noon on January 13. Gandhi said on national radio, “I shall terminate the fast only when peace has returned to Delhi.”
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On the fourteenth the seventy-eight-year-old was still strong enough to walk to his evening prayer meeting, then to meet with Nehru and the cabinet at Birla House at nine o’clock. As the ministers left, Gandhi heard a commotion out in the street. He asked what it was. They were Sikhs from West Punjab, made homeless by their Muslim neighbors as the Pakistani portion of the province was ethnically cleansed.

“What are they shouting?” Gandhi asked.

“They are shouting, ‘Death to Gandhi,’” he was told.

Gandhi sighed and began reciting the
Ramanama
.

The next day he became weak and complained of pains in his stomach and chills. His doctor noted that his kidneys were failing. Gandhi could barely sit up, but he still managed to speak into a radio microphone hooked up to his bed. He told listeners that the Indian government had finally agreed to transfer the 550 million rupees to Pakistan. Nonetheless he would not stop the fast until India and Pakistan were at peace.

The following evening a vast procession of Hindus and Muslims marched up Albuquerque Road in an emotional display of communal unity. They chanted:
“Bhai! Bhai!”
(Brother! Brother!) and
“Mahatma Gandhi ki jai”
although Manubehn could hear cries of
“Gandhi mordabad!”
on the crowd’s fringes.
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On the seventeenth 130 representatives of India’s various communities met at the house of Rajendra Prasad to discuss a resolution calling for reconciliation. Some key members were missing; Prasad urged that they be rounded up in a hurry.

Even if they passed the resolution, it was not clear that Gandhi would know it. Doctors were reporting that he had become delirious.

The Mahatma was dying.

Early that same morning, on January 17, a taxicab pulled off the main road in Bombay and parked along a narrow side street. Three men jumped out and walked to the door of the office of Hindu Sangathan, an ultra-nationalist group. They rang the doorbell. The new national flag of India flew overhead.

A man answered. He was elderly and thin, the skin of his face stretched tight against the skull. He beckoned the three young men inside and, after checking down the street, shut the door.

The man was Vinayak Savarkar. He was former president of the Hindu Mahasabha, now retired. He was revered in orthodox Hindu circles, even more than Gandhi. He and Gandhi knew each other well. They had met at the famous Dussehra dinner in London in 1909, when Gandhi had spoken of the patience and compassion of Krishna while the twenty-six-year-old Savarkar spoke of the awesome power of Durga, the Mother Goddess.
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The two had met only once after that, but Savarkar had nursed a burning hatred of the Mahatma ever since.

Since independence he had carefully disguised his feelings. He had praised Nehru as prime minister; he officially adopted the new flag of India. But inwardly he had seethed at the fact of partition. Now he was planning to strike back.

Savarkar warmly greeted the young men. Like Savarkar, Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte were Chitpavan Brahmins, serious high-caste Hindus and members of Mahasabha. The third young man, Digambar Badge, was told to wait downstairs as the other three went upstairs.

Godse, at thirty-eight, had been a fervent Savarkar disciple since meeting him in 1929. At one time he had been Savarkar’s secretary. Godse was puritanical, an intellectual who shunned all contact with women. By contrast, Apte was a ladies’ man who drank whiskey and wore fashionable British clothes. Together they edited the Hindu nationalist newspaper
Agrani,
which preached that everyone except Hindus should leave India.
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Godse and Apte both believed partition was a national calamity, and the man they blamed for it was Gandhi. In an issue published earlier that year, Godse blatantly called for Gandhi’s assassination. Now he and Apte were meeting the man who would help make that appeal a reality.