Freedom at Midnight (70 page)

rapid and secret return to English rule had been dissolved. He had become again what it was always intended he should be, a constitutional head of state whose powers were largely limited to whatever authority he could derive from his friendship with India's leaders.

Gandhi, in the armchair opposite Mountbatten, his bare feet, as always, drawn up under the edge of his shawl, his air drawn and saddened, seemed to bear all the misery of his nation on his countenance. His teachings rejected by many of his old followers, his doctrine contested by so many of his countrymen, he seemed a piece of driftwood cast up by a passing tide.

Yet, despite the pain that India's division had caused him, Gandhi's personal esteem for the Englishman who had felt it his duty to impose it on India had never stopped growing. Gandhi felt that only Mountbatten had understood the meanings of his actions since independence. When the Mountbattens had flown to London for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and their nephew Philip, Gandhi had shown his affection for them with a touching gesture. Packed into their York aircraft, along with the ivory carvings, the Mogul miniatures, the jewels, the silver plates offered the royal couple by India's former ruling princes, was a wedding gift from the liberator of India to the girl who would one day wear Victoria's crown, a tea-cloth made from yarn that Gandhi himself had spun.

Gandhi had such implicit faith in Mountbatten's integrity that he was persuaded that as long as he was Governor General he would not countenance any dishonorable act by India's government. Indeed, for the last month, all Mountbatten's actions had been devoted to what was in Gandhi's eyes the most honorable of ends: preventing a war between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. He had placed his friendship with Nehru under an almost intolerable strain to get India to submit the issue to the United Nations. He had even suggested that Prime Minister Clement Attlee fly to India to arbitrate between the two dominions. He had opposed India's decision to withhold Pakistan's 550 million rupees, an action that he feared might drive a desperate and bankrupt Jinnah to war. He also believed that the decision had no moral basis. The money belonged to Pakistan, and refusing to pay it was almost an act of international embezzlement.

His arguments failed to move Nehru and Patel. They

were not going to risk inflaming an already disturbed public opinion by giving Pakistan money which would almost certainly be used to pay for arms.

Now, in his still small voice, the elderly man in the armchair revealed to Mountbatten a decision that he had not yet discussed with either of those two colleagues of his. For weeks, he said, his Moslem friends in Delhi had been begging him for advice: should they stay in India and risk death or give up the struggle and go to Pakistan?

His advice had always been "stay and risk death rather than run away." He could not, he felt, go on offering that advice without himself taking a grave risk.

He hoped Mountbatten would not be angry, he told the Governor General, but he had decided to undertake a fast unto death until there was "a reunion of hearts of all the communities in Delhi," a reunion provoked not by "outside pressure, but by an awakened sense of duty."

The Governor General sank back in his armchair, astonished. Mountbatten knew full well there was no arguing with Gandhi. Besides, as he noted at the time, he admired "the extreme courage, based on a lifetime's creed and convictions," that his decision implied.

"Why should I be angry?" he said. "I think it's the most magnificent and fine thing anybody could do. I admire you immensely, and furthermore, I think you'll succeed where all else has failed."

As he spoke those words, a thought suddenly occurred to Mountbatten. Gandhi's action would give him a unique moral force. During those hours or days when, on his straw pallet in Birla House, he would tiptoe toward death, he would have a power over the Indian government that no one else could rival. What Nehru and Patel could deny to him, they could never deny to Gandhi dying in the agony of a fast.

India's refusal to pay Pakistan her rupees was, Mountbatten told Gandhi, the only dishonorable act his government had consciously committed.

Gandhi sat upright. Yes, he agreed, it was a dishonorable act. When a man or government had freely and publicly entered into an agreement, as India had on this issue, there could be no turning back. Moreover, he wanted his India to set the world an example by her international behavior, to offer a display of "soul force" on a worldwide

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scale. It was intolerable to him that so soon after her birth India should be guilty of so immoral an action.

His fast, he told Mountbatten, would have a new dimension. He would fast not just for the peace of Delhi, but for the honor of India. He would set as a condition for ending it India's respecting the letter of her international agreements by paying Pakistan her rupees. It was an honest and courageous decision. It would also prove to be a fatal one.

A mischievous smile enlivening his face, he told Mount-batten that "they won't listen to me now." But, he added with a chuckle, "once my fast has started, they won't refuse me."

"LET GANDHI DIE"

The Last Fast: New Delhi, January 13-18,1948

The last fast of Mohandas Gandhi's life began at eleven fifty-five on the morning of Tuesday, January 13, 1948. As did all his days that chilly winter, this one had begun with a predawn prayer. "The path to God," Gandhi had sung in the darkness of his unheated room, "is for the brave, not cowards."

At ten-thirty he ate a final meal: two chapatis, an apple, 16 ounces of goat's milk and three grapefruit sections. When he had finished, an impromptu religious service in the garden of Birla House marked the formal beginning of his fast. Only a few close friends and the members of his community were there: Manu, whose straw pallet was still stretched out each night beside his on the floor of Birla House; Abha, another great-niece, who was his second "walking stick"; his secretary, Pyarelal Nayar; Nayar's sister, Sushila, the doctor who would care for Gandhi during the fast; and his spiritual heir, Jawaharlal Nehru. The service ended with Sushila singing the Christian hymn whose words had never ceased to move Gandhi since he heard them tor the first time on the veldt of South Africa: "When I survey the Wondrous Cross."

After she had sung out its last notes, Gandhi stretched out on his cot to doze in the midday sun. A strangely contented air seemed to cross the pinched features on which so much sorrow had been reflected in the past weeks. Not since returning to Delhi in September, his secretary

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thought, had Gandhi appeared as "cheerful and carefree" as he did now that his fast had begun.

The concentration of the Indian and international press in Delhi immediately gave Gandhi's new ordeal a dimension that his Calcutta fast had not had. But the fast also perplexed many, because no outburst of violence had preceded Gandhi's sudden decision to begin it. Delhi was tense, but the communal massacres in the city had stopped. Yet Gandhi, with his intuitive feeling for his people, had perhaps sensed something that others did not: that another massive explosion of violence was dangerously close to eruption in India.

His countrymen greeted the news of his fast and the conditions he had set for ending it with a mixture of consternation and outright hostility. Conditions in Delhi were far less conducive to success than the situation in Calcutta had been. The capital was overflowing with refugees crying out their hatred of the Moslems. To escape the cold and misery of the refugee camps, they had seized mosques and Moslem homes all across the city. Now their Ma-hatma wanted them to return those dwellings to their hated Moslem owners and go back to their wretched camps. Gandhi's decision to make the payment of Pakistan's 550 million rupees a condition for ending his fast also infuriated a large segment of public opinion and divided the Indian government.

All those considerations, however, now lay behind the old man sleeping in the sun outside Birla House. For weeks, even months, it might have seemed to some that Gandhi was India's forgotten man, the message he had preached a conveniently discarded doctrine. No more. By turning on his own countrymen that ancient weapon of the rishis that he had used so dramatically against the British, Gandhi had suddenly reminded all India who he was and what he stood for. For the last time, he was forcing his countrymen to ponder the meaning of his life and the message that he had sought to deliver to them.

Poona, January 13> 1948

Seven hundred miles from the capital of India, in the whitewashed shed in which barely ten weeks earlier they had inaugurated the new offices of the Hindu

Rashtra newspaper, two men stood transfixed before the glass window of a teletype machine. The flow of urgent bulletins pouring from their teleprinter that midday of January 13, 1948, would alter irrevocably the destinies of Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte. They announced the beginning of Gandhi's fast and the conditions that he had set for ending it. One of those bulletins catalyzed the virulent emotions of the two Hindu zealots and thrust them on the road to a crime that would horrify the world. It was Gandhi's demand for the payment of Pakistan's 550 million rupees.

Nathuram Godse paled. It was political blackmail. The man for whom he had once gone to jail and now loathed with such intensity was trying to coerce India's government into surrendering to the Moslem rapists and murderers of the Punjab. Like Apte, like all the other Hindu fanatics of Poona, Godse had often proclaimed that it would be a blessing if Gandhi were forcibly removed from the Indian political scene. Godse's words had until this instant been nothing more than the ravings of a political fanatic.

Now he turned to Apte. All his grandiose plans for guerrilla campaigns in Hyderabad, for killing Jinnah, were "sideshows," he said. Only one act should concern them now—they must concentrate all of their energies, all of their resources, on that one supreme objective: "We must kill Gandhi," Godse declared.

The last shafts of Delhi's winter sunlight warmed the slender brown figure of Mahatma Gandhi as he advanced with steady strides across the immaculately trimmed lawn of Birla House. One hand resting lightly on Manu's shoulders and the other on Abha's, he shuffled up the four red-sandstone steps to the heart of the garden, a raised lawn the size of a pair of tennis courts, its perimeter marked by a knee-high balustrade rising above a scarlet swath of roses. There, in the tranquil beauty of that garden, Gandhi had found the spot he preferred in Delhi for his evening prayer meeting.

At the edge of the raised lawn, under the decorative arches of a sandstone pavilion lining one of its sides, Gandhi's followers had installed a wooden platform six inches high. On it were a straw pallet for the Mahatma

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and a microphone. Manu carefully set out beside his pallet the three articles that always accompanied him to the prayer ground: his Gita, his notebook with the text of his address, and his brass spittoon. Because of the extraordinary importance of this day, more than six hundred people crowded in front of the platform. Gandhi began the prayer by asking the assistants to join him in singing Tagore's hymn that he had sung each day a year earlier as he had strode through the marshes of Noakhali on his Penitent's Pilgrimage: "If they answer not thy call, walk alone, walk alone."

A hush stilled the crowd as he prepared to speak. His fast, he declared, was "an appeal to God to purify the souls of all and make them the same. Hindus and Sikhs and Moslems must make up their mind to live in amity here as brothers."

Listening to those words, each pronounced with such burning conviction, Life magazine's Margaret Bourke-White suddenly thought, This is really it; he has a religious position of his own to defend, his belief in the brotherhood of men. Like many in the garden of Birla House that evening, she sensed that a "greatness hovered over that frail little figure talking so earnestly in the deepening twilight."

"Delhi is on trial now," he warned. "What I demand is that no amount of slaughter in India or Pakistan should deflect the people of Delhi from the path of duty." Should all the Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan be killed, "the life of even a puny Moslem child in this country must be protected," he said. All communities, all Indians, should become again "true Indians, by replacing bestiality with humanity. If they cannot do so, my living in this world is futile."

A worried silence stilled the garden, while Manu gathered up his spittoon and his Gita. Then, wordlessly the crowd parted, opening an alley through which the little man might pass back across the lawn to Birla House. Margaret Bourke-White watched him go, photographing with affectionate eyes his lean brown figure disappearing from the garden, wondering with so many others, "whether we would ever see Gandhi again."

No prying eyes observed the meeting of the four men in the ofl&ce of the Hindu Rashtra this time. The policeman

who, three months earlier, had discreetly watched the inauguration of the paper's press, had been ordered to discontinue his activities. This was a tragedy, for the words spoken by Nathuram Godse that night were the most important that an Indian policeman could hear. Beside him, uncharacteristically silent, was his partner, Apte. Opposite him were two men. The first was Vishnu Karkare, the owner of the Deccan Guest House. The second was the Punjabi refugee whom Karkare had embraced after the hurling of a bomb at a Moslem procession, Mad-anlal Pahwa.

Godse reviewed the Indian political scene for them. Then he vowed that "We must take action."

"We must stop Gandhi," he declared.

His words elicited Madanlal Pahwa's immediate agreement. Before Madanlal at last was the opportunity to savor that revenge that he had sought since he left his father on his hospital bed in Ferozepore six months earlier. Karkare agreed as well.

From the Hindu Rashtra, the four men went to the home of the arms peddler who walked about Bombay province disguised as a sadhu. Like a jeweler laying out his earrings and necklaces on his black velvet cloth, Di-gamber Badge set out on a rug on his floor the choicest items in his armory. He had everything, except the most vital tool of all, an easily concealable, automatic pistol. They made a selection of hand grenades, detonators and high explosives. Apte asked them all to meet him after dark Wednesday, January 14, in the office of the Hindu Mahasabha in Dadar, a working-class quarter of Bombay. Then they discreetly slipped off into the night.