Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India (56 page)

That said it all, but Gandhi carried on. His pledge to return to the Punjab and spend the rest of his life in Pakistan had to be diluted two days later in Patna when he promised to return to Bihar after a few weeks in Noakhali. In fact, none of these promises would be kept. Gandhi was now in the final half year of his life. He would never reach Noakhali, never return to Bihar or the Punjab, never set foot in independent Pakistan. In these final months, his view took in the whole subcontinent, but his field of endeavor was limited to two cities. First in Calcutta, then in Delhi, he managed almost single-handedly to roll back tides of violence by embarking on his final fasts “unto death.” He was never more heroic, never more a miracle worker, but the Punjab, acting out Kripalani’s anxious premonition, still burned with horrendous mass violence:
Sikhs and Hindus slaughtering Muslims in the eastern portion of the province, now India; Muslims butchering Hindus and Sikhs, seizing their women, sacking their temples, in West Punjab, now Pakistan. Gandhi’s theory that inspired peacemaking in one place could prove contagious, dousing explosions of extreme violence in others, would not be borne out until an exhausted subcontinent had to contemplate the fact of his death.
By then, hundreds of thousands had been slain, millions displaced.

“
The country was partitioned in order to avoid Hindu-Muslim rioting,”
Rammanohar Lohia, a Socialist leader, would later write. “Partition produced that which it was intended to avoid in such abundance that one may forever despair of man’s intelligence or integrity.”

The Mahatma had no elixir other than his presence, his example. Wherever he traveled, his basic strategy was to revive the courage of besieged and vulnerable minorities while shaming and coaxing marauding majorities back to some elementary level of reason, if not
compassion. If he’d lived to go to Pakistan, he’d have extended his protection, such as it was, over the Hindu minority. Since his last months came to be spent in what would remain India, it was the Muslim minority that cried out for his moral shield. Circumstances thus cast him as pro-Muslim in the eyes of dispossessed and enraged Hindu and Sikh refugees pouring in from what was becoming Pakistan, in the eyes of Hindu chauvinists generally. Playing the part for which his whole life had prepared him, Gandhi now helped frame the death warrant under which he’d long felt himself to be laboring.

To those charged with the main business of extracting the British and establishing the new states, the Mahatma’s successive, overlapping pilgrimages registered mainly as a sideshow.
An impatient Nehru said he was “going round with ointment trying to heal one sore spot after another on the body of India.” When the partition plan came up for final Congress approval, Nehru was so concerned that Gandhi might break ranks that he had his right-hand man,
Krishna Menon, seek the help of Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy. The Mahatma was in an emotional, unpredictable frame of mind, Menon warned in the first week of June.

The viceroy then made sure to see Gandhi before he next spoke in public at a prayer meeting.
A pressing invitation was sent for him to come to the Viceregal Lodge, a 340-room imperial pile in contrasting shades of red sandstone—which the Mahatma had recently proposed turning into a hospital—for what became a virtuoso recital by this great-grandson of Queen Victoria, the first empress of India. The courtly Mountbatten used all the charm and flattery at his command to persuade his guest that the plan was actually a composite of Gandhi’s own ideas about non-coercion and self-determination, assuring what he had long sought—the earliest possible departure of the British. Really, the viceroy said, it should be called not the Mountbatten Plan but “the Gandhi Plan.” Gandhi must have known this massage was meant for his ego. But it eased the tension he’d been feeling. That evening at his prayer meeting, he said the viceroy was as much opposed to partition as the Congress.
Since Hindus and Muslims couldn’t agree, the viceroy had “no choice.” If this was less than a green light, it was his way of saying proceed with caution.

In using Mountbatten to get to Gandhi in this way on June 4, Nehru might have reflected that Gandhi had regularly dealt with viceroys and other colonial envoys without bothering to consult his own colleagues.
As recently as April 1, Gandhi had “staggered” the newly arrived Mountbatten at their second meeting with the idea of offering Mohammed Ali Jinnah an opportunity to serve as head of the interim government in order to pry him loose from his fixation on Pakistan, long enough, at least, to avoid partition. Jinnah, in this scheme, would be free to include only members of the
Muslim League. The corollary that this might have meant sending Congress into the wilderness didn’t particularly disturb Gandhi, who’d have considered that a small price to pay for the country’s unity, not to mention an opportunity for the movement to renew itself, finally, at its neglected grass roots as he’d been imploring it to do for two decades.
It was part of Gandhi’s proposal, according to Mountbatten’s later reminiscences, that it would be the viceroy, not himself, who’d broach the scheme to Nehru and the other Congress leaders.
Mountbatten, understandably, declined to serve as the Mahatma’s nuncio. By the time he and Nehru touched on the plan, the viceroy had already been told by his advisers that it was “an old kite” Gandhi had flown before, an idea Jinnah had never taken seriously. Nehru’s reaction was openly dismissive. He told the viceroy, with whom he was developing a more confidential relationship than any he had with his colleagues, that Gandhi “had been away for four months and was rapidly getting out of touch.”

Gandhi drafted a nine-point summary of his plan. This would be the last of countless petitions and diplomatic notes and aide-mémoire he laid before British colonial authorities on three continents over half a century. Then he had to confess to Mountbatten what Mountbatten already knew: that his idea had attracted next to no support from the Congress high command. “
Thus I have to ask you to omit me from your consideration,” he wrote abjectly, meaning he now lacked the influence to be considered someone who had to be consulted.

When the viceroy first heard Gandhi’s audacious suggestion, he asked what Jinnah would say. “If you tell him I am the author, he will reply, ‘Wily Gandhi,’ ” he predicted. That’s close to what Jinnah did say. It’s not refuted by what Gandhi himself had to say to the viceroy, if Mountbatten’s paraphrase more than two decades after the fact can be accepted as somewhat accurate, rather than written off as a snippet of stray embroidery, a misattributed surmise. “
Jinnah won’t be able to do very much,” Gandhi is supposed to have said, “because in effect you can’t coerce a majority by executive acts at the center and he’d have less power than he will think he’s going to get.” The catch in Gandhi’s “wily” scheme had all along been that his imagined Jinnah government would
inevitably be responsible to an assembly with a Congress majority that could check it and, eventually, bring it down.

The day after bowing out in his letter to Mountbatten, Gandhi returned to Bihar, where he’d spent scarcely three weeks on his earlier visit. He’d arrived in Bihar late, four months after the worst bloodshed, but found scant signs of remorse among most Hindus, including most congressmen, until he started preaching on themes of repentance, atonement, and unity.
Often the killings, he was told, had been accompanied by cries of “
Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!
”—“Glory to Mahatma Gandhi!”

“
I hate to hear
Jai
shouts,” he said. “They stink in my nostrils when I think that to the shouting of these
Jais
, Hindus massacred innocent men and women, just as Muslims killed Hindus to the shouting of
Allah-o-akbar!
[‘God is great!’].”

On his second swing through Bihar he managed to stay another two weeks before being summoned back to the capital. His moral authority had perhaps never been higher, but his political isolation couldn’t be ignored, leading him to feel, not for the first time, that his career as an active leader might have reached its terminus. The thought still didn’t sit easily in his mind. He called himself a “
spent bullet” and a “back number.” He was now afflicted with a kind of split vision that was becoming chronic. On one level, he was resolute, ready to stand alone; on another, he allowed himself to wonder if the Congress leaders, now going their own way, might have a better grasp on the country’s needs. On the train to Bihar, he wrote a letter to his erstwhile disciple
Vallabhbhai Patel, now yoked to Nehru in an uneasy duumvirate. “
It is just possible,” he conceded, “that in administering the affairs of the millions you can see what I cannot. Perhaps I too would act and speak as you do if I were in your place.” In context, it sounds like a genuine doubt, not a gesture or courtesy, meant to placate. He’s asking whether India can possibly be run on Gandhian lines.

The same sort of split vision shows up in what sounds like a valedictory comment on the efficacy of his campaigns. The nonviolent resistance he’d meant to inspire was muscular, disciplined, brave enough to risk injury, even death; this he called “the nonviolence of the strong.” All he’d evoked from the mass of Indians, he now commented, was mere passive resistance, “the nonviolence of the weak.” Speaking to an American professor in the first days of independence, he reflects that his career had been all along based on an “illusion.” He’s not bitter. He even manages to draw a measure of comfort from what he now presents as his
disillusion. “
He realized that if his vision were not covered by that illusion,” according to the summary he authorized of that conversation, “India would never have reached the point it had today.” If he’d conned anyone, he seems to be saying, it was himself. With at least a touch of pride, he said he wasn’t sorry.

It’s monsoon season when he finally embarks on his long-promised return to Noakhali, hoping to arrive in the district in time for the dual independence of Pakistan and India. Going back to Noakhali would be a way of distancing himself from any responsibility for partition without having to denounce the Congress leadership, a way also to express his continued devotion to the cause of Hindu-Muslim “unity,” now seemingly down to its last gasp. “
I do not like much that is going on here … [and] do not want it to be said that I was associated with it,” he’d written to Patel before embarking on this latest swing. This time he manages to get no farther than a demoted, deflated Calcutta: capital of the whole subcontinent, the entire Raj, until 1911 when the British announced their intention to shift the seat of government to
Delhi; of an undivided Bengal thereafter; now, with partition, about to become the seat of a smallish Hindu-majority Indian rump state to be known as
West Bengal.

The
Muslim League government had already decamped to Dacca, about to be proclaimed capital of East Pakistan, taking with it the upper tier of Muslims in the civil service and police, which were suddenly, by default, overwhelmingly Hindu again. Anxious Muslims who remained saw the writing on the wall—revenge for the Great Calcutta Killing of the previous year. Just as the Muslim League’s chief minister, Suhrawardy, had called on Gandhi then at the Sodepur ashram ten months earlier with the aim of getting him to change his travel plans, another Muslim League delegation waited on him there the day of his arrival, August 9, with an even more urgent plea. They implored him to stay in Calcutta to protect their community now living in terror, according to them, under the shadow of a Congress government.

“
We have as much claim on you as the Hindus,” the leader of the delegation, a former Calcutta mayor named
Mohammad Usman, said on his return the next day. Usman belonged to the same Muslim League that had done much to precipitate the crisis, that only half a year earlier was decrying the Mahatma’s mission in East Bengal. But now that Gandhi had actually gone to Bihar and denounced as bestial and barbaric what Hindus had done to their co-religionists there, and now that
partition had left them feeling vulnerable in a state where they’d be a minority henceforth and forever, Bengali Muslims left behind in India saw the Mahatma in a new light: as a potential savior. “You yourself have said that you are as much of Muslims as of Hindus,” the pleading former mayor said.

Gandhi agreed to delay his return to Noakhali on two conditions. One was that the Muslims guarantee peace and the protection of minority Hindus in Noakhali as he had meant to do; if there were a provocation there, his life would be “forfeit” through fasting, he threatened. The other was that Suhrawardy—who’d rushed to Calcutta from Karachi on hearing of Gandhi’s arrival there—join him in a peace committee of two to maintain order in Calcutta as British rule ended.

Suhrawardy was one Muslim League politician whose political fortunes had taken a dive with the advent of Pakistan. The united Bengal he’d governed was about to go out of existence; he would then hold office in neither Pakistan nor India, thanks in part to a quixotic and doomed eleventh-hour push he’d led to keep Bengal united, even if that meant its being partitioned off as a third independent state. The failure of that effort left the chief minister, an Urdu speaker who was not viewed as a true Bengali, as a leader without a following, an isolated, uncommitted actor with what seemed to be dwindling prospects. In the Mahatma’s depressed mood, that defined him again as a sympathetic character; it might even be said, as a disappointed fellow sufferer.

The idea of a single Bengal uniting Hindus and Muslims had appealed to Gandhi as a refutation of Jinnah’s theory that they were, by definition, two nations—so much so that during the movement’s brief spasm in May, this elderly non-Bengali, this beginning student of the Bengali language, had offered to enlist as what amounted to a headquarters warrant officer. “
I am quite willing,” the aging Mahatma wrote to Suhrawardy then, “to act as your honorary private secretary and live under your roof, till Hindus and Muslims begin to live as the brothers they are.”

“What a mad offer!” Suhrawardy was supposed to have responded. “I will have to think ten times before I can fathom its implications.” In effect, Gandhi was offering to revive the partnership he’d had a quarter of a century earlier with the Khilafat leader Muhammad Ali.