Muslims and Liberals

WHEN INDIAN PRIME Minister Narendra Modi, in his Independence Day speech, was extolling Vinayak Damodar Savarkar as one of India’s national heroes, Mahatma Gandhi’s soul must have responded, “I forgive you, Vinayak!”

In 1965 an inquiry commission was set up under the former Indian Supreme Court Justice Jiwan Lal Kapoor to investigate the Gandhi assassination. Its conclusion: “All these facts taken together were destructive of any theory other than the conspiracy to murder by Savarkar and his group.”

Forgiveness is the only gift that India’s latter-day Buddha would have for his murderers.  They killed the Mahatma because of what they despised as his “appeasement of Muslims.”

Savarkar was the mentor of Nathuram Godse, who pumped three bullets into Gandhi’s chest and abdomen, snuffing out his life in minutes. Savarkar also financed the newspaper Agrani (renamed Hindu Rashtra), of which Godse was the editor and Narayan Apte, the publisher.  Both of them would be convicted of assassinating Gandhi and hanged.

Godse was the organizer and Apte the secretary of Savarkar’s Hind Rashtra Dal outfit, set up to carry out the secret activities of the Hindu fundamentalist organization Hindu Mahasabha of which Savarkar would be the president.  Godse and Apte, too, were members of the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS), a paramilitary organization committed to making India a Hindu theocracy.

Modi’s introduction of Savarkar as a hero of India’s independence struggle reminded me of Sashi Tharoor, a prominent leader of India’s Congress party. Modi had built the world’s tallest statue for his other hero, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, a top Congress leader who was India’s first deputy prime minister and home minister. The statue cost Rs. 2,989 crores and is 182 meters tall, dwarfing China’s Spring Temple Buddha, which used to be the world’s tallest. Modi and his Hindu nationalists adore Patel, the so-called “Hindu face of the Congress,” because of his anti-Muslim biases. Referring to the outlandish statue built for Patel, Tharoor had accused the Hindu nationalist prime minister of trying to “hijack” the Congress statesman (Patel) because Hindu nationalists had “no heroes” of their own in Indian politics.

Was Modi responding to Tharoor’s taunt by billing Savarkar as a leader of India’s struggle for freedom from British colonial rule? Savarkar never really bothered to plunge into the Indian anti-colonial movement. He invented “Hindutva,” Hinduness, the ideology of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and, as mentioned, headed the Hindu Mahasabha. But he’s hated widely in India for his ideology of hatred toward Muslims and Christians and, especially, for his role in eliminating India’s greatest saint and hero ever.

Patel was, of course, one of Gandhi’s two closest disciples, the other being Jawaharlal Nehru. But the Sudra lawyer-politician from Gujarat tried to disguise his animus toward Muslims while Savarkar did not. Well, sometimes the guise of Patel’s animosity toward Muslims was too flimsy as it was when he lamented to the Hindu fundamentalist leader Syama Prasad Mookherjee about “the dangerous possibilities inherent in the presence in India of a section of disloyal elements.” Those allegedly “disloyal elements” couldn’t have been anybody other than Muslims.  While publicly criticizing religious violence, Patel was often reluctant to act against anti-Muslim rioters.

Patel’s anti-Muslim attitudes were the main cause of his estrangement with Gandhi in the last years of the Mahatma’s life. Many attribute this fissure in their relationship to the home minister’s lack of interest in providing the necessary security to Gandhi while Hindu extremists were almost openly conspiring to murder him.

An attempt to bomb Gandhi’s prayer congregation and shoot him dead was botched on Jan. 20, 1948 – 10 days before he was actually assassinated – leading to the publicization of the plot and names of the plotters.  They included Godse, Apte, Madanlal Pahwa, Vishnu Karkare, Digambar Badge, Gopal Godse and Shankar Kistaiya. 

The conspiracy unraveled when Madanlal failed to ignite the bomb, which gave off a puff of smoke, followed by a firecracker-like eruption. One Sulochana Devi, who was among those who saw the incident, got a policeman to capture Madanlal. During a police interrogation, Madanlal confessed that he was part of a seven-member gang who wanted to kill Gandhi and described the plot. The police dragged Madanlal to two hotels where the other conspirators had been staying, but all of them had fled.

This led to public criticism of Patel for his and his Home Ministry’s failure to make proper security arrangements for Gandhi. As a result, the Home Ministry posted nearly two dozen plain-clothes policemen around Birla House, the mansion whose owner had let Gandhi and his attendants live there, but most of the conspirators remained at large. One of those cops, A.N. Bhatia, was assigned to guard Gandhi at his prayer meetings, and a personal attendant, named Gurbachan Singh, was given the task of walking in front of the Mahatma whenever he went to the prayer congregation.

Mysteriously, on the fateful evening of Jan. 30, Bhatia, the cop appointed to serve as Gandhi’s guard, didn’t show up because he had been assigned elsewhere! And Gurbachan Singh decided to walk behind the Mahatma, instead of in front of him, when Gandhi was arriving at his prayer congregation! Khaki-clad Godse, 37, approached Gandhi nonchalantly, shoved off with his left hand the Mahatma’s grand-niece Manu from his side, and fired the three bullets into Gandhi’s frail, 107-pound frame at point-blank range.

Mass butchery, dispossession

The Hindu extremist canard against Gandhi’s “appeasement of Muslims” became shrill and pervasive as anti-Muslim riots began to spread in India with the partition of the subcontinent and Gandhi stepped up his denunciation of the Hindu and Sikh butchery and dispossession of helpless Muslims.

Beginning in January 1947 West Pakistan began to practically empty itself of its Hindu and Sikh populations. These Hindu and Sikh refugees, who had lost everything, were streaming to Delhi and adjoining areas. Some of them, joined by local Hindus and Sikhs, were slaughtering Muslims, occupying their homes, mosques and shrines of Muslim saints. That hurt Gandhi deeply. In response to his pleas to stop the carnage, the refugees told him tales of horror visited on them by their Muslim neighbors in Pakistan.  Gandhi told them of his distress over their plight, but he kept admonishing them that their own religions did not permit them to avenge those injustices on Indian Muslims.

Gandhi told visitors that persecution of minorities would destroy Hinduism, Sikhism and Islam, but he warned Hindus and Sikhs that whereas if Islam died as an ethical system in India and Pakistan it would still have other countries for its ethical existence, but he warned them that Hinduism and Sikhism had “no world outside India” and that the loss of their ethnical core would spell the demise of both religions and social systems. He reiterated these pleas day and night to people in trouble-torn areas he visited, but the killing of Muslims and their expulsion from their homes and properties continued unabated.

Gandhi was outraged by Patel’s and his Home Ministry’s inaction to stop the anti-Muslim pogrom. On Oct. 2, 1947, Patel, among several other Congress leaders, dropped in to convey their good wishes to Gandhi on his 78th birthday. His Irish disciple, Mira, had decorated his room, but Gandhi was in no celebratory mood. He turned to Patel and asked, sternly, “What sin have I committed that He should have kept me alive to witness all these horrors?”

In January 1948 Gandhi learned, too, that Patel had decided to inflict what the Mahatma considered a serious injustice on Pakistan. At the time of the partition, India had assumed the obligation to give Pakistan Rs. 550 million as its share of the immovable property that belonged to the British Indian government. Citing the inroad of Pakistani Pathan tribes into Jammu and Kashmir, Patel announced that India wouldn’t, after all, transfer the money to Pakistan. To Gandhi’s surprise, Patel ignored his caveat to reverse his decision to withhold the payment to Pakistan.

His twin failures – to stop anti-Muslim riots in India and the confiscation of Pakistan’s share of British Indian assets – drove the Mahatma into using his “last weapon” to try to rectify them.

On the evening of Jan. 11, 1948, at his prayer congregation, Gandhi announced that he would soon begin to fast for an indefinite period to persuade the Indian government to pay Pakistan the Rs. 550 million India owed it and, secondly, to stop the killing and dispossession of Muslims by Hindus and Sikhs in India.

“I see the Muslims of Delhi being killed before my very eyes,” the Mahatma told the gathering. “This is done while my own Vallabhbhai [Patel] is the Home Minister of the Government of India and is responsible for maintaining law and order in the capital. Vallabhbhai has not only failed to give protection to the Muslims, he light-heartedly dismisses any complaint made on this count. I have no option but to use my last weapon, namely to fast until the situation changes.”

The Mahatma began his fast on Jan. 13. The news of his fast electrified India, especially Delhi. Initially, some activists of the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha and some refugees raised anti-Gandhi slogans here and there, including at one of Gandhi’s prayer congregations. But everyday Hindus were alarmed about Gandhi’s health. They hit the streets of Delhi in droves, demanding the immediate acceptance of Gandhi’s demands.  RSS and Hindu Mahasabha offices were mobbed and activists of the two organizations were warned of dire consequences if Gandhi didn’t survive the hunger strike.

End of pogrom

It all worked more quickly and effectively than perhaps the Mahatma had expected. The government announced the transfer of Rs. 550 million to Pakistan. Clusters of leading citizens of Delhi and leaders of religious and social organizations visited Gandhi and promised to stop the rioting and persecution of Muslims. Leaders of the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha — Lala Harichand, Lala Hansraj Gupta, R.B. Narain Das, Ganesh Datt, Basant Lal and Narain Dutt — signed a written pledge to do the same thing.

Anti-Muslim riots came to almost a complete stop. More than 130 mosques and some shrines of Muslim saints that had been occupied by Hindus and Sikhs were vacated. Hindus got Muslims to reopen the shops and other business operations they had closed in the wake of the riots.

Gandhi broke his fast on Jan. 18.

That was an eye-opener for the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha. They realized more than ever how tight was Gandhi’s grip on Hindu society, and that their plans to make India a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu religious state) can’t be realized as long as he was alive.

Meanwhile, Gandhi had been working on a plan – almost as grand as the Indian independence struggle  – which was opposed by both Nehru and Patel and which had riled up the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha as never before. The plan called for the promotion of amity between India and Pakistan and reconciliation between Hindus and Muslims in both countries.

On Sept 18, 1947, Hussein Shaheed Suhrawardy, the last Muslim premier of pre-Partition Bengal, visited Gandhi in Delhi on his way to Karachi, then the Pakistani capital. The Mahatma asked him to remind Muhammad Ali Jinnah, now governor-general of Pakistan, of his pledges to protect minorities in Pakistan. And he asked Suhrawardy to inform Jinnah that he would be writing an important letter to the Pakistani leader soon. Later the same day Gandhi told a group of visitors that he hoped to soon “leave for Pakistan” to confront Pakistanis’ atrocities toward Hindus and Sikhs. “I shall not spare them,” the Mahatma promised. “I shall die for the Hindus and the Sikhs there. I shall be really glad to die there.”

In fact Gandhi was prepared to die for Hindus in 1946 in the East Bengal district of Noakhali, where Muslims slaughtered, tortured, and raped many thousand Hindus with hair-raising ferocity and converted many of them to Islam by force. Gandhi spent four months with a small entourage in the district, touring Muslim villages without any protection and preaching peace. Some of his associates said later that they didn’t think the Mahatma would leave Noakhali alive.

Following Suhrawardy’s visit, Gandhi wrote a note to Jinnah, proposing to move to Pakistan and live in Lahore. In a gracious reply, Jinnah welcomed him to Pakistan and suggested that Gandhi live in Karachi, instead. But the Mahatma was determined to settle in Lahore, the capital of the Pakistani province of Punjab, where the worst of the anti-Hindu and anti-Sikh riots had occurred.  Gandhi’s migration to Pakistan was set for Feb. 14. He asked 50 Hindu and Sikh refugee families from Pakistan to get ready to accompany him on his journey to Lahore.

Gandhi’s decision to settle in Pakistan and, especially, try to build close ties between India and Pakistan, angered Patel and Nehru. Always hateful of Muslims and Pakistan, Patel had nothing to do with them. Nehru, happily receiving accolades from the world over as prime minister of one of the world’s largest countries, had no use for Gandhi’s new mission, either. But they didn’t dare to approach their “Bapu” (dad) to ask him to cancel his Pakistan trip.

They sent Lord Mountbatten to try to dissuade him from the journey. The governor-general told Gandhi that his relocation to Pakistan would undermine the positions of his two closest disciples: Prime Minister Nehru and Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister Patel. Both of them, he said, opposed his Pakistan plans. Mountbatten didn’t make any argument about the interests of India or the Indian people that could be hurt by Gandhi’s Pakistan mission. The Mahatma responded to the governor-general’s plea with silence.

The news of Gandhi’s decision to resettle in Pakistan, which circulated in Delhi in early January, drove the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha stark raving mad. They had blamed Gandhi, falsely, for the Congress’ acceptance of Pakistan. In fact in the Congress High Command, Patel was the first to accept the plan to divide old India to create Pakistan, followed by Nehru. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (who never accepted the partition of India) visited Patel and demanded to know if he really wanted to split India to carve out Pakistan.

 “I was surprised and pained,” the Maulana wrote in his memoir, India Wins Freedom, “when Patel in reply said that whether we liked it or not, there were two nations in India.”

The Hindu Mahasabha (like the Muslim League) had proclaimed that the Hindus and Muslims of the subcontinent were two different nations. Patel took his cue from it on many Muslim-related issues.

But Gandhi’s acceptance of Pakistan and plans to reconcile with it and his defense of Muslims against Hindu and Sikh rioters cost him his life.

At his trial for Gandhi’s assassination, Nathuram Godse began his statement with the complaint that the Mahatma had “compel[led] the Dominion Government to pay the sum of Rs 55 crores [550 million] to Pakistan” and said later that “his last pro-Muslim fast, at last, goaded me to the conclusion that the existence of Gandhiji should be brought to an end immediately.”

Gandhi valued Patel’s hard work for the Congress organization. While Nehru pontificated about Fabian socialism in living rooms and had no clue about organizational matters, Patel built the All-India National Congress of the 1930s and 1940s from the grassroots and was in regular contact with its key leaders in the provinces. But the Gujarati lawyer often sizzled in private with ill-disguised anti-Muslim vibes, which was the main reason Gandhi had reservations about his leadership of the Congress or the country. In 1929 and 1937 Gandhi overruled nominations for Patel’s presidentship of the Congress and picked Nehru for the position, instead.  Patel, still an admirer of Gandhi’s, took those two incidents with relative equanimity.

Crucial Choice

But the 1946 election to the party presidency was different. India’s independence was at hand and everybody knew that the Congress president of the day would become prime minister of independent India. Congress presidents were, as a rule, nominated by provincial Congress committees, and in 1946, 12 of the 15 provincial committees nominated Patel for the position while three abstained, and not a single committee nominated Nehru.

Nevertheless, Nehru told Gandhi that he wouldn’t accept any position other than that of the president, and the Mahatma asked Patel to let Nehru have the post. Patel, usually expressionless and inscrutable, frowned. He obviously felt that Gandhi was doing him a grave injustice: He was being asked to hand undeserving Nehru not only the leadership of the organization he had built but also the prime ministership of India against the wishes of nearly the entire Congress organization. But Gandhi was the embodiment of the Congress, and to a large measure of India, and the dyed-in-the-wool Hindu chauvinist couldn’t say no. But it killed the lifelong Gandhi devotee in him, replacing it with a deeply resentful antagonist.

On April 29, 1946, when Gandhi asked Patel to forgo the Congress presidency in favor of Nehru, he knew that he was hurting the man deeply and perhaps losing him as a devoted follower. But the Mahatma had to make a crucial choice. He can either keep a loyal disciple happy or pursue his core value and mission in life, but can’t do both. For a man with a mission of Gandhi’s, the choice was easy. Compassion was Gandhi’s core value (which he said he had learned from the Christian Bible and Leo Tolstoy), and his goal in life was promoting peace and resisting violence, whose worst victims in post-independence India were the Muslims. He believed that violence and injustices against Indian Muslims would get far worse under a Patel-led government.

Prior to the failed attempt on his life on Jan. 20, Gandhi had survived four other assassination attempts, all from Hindu extremists. The elaborate conspiracy that led to this fifth attempt and the fact that most of the conspirators remained at large convinced him that his days on earth were numbered. Other people were talking about it openly. Puchalapalli Sundarayya, the prominent Communist leader of Hyderabad, said at a public meeting that the Hindu Mahasabha, RSS and Sardar Patel planned to “kill the Mahatma to perpetuate fascist rule in India.”

Gandhi hinted and talked openly about his sojourn on earth coming to a rapid end. On Jan. 28, two days before his assassination, he said to his associates, “If I’m to die by the bullet of a madman, I must do so smiling. God must be in my heart and on my lips. And if anything happens, you are not to shed a single tear.”

Early on the morning of the fateful day, Jan. 30, he said to Manu, “If someone fires bullets at me and I die without a groan and with God’s name on my lips, then you should tell the world that here was a real Mahatma…”

A few hours later the Mahatma wondered aloud: “Who knows, what is going to happen before nightfall or even whether I shall be alive?”

In the early afternoon, a delegation of Delhi Muslim leaders showed up. They talked about communal tensions and the refugee crisis. Gandhi said he had planned to visit Wardah in early February and was alerting them about his possible absence from the trouble-torn city for a few days. Then he added: “But if Providence has decreed otherwise, that is a different matter. I am not sure, however, whether I shall be able to leave here even on the day after tomorrow. It is all in God’s hands.”

After 4 p.m. Sardar Patel came in to see Gandhi. They talked about a feud between Patel and Nehru. The visitor told Gandhi that if Nehru did not “change his way of working,” – Gandhi apparently knew what he meant – then Patel would resign from the Cabinet.  

Gandhi told Patel that he had discussed the matter with Mountbatten and agreed with the governor-general that both of them – Nehru and Patel — were “indispensable.” They must work things out, Gandhi admonished.

In came Manu to tell Gandhi that two leaders from Kathiawar had arrived and wished to see the Mahatma.

With Patel sitting by, Gandhi instructed his grand-niece: “Tell them that I will, but only after the prayer meeting, and that too if I am still living!” 

Patel had no reaction to the comment but continued his conversation with Gandhi. Gandhi always began his prayer meeting at 5 p.m., punctually. As the time for the meeting was approaching, his attendants ended his conversation with Patel and rushed him out toward the prayer congregation, where Godse was waiting with his Beretta M1934.

~Mustafa Malik, a retired American journalist, is an international affairs commentator, living in Bangladesh.