Before his first week in Delhi ended, Gandhi gave notice to the residents of Delhi and to the citizens of the two new states of India and Pakistan of what he intended to do. He also tried to spell out why and how he planned to carry out his mission. His words were broadcast to a very wide audience through All India Radio, which transmitted the speeches he gave at the daily prayer meetings he presided over at the Birla House. He called his plan of action a yajna; a sacred sacrifice, invoking as was wont of him an ancient word, pregnant with meaning and symbolism.
A yajna, at its most basic, is a Vedic ritual in which offerings are made to Agni or a specially prepared and invoked sacred fire to the accompaniment of mantras or chants. The recitation, for the ritual to be effective, must be performed correctly, with the right intent and form, according to prescribed rules. The chants themselves are sacred formulae through which the ends of the ritual are accomplished. They actually describe what is being done, offered, or performed while the ritual is in progress. Each yajna thus has a specific meaning and a purpose, but the general aim is to worship and make offerings to deities, re-establish cosmicunity, and to pray for the good of the whole society. Whatever is offered into the sacrificial fire is believed to be consecrated and to reach the Divine.
Gandhi’s yajna was to stop Hindus and Muslims from murdering, raping, looting and displacing each other in the subcontinent. He also wanted the two new countries of India and Pakistan to live in peace and amity with one another. He wished to put a halt not just to the violence but also to the transfer of populations between these countries; Hindus and Sikhs being driven out of Pakistan into India and Muslims from India to Pakistan. He was totally against such ethnic cleansing. In fact, he wanted those who had left their homes in either country, either involuntarily or of their own accord, to return. He especially wished that the women from both sides, who had been abducted, raped and held hostage, be restored to their homes and families. Finally, he wanted the two communities to live in peace within each country. The first and crucial step in accomplishing these ends was the restoration of peace and normalcy in Delhi, which Gandhi believed to be the symbol of the whole country. Peace in Delhi, of course, meant several things: not just safeguarding the life and properties of the Muslim residents of the city, but assuring those who felt forced to leave for Pakistan that it was safe for them to stay; in addition it meant resettling and becalming the hundreds of thousands of Hindu and Sikh refugees who had poured into the city after being driven out of Pakistan, many of whom were baying for the life and properties of the Muslims residents of the city; finally, it meant coping with enormous shortages in food, clothing and housing in the new capital. Gandhi wanted his yajna to tackle, if not solve, all these seemingly insurmountable problems.
If so, what were the offerings and oblations that Gandhi had to pour into his symbolic sacrificial fire? First of all, he wanted a cleansing of heart, followed by a cleansing of hands – rage replaced by compassion, revenge by fellow-feeling, hatred by brotherhood. He wanted Hindus and Sikhs to renounce retaliatory violence and take positive steps to safeguard the life and properties of Muslims in Delhi. He wanted Muslims who remained in India to avow their loyalty to India over Pakistan. He also wanted Muslims who had hoarded arms in the city in order to defend themselves to surrender their caches of weapons and take refuge in the good offices of the newly formed government of India. He also wanted the controls over food, grains and cloth to be lifted so that supplies could be improved. On a more sombre note, he also expected several Indians, both Hindus and Muslims, to lay down, if necessary, their very lives for one another, rather than succumb to violence. He often used the expression that he would ‘dance with joy’ if he heard of such martyrdoms. Eventually, of course, Gandhi offered his own life as oblation in his yajna. Not by accident, he had been preparing for such a finale for several months, regarding it as a true test and validation of his life’s work. Before he was murdered, he went on a fast for five days, from 13 to 18 January 1948, thus literally cleansing and purifying himself so that when he was actually killed, his offering was fit to be accepted by the highest heavens. In that sense, he was in the highest state of purity when he departed from this earth.
The nature of his agenda and the basis for his action in these last days of his life were laid out in a series of early prayer meeting speeches. Speaking on 12 September 1947, he admitted:
It is natural to feel, ‘why not kill the Muslims because our brothers have been killed.’ But I for one cannot kill even the actual murderers of my brothers. Should I then prepare myself to kill other innocent people? I do not believe in meeting evil with evil … I would like to request you not to regard the Muslims as your enemies.
(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 361)
Gandhi did not wish to minimize or underestimate the enormity of Partition, but he was clear that to carry its illogic any farther would only be to destroy one another and the hard-won freedom that both countries had just earned: ‘Just because the country has been divided into India and Pakistan, it does not befit us to slaughter the Muslims who have stayed behind’ (ibid.: 361–362).
Gandhi’s speech at this prayer meeting is one of his most important, not only because it sets out the entire basis of his thought and action during the last phase of his life, but because it also shows how mistaken his critics were in alleging that he was partial to the Muslims or incapable of facing the reality of what was happening in Pakistan. Gandhi’s remarks at this prayer meeting clearly show that he was not turning a blind eye, as his critics claimed, to the plight of the Hindus and Sikhs left behind in Pakistan: ‘I have seen the terrible plight of the Hindus and Sikhs of Pakistan … I claim that my pain is no less than that of any Punjabi’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 362). But how could that be? What was the proof that Gandhi felt their pain when none of his near and dear ones had suffered in the same manner? Gandhi’s answer is stunning in its assertion of his empathy for all sufferers:
If any Hindu or Sikh from the Punjab comes and tells me that his anguish is greater than mine because he has lost his brother or daughter or father, I would say that his brother is my brother, his mother is my mother, and I have the same anguish in my heart as he has.
(Ibid.)
Gandhi’s assertion of identity with all sufferers gives him the right to exhort and cajole them. It was both an ethical and an existential assertion of non-separation from them. Moreover, it was a direct outcome of his renunciation of a private self or identity. Without a trace of that sort of selfishness, how can there be any difference between ‘mine’ and ‘yours’?
Gandhi admits that he also feels anger and outrage like anyone else, but not yielding to them gives him strength: ‘I am also a human being and feel enraged but I swallow my anger. That gives me strength’ (ibid.). Gandhi repeats his earlier admonition that returning barbarism with barbarism is no solution: ‘Should I say that the Hindus and Sikhs of Delhi and those who have come from outside should become barbarians because Muslims are becoming barbarians?’ (ibid.). Moreover, Gandhi strikes at the very heart of any assertion of moral superiority on the part of Hindus and Sikhs just because they did not initiate but merely retaliated against the Pakistanis: ‘The people of Pakistan resorted to ways of barbarism, and so did the Hindus and Sikhs. And so, how could one barbarian find fault with another barbarian?’ (ibid.). Only he or she who has not sinned has the right to cast the first stone. In this case, Hindus and Sikhs could not claim that high moral ground. Instead, Gandhi pleads,
That is why I would like to appeal to all of you to save Hinduism and Sikhism, save India and Pakistan and thus save the whole country. If we remain good to the end, the Muslims of Pakistan would have to be good too. That is the law of the world. No one can change it.
(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 362)
The law that Gandhi refers to is the principle that one party cannot indefinitely go on hurting the other if the other refuses to retaliate. Unilateral violence is very soon spent, but there is no stopping reciprocal violence.
How does Gandhi ‘know’ this? It is his own experience that serves as a guide: ‘I have had enough experience in my 78–79 years’ (ibid.: 363). Gandhi believes that vengeance belongs to the Lord, not to human beings: ‘I can say in the light of my own experience that it is not for us to avenge anybody’s wrongs’ (ibid.). A few days later, Gandhi repeats this much more forcefully: ‘Who are you to punish the wicked for their wrong deeds? They are going to be punished themselves. I have no doubt about it. This is the essence I have drawn from all religions’ (ibid.: 374). Moreover, to return good with good is like a business transaction: ‘He who does good to one who has been good to him is a mere Bania and a pseudo-Bania at that’ (ibid.). Banias were a trading caste, known for their astuteness in business; from time to time Gandhi referred to himself as one, being born in such a community. To him a ‘true Bania’ is one who made profit, who ensured that he got a better return than just his investment. To return good with good, to Gandhi, was thus not the mark of true Bania, but only of a pseudo-Bania. A true Bania would return evil with good so as to get a higher return, the good of his adversary, on his investment: ‘I say that I am a Bania myself; and I am a true Bania. May you not become pseudo-Banias. True human being is he who does a good turn for evil’ (ibid.). Gandhi asserts that he learned this lesson early in his life and that he still believes in it: ‘I learnt this in my childhood. I still believe in the rightness of this’ (ibid.). Now Gandhi comes to the essence of his teaching in a time of great conflict: ‘I would like you to return evil with good’ (ibid.). This he considers to be the sum and substance of dharma:
Let us know our own dharma. In the light of our dharma I would tell the people that our greatest duty is to see that the Hindus do not act in frenzy, nor the Sikhs indulge in acts of madness.
(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 374)
When questions were repeatedly being raised about the loyalty of the Muslims who remained behind in India, Gandhi did not leave them out: ‘I appeal to the Muslims that they should open-heartedly declare that they belong to India and are loyal to the Union’ (ibid.: 364). Next he turns his appeal to the Muslims in Pakistan, but he wishes the Muslims in India to carry his message to the former: ‘And I want the Muslims here to tell the Muslims in Pakistan who have become the enemies of the Hindus, not to go mad’ (ibid.). He wants such Muslims not only to ‘remain faithful to the Union, and salute the tricolour’ but also to exhort their co-religionists in India to ‘surrender all their arms’: ‘I would like the Muslims to surrender all the arms in their possession to the Government. The Hindus too should surrender all their arms’ (ibid.). The result would be clear for the world to see: ‘We should tell them that whatever happens outside, we in Delhi would live like brothers’ (ibid.). He gives them the example of Calcutta and Bihar: ‘The same thing happened in Calcutta and the Hindus and the Muslims have started living like brothers. The Hindus in Bihar have adopted the same attitude’ (ibid.). If Delhi can be saved, then Gandhi can carry its positive results to Punjab which is the worst affected part of the country: ‘You must soon create such a situation in Delhi that I can immediately go to the Punjab and tell the people there that the Muslims of Delhi are living in peace. I would ask for its reward there’ (ibid.). To Gandhi peace is the reward of peace. The big flaw in Godse’s argument was that he considered being peaceful the same as being weak.
Gandhi, it is clear, is peaceable but not weak. Nor is he unaware of Pakistan’s intentions:
The Muslims wanted Pakistan and they have got it. Why are they fighting now and with whom are they fighting? Because they have taken Pakistan, do they want the whole of India too? That will never happen.
(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 365)
What makes him so sure? Given the hundreds of years of Muslim domination in the region, how can Gandhi categorically declare that Pakistan can never take over India? It is because Gandhi has a better sense of the strength of awakened India, and of the Hindus who played a great role in it. He strikes at the cowardice of the Pakistanis in targeting the minorities: ‘Why are they killing the weak Hindus and the Sikhs?’ (ibid.). What will further ethnic cleansing accomplish? By the very logic of violence, once you have eliminated the Other in your midst, you will start fighting among yourselves, as indeed the recent history of Pakistan has borne out. Destroying or driving out minorities does not end violence; it only gives rise to further violence when the majority turns on itself. The image of Gandhi as partial to Muslims that the Hindu right sought to project is ill-founded: ‘If there is any Muslim who has gone mad and who secretly keeps machine-guns in his house, we would punish him. But no one can touch the Muslims who are loyal to the country’ (ibid.). It is a convenient lie to try to justify his killing or to hide anti-Muslim policies.
The lie that Gandhi favoured the Muslims or wished to appease them was created and became an excuse to kill the old man who spoke inconvenient truths. It is true that some of his remarks may be construed as favouring Muslims or weakening Hindus by enjoining them to non-violence and leaving them unarmed against their aggressive adversaries. Yet when the need arose, as we shall see later, he even approved of the army being sent to Kashmir to push back the invaders and protect the defenceless civilians. It is thus a canard to think that he wanted Hindus or Indians to be weak. But it is equally wrong to argue that Hindu fundamentalists are the sole or greater enemy; all fundamentalists are enemies; it is communalism to selectively condemn Hindus to appease Muslims. It is not as if the right wing alone has misunderstood Gandhi; so have the Congressmen. Gandhi was not interested in appeasing anyone, nor did he wish to favour one group over the other. His sympathies were naturally with the under-dog; he wanted the stronger groups to show graciousness, not out of weakness but out of magnanimity.
From an insistence on non-retaliation, which he repeats over and over again, Gandhi goes on to derive a new meaning not only of sanatanism but also of inter-religious harmony. In his prayer meeting on 13 September 1947, continuing from the previous day, Gandhi said, ‘I claim to be a true Hindu and a sanatani Hindu at that’, he says, but adds in the very next breath, ‘That is exactly why I am also a Muslim, a Parsi, a Christian and a Jew’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 368), thus giving an entirely new definition of what it is to be a traditional Hindu. Only a true Hindu, he implies, can have the breadth of vision to see all the different religions of the world as ‘the branches of the same tree’ (ibid.). How then can one branch be superior or inferior to another, truer to the tree or more authentic than the others?
Which of these branches should I keep and which should I discard? From which branch should I pick the leaves and which should I ignore? For me all are the same. That is how I am made. How can I help it? There would be absolute peace if everybody starts thinking like me.
(Ibid.)
However, to carry the metaphor forward, he does imply that some branches, of their own accord, do weaken, rot, or even drop off. It is this process of self-destruction that he wants to avoid in India and Pakistan. Great traditions fall not so much by external aggression, Gandhi suggests, but by their own inner weaknesses and wrongdoings. Gandhi’s criticism, however, is very different from Iqbal’s who, in Shikwa aur Jawab (Complaint and Answer) engages in deep soul-searching on the fall of Muslims from their heights of power and glory. Iqbal’s answer is that the decline of Islam was because Muslims were not obedient and jealous servants of the Lord. Like Moses’s admonitions to the deviant Jews, Iqbal wants Muslims to return to their uncompromising fidelity to Allah so that they might regain their former glory. Gandhi, on the other hand, addresses all – Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Christians, and others – only to remind them that it is not because of their lack of zeal or loyalty that they will decline, but because of their wrong-doing, folly and persistence in the path of evil. Hindu cultural nationalists, on the other hand, saw the partition as an opportunity to establish Hindu dominance, an idea that Gandhi found abhorrent.
Gandhi, like the Buddha, believed that human beings rose or declined by their deeds: ‘If we wish we can turn either into heaven or by our own deeds into hell’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 368). Furthermore, he was quite alive to the very real possibilities of both countries resembling the latter:
And if both the countries become hell, an independent man has no place there. After that we are only doomed to slavery. This thought is gnawing at my heart. My heart trembles and I wonder how I will make any Hindu, Sikh or Muslim understand all this.
(Ibid.)
To imagine that freedom would be lost, and that Indians would be enslaved again, filled Gandhi with anguish.
Gandhi also wished to abolish violence from the private domain. As individuals, he believed that we should also be courteous and non-violent. Violence, if unavoidable, must be left to states, which to him were inherently violent in any case. He constantly urged people not to take the law into their own hands, but to rely on the government to redress their wrongs. Today, few would repose as much confidence in the government machinery, but perhaps in those days, Gandhi was much more optimistic: I tell you that if we become good and behave well the Government will see that justice is done to us. Let the Governments fight each other; but we would not quarrel among ourselves. We would remain friends.
(Ibid.: 370)
Gandhi’s related contention was that the power over life and death was vested only in God or a higher order, not in any individual or human agency. To him, even an aggressor such as Hitler could not kill us unless our time had come. The real power over life and death only belongs to God, therefore none should be afraid regardless of how powerful or well-armed the adversary is: ‘However powerful the person who wants to kill us is, he cannot kill us so long as God protects us’ (ibid.). Human beings must therefore never deviate from righteous conduct, leaving the punishment of wrong-doers either in the hands of the government or to an even higher authority. They must not take the law into their own hands or fear death.
Gandhi is aware that Pakistan has double standards. He does not hesitate to indict it. As he had said earlier, ‘The Government of Pakistan has forgotten its duty’ (ibid.: 362), a charge that he repeats a couple of days later in his prayer meeting of 14 September 1947: ‘It is failure of the Government of Pakistan that the minorities have to run away from there’ (ibid.: 373). Jinnah’s double standards are also not hidden from him; Jinnah, Gandhi knows, only complains about the plight of the Muslims, not the sufferings of the Hindus:
I did not like the statement made by the Qaid-e-Azam … why does he not mention what happened to the Hindus in West Punjab? If Bihar indulged in evil acts they repented it. In Calcutta the Hindus came to me and repented before me. It would be a noble thing if the Muslims do the same and admit that they have done wrong things.
(Ibid.: 370)
But just because he is aware of Jinnah’s duplicity, he cannot be partial himself:
I have seen the things and how can I close my eyes to them? Nor can I cover up the crimes committed by the Hindus. I want to be faithful to all religions. I can betray neither God nor men. I wish to be loyal to all.
(Ibid.)
The failures of the Government of Pakistan are all too evident to him. Lahore, a historic city to whose greatness Hindus and Sikhs also contributed, is now denuded of the latter:
Lahore is almost empty. It is the city built up by the Hindus where I saw the big mansions of the Hindus and so many educational institutions –where else do you find so many colleges? … Today who is in possession of those colleges? All this hurts me. And I feel ashamed that the Government of Pakistan can be so mean.
(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 373)
Clearly the charge against Gandhi, that he turned a blind eye to the sufferings of the Hindus or that he never spoke against Pakistani misdeeds, is wrong.
In addition, Gandhi is also acutely aware of how sorry a figure the two recently independent but now feuding countries present to the world:
the European powers, be it Russia, France or Britain, as well as America will laugh at us and say that we are not capable of preserving our freedom. We are only capable of being slaves.
(Ibid.)
This would ironically only prove colonial claims that Indians were incapable of self-rule. As Winston Churchill, who persisted in believing that granting independence to India was a mistake, famously remarked:
Power will go to the hands of rascals, rogues, freebooters … all Indian leaders will be of low calibre and men of straw. They will have sweet tongues and silly hearts. They will fight amongst them selves for power and India will be lost in political squabbles.
(Quoted in Subramanian 2001: 5)
In contrast, again and again, Gandhi also makes a different point in the context of the battle between Muslims and Hindus: if they (the Muslims) are brutes, should we (the Hindus) also follow suit? Yet he also knows that such an argument cannot hold good if the violence in Pakistan continues:
I also want to tell the Muslims that if the Muslims in West Punjab, the Frontier Province, Baluchistan and Sind go crazy and the Hindus and the Sikhs cannot live in peace there, then the situation becomes difficult for us here. After all, we are all human beings. So let them understand humanity. How long can we go on persuading?
(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 373–374)
But Gandhi’s ethical idealism is not naive. He knows full well what the Pakistani ambitions might have been, but either because he is aware of his own strength or of the impracticality of such ambitions, he is not afraid and wishes that other Hindus and Sikhs should also not be. Without mincing words he says:
let the Muslims admit their mistakes. Let them say that they had wished to conquer Delhi and turn the whole of India into Pakistan but now they have realized that it is not possible to turn India into Pakistan. They must be content that they are already having Pakistan.
(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 374)
Such a realization might result in a resolve in both communities and nations to save and serve one another: ‘Then it would so happen that both India and Pakistan would compete with each other in being good and more sincere in their humanity’ (ibid.). Religion, in that case, would not matter: ‘Whether we look towards Mecca or towards the East, truthfulness lies in our own hearts, and what matters is that our hearts should be clean’ (ibid.). On the other hand, if Hindus and Sikhs also pay back Muslims in the same coin of violence and retribution, Gandhi would rather die than stand mute witness to it:
I told you that since I had come here I would also wish to die here. If we go on indulging in acts of frenzy and become overcome by rage and kill the Muslims, I can have nothing to do with it. I do not wish to be a witness to such a thing. … That is why I would say that whatever wrong the Muslims may do, you have got to be good. If you really want to avenge the evil deeds it can only be through the deeds of goodness.
(Ibid.)
But of course, returning cruelty with kindness, evil with good, violence with non-violence is not revenge at all; it is the highest form of religion. Again, Gandhi wishes, like a good Bania, to derive greater profit from others’ misdeeds than to lose whatever little virtue one possesses in senseless retaliation. Godse vs. Gandhi is thus, ultimately, also about profit and loss of virtue; Godse’s way leads to moral bankruptcy, Gandhi’s to good fortune. But this is impossible to understand from a commonsensical point of view. It can only become evident from a foundational belief that the purpose of human life is ethical progress and spiritual realization. It is only when the ‘higher’ good of winning the soul is clearly perceived that an apparent ‘loss’ at the human, material level is seen as the basis of spiritual profit.
On the night of 14 September, it rained. But instead of enjoying the autumn showers in a violence-ravaged city, Gandhi’s heart weeps for the refugees exposed to the elements:
During the night as I heard what should have been the soothing sound of gentle life-giving rain, my mind went out to the thousands of refugees lying about in the open camps at Delhi. I was sleeping snugly in a verandah protecting me on all sides. But for the cruel hand of man against his brother, these thousands of men, women and children would not be shelterless and in many cases food less. In some places they could not but be in knee-deep water. They have no other choice. Was it all inevitable? The answer from within was an emphatic ‘No.’ Was this the first fruit of freedom, just a month-old baby? These thoughts have haunted me throughout these last twenty hours.
(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 375)
Gandhi’s identification with the sufferers, his penetrating grasp of the real causes of their discomforts, and his cure to their woes is all too evident in his remarks during the prayer meeting on the evening of 15 September 1947. It was a Monday, Gandhi’s day of silence, so his speech was read out by someone else. ‘Have the citizens of Delhi gone mad?’ he asked, ‘Have they no humanity left in them? Have love of the country and its freedom no appeal for them?’ (ibid.). He knows that he is blaming Hindus and Sikhs first, because the city belongs to them. But he continues, ‘Could they not be men enough to stem the tide of hatred?’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 376). Gandhi is, however, aware that both sides have made mistakes, but his advice is ‘precise and firm. Its soundness is manifest’:
Trust your Government to defend every citizen against wrongdoers, however well-armed they may be. Further trust it to demand and get damages for every member of the minority wrongfully dispossessed.
(Ibid.)
What the successive governments in independent India have done, however, is to show that they are incapable of being trusted. Each has played havoc with the nation, offering a deadly cocktail of politics and religion. Pakistan has possibly fared even worse. The citizens of neither country can trust their governments, so perhaps this exhortation of Gandhi would not work in times of unrest and insecurity. The India of that time was, of course, different, with leaders like Nehru and Patel at the helm. But when governments are weak or the rule of law suspended, non-governmental actors fill the vacuum not just to settle scores but to grab their own advantage. This does not mean that Gandhi is utopian or unrealistic. For example, in a disciplined society such as Japan, we saw after the 2010 tsunami how there was no looting or rioting. In the US, on the other hand, the experience of the hurricane in New Orleans was quite different.
The options, as Gandhi states them, are as follows: ‘Either the minority rely upon God and His creature man to do the right thing or rely upon their fire-arms to defend themselves against those whom they must not trust’ (ibid.: 376). It is obvious that Gandhi opts for the former, but can the latter option be ruled out entirely? It would seem that our natural propensity is not to rely on God or others, but on our own strength or capacity for self-preservation. At least that way we can be responsible for both our victories and defeats, but if we surrender agency altogether, whom can we blame when things go wrong? Gandhi’s politics during this last phase is to shift the populace from the latter to the former, it is to create trust not only in God, but in man too. After all, what option do we have other than to trust one another? Indefinite distrust either of God’s laws or of fellow human beings, sole reliance on the strength of arms, uncompromising self-reliance in one’s own capacity to save oneself – all these will only lead, according to Gandhi, to mutually assured destruction.
Reading through this speech, one is suddenly confronted with this remarkable statement: ‘Those who seek justice must do justice, must have clean hands’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 376). Personally, I was struck by it because Gandhi uses the exact same words in the first half of this sentence as he did in his first book, Hind Swaraj (1909), where he admonished his reader not to be so harsh on all Englishmen just because he was fighting from India’s freedom from the British: ‘We who seek justice will have to do justice to others’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 10: 250). To give one’s adversary his due is a great Gandhian principle. Rather than distorting or demonizing the Other in order to justify one’s violence, it is our duty according to Gandhi to see the Other in the best possible light so that one’s own behaviour may be according to the highest possible standards. Again, Gandhi clearly sees one’s moral profit, even if not always immediate worldly gain, in this. The second half of the statement made on 15 September 1947, however, shows how much more sanguine the situation now is: our own hands are not clean, Gandhi reminds us; they are blood-soaked too. Then how can we merely blame the Pakistanis or the Muslims?
The culmination of Gandhi’s yajna was of course his fast from 13 January to 18 January 1948. This fifteenth fast of his life also proved to be his last. On the eve of the fast in his prayer meeting on 12 January 1948, he said, ‘Fasting is his last resort in the place of the sword. … My impotence has been gnawing at me of late. It will go immediately the fast is undertaken’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 224). All his near and dear ones were alarmed by his sudden decision, though they should not have been. Gandhi had had to fast in Calcutta too, before the violence could end. Now in Delhi, he again lay down similar conditions: his fast would end ‘when and if I am satisfied that there is a reunion of hearts of all communities brought about without any outside pressure, but from an awakened sense of duty’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 224). Perhaps it was a tall order, but Gandhi was not fasting purely for an external goal or result: ‘A pure fast, like duty, is its own reward’ (ibid.).
That he took this fast seriously is clear in his letter of 16 January 1948 to Mirabehn in which he called it his ‘greatest fast’ (ibid.: 240). He added, though, ‘Whether it will ultimately prove so or not is neither your concern nor mine’ (ibid.). Unlike the repeated allegation against him that he was appeasing the Muslims, Gandhi clarified in his prayer meeting on the day of the fast, ‘I do not say this in order to appease the Muslims or anyone else. I want to appease myself which means that I want to appease God’ (ibid.: 224). Indeed, one specific target of the fast were the people of Pakistan:
I must say to all those who reside in Pakistan and mould its fortunes that they will fail to make Pakistan permanent if their conscience is not quickened and if they do not admit the wrongs for which Pakistan is responsible.
(Ibid.: 249)
It is incorrect, if not mischievous, to contend that Gandhi was fasting against the Hindus and the Sikhs of Delhi. Even in the last days of his life Gandhi maintained, ‘if I am able to achieve success here I shall go to Pakistan and try to make Muslims understand their folly’ (ibid.: 256). That is why, when Gandhi said
Since I have undertaken the fast in the cause of the Muslims, a great responsibility has come to devolve on them. They must understand that if they are to live with the Hindus as brothers they must be loyal to the Indian Union, not to Pakistan.
(Ibid.: 225)
It would be a mistake to consider only the first half of this paragraph and to quote it out of context. Gandhi was calling upon the conscience of the Muslims to live in harmony with Hindus both in India and Pakistan when he said that he was fasting for them. Nathuram’s defence, before a careful examination of Gandhi’s last days, is therefore revealed to be an elaborate tissue of lies, a deliberate fabrication of half-truths and allegations whose sole purpose seems to be to justify the unjustifiable.
Three days into the fast, on 16 January, when his health was weakening alarmingly and when the doctors attending on him began to worry for his life, he said, ‘I may say that I am in no hurry at all. Hurry will not help our work. I feel ineffable peace’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 245). Even the day before he ended his fast, he said ‘I shall fast for as many days as I can and if it is the will of God that I should die then I shall die’ (ibid.: 248). Earlier, he had insisted that no one should do anything just to please him, nor should there be any hurry because of the threat to his life:
I do not want that anyone should do anything incompletely and tell me that everything is all right. When there is perfect peace in Delhi there will be peace all over India. I have no wish to live if I cannot see peace established all round me, in India as well as in Pakistan. This is the meaning of this yajna.
(Ibid.)
It was, literally, do or die for Gandhi. On the fifth day, already very weak, with alarming signs of deterioration, he said,
I shall terminate the fast only when peace has returned to Delhi. If peace is restored to Delhi it will have effect not only on the whole of India but also on Pakistan. … So long as things do not return to normal in Delhi, they will not be normal either in India or in Pakistan.
(Ibid.: 227)
He had staked his life on peace in Delhi. When he ended has fast on 18 January 1949, representatives of the feuding parties had given written pledges to end the violence and retaliation. Gandhi said ‘I shall break my fast. Let God’s will prevail. You all be witness today’ (ibid.: 257). That he was to lose his life to gain peace in Delhi just a few days later would not have been a matter of regret to him. Indeed, his soul, to use one of his favourite expressions, would have ‘danced in joy’ for having won such a death, though what he really wanted was to see, on the very ‘verge of death’, his childhood dream of seeing that ‘Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis, Christians and Muslims could live in amity not only in Rajkot but in the whole of India’; if they could do so, they ‘would all have a very happy life’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 235). Then though he was an old man, his ‘heart would dance. Children would then frolic in joy to see that there is no strife any more. I urge all of you to help me in this task’ (ibid.). Today, in many parts of India, the children of independent India do frolic around Gandhi’s statues, but his dream of seeing all communities of India living together in peace and friendship is still unrealized.
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