Gandhi's political decline started when it was realized by his close associates as well as by his big bourgeois supporters that his calculations about the `Quit India' movement had gone awry. The British imperialists no longer trusted him, though in 1945-47 they handled him carefully in order not to antagonize him because of his influence on the Hindu masses. Nor did his associates, his former `yes-men', and big bourgeois patrons repose in him the faith that they had before.
Nehru noted in his prison diary on 7 April 1943 that Patel, Kripalani, Prafulla Ghosh and Shankar Rao Deo "have been hit in their great faith in Bapu's instinct for right action at the right time.... it is obvious that they visualize an end of the so-called Gandhian era in Indian politics and this prospect leads to unhappiness, for the future is uncertain and dark."(36)
The Birlas too were disillusioned about his `infallibility' after `Quit India'. On 14 April 1934, Birla wrote to Gandhi:
"Somehow or other, I always agree with you and therefore please don't think that I am lacking in reasoning powers. After all what am I to say if you are ever correct?"(37)
The same Birla told Wavell in March 1944 that "political leaders had missed a great opportunity during the war".(38) Until 1941 Gandhi was their master-strategist and they wanted him to be the sole plenipotentiary of the Congress. Gandhi's policies, aided by Nehru's rhetoric, were superb in handling mass discontent, thwarting anti-imperialist, anti-feudal struggles and in safeguarding and promoting the interests of the colonial masters, the big compradors, the princes and the landlords. They had found in him a leader without an equal, gave him whatever help they could and venerated him. But their faith was shaken after Gandhi's `Quit India' gamble. Birla distanced himself from Gandhi and his place was taken by Patel. Nehru too proved his usefulness to them: his work on the Planning Committee, his enthusiastic reaction to the Bombay Plan and his role during the post-war upsurge established his bona fides.
In mid-1944 G.D. Birla, J.R.D. Tata, Thakurdas and Ardeshir Dalal saw Gandhi and sought his opinion about Dalal's appointment as the member of the Viceroy's Executive Council for Planning and Reconstruction. But they refused to abide by his advice.(39) Early in March 1944, Birla proposed to Wavell the visit of an industrial delegation to the U.K. and expressed his willingness to go. And the delegation led by Birla and J.R.D. Tata actually left India for the U.K. in May next year. It is somewhat significant that Birla, who would earlier keep Gandhi informed of the minutest details of much of his work, withheld this important information from Gandhi for more than a year. When Gandhi came to know of it on the eve of the delegation's departure, he issued a press statement accusing "big merchants, capitalists, industrialists and others" of doing the will of the government and profiting in the process, and suggesting that the delegation might enter into "a shameful deal" with the government. When Birla protested and Tata fumed, Gandhi blessed the delegation.(40)
Differences between Gandhi and his colleagues began to crop up and during the talks with the Cabinet Mission they became serious. Pyarelal wrote:
"In that hour of decision they had no use for Bapu. They decided to drop the pilot.... At noon [on 25 June] the Cabinet Mission invited the members of the Working Committee to meet them. Bapu not being a member was not sent for and did not go. On their return nobody told Bapu a word about what had happened at the meeting! The final phase of negotiations with the Cabinet Mission marked the beginning of the cleavage between Gandhiji and some of his closest colleagues which in the final phase of the transfer of power left them facing different ways."(41)
In a note to G.D. Birla in 1946, Gandhi wrote:
"My voice carries no weight in the Working Committee. If I leave the scene, the soreness will go, I do not like the shape that things are taking and, I cannot speak out.... Today I feel like Trishanku. Is it really time for me to retire to the Himalayas? Many people have started suggesting this."(42)
Gandhi felt that he was not wanted in Delhi and thought of going to Noakhali in Bengal. On 25 October 1946 he wrote to his disciple D.B. Kalelkar: "I have been reduced to the position of Trishanku. I am hanging in mid-air. I do not know whether I shall go to Bengal or continue here or go to Sevagram." The first person he consulted was Nehru. "Without a moment's hesitation he [Nehru] replied: `Yes, your place is there [Noakhali]...', I asked him, `when?' `As soon as you feel like it', he replied."(43) It seems it was good riddance for Nehru and Patel. All momentous decisions -- to dismember Punjab and Bengal and partition India artificially -- were adopted without any reference to him. He was allowed to plough his lonely furrow. He came to Delhi at the end of March 1947 at the invitation not of his colleagues but of the new Viceroy Mountbatten. Nehru sarcastically told Mountbatten that "Gandhi was going round with ointment trying to heal one sore spot after another on the body of India, instead of diagnosing the cause of this eruption of sores and participating in the treatment of the body as a whole".(44)
Gandhi's complaint to Nirmal Kumar Bose, his secretary in Noakhali, seemed an acknowledgement of his tragic defeat. Gandhi said:
"Mountbatten had the cheek to tell me `Mr Gandhi, today the Congress is with me and not with you'."(45)
On 15 August 1947, when Abul Hashim saw Gandhi at Sodepur (near Calcutta), Gandhi complained:
"The world knows Sardar Patel is my `yes-man' but these days he says `no' to everything I say; Babu Rajendra Prasad goes out with me in my morning walk but when I come back to my Ashram I feel as though we shall never meet again..."(46)
The winter of the mahatma's life was a winter of despair. His charisma did no longer work on those he had groomed so long. When Pyarelal rejoined Gandhi in the middle of December 1947, he found him "the saddest man that one could picture... spiritually isolated from his surroundings and from almost every one of his colleagues, who now held positions of power and prestige in the Government".(47) His hold on "the pillars of various constructive work organizations" was also slipping away. He had to loyally abide by the decisions made by them who had previously abided loyally by his decisions. Those who had joined his bandwagon in the past and whom he had placed in positions of power now ignored him. When Gandhi undertook a fast to save Muslims in Delhi from massacre, Patel did not hesitate to insult him. Even Patel's secretary refused to see Gandhi when requested by Gandhi's secretary to do so in connection with some grievances of refugees.(48) Gandhi went on lamenting: "today I have become a sort of burden. There was a time when my word was law. But it is no longer so." He said at a prayer meeting on 5 November 1947: "Today I have become bankrupt. I have no say with my people today."(49) In one of his letters written probably in January 1948, Gandhi wrote: "I still do not know what the next step is going to be.... I am groping for light." In another letter he said: "Regard me as bankrupt". Nearly ninety-five per cent of the post received by Gandhi in the months before 15 August 1947 was full of abuse.(50)
Who conspired to kill him is shrouded in mystery. It seems that the centre of the "terrible and widespread conspiracy", as Gandhi called it days before his assassination, was not Pune or some other distant place but quite close to him, and he had apprehensions about it.(51)
To quote Khaliquzzaman,
"From a statement of Mr K.M. Munshi, it is borne out that months before his assassination such talk had been taking place amongst big Hindu leaders, which encouraged Mr Munshi to tell Gandhiji that if he suffered violence at anybody's hands it would be a Muslim, to which Gandhiji replied, `No, it would be a Hindu'."(52)
Significantly, early in the morning of the day he was assassinated, Gandhi "had said to Biswan, his personal attendant: `Bring me all my important letters. I must reply to them today, for tomorrow I may never be'."(53)
Information about the conspiracy, some of the conspirators, and some details were conveyed to Bombay's chief minister B.G. Kher by one professor personally after the bomb explosion at Birla House on 20 January 1948, and the information was passed on to Union Home Minister Patel and to Gandhi. Pyarelal writes:
"What, however, surprises one is that in spite of the definite and concrete information of which the authorities were in possession, they should have failed to trace and arrest the conspirators and frustrate their plan...."(54)
There is a contradiction between what G.D. Birla broadcast immediately after Gandhi's assassination and Patel's statement in Parliament on 6 February 1948 on the one hand and what Gandhi actually said on the other. On the morning of 21 January Gandhi did say to Birla that he was prepared to allow police guards to be posted for his protection, which is contrary to the story spread by Birla and Patel.(55)
Gandhi's funeral procession was organized as a military operation by the British Commander-in-Chief of `free' India's army. His body went on its last journey in an army vehicle after the last five months' stay in the Birla House. As Pethick-Lawrence wrote, "The funeral carriage was drawn by units of India's army, navy and air force.... Dakotas of the Royal Indian Air Force, dipping in salute, showered flowers on the bier." This seemed incongruous to a Gandhiite who observed: "perhaps it was the height of tragedy when his erstwhile companions so arranged that his mortal remains should be carried in a gun-carriage over which military bombers hovered and dipped low in ostentatious salute."(56) This was indeed a somewhat ironic tribute to the prophet of non-violence from his erstwhile disciples. Perhaps the mahatma, whose love of non-violence manifested itself in his refusal, even when approached, to comment on the USA's dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945,(57) apart from his other actions and pronouncements, deserved this tribute.
Gandhi had served his purpose. His big bourgeois patrons, his Congress colleagues and British imperialism had no more any use for him. In his seventy-ninth year he passed away as a martyr with a halo around him and with all criticism of both his political and personal life(58) hushed.
1. B.R. Tomlinson, "India and the British Empire 1880-1935", IESHR, Oct.-Dec. 1975, 349.
2. Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms, April 1918, 14; quoted in M.R. Masani, The Communist Party of India, 11.
3. M.K. Gandhi, An Autobiography, 105, 219; also ibid, 191; CWG, I, 289; III (1979 edn.), 398, 431, 432; XII, 564n, 565; passim.
4. CWG, LXXXIX, 237,246,433,434; Pyarelal, op cit., I, 476,488; N.K. Bose, My Days with Gandhi, 251; Jawaharlal's Speeches 1949-1953, 357-8; Nehru, Independence and After, 236; K.M. Munshi, The End of an Era: Hyderabad Memories, 6. See also Vol.I of this book, 132-3.
5. See ibid, 161-3.
6. Romain Rolland's Diary, 29 June 1926, in Romain Rolland and Gandhi Correspondence -- emphasis added.
7. Dwarkadas, India's Fight for Freedom, 470; also Subhas Bose, The Indian Struggle, 207.
8. Ibid, 113-5.
9. David Petrie, Communism in India 1924-1927, 289.
10. CWG, XLIII, 330; LXXXVIII, 29.
11. Ravinder Kumar, Introduction to Essays on Gandhian Politics: The Rowlatt Satyagraha of 1919, edited by him, 16; see also Stanley Wolpert, "The Indian National Congress in Nationalist Perspective", in Sisson and Wolpert (eds.), op cit., 24.
12. See Vol.I of this book, 286-9.
13. See Ghanshyam Shah, "Traditional Society and Political Mobilization: The Experience of Bardoli Satyagraha (1920-1928)", Contributions to Indian Sociology (NS), No. 8, 1974 -- emphasis added.
14. See David Hardiman, Peasant Nationalists of Gujarat, 244.
15. Shahid Amin, "Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921-2", Subaltern Studies III, ed. by Ranajit Guha.
16. Satinath Bhaduri, "Dhonrai Charit Manas", Satinath Granthavali, II, 26-31, 111.
17. P.C. Bamford, Histories of the Non-Co-operation and Khilafat Movements, 49.
18. CWG, LXVII, 410.
19. GOI, Home Poll, File 18/7/1938, cited in Biswamoy Pati, "Storm over Malkangiri", in G. Pandey (ed.), Indian Nation in 1942, 193; Congress Responsibility for the Disturbances 1942-43, 31-2; IAR, 1942, II, 194.
20. Congress Responsibility for the Disturbances 1942-43, 80-81.
21. Nehru, An Autobiography, 254.
22. Percival Spear, A History of India, II, 190; see Vol.I of this book, 183-7.
23. R. Prasad, At the Feet of Mahatma Gandhi, 299.
24. Pyarelal, op cit., I, 371,383,439,453,464,498,499,520,559,561, passim; Wavell the Viceroy's Journal, 428; Nirmal Kumar Bose, My Days with Gandhi, 149-50,152. Nirmal Bose was Gandhi's secretary in Noakhali.
25. Pyarelal, op cit., I, 240.
26. Tendulkar, op cit., VI, 293; F. Gunther to Nehru, March 1938, JN Papers, cited in B.N. Pandey, op cit., 224.
27. Tendulkar, op cit., VII, 312.
28. Ravinder Kumar, "The Rowlatt Satyagraha in Lahore", in Essays in the Social History of Modern India, 207; Vol.I of this book, 218; Gyanendra Pandey, The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh, 214; Shahid Amin, op cit., 52-5.
29. Judith M. Brown, "The Role of a National Leader", in Low (ed.), Congress and the Raj, 153.
30. Judith M. Brown, "The Mahatma in Old Age", in Sisson and Wolpert (eds.), op cit., 286.
31. Jacques Pouchepadass, "Local Leaders and the Intelligentsia in the Champaran Satyagraha (1917)", in Contributions to Indian Sociology (NS) 8: 1974, p. 84; cited in Shahid Amin, op cit., 6.
32. D.R. Gadgil, Economic Policy and Development, 81; Khandubhai Desai, "Indian Textile Industry (1940 to 1946)", Harijan, 19 Jan. 1947, cited in Rajat K. Ray, op cit., 71; S.D. Mehta, The Cotton Mills of India 1854 to 1954, Bombay, 1954, 196-7.
33. Ram Niwas Jaju, G.D. Birla: A Biography, 130,137.
34. CWG, LXXXIX, 354; XC, 43-4; also LXXXIX, 467,491,502, passim.
35. Snow, op cit., 45 -- emphasis added.
36. SWN, XIII, 101.
37. Birla, Bapu, I, 365.
38. TOP, IV, 779.
39. Pyarelal, op cit., I, 22.
40. TOP, IV, 779; CWG, LXXX, 80,94 and fn.1,100,102-3.
41. Pyarelal, op cit., I, 239; also 230; B.N. Pandey, op cit, 252; Nirmal Kumar Bose, Studies in Gandhism, 302.
42. CWG, LXXXVI, 295.
43. Ibid, 34; Pyarelal, op cit., I, 430-1.
44. TOP, X, 71.
45. N.K. Bose, Studies in Gandhism, 284.
46. Abul Hashim, In Retrospection, 163; also CWG, LXXXIX, 480.
47. Pyarelal, op cit., II, 681.
48. Azad, op cit., 216-7; ibid (1988 edn.), 235-6; See also Wavell the Viceroy's Journal, 303; CWG, XC, 411; J.B. Kripalani, Gandhi: His Life and Thought, New Delhi, 1970, 295.
49. CWG, XC, 108; also 378, 400; LXXXIX, 481, passim.
50. Pyarelal, op cit., II, 321,698,699.
51. Ibid, 705.
52. Khaliquzzaman, op cit., 409.
53. Lord Pethick-Lawrence, "Last Years", in H.S.L. Polak, H.N. Brailsford, Lord Pethick-Lawrence, Mahatma Gandhi, London, n.d., 300-1.
54. Pyarelal, op cit, 755, 756.
55. Birla, In the Shadow, 297; CWG, XC, 469-70 and 469, fn.1; Azad, op cit., 222-3; ibid (1988 edn.), 244.
56. Pethick-Lawrence, op cit., 302; N.K. Bose, Studies in Gandhism, 303.
57. CWG, LXXXI, 163,271,420.
58. We have refrained from discussing aspects of Gandhi's personal life. One aspect invited severe criticism, even condemnation, from his former `yes-men' and others. One who is interested in knowing it and knowing Gandhi the man better may refer to CWG, LXVII, 61,69,104-5,117,166,416; LXX, 81-2,95,312-5; LXXIX, 212-3,215-6,238; LXXXI, 82-3; LXXXVI, 452-3,465-6; LXXXVII, 89-92,108, passim; also Nirmal Kumar Bose, My Days with Gandhi, 133-4,154,158,174,179,184; and Ved Mehta, Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles, Penguin Books, 1977 for Sushila Nayar's statement.