The Longest August (7 page)

Undoubtedly, at the core of Gandhi's faith was orthodox Hinduism, with its prohibition on beef and the killing of cows as an integral part of daily life. His view was aptly summed up by the remark “I yield to none in my reverence for the cow.”
35
Like all pious Hindus, he aimed to achieve
moksha
(Sanskrit: liberation) from the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, thus ending the suffering inherent in this cycle. “I am impatient to realize myself, to attain
moksha
in this very existence,” he wrote in
Young India
in 1924. “My national service is part of my training for freeing my soul from the bondage of flesh. Thus considered, my service may be regarded as purely selfish. I have no desire for the perishable kingdom of earth. I am striving for the Kingdom of Heaven, which is
moksha
.”
36
Elsewhere he said that the path toward moksha was “crucifixion of the flesh,” without which it was impossible to “see God face to face” and become one with him. But if such perfection could be attained, the divine would walk on earth, for “there is no point in trying to know the difference between a perfect man and God.” Then there would be no limit to his command of his countrymen: “When I am a perfect being, I have simply to say the
word and the nation will listen.”
37
Around this core of Hinduism was wrapped a layer of Jainism, an offshoot of Hinduism, with its stress on nonviolence, or the nonhurting of any life form.

Following his abandoning of the civil disobedience program, Gandhi undertook a five-day fast of penance as part of his periodic crucifixion of the flesh. All this reinforced his saintly image as a mahatma among the illiterate and deeply religious masses.

There was, however, no letup in his campaign against the British Raj. “How can there be any compromise whilst the British lion continues to shake its gory claws in our face?” he asked. “The rice-eating, puny millions of Indians seem to have resolved upon achieving their own destiny without further tutelage and without arms. . . . The fight that was commenced in 1920 is a fight to the finish.”
38

This article was one of three judged to be seditious, the earlier ones having appeared on September 19 and December 21 of the previous year in
Young India
. Gandhi was arrested on March 10, 1922, found guilty of sedition, and sentenced to six years in prison. As a result of his unexpected surgery for acute appendicitis, he would be freed in February 1924.

During his absence from the political stage, the landscape changed radically.

Retreat and Reaction

The shattered hopes for self-government within a year and the abrupt ending of the civil disobedience movement led to disappointment and frustration among the leaders and the led. There was split among Congress dignitaries, with several of them abandoning noncooperation and deciding to participate in elections to be held under the Government of India Act of 1919.

Some at the top who had disagreed with Gandhi's radical agenda started to drift away from the Congress Party. Among them was Madan Mohan Malaviya, who had been the party's president twice. He transferred his loyalty to the All India Hindu Mahasabha (Hindi: Grand Council), a communal organization founded in 1914 as a counterforce to the All India Muslim League. Addressing the Hindu Mahasabha's annual conference in late December 1922, Malaviya detailed the grievances of Hindus. He referred to the atrocities visited on them by Mopila Muslim peasants in the southern Malabar region (now called Kerala) since August 1921.
In the communal rioting in the Punjabi city of Multan in September 1922, Hindus had witnessed the desecration of their temples by Muslim hooligans, he noted. There were similar instances in Amritsar.
39

On their part, the leaders of the Arya Samaj, a Hindu social reform movement founded originally in 1875 to purge contemporary Hinduism of the caste system and idolatry, started the
Shuddhi
(Sanskrit: purification) movement to return converted Indian Muslims to Hinduism. Some Muslim notables were upset by this effort. Justifying the Shuddhi campaign, Malaviya claimed that during the past year one hundred thousand Hindus had been converted to Islam in Gujarat, an alarming phenomenon. “If when now we are badly treated with a numerical strength of 22 crores [220 million out of 300 million Indians], what would be our condition in future with a much reduced Hindu population if we allow this rate of conversion from Hinduism and do not allow re-conversion into Hinduism?”
40

Relations between Hindus and Muslims were deteriorating. There was a major outbreak of Hindu-Muslim violence in Calcutta in 1923. To reverse the trend, Congress delegates honored Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar by electing him the party's president at their 1923 session within months of his second release from jail. He became the sixth Muslim president of the organization in its thirty-eight-year history. (Five years earlier, when he was still imprisoned, he had been elected president of the Muslim League.)

Jinnah kept well clear of the noncooperation and civil disobedience campaigns. In April 1923 he resigned formally from the Congress Party. In September he was elected a Muslim member representing Bombay in the newly established Central Legislative Assembly, the successor to the old Imperial Legislative Council. In the chamber he continued to press his demand for “a fully responsible government,” first promised by Edwin Montagu in 1917.

Gandhi had hardly recuperated fully from his debilitating surgery after his release from jail when he and Khilafat leaders suffered a major political setback. On March 3, 1924, at the behest of the Turkish president, General Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the Grand National Assembly in Ankara deposed Caliph Abdul Majid and abolished the 1,292-year-old office of the caliph. With that, both planks of Gandhi's noncooperation campaign collapsed.

To Jinnah, a secular public figure, the fate of the caliphate mattered little, if at all. Indeed, he had watched with deepening unease the rising
influence of Muslim preachers—bearing the title of
maulavi
(another derivative of
mawla
, Arabic: master or learned man)—in the community on the issue of the caliph and his continued control over Islam's prime holy shrines in Mecca and Medina. With the abolition of the caliphate, Jinnah's stature in the Muslim League rose. Its delegates elected him the party's president in 1924 for a three-year term.

As someone who believed that politics should be the privilege only of the highly educated, he deplored the way Gandhi had opened it up to semiliterate and illiterate agitators. It was this phenomenon that, in his view, had led to the rising tensions between Muslims and Hindus.

On his part, Gandhi tried to reverse this worrying trend. For weeks he listened to both sides and made independent inquiries. The end result was his article “Hindu-Muslim Tension: Its Cause and Cure” in
Young India
on May 29, 1924. Its extraordinary length of six thousand words could not mask its flaws. It summarized the common perceptions of Hindus about Muslims, and vice versa. It examined a few cases of communal rioting. It castigated each community for its seemingly irrational behavior. He recycled his earlier argument that “we [Hindus] say nothing about the slaughter [of cows] that daily takes place on behalf of Englishmen [living in India]. Our anger becomes red hot when a Muslim slaughters a cow. . . . [But] the cows find their necks under the butcher's knife because Hindus sell them.”
41
What it did not do was to provide an in-depth analysis of the problem in terms of history, sociology, and economics. In the absence of a fair grasp of these disciplines, the task was beyond his intellectual powers.

As for the cure for this centuries-old malady, he concluded that Hindu-Muslim unity was possible because “it is so natural, so necessary for both, and because I believe in human nature.”
42
This circular argument was in essence a cop-out.

Unsurprisingly, his overlong article in English had no impact on the situation on the ground. Periodic rioting continued. But the one that stood out occurred in the town of Kohat (population, forty-four thousand) in North-West Frontier Province (later Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) in September 1924.

The local branch of the Sanatan Dharma Sabha (Sanskrit: Eternal Law Council), a Hindu revivalist organization like the Arya Samaj,
43
published a pamphlet containing a scurrilous poem about Islam purportedly as a riposte to an anti-Hindu poem printed earlier in a Muslim news sheet. This infuriated Muslims, who were 92 percent of the local population. They were not satisfied by the apologies offered by the local Hindu
leaders. A three-day rampage, September 9–11, with looting, arson, and violence, left 155 Hindus dead. The authorities evacuated 3,500 Hindus to the town's military cantonment area for their safety.
44

Fifty-four-year-old Gandhi decided to act in his own peculiar way. In order to “reform” those who loved him, he would fast. This was his attempt to reach out to the belligerents' hearts so that they could share his feelings and react the way he did. On September 17 he announced a twenty-one-day fast in the house of Muhammad Ali Jauhar in Delhi. He was attended by two Muslim doctors. This would show Hindus that their saintly politician trusted Muslims with his life, and that the world would see Mohandas and Muhammad as bosom friends.

On October 8 Gandhi broke his fast with a Muslim preacher reciting the opening verses of the Quran, followed by the singing of the hymn “When I survey the wondrous Cross,” and ending with the Hindu hymn, “Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram/ Patita Pavan Sitaram” (“Chief of Raghu's house, King Rama/Uplifter of the fallen, Sita and Rama”).
45
It was all very moving and widely publicized. But it made little difference at the popular level.

Gandhi's hunger strike was altogether different from what he had done in Ahmedabad in March 1918. The textile workers' strike was a local issue. The mill owners were a small, cohesive group, apprehensive of Gandhi dying. In stark contrast, the Hindu-Muslim issue existed on a national scale and concerned vast, amorphous social entities even if only their urban members were taken into account. The intercommunal misperceptions and prejudices that had grown over centuries could not be dissipated by an ascetic politician voluntarily abstaining from food.

In late December 1924 in Belgaum, the day after the end of the Congress session he presided over, Gandhi attended the cow protection conference. It decided to found an All-India Cow Protection Organization. His strategy was to persuade Muslims to refrain from killing cows and eating beef voluntarily. “Mussalmans claim that Islam permits them to kill the cow,” he wrote in the
Young India
on January 29, 1925. “To make a Mussalman, therefore, to abstain from cow-killing under compulsion would amount in my opinion to converting him to Hinduism by force.”
46

On a contemporary issue such as the rioting in Kohat, Gandhi was unable to reconcile his assessment with Shaukat Ali's. Their joint visit to Kohat to collect evidence had to be scrapped when they were barred from entering the town by the viceroy. They decided to conduct their hearings in Rawalpindi. They ended up viewing the virulent episode from different
perspectives. In January 1925, Shaukat Ali declared that arson and the concomitant shootings were accidental, and that there was no preplanned jihad against Hindus. Gandhi, then serving as the Congress Party's president, stated that the Muslim fury was so intense on September 10 that if Hindus had not been evacuated en masse, many more would have been butchered.
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Gandhi-Jinnah—Parting of Ways

A disheartened Gandhi now channeled some of his time and energy into a campaign to end untouchability practiced by caste Hindus in their treatment of outcastes. At the same time, to bolster support for
swaraj
, he resorted to presenting its realization in religious terms. He argued that the end of the British Raj would lead to the onset of Ram Raj, the golden age of ancient India, when justice and equity prevailed in a realm ruled by Lord Rama. This scenario mesmerized particularly the unlettered Hindu masses in villages but left Muslims cold and alienated. They could not relate to the Hindu god-king Rama and his kingdom, which supposedly existed around 700 to 300
bce
—two millennia before the founding of Islam.

On his part, Jinnah remained an active participant in the 145-member Central Legislative Assembly. He was elected to the assembly's committee charged with exploring the possibility of establishing a military defense academy in India. In that capacity, he spent several months touring major European countries and North America. Among those who accompanied the committee members during their visit to Sandhurst Military College in Britain was Captain Douglas Gracey—later Sir General Douglas Gracey, commander in chief of the Pakistani Army. Recalling Jinnah's arrogant behavior toward the British officers appearing before the committee, Gracey said, “I had to protest and point out that the officers were giving evidence voluntarily . . . and that they had the right to be treated with courtesy. . . . Once Jinnah was challenged, he became reasonable, and he would never bear malice afterwards.”
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Despite the leadership Jinnah provided the Muslim League, its membership in 1926 shrank to 1,330.
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That made him immerse himself further into politics at the cost of neglecting Ruttie. They became estranged.

In November 1927 Lord Birkenhead, secretary of state for India, appointed a seven-member commission of MPs, headed by John Simon, to
recommend a revision of the 1919 Government of India Act. The Congress session in December decided to boycott the Simon Commission because it lacked any representatives from India. Guided by Jinnah, the Muslim League's Council followed suit but by a narrow majority, which caused a split in the party. Lord Birkenhead challenged Indian politicians to draft a constitution that would be accepted by the leaders of various communities.