Freedom at Midnight (59 page)

tossed into a truck carrying frightened Moslems away from the neighborhood.

Gandhi immediately rushed to the site. The spectacle sickened him. The two dead were poor laborers dressed in rags. They lay in a pool of blood, hordes of flies creeping over the lips of their open wounds. A four-anna piece had tumbled from the rags of one of them and sparkled on the sidewalk beside his body. Gandhi stood hypnotized by the cold-blooded butchery. So sickened was he by the sight that he refused his evening meal. He lapsed into moody silence. "I am praying for light," he said. "I am searching deep within myself. In that, silence helps."

That evening, after a brief stroll, he sat down on his straw pallet and began to draft a public proclamation. He had found the answer for which he had been searching. The decision that his paper announced was irrevocable. To restore sanity to Calcutta, Gandhi was going to submit his seventy-seven-year-old body to a fast unto death.

The weapon Gandhi was going to brandish to restore sanity to Calcutta was a singularly anomalous one to employ on a country in which for centuries death from hunger had been a constant and common curse. Yet, it was a device as old as India. The ancient prayer of the rishis, Hinduism's earliest sages—"If you do that, it is I who will die"—had never ceased to inspire a people most often lacking any other means of coercion. In the India of 1947, peasants continued to fast on the doorsteps of moneylenders, beseeching by their suffering a suspension of their debts. Creditors, too, could fast to force their debtors to meet their obligations. Gandhi's genius had been to give a national dimension to what had been an individual weapon.

In Gandhi's hands the fast became the most potent weapon ever wielded by an unarmed and underdeveloped people. Because a fast forced on an adversary a sense of urgency that compelled him to face an issue, Gandhi resorted to it whenever he found himself confronted by an insurmountable obstacle.

His career was studded by the achievements won by his major fasts. Sixteen times, for great or minor reasons, he had publicly refused to take nourishment. Twice his fasts had covered twenty-one days, carrying the little man to

life's outer frontiers. Whether they had been in South Africa for racial justice, in India for Hindu-Moslem unity, to end the scourge of Untouchability or to hasten Britain's departure, Gandhi's fasts had moved hundreds of millions of people around the globe. They were as much a part of his public image as his bamboo stave, his dhoti and his bald head. A nation, 95 percent of whose inhabitants could not read and had no access to a radio, still managed somehow to follow each of Gandhi's slow crucifixions, shuddering in rare and instinctive unity whenever he was menaced by death.

Fasting was for Gandhi, first of all, a form of prayer, the best way to allow the spirit to dominate the flesh. Like sexual continence, it was an element essential to man's spiritual progress. "I believe," he stressed, "that soul force can only be increased through the increasing domination of the flesh. We forgot too easily that food was not made to delight the palate, but to sustain the body as our slave." In private, fasts offered him the perfect tool with which to fulfill his constant need for penance.

In public the self-imposed suffering of a fast made it, Gandhi held, the most effective arm in the arsenal of nonviolence, and he became the world's greatest theoretician on its use. A fast, Gandhi believed, could be undertaken only under certain conditions. It was useless, he declared, to fast against an enemy on whose love and affection the faster had no claim. It would have been absurd and against his theories for a Jewish inmate of Buchenwald to employ a fast against his SS captors or for a prisoner in a Siberian gulag to fast against his Stalinist guards. Had a Hitler or a Stalin ruled India instead of the British, the fast would have been an ineffectual weapon, Gandhi acknowledged.

A fast gave a problem a vital dimension of time. Its dramatic menace forced people's thoughts out of the ruts in which they were accustomed to run and made them face new concepts. To be effective, a political fast had to be accompanied by publicity. It was a weapon to be used rarely and only after careful thought, because, if repeated too often, it would become an object of ridicule.

Gandhi employed two kinds of public fasts. The first and most dramatic was a fast "unto death" in which he vowed to achieve a specific end or starve. The second was a fast for a fixed, predetermined duration. Sometimes, it

was a form of personal penance, sometimes a public atonement for his followers' errors, a compelling way to bring them back to the Mahatma's discipline.

A set of rigorous rules governed them. Gandhi drank only water mixed with a pinch of bicarbonate of soda. Sometimes before beginning, he stipulated that his followers might add the juice of one sweet lime or a lemon to the water to make it palatable. He had an aversion, understandable in the circumstances, to its taste. In 1924, during his first twenty-one-day fast, he had allowed his doctors to administer him a glucose enema when he weakened toward the end, since he was embarked not on a fast unto death, but on one of a precisely defined duration.

Now, approaching his seventy-eighth birthday, Gandhi prepared to inflict on himself once again the suffering of a public fast. This time he was employing his weapon on a new kind of conflict. He was fasting not against the British, but against his own countrymen and the irrational frenzy gripping them. To save the lives of the thousands of innocents who might die in Calcutta's violence, he was preparing to risk on their behalf what life remained in his elderly body.

Aware of the terrible risks a fast at his age would involve, Gandhi's disciples sought desperately to dissuade him.

"Bapu," his old Congress ally, Bengal's first Indian governor, C. R. Rajagopalachari, asked, "how can one fast against goondas?"

"I want to touch the heart of those who are behind the goondas," Gandhi replied.

"But if you die," his old follower pleaded, "the conflagration you are trying to end will be even worse."

"At least," Gandhi answered, "I won't be a living witness to it."

Nothing was going to move him. Late in the evening of September 1, Gandhi woke Manu and Abha to inform them his fast had begun with the supper he had been unable to eat after viewing the victims before Hydari House. He would succeed or die, he said. "Either there will be peace in Calcutta or I will be dead."

This time, Gandhi's physical forces crumbled with

dizzying speed. The emotional strain that he had been under since New Year's Day had left its trace.

The following day his doctor discovered that his heart was already missing one beat in four. After a midday massage and a warm-water enema, he absorbed a liter of water and bicarbonate of soda. Shorty thereafter his voice became so weak it was barely a whisper.

In a few hours the news of the challenge he had thrown down swept across Calcutta and scores of anxious visitors thronged the streets around Hydari House. But the epidemic of violence already launched could not be checked in a day. Fires, looting, killing continued to plague the city. From his pallet Gandhi himself could hear a sinister sound betokening still more killings, a distant echo of gunfire.

As he agonized, his followers sought out the leaders of the city's Hindu extremists. Thousands of their fellow Hindus in Noakhali survived, they pointed out, because of the pledge Gandhi had extracted from Noakhali's Moslem leaders. If the slaughter of Moslems in Calcutta continued and Gandhi died, the result, they warned, would be the massacre of tens of thousands of Hindus in Noakhali.

By morning of the second day of his fast, a new sound had begun to mingle with the crack of gunfire, the chant of calls for peace raised by the delegations streaming in growing numbers toward Hydari House. Calcutta's rioters paused to ponder Gandhi's blood pressure, his heart rate, the amount of albumen in his urine. Rajagopalachari called to announce that the city's university students were launching a movement to restore peace to the city. Hindu and Moslem leaders rushed to the failing Gandhi's bedside to beg him to give up his fast. One Moslem threw himself at Gandhi's feet crying: "If anything happens to you, it will be the end for us Moslems." No despairing supplications, however, were going to shake the will burning inside Gandhi's exhausted body. "I will not stop my fast until the glorious peace of the last fifteen days has been restored," he intoned.

At dawn on the third day, Gandhi's voice was a murmur. His pulse had weakened so rapidly that his death became an imminent possibility. As the rumor that he was dying spread, a fit of anguish and remorse embraced Calcutta. Beyond the city, an entire nation's attention sud-

denly turned to the straw pallet in Hydari House on which India's Mahatma agonized.

As life seemed to ebb from Mohandas Gandhi's spent frame, a wave of fraternity and love suddenly swept a city determined to save its savior. Mixed processions of Hindus and Moslems invaded the slums where the worst rioting had taken place to restore order and calm. The most dramatic proof that a change of heart had really taken hold of Calcutta came at noon when a group of twenty-seven goondas appeared at the door of Hydari House. Heads bowed, their voices vibrant with evident contrition, they admitted their crimes, asked Gandhi's forgiveness and begged him to end his fast.

That evening, the band of thugs responsible for the savage murders on Beliaghata Road that had so sickened Gandhi appeared. After confessing their crime, their spokesman told Gandhi: "Me and my men are ready to submit willingly to any punishment you choose if you will end your fast." At his words, they opened the folds of their dhotis. A shower of knives, daggers, pistols and tiger claws, some still darkened by the blood of their victims, tumbled to the floor under the astonished gaze of Gandhi and his disciples. As they clattered to rest beside his pallet, Gandhi murmured: "My only punishment is to ask you to go into the neighborhoods of the Moslems you've victimized and pledge yourself to their protection."

That evening a handwritten message from Rajago-palachari announced that complete calm had returned to the city. An entire truckload of grenades, automatic weapons, pistols and knives handed in voluntarily by goonda bands arrived at the gates of Hydari House. Calcutta's Hindu, Sikh and Moslem leaders framed a joint declaration solemnly promising" Gandhi: "We shall never allow communal strife in the city again and shall strive unto death to prevent it."

Finally, at nine-fifteen in the evening of September 4, seventy-three hours after he had begun it, Gandhi ended his fast by taking a few sips from a glass of orange juice. Just before making his decision, he had addressed a warning to the Hindu, Sikh and Moslem leaders hovering over his pallet.

"Calcutta," he said, "holds today the key to peace in India. The least incident here can produce incalculable repercussions elsewhere. Even if the whole countryside goes

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up in a conflagration, you must see to it that Calcutta is kept out of the flames."

They would. This time the "miracle of Calcutta" was real and it would endure. On the tortured plains of the Punjab, in the Frontier Province, in Karachi, Lucknow and Delhi, the worst was yet to come, but the City of Dreadful Night would keep faith with the old man who had risked death to give it peace. Never again during Gandhi's lifetime would the blood of a communal riot soil the pavements of Calcutta. "Gandhi has achieved many things," his old friend Rajagopalachari noted, "but there has been nothing, not even independence, that is so truly wonderful as his victory over evil in Calcutta."

Gandhi himself was unmoved by those accolades. "I am thinking of leaving for the Punjab tomorrow," he announced.

New Delhi, September 1947

Gandhi would never complete his trip to the Punjab. A new outburst of violence interrupted him in mid-journey. This time the mania erupted in the vital nerve center from which India was governed, the proud and artificial capital of the extinct raj, New Delhi itself. The city that had witnessed so much pomp and pageantry, the sanctuary of the world's vastest bureaucracy was not to be spared the poison afflicting the slums of Calcutta and Lahore.

Set at the limits of the Punjab, once the citadel of the Moguls, Delhi was still in many ways a Moslem city in 1947. Most domestics were Moslems. So, too, were most of its tonga drivers, fruit and vegetable peddlers, the artisans of its bazaars. The riots had jammed its streets with thousands of Moslems from the surrounding countryside searching for shelter and safety. Inflamed by the horror stories told by Hindu and Sikh refugees pouring into the city, angry at the sight of so many Moslems in their new nation's capital, the Sikhs of the Akali sect and the Hindu fanatics of the R.S.S.S. launched Delhi's wave of terror on the morning of September 3, the day Gandhi ended his fast in Calcutta.

It began with the slaughter of a dozen Moslem porters at the railroad station. A few minutes later, a French jour-

nalist, Max Olivier-Lecamp, emerged into Connaught Circus, the commercial heart of New Delhi, to discover a Hindu mob looting its Moslem shops and butchering their owners. Above their heads, he saw a familiar figure in a white Congress cap whirling a lathi, beating the rioters, showering them with curses, trying by his actions to arouse the dozen indifferent policemen behind him. It was Jawaharlal Nehru, the prime minister.

Those attacks were the signal for commandos of Akali Sikhs in their electric-blue turbans and the R.S.S.S. with white handkerchiefs around their foreheads to unleash similar attacks all across the city. Old Delhi's Green Market with its thousands of Moslem fruit and vegetable peddlers was set ablaze. In New Delhi's Lodi Colony near the marble-domed mausoleum of the Emperor Humayun and the red-sandstone tomb of Akbar's greatest general, Sikh bands burst into the bungalows of Moslem civil servants, slaughtering anyone they found home.

By noon, the bodies of their victims were scattered about the green expanses ringing the buildings from which England had imposed her Pax Britannica over the subcontinent. Driving from Old to New Delhi for dinner that night, the Belgian consul counted seventeen corpses along his route. Sikhs prowled the darkened alleys of the Old City flushing out their quarry by shouting: "Allah Akhbar," then beheading those Moslems unfortunate enough to answer their call.