An old formula in the capital of New India
As soon as he reached Delhi, Gandhi issued a press statement that was later published in his own paper, Harijan:
I knew nothing about the sad state of things in Delhi when I left Calcutta on Sunday last. On reaching Delhi, I have been listening the whole day long to the tale of woe that is Delhi today. I saw several Muslim friends who recited their pathetic story. I must do my little bit to calm the heated atmosphere. I must apply the old formula ‘Do or Die’ to the capital of India.
(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 352)
Gandhi had spent nearly a month in Calcutta, dousing the flames of communal hatred there. Earlier, in both Noakhali and Bihar, he had brought back peace and stopped the murderous strife between Hindus and Muslims. In Noakhali, the Hindu minority had been terrorized and targeted; in the retaliatory violence in Bihar, it was the Muslims who were the worse suffer ers. In Calcutta, where he reached thereafter, angry mobs were targeting Muslims, attacking mosques, rioting, looting, and killing. H. S. Suhrawardy, the Premier of pre-Partition Bengal, had requested Gandhi to remain in this strife-torn city till peace had been restored. Gandhi invited Suhrawardy to stay with him to show Hindu-Muslim solidarity to the divided populace. They moved into Hyderi Mansion in Beliaghata on 13 August 1947, just two days before independence. On 15 August 1947, the day India became independent, Gandhi was fasting, spinning and praying to atone for the sin of Partition. From 1 to 4 September Gandhi fasted for the end of communal hatred, triggering the miracle of Calcutta. The feuding parties signed a pledge to end violence and normalcy returned to the city.
Gandhi had originally planned to go to Punjab from Bengal because it was the site of the worst atrocities – killing, rape, loot and displacement – of the Partition, but the situation in Delhi had quickly deteriorated so much that he went there instead. Delhi was the capital of India and to Gandhi the testing ground of the new nation. In Delhi, the influx of hordes of refugees from Pakistan had turned the city almost into a tinder box. These immigrants not only needed to be settled, but they were seething with anger over what they had suffered – loss of home and property, forced displacement, not to speak of rape, killing, destruction of families, separation from loved ones. Their entire lives had been uprooted and pulverized. They sought revenge. There was a real danger that, in retaliation, the Muslims of Delhi would be driven out. This would also be to the financial advantage of the Hindu and Sikh residents and refugees. They would be able to take over the properties and businesses of the Muslims who had left or been driven out. Gandhi became the one-man peace-keeping force of the new republic. To him Delhi was the symbol of all of India. If peace returned to Delhi, if the life and property of its Muslim residents were protected, he believed it would send a powerful signal not just to the rest of the country but also to Pakistan. Perhaps the two recently parted neighbours might be able to live in peace afterwards.
When he assessed the situation, Gandhi’s fundamental contention, which he repeated over and over again, was that retaliatory violence was both ethically wrong and impractical. Mimicking one’s enemy, as Girard showed, would only lead to a cycle of never-ending violence; Gandhi concurred:
I am prepared to understand the anger of the refugees whom fate has driven from West Punjab. But anger is short madness. It can only make matters worse in every way. Retaliation is no remedy. It makes the original disease much worse. I, therefore, ask all those who are engaged in the senseless murders, arson and loot to stay their hands.
(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 352)
‘Retaliation is no remedy’; in fact, it only debases one to the same brutal level as one’s enemy – this became the theme of his last days on earth; this was the keynote of his Delhi initiative. As he said to P. C. Joshi, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of India when the latter came calling, ‘We must not degrade ourselves by following the ways of Pakistan’ (ibid.: 353).
It is true, however, that Gandhi felt lonely and frustrated. As he told Joshi, ‘Somehow or other I have never felt so resourceless as I am doing today … I feel like a General without an army. To whom am I to give orders?’ (ibid.). But he was not bereft of hope. He had the miracle of Calcutta to go by. ‘You do not know the story of Calcutta’, he told Joshi, ‘There it looked literally like overnight conversion’ (ibid.). Shrewd politician and strategist that he was, he was aware that the miracle of Calcutta was not merely because of his moral force. On the very day that he had moved into Hyderi mansion an angry mob had attacked him. Later, when he addressed a meeting of Muslim businessmen at the Grand Hotel, he again faced a violent demonstration. In both instances, Gandhi not only faced up to the protesters rather than escaping from them, but told them that they could kill him if they liked but he would not stop working for peace between the two communities. In addition to Gandhi’s own actions, which ‘turned the wave’ of Hindu sentiment, he acknowledged that ‘The Muslim mind was ready’ as were the businessmen, who were ‘tired of strife’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 353). Many years ago, something similar had happened in South Africa, where the there was an ‘overnight conversion of the European mind’ after Gandhi was attacked and beaten: ‘When the whole thing including my interview appeared in the press the next morning, the Europeans felt ashamed and the atmosphere changed (ibid.: 353–354). Gandhi was hoping to pull off a similar transformation in Delhi, but he also wondered if that would be possible: ‘If some such thing happened here, my mission would succeed. But I am afraid it will not happen’ (ibid.).
The very evening of his arrival on 9 September 1947, Gandhi addressed his first prayer meeting during this final phase of his life in Delhi. In it, in his own intimate, inimitable way, he describes his feelings on reaching Shahadara railway station after crossing the Yamuna to enter Delhi:
When I reached Shahadara Sardar Patel, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur and others were there to welcome me. But I did not find the usual smile on the Sardar’s lips. Gone too was his jocular temperament. After alighting from the train I found some police personnel and others also equally sad. Has the city of Delhi which always appeared gay turned into a city of the dead?
(Ibid.: 355)
He quickly saw the seething violence, the hatred between communities, the huge influx of refugees, the crippling shortages of food and clothing and the early onset of a cold winter. The two countries, India and Pakistan, on suddenly becoming free of British imperialism, had also given in to lawlessness and partial anarchy. The old authority of the Raj had ended and in its place the two new states had yet to get a firm hand on the reins of power. Indians and Pakistanis, Gandhi observed,
are not forced to do anything against their will under the crushing burden of Imperialism. Today they can do anything they choose. But if they wish to face the world with honesty, freedom should not mean that there need be no rule of law in both the Dominions.
(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 326)
Just as he repeatedly opposed retaliatory violence, he also encouraged respect for the rule of law. Those who had genuine grievances had to appeal to the authorities rather than resorting to lawlessness or direct action.
It may be argued that Gandhi was bound to fail because he demanded exceptional conduct from the common people of the subcontinent. He did not take into account the way average men and women felt; he did not accept the general weaknesses of ordinary people. However, it would not be entirely correct to assume this. Actually, Gandhi was quite aware of the workings of ordinary human nature, but he refused to believe that people could not rise above it. He was willing to allow for mistakes, which had to be admitted and repented for, but he refused to let people deliberately do harm to others without telling them that they did so.
As always, Gandhi gambled on the heights to which his otherwise gentle, loyal and spiritually alive countrymen might be roused to ascend, not the barbarous and murderous depths to which they could and had descended. He did not think that Indians were especially lacking in humanity just because they did not turn brutal and homicidal with the organized precision and orderly discipline of Europeans. On the contrary, the very primitivism of subcontinental violence suggested that it was amenable to the kind of appeal to sentiment and moral force that he had developed a special skill and expertise in nurturing.
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