India After Gandhi (7 page)

With attacks on Muslims continuing, Gandhi chose to resort to another fast. This began on 13 January, and was addressed to three different constituencies. The first were the people of India. To them he simply pointed out that if they did not believe in the two-nation theory, they would have to show in their chosen capital, the ‘Eternal City’ of Delhi, that Hindus and Muslims could live in peace and brotherhood. The second constituency was the government of Pakistan. ‘How long’, he asked them, ‘can I bank upon the patience of the Hindus and the Sikhs, in spite of my fast? Pakistan has to put a stop to this state of affairs’ (that is, the driving out of minorities from their territory).

Gandhi’s fast was addressed, finally, to the government of India. They had withheld Pakistan’s share of the ‘sterling balance’ which the British owed jointly to the two dominions, a debt incurred on account of Indian contributions during the Second World War. This amounted to Rs550 million, a fair sum. New Delhi would not release the money as it was angry with Pakistan for having recently attempted to seize the state of Kashmir. Gandhi saw this as unnecessarily spiteful, and so he
made the ending of his fast conditional on the transfer to Pakistan of the money owed to it.

On the night of 15 January the government of India decided to release the money owed to the government of Pakistan. The next day more than 1,000 refugees signed a declaration saying they would welcome back the displaced Muslims of Delhi and allow them to return to their homes. But Gandhi wanted more authoritative assurances. Meanwhile, his health rapidly declined. His kidney was failing, his weight was dropping and he was plagued by nausea and headache. The doctors issued a warning of their own: ‘It is our duty to tell the people to take immediate steps to produce the requisite conditions for ending the fast without delay.’

On 17 January a Central Peace Committee was formed under the leadership of the president of the Constituent Assembly, Rajendra Prasad. Other Congress Party members were among its members, as were representatives of the RSS, the Jamiat-ul-Ulema and Sikh bodies. On the morning of the 18th they took a joint declaration to Gandhi which satisfied him enough to end his fast. The declaration pledged ‘that we shall protect the life, property and faith of Muslims and that the incidents which have taken place in Delhi will not happen again’.
³⁵

Would the ‘miracle of Calcutta’ be repeated in Delhi? The leaders of the militant groupings seemed chastened by Gandhi’s fast. But their followers remained hostile. On previous visits to Delhi Gandhi had stayed in the sweepers colony; this time, however, he was put up at the home of his millionaire follower G. D. Birla. Even while his fast was on, bands of refugees marched past Birla House, shouting, ‘Let Gandhi die'. Then, on 20 January, a Punjabi refugee named Madan Lal threw a bomb at Gandhi in Birla House while he was leading a prayer meeting. It exploded at some distance from him; luckily no one was hurt.

Gandhi was undaunted by the attempt on his life. He carried on meeting people, angry refugees included. On 26 January he spoke at his prayer meeting of how that day was celebrated in the past as Independence Day. Now freedom had come, but its first few months had been deeply disillusioning. However, he trusted that ‘the worst is over’, that Indians would work collectively for the ‘equality of all classes and creeds, never the domination and superiority of the major community over a minor, however insignificant it may be in numbers or influence’. He also permitted himself the hope ‘that, though geographically and
politically India is divided into two, at heart we shall ever be friends and brothers helping and respecting one another and be one for the outside world’.

Gandhi had fought a lifelong battle for a free and united India; and yet, at the end, he could view its division with detachment and equanimity. Others were less forgiving. On the evening of 30 January he was shot dead by a young man at his daily prayer meeting. The assassin, who surrendered afterwards, was a Brahmin from Poona named Nathuram Godse. He was tried and later sentenced to death, but not before he made a remarkable speech justifying his act. Godse claimed that his main provocation was the Mahatma’s ‘constant and consistent pandering to the Muslims’, ‘culminating in his lastpro-Muslim fast [which] at last goaded me to the conclusion that the existence of Gandhi should be brought to an end immediately’.
³⁶

Gandhi’s death brought forth an extraordinary outpouring of grief.There were moving tributes from Albert Einstein, who had long held Gandhi to be the greatest figure of the twentieth century, and from George Orwell, who had once thought Gandhi to be a humbug but now saw him as a saint. There was a characteristically flippant reaction from George Bernard Shaw – It shows you how dangerous it is to be good’ – and a characteristically petty one from Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who said that the death of hi sold rival was a loss merely to ‘the Hindu community’.

However, the two most relevant public reactions were from Gandhi’s two most distinguished, not to say most powerful, followers, Vallabhbhai Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru. Patel who was now home minister in the government of India, was a fellow Gujarati who had joined Gandhi as far back as 1918. He was a superb organizer and strategist who had played a major role in making the Congress a national party. In the Indian Cabinet, he was second only to the prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru had come to Gandhi a couple of years later than Patel, and could converse with him in only two of his three languages (Hindi and English). But he had a deep emotional bond with the Mahatma. Like Patelhegenerally called Gandhi ‘Bapu’, or ‘Father’.
But he was, in many ways, the favourite son (dearer by far than the four biological children of the Mahatma), and also his chosen political heir.

Now, in an India caught in the throes of civil strife, both men told the nation that while their master had gone, his message remained. Speaking on All-India Radio immediately after Gandhi’s death, Patel appealed to the people not to think of revenge, but ‘tocarry the message of love and non-violence enunciated by Mahatmaji. It is a shame for us that the greatest man of the world has had to pay with his life for the sins which we have committed. We did not follow him when he was alive; let us at least follow his steps now he is dead.’
³⁷
Speaking at Allahabad after immersing Gandhi’s ashes in the Ganga, Nehru observed that ‘we have had our lesson at a terrible cost. Is there anyone amongst us now who will not pledge himself after Gandhi’s death to fulfil his mission . . .?’ Indians, said Nehru, had now ‘to hold together and fight that terrible poison of communalism that has killed the greatest man of our age’.
³⁸

Nehru and Patel both called for unity and forgiveness, but as it happened the two men had recently been involved in a bitter row. In the last fortnight of December Nehru had planned to visit the riot-hit town of Ajmer. At the last minute he called off his trip and sent his personal secretary instead. Patel took serious offence. He felt that since the Home Ministry had sent its own enquiry team to Ajmer, the tour of the prime minister’s underling implied a lack of faith. Nehru explained that he had been forced to cancel his own visit because of a death in the family, and had thus sent his secretary – mostly so as not to disappoint those who had expected him to come. But in anycase, as the head of government he had the right to go wherever he wished whenever he wished, or to send someone else to deputize for him. Patel answered that in a cabinet system the prime minister was merely the first among equals; he did not stand above and dominate his fellow ministers.

The exchange grew progressively more contentious, and at one stage both men offered to resign. Then it was agreed that they would put their respective points of view before Gandhi. Before a suitable time could be found the Mahatma began his final fast. The next week Patel was out of Delhi, but the matter lay very much on his mind, and on Nehru’s. Indeed, on 30 January Gandhi met Patel just before the fateful prayer meeting and asked that he and Nehru sort out their differences. He also said he would like to meet both of them the next day.

Three days after Gandhi’s assassination Nehru wrote Patel a letter which said that ‘with Bapu’s death, everything is changed and we have to face a different and more difficult world. The old controversies have ceased to have much significance and it seems to me that the urgent need of the hour is for all of us to functionas closely and co-operatively as possible . . .’ Patel, in reply, said he ‘fully and heartily reciprocate[d] the sentiments you have so feelingly expressed . . . Recent events had made me very unhappy and I had written to Bapu . . . appealing to him to relieve me, but his death changes everything and the crisis that has overtaken us must awaken in us afresh realisation of how much we have achieved together and the need for further joint effortsin our grief-strickencountry’s interests.’
³⁹

Gandhi could not reconcile, in life, Hindu with Muslim, but he did reconcile, through hisdeath, Jawaharlal Nehru with Vallabhbhai Patel. It was apatch-up of rather considerable consequence for the newand very fragile nation.

It was India’s historic destiny that many human races and cultures should flow to her, finding a home in her hospitable soil, and that many a caravan should find rest here . . . Eleven hundred years of common history [of Islam and Hinduism] have enriched India with our common achievements. Our languages, our poetry, our literature, our culture, our art, our dress, our manners and customs, the innumerable happenings of our daily life, everything bears the stamp of our joint endeavour . . . These thousand years of our joint life have moulded us into a common nationality . . . Whether we like it or not, we have now become an Indian nation, united and indivisible. No fantasy or artificial scheming to separate and divide can break this unity.

M
AULANA
A
BUL
K
ALAM
A
ZAD
,
Congress Presidential Address, 1940

The problem in India is not of an intercommunal but manifestly of an international character, and must be treated as such . . . It is a dream that Hindus and Muslims can evolve a common nationality, and this misconception of one Indian nation has gone far beyond the limits, and is the cause of most of our troubles, and will lead India to destruction, if we fail to revise our actions in time. The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs, and literature. They neither intermarry, nor interdine together, and indeed they belong to two different civilizations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions. Their aspects on and of life are different.

M. A. J
INNAH
,
Muslim League Presidential Address, 1940

I

D
ID
I
NDIA
HAVE
TO
be partitioned? When the British left, could they not have left a single country behind? Ever since 1947 such questions have been asked. And in the process of being answered, they bring forth the supplementary question –
Why
was India partitioned?

The nostalgia for an undivided India has been mostly manifest among people on the Indian side of the border. But there has sometimes been a sense of loss displayed in what has become Pakistan too. Indeed, on 15 August 1947 itself, a veteran Unionist politician wrote of how he wished he

could do anything to save the unity of the Punjab . . . It is heartbreaking to see what is happening . . . It is all due to the policy of liquidating and quitting before any real agreement has been arrived at . . . The fixing of a date for transference of power ruled out any adjustment and vivisection was the only course left . . . We will have to start afresh [but] there is hardly any hope of building things on old lines as communal hatred and mutual destruction are now uppermost in everybody’s mind.
¹

Why could not the unity of Punjab, or of India, be saved? There have been three rather different answers on offer. The first blames the Congress leadership for underestimating Jinnah and the Muslims. The second blames Jinnah for pursuing his goal of a separate country regardless of human consequences. The third holds the British responsible, claiming that they promoted a divide between Hindus and Muslims to perpetuate their rule.
²

All three explanations, or should one say accusations, carry an element of truth. It is true that Nehru and Gandhi made major errors of judgement in their dealings with the Muslim League. In the 1920s Gandhi ignored Jinnah and tried to make common cause with the mullahs. In the 1930s Nehru arrogantly and, as it turned out, falsely, claimed that the Muslim masses would rather follow his socialist credo than a party based on faith. Meanwhile, the Muslims steadily moved over from the Congress to the League. In the 1930s, when Jinnah was willing to make a deal, he was ignored; in the 1940s, with the Muslims solidly behind him, he had no reason to cut a deal at all.

It is also true that some of Jinnah’s political turns defy any explanation
other than that of personal ambition. He was once known as an ‘ambassador of Hindu–Muslim unity’ and a practitioner of constitutional politics. Even as he remade himself as a defender of Islam and Muslims, in his personal life he ignored the claims of faith. (He liked his whisky and, according to some accounts, his ham sandwiches too.)
³
However, from the late 1930s he assiduously began to stoke religious passions. The process was to culminate in his calling for Direct Action Day, the day that set in train the bloody trail of violence and counter-violence that made Partition inevitable.