Hindu-Muslim amity

During his last four-and-a-half months in Delhi, almost the entire focus of Gandhi’s deliberations on ahimsa was Hindu-Muslim relations. He had started off his political career with making unity a plank, then very reluctantly lowered his expectations to amity, but in the end, he was willing to settle for peaceful coexistence or civil tolerance – anything but the murderous violence and unremitting enmity that he was witnessing all about him.

Yet this did not make Gandhi blind to political realities; the entire basis of the Muslim League and its call for Pakistan being little more than a clever misuse of religion for political ends. The Muslim League was not averse to invoking the martial history of the Muslim conquerors of India to justify the use of violence to achieve its goals. In his prayer meeting on 24 September 1947, Gandhi spoke out against the League and its brand of violent politics:

I am a witness to the propaganda of the Muslim League that the Muslims would take Pakistan by force, not by negotiating for it, not by pleading their case with the Hindus and other non-Muslims. It was our misfortune that for years they went on clamouring that they would take Pakistan by force.

(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 417)

But the scope for misunderstanding was always there; if one party gets what it wants by threats and violence while the other party claims that they gave it willingly, who is to be believed? The confrontation that Gandhi wanted to avoid at all costs was, it would appear, inevitable. As Gandhi continued,

But that will never do. What is the point in having it by force? In a way we can say that they have not taken Pakistan by force. Rather we have granted it, the Congress has granted it. There would have been no Pakistan without the British agreeing to the demand. However much the Congress might have agreed to it, the ultimate power was in the hands of the British.

(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 417)

Gandhi is forced to admit that the demand for Pakistan could not be ignored; Hindus and Muslims could not work out a compromise to live together in one country; the British, who were the rulers of India, granted the League’s demand for Partition. A tragedy of colossal proportions, which he had tried so hard to avert, became a reality.

Perhaps the roots of this conflict lay buried deep in the history of the subcontinent. Muslim invaders had eventually conquered the land, but not entirely subdued or vanquished the people. When the Mughal power weakened, Hindus and Sikhs had started reasserting themselves. But before the latter could defeat the former comprehensively, the British had established themselves as the rulers of India. With the exit of the British, the older, unfinished business between Hindus and Muslims once against came to the fore. Perhaps the only reason the British could win India is because of the rivalry between Hindus and Muslims in the first place. Even after 800 years of living in close proximity, the two communities had still not found the formula to live with each other. It was only when a superior imperial power intervened that they stayed within their colonially apportioned or allocated spaces. With the creation of Pakistan, a militaristic and hostile country, the problem had become many times more intense.

Gandhi knew this as he did the source of the violence during the Partition. How to contain the aggression of an armed and violent adversary was his problem too, perhaps as much as that of the more militant of the Hindus and Sikhs. He gave his detailed analysis of this problem in his prayer meeting of 24 September 1947. In fact, before the meeting started, a slip of paper was passed on to him in which the questioner asked that when Pakistan was driving out Hindus and Sikhs from East Punjab, if Gandhi continued to advise the Indian Government to keep Muslims in India and to treat them as equal citizens, ‘How could the Union Government bear this double burden?’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 429). This is how Gandhi responded:

I know everything that has happened there. The Muslims went berserk. They thought that since they were now free they could kill and slaughter. It all started from there. And once it started, there were the Sikhs who are also warriors. How could they take it lying down? They also started killing and slaughtering. That is the story which is not yet over.

(Ibid.: 418)

Whereas the Hindus and Sikhs thought that retaliation was the only language that Pakistan would understand, Gandhi thought otherwise, as we have already seen. But Gandhi’s point was that the solution to the problem of Pakistan could not be effected through force. He considered the Hindu nationalist idea of Hindu dominion over the whole subcontinent also to be a pipe dream:

Now suppose the Muslim League does something crazy because something got into its head. And then we think that if they can behave like that let us also behave in the same manner. You may want to rule the whole of India and destroy Pakistan. But I tell you that we have agreed to the formation of Pakistan. Where then is the question of destroying it? We cannot destroy it. We cannot destroy it with our physical strength or with the help of the sword. If we try to destroy Pakistan, both the countries are going to sink.

(Ibid.: 419)

It is such thinking, leading to mutually assured destruction, which led him to say ‘Ours is a wrecked ship’ (ibid.). If Muslims could not destroy Hindus and rule over India and if Hindus could not defeat the Muslims and rule over all of India, the only way forward was for both sides to give up thoughts of dominating over the other and to find a way to live together peacefully.

With the skill of the trained lawyer that he was, Gandhi tries to convince his listeners of the futility of a violent solution. For Muslims to kill all the Hindus would be impossible; similarly for Hindus to get rid of all the Muslims would also be impossible. Therefore, the only way was to accept one another and one another’s differences:

After all, there are only 4½ crores Muslims in the country. Why should we be scared of them? Suppose you kill 4½ crores Muslims, what would you do after that? And there are so many Muslims in Pakistan. Whom would you kill there? The Pakistanis would like to settle accounts with you for those 4½ crores Muslims here. You would not be able to accept that challenge, because they would have the support of the whole world. That is why I say that we should remain pure. Let us keep our accounts clear. Let us not be in the position of debtors.

(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 420)

But does this mean that the Hindus and Sikhs should remain passive victims? No, Gandhi assures them that if they listen to him and take the moral high-ground, the Indian government will take up their cause: ‘If we are in the position of creditors, I tell you that your Government will have to give ultimatum to Pakistan’ (ibid.), but under no circumstances should the people take the law into their own hands: ‘do not take the law into your hands, do not use your guns and do not kill anyone’ (ibid.: 421). Gandhi is convinced that those who are pure and good will ultimately triumph because there is a divine force that controls our destinies:

If you do this much, victory will be ours, and our ship which is beginning to sink will be saved. God is always on the side of truth. God can never abandon us but if we give up God, if we forget Him and abandon the right path, what can God do?

(Ibid.)

Gandhi speaks with the certainty of one who knows the laws and the workings of the universe, but he also speaks as one God-fearing man to an audience of Indians who also intrinsically share his views.

Gandhi continued with his theme in the prayer meeting of the next day, 25 September 1947, asking his audience, ‘What is your duty?’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 429), then going on to answer his own question: ‘It is to live together in amity and not to regard the Muslims as your enemies’ (ibid.). But what about the aggressors and the wrongdoers? They according to Gandhi, ‘would automatically meet their own end’ (ibid.). Attacking, killing and regarding others as our enemies was ‘cowardice on our part, and it has a weakening effect on us’ (ibid.). The strong and courageous, according to Gandhi, ought not to ‘quarrel with others’ (ibid.):

Every place is burning. It is our duty to extinguish that fire, pour water over it, without which it cannot be put out. Our first task is to make the people understand [the situation]. I try to convince them as well as you in the same terms. I shall repeat the same thing to the whole world till my last breath. The glorious land that was India has become a cremation-ground today. It has become that barbarous.

(Ibid.: 429–430)

We cannot forget how Gandhi extolled the traditional civilization of India in Hind Swaraj, preferring it to Western-style modernity. But the Partition showed how much brutality and violence lay hidden beneath the surface in this troubled land. Instead of caving in under the enormity of the situation, Gandhi faced up to it with extraordinary heroism and courage.

His message was to hammer home to his audience that the fighting between the communities had nothing to with religion; it was instead an aberration, a departure from the real meaning of religion. Gandhi spoke as a religious man, as one who had not only read but practiced many faiths. He also predicted the following day in his prayer meeting of 26 September 1947 that religions which commit or permit such crimes would themselves not last: ‘What is going on is not Sikhism, nor Islam nor Hinduism. We are somewhat familiar with each of these. Can any religion which indulges in unworthy things survive?’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 432). A month later, in his prayer meeting of 24 November 1947, he stressed once again that without rapprochement between the warring communities, there could be no future for India or Pakistan. The imperative of the hour was therefore obvious: ‘The first and foremost today is communal harmony’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 97: 382).

The separation of religion from nationalism was therefore imperative. As he said on 28 November 1947, ‘No man who values his religion as also his nationalism can barter away the one for the other. Both are equally dear to him. He renders unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s’ (ibid.: 406). The allusion is, of course, to the Bible, to Jesus’s words, but Gandhi, applying them to the current context, stresses that faith and politics are best kept in two separate compartments because allowed to mix, they become a deadly and explosive cocktail.

He insisted that India not imitate Pakistan, but treat its Muslims with respect and courtesy, something he repeated over and over again:

Pakistan has to bear the burden of its sins, which I know are terrible enough. … What is of moment is that we of the Union copied the sins and thus became fellow-sinners. Odds became even. Shall we now awake from the trance, repent and change or must we fall?

(Ibid.: 385)

But he was also compelled to admit that Hindus and Sikhs were not too far behind in the scale and score of atrocities either. Narrating incidents against Muslims in Kathiawar, his own native place, he concluded: ‘This is my sad tale, rather, the sad tale of the whole of India, that I have placed before you’ (ibid.: 405). In his prayer meeting on 30 November 1947, he once again regretted the actions of his own co-religionists: ‘I have great respect for the Sikhs in my heart but today, everybody, whether Hindu or Sikh, is going astray and India is being destroyed’ (ibid.: 432). The calamity was so great that everything that India had stood for was about to be destroyed: ‘Are we going to drag India into dust after raising her high? Are we going to destroy our religion, our achievements and our country? May God save us from all this’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 97: 432). What was more, as we have already seen, Delhi was the key: ‘I see my battle has to be fought and won in Delhi itself ’ (ibid.: 433). As he repeated on 20 January 1948: ‘Delhi after all is an ancient city and what is achieved in Delhi is bound to have an impact on the whole of India and Pakistan’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 273).

To the displaced Hindus and Sikhs, furious and thirsty for revenge, Gandhi said, ‘good should be returned for evil. We must not copy the wrong-doer, we must emulate the man who does good’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 97: 469). How should those wronged by members of one community regard the other community? Gandhi said, for his part, ‘I shall continue to trust the Muslim friends till it is proved that they cannot be trusted. Trust begets trust. It gives one the strength to face treachery’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 59). Gandhi was firm in his belief that those who persisted in good even though they were betrayed would, in the end, prevail. Hindus and Muslims, in any case, were not enemies. Especially, those Muslims who had stayed back in India, Gandhi said, must not be treated as enemies. As he said in his prayer meeting of 18 December 1947: ‘If you want to safeguard Hinduism you cannot do so by treating as enemies the Muslims who have stayed on in India’ (ibid.: 74). Furthermore, Gandhi was convinced that Islam too would be weakened by its intolerance: ‘The same rule applies to Muslims. Islam will be dead if Muslims can tolerate only Muslims. The same goes for Christians and Christianity’ (ibid.: 74). So sure was he that he said, ‘My days in this world are numbered. Soon I shall be gone. You will then realize that what I said was right’ (ibid.). He repeated the same warning in his prayer meeting of 20 December 1947: ‘Likewise it will be the doom of Islam if Pakistan decides that no Hindus and Sikhs may live there’ (ibid.: 84). Five days later, in his prayer meeting of Christmas Day, 1947, Gandhi again repeated:

I want to say to the Government of Pakistan in all humility that if their claim to being the greatest Islamic power in the world is true, they should make sure that every Hindu and every Sikh in Pakistan is justly treated.

(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 114)

Again, in his prayer meeting on 2 January 1948, he said, ‘If there is a war both countries are going to bleed. I do not wish to be alive to see that. I do not wish to be a witness to that carnage’ (ibid.: 161). He added this warning for good measure: ‘There are now perhaps thirty or thirty-five millions of Muslims in India. If we harass them we shall not survive as a nation nor can our Hinduism’ (ibid.). Likewise, he warned a few days later in his prayer meeting of 7 January 1948, ‘If the Pakistan Government allows the people to be murdered in this way, the Government will not last long’ (ibid.: 192). At least in partial measure, Gandhi’s prediction has come true, especially in the case of Pakistan, where both the state and the state religion are wobbly. The policy of eradicating or converting minorities has indirectly resulted in ruining Pakistan itself whereas India’s pluralism is now so much more vibrant, attractive and viable. The continuous state of hostility between India and Pakistan has, however, proved costly and debilitating for both states. Gandhi seems almost to have prophesied this in his prayer meeting of 18 December 1947: ‘It should not be our fate to be eternal enemies of each other. It will only end in our ruin’ (ibid.: 81).

But Gandhi was not blind to the fanatical streak in Islam, though it pained him greatly:

I saw a couplet in an Urdu magazine today. It hurt me. I do not remember the words but the substance is this: ‘Today Somnath is on the tongue of everyone. If the temple is renovated it will have to be avenged. A new Ghazni must come from Ghazni to avenge what happened in Junagadh.’ It is painful to think that such a thing can issue from the pen of a Muslim.

(Ibid.: 114)

It is clear that Gandhi would not have regarded Mahmud Ghazni, who raided India 17 times, sacking the famous Somnath temple among many others more than once, a great or good Muslim. But did that help the victims of Ghazni or change the hearts of those who espoused his brand of Islam? To this sort of question, Gandhi had only one answer: ‘I have said that I must do or die; which means that I shall either bring about Hindu-Muslim amity or lay down my life’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 114). The rabid anti-Hindu sentiments of some Muslims was not going to change Gandhi: ‘This sort of thing cannot affect my resolve. I cannot return evil for evil. I can only return good for evil’ (ibid.). To those who might react with anger or hostility to such sentiments, he added, ‘I tell you all this so that you may not be taken in by such things. You must not remember the wrong that Ghaznavi did’ (ibid.). But almost as if to make sure that Hindu fanatics might not use such statements to condemn him for weakening Hindus, Gandhi added, ‘Muslims should realize and admit the wrongs perpetrated under the Islamic rule’ (ibid.). Nothing of the sort has, of course, ever happened. There is no Indian equivalent of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, which helped to heal the wounds of apartheid after the collapse of the latter. Such a process has never happened between Hindus and Muslims in India. Instead, there is denial and appeasement in India, while in Pakistan there is unashamed and continued aggression and the promotion of militarist Islam.

No surprise that Gandhi, from time to time, admonished Indian Muslims too, asking them to be more patriotic or responsible. On 14 January 1947, he told a Maulana who wanted the government to send him to England if they could not protect him in India, and who felt that British colonialism was better than independence:

Do you not feel ashamed of asking to be sent to England? And then you said that slavery under the British rule was better than independence under the Union of India. How dare you, who claim to be patriots and nationalists, utter such words? You have to cleanse your hearts and learn to be cent per cent truthful. Otherwise India will not tolerate you for long and even I shall not be able to help you.

(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 232)

The charge of appeasement and favouritism is thus misplaced. Gandhi was clear that the Muslims who remained in India should be patriotic, even willing to defend the country or fight with fellow-Muslim Pakistanis, in case of a war. In the prayer meeting on the same day, Gandhi stated that it was wrong to say that he wanted to weaken Hindus: ‘I want everyone to become strong’ (ibid.: 233). As he said in his prayer meeting the day before he died, ‘Why do you presume that I do not understand the sufferings of the refugees? Why do you presume that because I am a friend of Muslims I am an enemy of Hindus and Sikhs?’ (ibid.: 331). This, indeed, is the false binary that Gandhi wished to undo: to be a friend of Muslims meant automatically to be the enemy of Hindus and Sikhs, and vice-versa. He wanted to reassert the possibility that one could be well-disposed towards both. But such a position was unacceptable either to Godse or to the League.

On 13 January 1948, the day Gandhi started his fast, a train carrying Hindus and Sikhs from Bannu was ambushed by tribesmen at the Gujrat, in West Punjab. The assigned escort of troops could not defend the train. Hundreds were killed and maimed; many women and girls were abducted. In anguish, Gandhi said in his prayer meeting that afternoon:

What has happened in Karachi? Innocent Sikhs were murdered and their properties looted. Now I understand the same thing has happened in Gujrat. There was a caravan coming from Bannu or somewhere. They were all refugees running away to save their lives. They were waylaid and cut down. I do not want to relate this grim tale. I ask the Muslims if in their name this kind of thing continues in Pakistan, how long will the people in India tolerate it [?].

(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 234)

There was after all, he was telling the Muslims, a limit to the tolerance of Hindus and Sikhs. He was urging the Muslims to act, to do something to stop such attacks. He warned, ‘Even if a hundred men like me fasted they would not be able to stop the tragedy that may follow’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 235). ‘It is impossible’, he added, ‘to save the Muslims in the Union if the Muslim majority in Pakistan do not behave as decent men and women’ (ibid.: 239). Towards the end of his life, speaking at the Urs of Khwaja Qutubudin Bakhtiyar Kaki in Mehrauli, which he himself had intervened in to save from protesting Hindus, Gandhi said ‘Only today I have read that Hindus have been killed in the Frontier. The Muslims here should be ashamed of it’ (ibid.: 310). He did not hesitate to scold Muslims, just as he criticized Hindus and Sikhs.

Gandhi was not unaware that Hindus and Sikhs were upset with him for his insistence on their ‘making up’ with the Muslims. He even acknowledged, as in is prayer meeting of 28 December 1947, that he was called ‘mad’ for saying so:

I say we should not treat Muslims as enemies. But people turn away from me. They say I am mad. I must say that if the masses do not listen to me they will be doing harm to their dharma. I say nothing improper. Tulsidas says that compassion is the essence of religion. You may say that Tulsidas was mad but no other book is as popular in the country as his Ramayana. It is not only in Bihar or in Delhi where it is popular, it is read everywhere. I only repeated what Tulsidas said. Why then do they say that I am mad?

(Ibid.: 127)

Gandhi’s ‘madness’ was of course quite different, quite the opposite of the madness of the mobs of feuding Hindus and Muslims. As Gandhi put it in his prayer meeting on New Year’s Eve, 1947:

After all madness seized us only after it had seized people in Pakistan. I shall not go into the various stages and degrees of madness. If sanity does not return we shall lose both India and Pakistan. There will be a war.

(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 148–149)

He pleaded with the Hindus and Sikhs, ‘To you, brothers, I shall only say, do not let yourselves become mad’ (ibid.: 192). It was almost as if he was positing his own kind of loving, compassionate, non-violent madness against the murderous madness of the communities in conflict. Kartar Singh, who came with a Sikh delegation, said: ‘Afflicted men cannot be balanced men. Everybody cannot be a Mahatma Gandhi’ (ibid.: 280), but could everyone also descend to levels of barbarism? Which madness was ‘easier’?

Gandhi even wanted the people who had left their homes and migrated to the other side to come back. He believed that there could be no peace if the transfer of populations was not stopped and reversed:

They point out that transfer of populations of such magnitude cannot be reversed. I do not hold this view. Even if I am the only one to say it I shall still say that so long as people do not go back to their homes there will be no peace in the two countries.

(Ibid.: 149)

Gandhi’s hopes were belied, even if his fears have come true. The displaced people never came back, but it is true that India and Pakistan are still not at peace. It is here that Gandhi’s notion of the Partition as a never-healing wound has been proven correct by history:

All the comforts you can provide to the Sikh and Hindu refugees are not going to heal the wounds they have suffered. It will be a matter of perpetual distress to them that they have lost their hearths and homes and if there is a war in fifty years’ time or a hundred years’ time, they are going to remember this. Such things are not forgotten.

(Ibid.)

How right Gandhi was. Neither side has forgotten; indeed, so many years after, there is still an outpouring of writing on the subject, in addition to a serious scholarly interest in it. In his letter of 2 January 1948 to Jaisukhlal Gandhi, Gandhi liked the situation to a ‘fiery pit’ where anything could happen; he was sure, though, the he would have to ‘do or die. There is no third way’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 157). He appealed to his listeners, ‘How can I go to Pakistan so long as we are behaving here as they do in Pakistan? I can only go to Pakistan after India has cleansed herself ’ (ibid.: 198).

Gandhi also spelled out his vision of a pluralistic India in which all communities would be entitled to equality and dignity, regardless of their religious affiliations. Writing in the Gujarati Harijanbandhu of 18 Januaray 1948, he said:

All Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Parsis, Christians and Jews who people this country from Kanyakumari to Kashmir and from Karachi to Dibrugarh in Assam and who have lovingly and in a spirit of service adopted it as their dear motherland, have an equal right to it. No one can say that it has place only for the majority and the minority should be dishonoured.

(Ibid.: 229)

It is interesting how he still includes Karachi in his idea of India. The Partition, obviously, was neither a settled fact, nor the new borders of India and Pakistan uncrossable.

On 16 January 1948, three days into Gandhi’s fast, the Government of India reversed a Cabinet decision to withhold the 55 crores owed to Pakistan as a part of its share of the finances of undivided India. The Indian Government had withheld the money after Pakistan-backed raiders invaded Kashmir. It was a way of putting pressure on Pakistan to desist from its acts of aggression. However, taking its cue from Gandhi’s pleas to show generosity and goodwill, Government issued a communiqué explaining its change on the earlier position enunciated by Vallabhbhai Patel in his statement to the press on 12 January 1948.1 Gandhi welcomed this gesture as ‘large hearted’ but hastened to add, ‘This is no policy of appeasement of the Muslims’ (ibid.: 245). He argued, instead, that ‘This is a policy, if you like, of self-appeasement’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 245). Gandhi elaborated that ‘No Cabinet worthy of being representative of a large mass of mankind can afford to take any step merely because it is likely to win the hasty applause of an unthinking public’ (ibid.). This unusual and far-reaching step, according to Gandhi, was an assertion of ‘sanity’ in ‘the midst of insanity’:

In the midst of insanity, should not our best representatives retain sanity and bravely prevent a wreck of the ship of State under their management? What then was the actuating motive? It was my fast. It changed the whole outlook. Without the fast they could not go beyond what the law permitted and required them to do. But the present gesture on the part of the Government of India is one of unmixed goodwill. It has put the Pakistan Government on its honour. It ought to lead to an honourable settlement not only of the Kashmir question, but of all the differences between the two Dominions. Friendship should replace the present enmity.

(Ibid.: 245)

This, was the last straw, so to speak, as far as the Hindu right was concerned. The conspirators’ bomb attack on Gandhi took place four days later, on 20 January 1948. But surely their plot was already in process, since they had been planning the assassination for several months. To pin the blame on the release of 55 crores to Pakistan, as Gopal Godse claimed (Godse 1971) is dishonest and misleading. Rather, it added one more excuse to do away with the Mahatma. Gandhi, on the other hand, persisted in his belief that trusting even one’s adversary was a mark of the brave: ‘we should trust even those whom we may suspect as our enemies. Brave people disdain distrust’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 246). Gandhi’s ideal, even in the face of such bitter and bloody clashes, was as uncompromisingly utopian as ever: ‘The letter of my vow will be satisfied if the Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs of Delhi bring about a union, which not even a conflagration around them in all the other parts of India or Pakistan will be strong enough to break’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 246). In the process, he set a high standard on the success of his yajna in Delhi. To his credit, there has been no communal riot in Delhi, even in the worst of times, between Muslims and Hindus. The pogrom against the Sikhs in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 was a different matter, with organized mobs led by leaders of a political party, but there was no outbreak of Hindu–Mulsim violence. It would seem that the truce brokered by Gandhi between the two communities has still endured.

On his part, like a true Bania, Gandhi wondered how the Pakistanis would reciprocate India’s generosity in transferring the 55 crores: ‘In the name of the people, our Government have taken a liberal step without counting the cost. What will be Pakistan’s countergesture? The ways are many if there is the will. Is it there?’ (ibid.: 247). Instead, the Finance Minister of Pakistan, Ghulam Mohammad, responded, ‘I am glad that Mahatma Gandhi’s efforts have been fruitful and that he has succeeded in making the Government of India see the error of its ways and save it from a most untenable position’ (ibid.). We might as well ask, where was the counter-gesture? There was none. Perhaps Gandhi was wrong and India had lost one of its key bargaining points with a country whose enmity has continued over the last six-and-a-half decades.

In the last few days of his life, Gandhi continuously emphasized the idea that Hindu-Muslim friendship was the only guarantee to safeguard the future of the two new nations. This became the enduring insight of his experiments in quelling the violence of the Partition. For instance, in his prayer meeting of 18 January, the day he ended his fast, he said: My reason and my heart tell me that if for some reason or other we are unable to forge friendship between Hindus and Muslims, not only here but also in Pakistan and in the whole world, we shall not be able to keep India for long. It will pass into the hands of others and become a slave country again. Pakistan too will become a slave country and the freedom we have gained will be lost again.

(Ibid.: 261)

Internal dissension was the cause of external rule; and if Hindus and Muslims could not get along, the independence of both nations would be lost. In the meanwhile, both communities had to confront all the horrors they had perpetrated on one another and, if possible, repent:

In the name of God we have indulged in lies, massacres of people, without caring whether they were innocent or guilty, men or women, children or infants. We have indulged in abductions, forcible conversions and we have done all this shamelessly. I am not aware if anybody has done these things in the name of Truth.

(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 261)

If truth were to be told, then the God in whose name such atrocities had been committed was a dangerous idea; truth is God, the reversal of Gandhi’s original formula, God is truth, might be a better bet in this case.

Gandhi ended his fast only after he was faced with a massive upsurge of public support. A noted historian of the Partition, Gyanendra Pandey, notes:

On the fifth day of the fast, 100,000 government employees, who had been to the fore in both pro-Pakistani and anti-Pakistani propaganda in Delhi since 1946, signed a pledge promising to work for peace and appealing to Gandhi to break his fast. The police signed a separate pledge. Among others who had more or less openly opposed Gandhi up to this point, representatives of the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha arrived with leaders of various Sikh and Muslim organisations, the Pakistani High Commissioner, and the chief commissioner and deputy commissioner of Delhi (who signed on behalf of the administration) to pledge their acceptance of the basic demands set out by Gandhi and to urge him to now break his fast.

(Pandey 2004: 144)

Gandhi was touched by this wave of concern and solidarity, but he was not entirely convinced about its lasting impact.

On 23 January 1948, Gandhi acknowledged Subhas Chandra Bose on his birthday. Bose had raised an army against the British with Japanese support. Though Gandhi disliked violence and Japanese imperialism, he praised the communal harmony that was the basis of Subhas’s practice:

The soldiers of that army included Hindus, Muslims, Parsis and Christians. He never considered himself only a Bengali. He had no use for parochialism or caste distinctions. In his eyes all were Indians and servants of India. He treated all alike. It never occurred to him that since he was the commander he deserved more and others less. Let us therefore in remembering Subhas think of his great virtues and purge our hearts of malice.

(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 293)

On 26 January 1948, he spoke of the meaning of independence on what had been traditionally observed as Independence Day by the Congress Party, once again insisting that Hindu-Muslim friendship was the only way to preserve the Union. Independence, he admitted, had been disillusioning: ‘Now we have handled it [independence] and we seem to be disillusioned. At least I am, even if you are not. What are we celebrating today? Surely not our disillusionment’ (ibid.: 303). Gandhi, spelling out his vision of Svaraj, once again said that villagers and city dwellers would be on equal footing:

we are on the road to showing the lowliest of the villager that it means his freedom from serfdom and that he is no longer a serf born to serve the cities and towns of India but that he is destined to exploit the city-dwellers for the advertisement of the finished fruits of well-thought-out labours, that he is the salt of the Indian earth and that it means also 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.

(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 303)

What is more, he even wished for Indo-Pakistani friendship, a dream that has still not been fulfilled:

Before leaving this topic of the day, let us permit ourselves to 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.

(Ibid.)

On the day he was killed, Gandhi actually admitted that he feared that the fate of quarrelling Hindus and Muslims would be like the legendary Yadavas, whose head and hero was Krishna:

Wherever I look I find our plight the same as that of the Yadavas who met their doom killing one another. No one realizes how much harm we are doing to society by being engaged in our personal feuds. But what can you or anyone else do about it? This indicates a failure on my part. What could anyone do when God made me blind to these things?

(Ibid.: 339)

Gandhi had, it would seem, a premonition that his efforts would not yield results, at least just yet, because not all the members of the two communities had realized that fighting with each other would be self-defeating.

In retrospect it does seem as if Gandhi’s was the last, and an almost superhuman, effort to bring about a unity between Hindus and Muslims in the subcontinent. The failure of this effort was evident even to him in his last days. But he did not give up on the somewhat more modest goal of peaceful coexistence, if not friendly relations, between the two communities.2 Hindu nationalists and supremacists considered Gandhi’s efforts at securing Hindu-Muslim amity as attempts to appease and favour the Muslims. Like their Muslim counterparts who wanted to defeat India militarily, these groups also cherished dreams of Hindu dominion and domination over Muslims. While Gandhi did not favour aggression under any circumstances, he did support a principled self-defence, both through non-violent and, failing that, violent means. Non-aggression combined with principled self defence is the hallmark of Svaraj. We do not wish to rule or dominate others, but this does not mean that we are weak or incapable of protecting ourselves from those who wish to rule or dominate us. But it is a precarious balance, even in favourable circumstances, with the scales easily dipping to one side or the other in times of stress or crisis.

Notes

1  Both statements are available as Appendices in Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98

2  See Rajmohan Gandhi’s Understanding the Muslim Mind (2003) and Eight Lives (1986) for an excellent account of Hindu-Muslim relations, narrated with the sympathy and depth of understanding befitting of the Mahatma’s own grandson