Great Soul_ Mahatma Gandhi And His Struggle With India Part 11

Speaking to dispossessed caste Hindus, he was hardly more tender. They needed to understand, he evidently felt, that their privileges and vices had something to do with their present misery. Those who don't labor but live on the toil of others are thieves, he said. It's surprising to discover how often he harps on the evil of untouchability when talking to the Noakhali refugees. He even makes collections there for his Harijan fund. Given that he's speaking to caste Hindus who have recently been burned out of their homesteads in strife with Muslims, it seems, at first, inappropriate, an old man's non sequitur. But untouchability had long since become for Gandhi a metaphor for all forms of social oppression involving "high" and "low." If caste Hindus resist dining and intermarriage with Muslims, he's now prepared to say, they're practicing a form of untouchability; in the back of his mind, he may have harbored the thought that many Muslims descended from untouchables who converted. "He had told us time and again," Pyarelal later wrote, "that the Hindu-Muslim question had its roots in untouchability."

After many years of verbal tiptoeing, it seems, he has ceased to speak in code or measure his words on issues of social equality. It's the end of the long intellectual and political journey that began in Durban when he first had the thought that whites treated Indians the way Indians treated one another, as untouchables. Asked what it would take to heal the rift between Muslims and the mainly Hindu Congress, he replied: "Giving equality to the untouchables." What sounds like a riddle is his way of saying what Ambedkar had been saying all along-that the disease in Hindu society starts with the practices of caste Hindus.

On the second day of his Noakhali walking tour, he addresses a gathering of Hindu women in Chandipur. Just as he once traced an earthquake to G.o.d's displeasure over untouchability, he now ascribes the Noakhali calamity to the same transgression. According to the authorized summary of his talk that is more than likely the result of his own rewriting, he said: If they still went on disowning the untouchables, more sorrow was in store for them. He asked the audience to invite a Harijan every day to dine with them. If they could not do so, they could call a Harijan before taking a meal and ask him to touch the drinking water or food...Unless they did penance for their sins...more calamities and more severe ones would overtake them.

The next week he twice urges the Muslim majority of the district not to treat Hindus as untouchables. A month later, still in Noakhali, he's calling for a casteless society. In Kamalapur, he's challenged to say how he feels about intercommunal marriages if he now condones intercaste unions. According to Bose's paraphrase, he responds: "He has not always held this view [but] had long come to the conclusion that an inter-religious marriage was a welcome event whenever it took place." So long, he couldn't refrain from adding, as it wasn't inspired by l.u.s.t.

As the tour proceeds, Muslims mostly keep a distance. Those who come to the prayer meetings are typically impa.s.sive. As described by Phillips Talbot, they "listened quietly to the after-prayer talk, and then went away." The young American wondered if he was witnessing a subtle s.h.i.+ft from opposition to "neutral silence." Had he stayed with Gandhi a few weeks more, he'd have had to give up that thin hope. Increasingly, with the tightening of Muslim boycotts-not only of Gandhi's meetings but of Hindu landowners and fishmongers and merchants-the Mahatma finds himself speaking to Hindus on what might be considered Hindu themes. On February 22 he pitches up at a place called Char Krishnapur, a spit of an island in the delta where his audience is predominantly made up of untouchables, called Namasudras in Bengali. As poor as the poorest Muslim peasants, they'd suffered as much as the richest Hindu landlords during the riots. There Gandhi stayed in "a low-roof shelter improvised from charred, corrugated sheets salvaged from a burnt-down homestead." In Haimchar, which turned out to be his last stop, he told Namasudras they needed to lift themselves up by their own efforts; for a start, they could do away with child marriage and promiscuity, so that "the higher castes so-called would be ashamed of their sin against them."

He'd already mapped out the next stage of his village tour, but here, finally, he felt compelled to come to grips with rising criticism on two fronts, one being his own camp and the other Muslim Leaguers. Though little was said in public, Gandhi's own circle was in turmoil over the brahmacharya test: perhaps even more than the nightly cuddle itself, his readiness to defend it openly, as he had in the first three days of February. Muslim Leaguers continued to harp on his stubborn refusal over four months to go to Hindu-dominated Bihar, where Muslims had been the victims. On the surface, the two issues seem unconnected, but it's probably no coincidence that they come to a head in his mind at very nearly the same moment, for in his own mind they'd always been linked.

In Haimchar, Gandhi spends six days with A. V. Thakkar, called Thakkar Bapa, another aging Gujarati, who'd been his closest and most respected co-worker on issues of untouchability. The two old men debate Gandhi's sleeping arrangements, which Thakkar closely observes on a nightly basis. Thakkar is finally persuaded that the yajna has spiritual meaning for the Mahatma but writes what Gandhi later dismisses as "a pathetic letter" to Manu urging her to withdraw from the "experiment," presumably for Gandhi's sake and that of the movement. According to a less than disinterested Pyarelal, Manu then tells Gandhi she sees "no harm in conceding Thakkar Bapa's request for the time being." Angry and unrepentant, Gandhi blames Manu's "lack of perspicacity," we're told by his biographer who is also her disappointed suitor. Conceding nothing, the Mahatma agrees to let her leave his bed. The yajna is suspended, if not over, and so, simultaneously, is the Noakhali walking tour.

Almost at once, he decides to break it off. He'd said he was prepared to spend years in Noakhali and "if necessary, I will die here." But on March 2, 1947, he donned sandals for the first time in two months, since the start of the walking tour, and began the reverse journey toward Bihar.

For four months he'd been fending off appeals from Muslims across India to prove his good faith by confronting the violence Hindus had wrought. His excuses for not going there earlier had come to sound increasingly far-fetched. He'd long since recognized that the Bihar violence had been far worse than that of Bengal. It was now early March, four months after Nehru had been so appalled by the carnage he'd witnessed in Bihar that he'd threatened to order the bombing of Hindu mobs there. Now, all of a sudden, Gandhi finally allowed himself to be moved by a letter from a nationalist Muslim saying that his Congress had done as little to address the violence there as the Muslim League had in East Bengal.

He promised he'd return to keep his commitments in Noakhali. In the months left to him, he kept that trip near the top of his ever-lengthening to-do list. But with part.i.tion looming and Hindu-Muslim slaughter spreading like an epidemic across North India-perhaps more like a wildfire, since it burned in some places and skipped over others-he faced new demands for the balm of his presence. Noakhali kept having to be put off.

At the midpoint of the tour, there'd been a foreshadowing that would later be recalled as fateful. Gandhi had run out of goat's milk and had to take coconut milk instead. Later that evening the stressed-out old man experienced severe diarrhea, started sweating heavily, and finally fainted. That was January 30, 1947. If he died of disease, he told Manu on regaining consciousness, it would prove he'd been a hypocrite. So Manu later wrote in a memoir. She then has him saying: "But if I leave the world with the name of Rama on my lips, only then am I a true brahmachari, a real Mahatma." So it is written in her gospel. Exactly a year later, on January 30, 1948, when he fell at her side, she'd recall these words as a prophecy fulfilled.

By any secular, this-worldly accounting of Gandhi's months in Noakhali district, it would be hard to show a political or social gain. The rupture he hoped to forestall occurred. Pakistan happened. By June 1948, more than one million Hindu refugees had crossed the new international border into the Indian rump state of West Bengal. In the next three years, that number doubled; by 1970, the total of refugees from East Bengal resettled in India exceeded five million. "The makers of the sh.e.l.l bangles that were obligatory ornaments for married Hindu women, the weavers of the fine silks and cottons worn by well-to-do Hindus, the potters who fas.h.i.+oned idols used in Hindu festivals, and the priests and astrologers who presided over Hindu rituals of birth, marriage and death were among the earliest migrants," according to the scholar Joya Chatterji. They'd fled in hot pursuit of the gentry and townsmen who'd employed them. The social order Gandhi had been willing to give his life to reconcile and reform had been-to use his word-"vivisected." Yet part.i.tion, as he predicted, had resolved little. It led to a division of land, spoils, and political authority, but majorities on each side of the new Bengal had to coexist with a substantial minority. Though a military government had proclaimed contemporary Bangladesh an Islamic republic, it still contained twelve million Hindus.

And, somehow, Gandhi still seems to register there as a possible source of inspiration. A lifetime after he left Noakhali, I found myself in Dhaka, the capital of this Islamic republic, at a well-attended commemorative gathering of intellectuals and ardent social reformers marking the 140th anniversary of his birth. The minister of law lit a lamp. Verses from the Koran were read, followed by a pa.s.sage from the Bhagavad Gita, then Buddhist and Christian prayers, making the event as self-consciously inclusive as Gandhi's own prayer meetings. Five Muslims and three Hindus spoke-against religious extremism and for harmony, the rule of law, clean politics, rural development, social equality-dwelling not on the Raj and Gandhi's time but on today's teeming Bangladesh. A half-dozen TV crews recorded their remarks for the evening news, cameras sweeping across the audience, to pick out upturned faces that could be read as inspired. "The fact is that such a man of flesh was born on our subcontinent and we are his descendants," said a woman introduced as a human rights advocate. "I feel his necessity every moment." The gathering ended with one of Gandhi's favorite devotional songs, sweetly sung by a small, evenly balanced group of Hindu and Muslim students, with most of the audience joining in.

As I said, by any secular accounting, it would be difficult to show a political or social gain from Gandhi's four months in Noakhali district, near the end of his life in 1946 and 1947. Yet this happened in 2009.

12.

DO OR DIE.

EVERYWHERE HE WENT he was urged to go somewhere else. In East Bengal's Noakhali district, where Hindus had been slaughtered, Muslim Leaguers pressed Gandhi to take his pilgrimage off to Bihar and prove there that he was willing to confront a Hindu majority with blood on its hands. Once he finally reached Bihar, Hindu nationalists tried to divert him to the Punjab, where Hindus and Sikhs were being terrorized out of Muslim-majority portions of the province, soon to be sliced off and st.i.tched into a gestating Pakistan. Eventually, with less than two weeks to go to part.i.tion and independence, an overstretched and agitated Mahatma popped up in the Punjab and, speaking in Lah.o.r.e on August 6, 1947, offered perhaps the most surprising of his absolute, flat-out vows. Having said he'd "do or die" in Noakhali, then in Bihar, the man who'd ever after be called "Father of the Nation" now promised: "The rest of my life is going to be spent in Pakistan." he was urged to go somewhere else. In East Bengal's Noakhali district, where Hindus had been slaughtered, Muslim Leaguers pressed Gandhi to take his pilgrimage off to Bihar and prove there that he was willing to confront a Hindu majority with blood on its hands. Once he finally reached Bihar, Hindu nationalists tried to divert him to the Punjab, where Hindus and Sikhs were being terrorized out of Muslim-majority portions of the province, soon to be sliced off and st.i.tched into a gestating Pakistan. Eventually, with less than two weeks to go to part.i.tion and independence, an overstretched and agitated Mahatma popped up in the Punjab and, speaking in Lah.o.r.e on August 6, 1947, offered perhaps the most surprising of his absolute, flat-out vows. Having said he'd "do or die" in Noakhali, then in Bihar, the man who'd ever after be called "Father of the Nation" now promised: "The rest of my life is going to be spent in Pakistan."

He'd been yearning to come to the Punjab, he explained, but now had to rush clear across the subcontinent, all the way back to Noakhali, for he'd committed himself to marking India's independence there on August 15. That's to say, on the day of independent India's birth, he meant to awaken in Pakistan. "I would go there even if I have to die," he said. "But as soon as I am free from Noakhali, I will come to the Punjab."

His head was evidently spinning as, careering bravely from Hindu pillar to Muslim post, he contemplated the impending "vivisection." The only way he could cling to the dream of a united India he'd spun decades earlier on the other side of the Indian Ocean, in Durban and Johannesburg, was to declare that henceforth he'd have two homelands. Perhaps one day they'd be reunited, but for now, obviously, he couldn't be everywhere. This was precisely the point the Congress president, Kripalani, had mournfully made back on June 15, the day Gandhi's movement had put its final seal of approval on the part.i.tion plan over his muted objections. He'd followed the Mahatma for thirty years, Kripalani said, but couldn't go any further. He still felt "that he, with his supreme fearlessness, is correct, and my stand [in favor of part.i.tion] is defective," but simply didn't see how Gandhi's n.o.ble efforts in Bihar could save the Punjab. "Today he himself is groping in the dark...Unfortunately for us today though he can enunciate policies, they have in the main to be carried out by others, and these others are not converted to his way of thinking."

That said it all, but Gandhi carried on. His pledge to return to the Punjab and spend the rest of his life in Pakistan had to be diluted two days later in Patna when he promised to return to Bihar after a few weeks in Noakhali. In fact, none of these promises would be kept. Gandhi was now in the final half year of his life. He would never reach Noakhali, never return to Bihar or the Punjab, never set foot in independent Pakistan. In these final months, his view took in the whole subcontinent, but his field of endeavor was limited to two cities. First in Calcutta, then in Delhi, he managed almost single-handedly to roll back tides of violence by embarking on his final fasts "unto death." He was never more heroic, never more a miracle worker, but the Punjab, acting out Kripalani's anxious premonition, still burned with horrendous ma.s.s violence: Sikhs and Hindus slaughtering Muslims in the eastern portion of the province, now India; Muslims butchering Hindus and Sikhs, seizing their women, sacking their temples, in West Punjab, now Pakistan. Gandhi's theory that inspired peacemaking in one place could prove contagious, dousing explosions of extreme violence in others, would not be borne out until an exhausted subcontinent had to contemplate the fact of his death. By then, hundreds of thousands had been slain, millions displaced.

"The country was part.i.tioned in order to avoid Hindu-Muslim rioting," Rammanohar Lohia, a Socialist leader, would later write. "Part.i.tion produced that which it was intended to avoid in such abundance that one may forever despair of man's intelligence or integrity."

The Mahatma had no elixir other than his presence, his example. Wherever he traveled, his basic strategy was to revive the courage of besieged and vulnerable minorities while shaming and coaxing marauding majorities back to some elementary level of reason, if not compa.s.sion. If he'd lived to go to Pakistan, he'd have extended his protection, such as it was, over the Hindu minority. Since his last months came to be spent in what would remain India, it was the Muslim minority that cried out for his moral s.h.i.+eld. Circ.u.mstances thus cast him as pro-Muslim in the eyes of dispossessed and enraged Hindu and Sikh refugees pouring in from what was becoming Pakistan, in the eyes of Hindu chauvinists generally. Playing the part for which his whole life had prepared him, Gandhi now helped frame the death warrant under which he'd long felt himself to be laboring.

To those charged with the main business of extracting the British and establis.h.i.+ng the new states, the Mahatma's successive, overlapping pilgrimages registered mainly as a sideshow. An impatient Nehru said he was "going round with ointment trying to heal one sore spot after another on the body of India." When the part.i.tion plan came up for final Congress approval, Nehru was so concerned that Gandhi might break ranks that he had his right-hand man, Krishna Menon, seek the help of Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy. The Mahatma was in an emotional, unpredictable frame of mind, Menon warned in the first week of June.

The viceroy then made sure to see Gandhi before he next spoke in public at a prayer meeting. A pressing invitation was sent for him to come to the Viceregal Lodge, a 340-room imperial pile in contrasting shades of red sandstone-which the Mahatma had recently proposed turning into a hospital-for what became a virtuoso recital by this great-grandson of Queen Victoria, the first empress of India. The courtly Mountbatten used all the charm and flattery at his command to persuade his guest that the plan was actually a composite of Gandhi's own ideas about non-coercion and self-determination, a.s.suring what he had long sought-the earliest possible departure of the British. Really, the viceroy said, it should be called not the Mountbatten Plan but "the Gandhi Plan." Gandhi must have known this ma.s.sage was meant for his ego. But it eased the tension he'd been feeling. That evening at his prayer meeting, he said the viceroy was as much opposed to part.i.tion as the Congress. Since Hindus and Muslims couldn't agree, the viceroy had "no choice." If this was less than a green light, it was his way of saying proceed with caution.

In using Mountbatten to get to Gandhi in this way on June 4, Nehru might have reflected that Gandhi had regularly dealt with viceroys and other colonial envoys without bothering to consult his own colleagues. As recently as April 1, Gandhi had "staggered" the newly arrived Mountbatten at their second meeting with the idea of offering Mohammed Ali Jinnah an opportunity to serve as head of the interim government in order to pry him loose from his fixation on Pakistan, long enough, at least, to avoid part.i.tion. Jinnah, in this scheme, would be free to include only members of the Muslim League. The corollary that this might have meant sending Congress into the wilderness didn't particularly disturb Gandhi, who'd have considered that a small price to pay for the country's unity, not to mention an opportunity for the movement to renew itself, finally, at its neglected gra.s.s roots as he'd been imploring it to do for two decades. It was part of Gandhi's proposal, according to Mountbatten's later reminiscences, that it would be the viceroy, not himself, who'd broach the scheme to Nehru and the other Congress leaders. Mountbatten, understandably, declined to serve as the Mahatma's nuncio. By the time he and Nehru touched on the plan, the viceroy had already been told by his advisers that it was "an old kite" Gandhi had flown before, an idea Jinnah had never taken seriously. Nehru's reaction was openly dismissive. He told the viceroy, with whom he was developing a more confidential relations.h.i.+p than any he had with his colleagues, that Gandhi "had been away for four months and was rapidly getting out of touch."

Gandhi drafted a nine-point summary of his plan. This would be the last of countless pet.i.tions and diplomatic notes and aide-memoire he laid before British colonial authorities on three continents over half a century. Then he had to confess to Mountbatten what Mountbatten already knew: that his idea had attracted next to no support from the Congress high command. "Thus I have to ask you to omit me from your consideration," he wrote abjectly, meaning he now lacked the influence to be considered someone who had to be consulted.

When the viceroy first heard Gandhi's audacious suggestion, he asked what Jinnah would say. "If you tell him I am the author, he will reply, 'Wily Gandhi,'" he predicted. That's close to what Jinnah did say. It's not refuted by what Gandhi himself had to say to the viceroy, if Mountbatten's paraphrase more than two decades after the fact can be accepted as somewhat accurate, rather than written off as a snippet of stray embroidery, a misattributed surmise. "Jinnah won't be able to do very much," Gandhi is supposed to have said, "because in effect you can't coerce a majority by executive acts at the center and he'd have less power than he will think he's going to get." The catch in Gandhi's "wily" scheme had all along been that his imagined Jinnah government would inevitably be responsible to an a.s.sembly with a Congress majority that could check it and, eventually, bring it down.

The day after bowing out in his letter to Mountbatten, Gandhi returned to Bihar, where he'd spent scarcely three weeks on his earlier visit. He'd arrived in Bihar late, four months after the worst bloodshed, but found scant signs of remorse among most Hindus, including most congressmen, until he started preaching on themes of repentance, atonement, and unity. Often the killings, he was told, had been accompanied by cries of "Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!"-"Glory to Mahatma Gandhi!"

"I hate to hear Jai Jai shouts," he said. "They stink in my nostrils when I think that to the shouting of these shouts," he said. "They stink in my nostrils when I think that to the shouting of these Jais Jais, Hindus ma.s.sacred innocent men and women, just as Muslims killed Hindus to the shouting of Allah-o-akbar! Allah-o-akbar! ['G.o.d is great!']." ['G.o.d is great!']."

On his second swing through Bihar he managed to stay another two weeks before being summoned back to the capital. His moral authority had perhaps never been higher, but his political isolation couldn't be ignored, leading him to feel, not for the first time, that his career as an active leader might have reached its terminus. The thought still didn't sit easily in his mind. He called himself a "spent bullet" and a "back number." He was now afflicted with a kind of split vision that was becoming chronic. On one level, he was resolute, ready to stand alone; on another, he allowed himself to wonder if the Congress leaders, now going their own way, might have a better grasp on the country's needs. On the train to Bihar, he wrote a letter to his erstwhile disciple Vallabhbhai Patel, now yoked to Nehru in an uneasy duumvirate. "It is just possible," he conceded, "that in administering the affairs of the millions you can see what I cannot. Perhaps I too would act and speak as you do if I were in your place." In context, it sounds like a genuine doubt, not a gesture or courtesy, meant to placate. He's asking whether India can possibly be run on Gandhian lines.

The same sort of split vision shows up in what sounds like a valedictory comment on the efficacy of his campaigns. The nonviolent resistance he'd meant to inspire was muscular, disciplined, brave enough to risk injury, even death; this he called "the nonviolence of the strong." All he'd evoked from the ma.s.s of Indians, he now commented, was mere pa.s.sive resistance, "the nonviolence of the weak." Speaking to an American professor in the first days of independence, he reflects that his career had been all along based on an "illusion." He's not bitter. He even manages to draw a measure of comfort from what he now presents as his disillusion. "He realized that if his vision were not covered by that illusion," according to the summary he authorized of that conversation, "India would never have reached the point it had today." If he'd conned anyone, he seems to be saying, it was himself. With at least a touch of pride, he said he wasn't sorry.

It's monsoon season when he finally embarks on his long-promised return to Noakhali, hoping to arrive in the district in time for the dual independence of Pakistan and India. Going back to Noakhali would be a way of distancing himself from any responsibility for part.i.tion without having to denounce the Congress leaders.h.i.+p, a way also to express his continued devotion to the cause of Hindu-Muslim "unity," now seemingly down to its last gasp. "I do not like much that is going on here...[and] do not want it to be said that I was a.s.sociated with it," he'd written to Patel before embarking on this latest swing. This time he manages to get no farther than a demoted, deflated Calcutta: capital of the whole subcontinent, the entire Raj, until 1911 when the British announced their intention to s.h.i.+ft the seat of government to Delhi; of an undivided Bengal thereafter; now, with part.i.tion, about to become the seat of a smallish Hindu-majority Indian rump state to be known as West Bengal.

The Muslim League government had already decamped to Dacca, about to be proclaimed capital of East Pakistan, taking with it the upper tier of Muslims in the civil service and police, which were suddenly, by default, overwhelmingly Hindu again. Anxious Muslims who remained saw the writing on the wall-revenge for the Great Calcutta Killing of the previous year. Just as the Muslim League's chief minister, Suhrawardy, had called on Gandhi then at the Sodepur ashram ten months earlier with the aim of getting him to change his travel plans, another Muslim League delegation waited on him there the day of his arrival, August 9, with an even more urgent plea. They implored him to stay in Calcutta to protect their community now living in terror, according to them, under the shadow of a Congress government.

"We have as much claim on you as the Hindus," the leader of the delegation, a former Calcutta mayor named Mohammad Usman, said on his return the next day. Usman belonged to the same Muslim League that had done much to precipitate the crisis, that only half a year earlier was decrying the Mahatma's mission in East Bengal. But now that Gandhi had actually gone to Bihar and denounced as b.e.s.t.i.a.l and barbaric what Hindus had done to their co-religionists there, and now that part.i.tion had left them feeling vulnerable in a state where they'd be a minority henceforth and forever, Bengali Muslims left behind in India saw the Mahatma in a new light: as a potential savior. "You yourself have said that you are as much of Muslims as of Hindus," the pleading former mayor said.

Gandhi agreed to delay his return to Noakhali on two conditions. One was that the Muslims guarantee peace and the protection of minority Hindus in Noakhali as he had meant to do; if there were a provocation there, his life would be "forfeit" through fasting, he threatened. The other was that Suhrawardy-who'd rushed to Calcutta from Karachi on hearing of Gandhi's arrival there-join him in a peace committee of two to maintain order in Calcutta as British rule ended.

Suhrawardy was one Muslim League politician whose political fortunes had taken a dive with the advent of Pakistan. The united Bengal he'd governed was about to go out of existence; he would then hold office in neither Pakistan nor India, thanks in part to a quixotic and doomed eleventh-hour push he'd led to keep Bengal united, even if that meant its being part.i.tioned off as a third independent state. The failure of that effort left the chief minister, an Urdu speaker who was not viewed as a true Bengali, as a leader without a following, an isolated, uncommitted actor with what seemed to be dwindling prospects. In the Mahatma's depressed mood, that defined him again as a sympathetic character; it might even be said, as a disappointed fellow sufferer.

The idea of a single Bengal uniting Hindus and Muslims had appealed to Gandhi as a refutation of Jinnah's theory that they were, by definition, two nations-so much so that during the movement's brief spasm in May, this elderly non-Bengali, this beginning student of the Bengali language, had offered to enlist as what amounted to a headquarters warrant officer. "I am quite willing," the aging Mahatma wrote to Suhrawardy then, "to act as your honorary private secretary and live under your roof, till Hindus and Muslims begin to live as the brothers they are."

"What a mad offer!" Suhrawardy was supposed to have responded. "I will have to think ten times before I can fathom its implications." In effect, Gandhi was offering to revive the partners.h.i.+p he'd had a quarter of a century earlier with the Khilafat leader Muhammad Ali.

He wasn't one to waste an inspiration. So taken was he with this latest scheme for reaching across the communal divide that now, three months later, on the eve of independence, he revived it, daring Suhrawardy to move with him into a troubled area of Calcutta whose Muslim residents felt vulnerable, to live with him there under the same roof without military or police protection. The Muslim Leaguer took a night to think it over, then agreed, attaching no conditions. On August 13, with less than two days to go to independence, the two moved into a ramshackle, abandoned mansion in a teeming area called Beliaghata where Muslim bustee bustee, or shanty, dwellers lived at close quarters with marginally less impoverished Hindus who lived in houses, into which refugees from East Bengal had lately been crowding. The neighborhood had already been shown to be a tinderbox. Hindu gangs attacked Muslim dwellings with Sten guns and homemade grenades, putting their residents to flight.

On his arrival, Gandhi was greeted with black flags and a chorus of abuse from a crowd of two hundred or so Hindus, some of whom tried to shove their way into the building through the window of the room reserved for the Mahatma. An attempt to close the old shutters was met by a barrage of stones. Once the young Hindu men were more or less calmed down, they demanded to know why Gandhi was so concerned about Muslims.

He faced down the rowdiest in discussions that seem to have gone on for an hour or more. "We don't need your sermons on ahimsa," one of these young Hindus supposedly blurted out to his face. Gandhi told them he wouldn't be bullied, that he'd never give in to force, nor call for help. Then he took up their charge that he was an enemy of Hindus. "Can't you understand that being a Hindu by religion, deed and name, I cannot possibly be an enemy of my own community?" he retorted. To that the young men had no answer. Some finally volunteered to stand guard over him.

A bemused Vallabhbhai Patel was only slightly more understanding. "So you have got detained in Calcutta...[in] a notorious den of gangsters and hooligans. And in what company too!" he wrote from New Delhi, where he was running the Home Ministry, making him the Indian official with paramount responsibility for keeping the peace. "It is a terrible risk."

The Hydari Manzil, as the dilapidated one-story villa was known, had only one toilet to accommodate its guests and the hundreds of visitors they attracted daily and only one charpoy, or string cot, which the old man refused to use as a bed, preferring the floor. The strong smell of ammonia, used in a hasty mopping to disinfect the place before the Mahatma moved in, hung in the air that first day. The scale of the villa was the only clue to its former opulence: ceilings about thirty feet high, large cas.e.m.e.nts and doorways, the gla.s.s and the doors often smashed. Keeping his distance from the independence celebrations in Delhi, Gandhi made it his headquarters for the first three roller-coaster weeks of Indian independence. Today, with the installation of marble wainscoting, fluorescent lights, and the usual displays of old photographs, it's a museum, yet another Gandhi shrine, only dimly reflective of the fears and pa.s.sions that surged and then were tamed there in 1947.

He'd been saying that he'd devote himself to fasting and spinning on Independence Day, August 15. When the BBC asked that he record a special independence message, the old man replied: "They must forget that I know English." When All India Radio came with a similar request, he said: "I've run dry." He awoke at 2:00 a.m. that day after only three hours of sleep. Beliaghata was quiet at that early hour, but a small, mostly Muslim crowd was waiting outside to congratulate him on the achievement of freedom. When daylight came, larger crowds began to gather. Strikingly, they were mixed; Hindus and Muslims who'd been taking up offensive and defensive positions days earlier were now celebrating together; according to contemporary reports, they were embracing and calling each other "brothers." The euphoria lasted two weeks. Instead of another Great Calcutta Killing, there was suddenly talk of a Calcutta miracle, which many were quick to attribute to Gandhi's presence and the example he'd set.

With Suhrawardy at the wheel, Gandhi went out for a drive two nights in a row to witness the big civic party, soak up the joy. At first he wouldn't allow himself to be drawn in, even when crowds in a Muslim section surrounded his car crying, "Jai Hind!" At his prayer meetings on the fifteenth and sixteenth, he spoke with chagrin about the rampaging celebrants who'd surged through Government House, the former seat of the viceroys (newly turned over to an Indian governor on Independence Day), stealing the silver, defacing pictures more or less in the spirit of the rowdy crowd that celebrated Andrew Jackson's inauguration by ransacking the White House; and as reports came in on rioting in Lah.o.r.e on the other side of the subcontinent, Gandhi went on mournfully about the bloodshed with which independence was being marked. His doubts about the durability of the Calcutta miracle persisted. "What if this is just a momentary enthusiasm?" he wrote to Patel.

From one moment to the next, he was torn between wariness and hope. As the mixed throngs of Hindus and Muslims that turned out almost daily to hear him and Suhrawardy continued to swell-to half a million or more, it was reported on at least two occasions-he was reminded of the high tide of the Khilafat movement that had swept him into a position of national leaders.h.i.+p. "One might almost say that the joy of fraternization is leaping up from hour to hour," he allowed himself to write.

Shaheed Suhrawardy, who'd tried to maneuver him out of Noakhali earlier in the year, now basked in the glow of the Mahatma, paying him tribute for the joy and relief Calcutta was drawing from its astonis.h.i.+ng plunge into amity. "All this is due to the infinite mercy of Allah and the good work of our beloved Bapu," this Muslim Leaguer said. Mountbatten, now governor-general of an independent India, noted that a "boundary force" under British officers had been dispatched to the Punjab in hopes of containing the violence there. "In the Punjab," he wrote, "we have 55,000 soldiers and large-scale rioting on our hands. In Bengal our forces consist of one man, and there is no rioting...May I be allowed to pay my tribute to the One Man Boundary Force, not forgetting his Second-in-Command, Mr. Suhrawardy."

Mountbatten's letter was delivered to Gandhi on August 30. Gandhi then scheduled his return to Noakhali for September 1. But that day didn't dawn peacefully. On what was to have been his last evening in Calcutta, the Hydari mansion, his Beliaghata command post, was again invaded by surly young Hindus with a score, they said, to settle with Suhrawardy. Luckily, the former chief minister had gone home to pack for the Mahatma's Noakhali trip, for which he'd enlisted. According to Gandhi's account, the invaders were carrying a Hindu man wrapped in bandages who had been stabbed by a Muslim, or so they claimed. On closer examination, it was shown he hadn't been stabbed at all. Gandhi had just retired for the night; at first, he said, he lay still with his eyes shut. Then, hearing shouts and the smas.h.i.+ng of more gla.s.s, the old man stepped into the adjoining reception room to face the attackers. It was his silent day, the one day a week he refrained from speech, but given the provocation, he made an exception.

"What is all this?" he demanded. "Kill me, kill me, I say. Why don't you kill me?"

He was speaking Hindi. Even after his words were translated into Bengali, they'd no effect. A chunk of brick was thrown at a man mistaken for a Muslim who'd been standing near the Mahatma. "Is this the reality of the peace that was established on August 15th?" a distraught but undaunted Gandhi then asked. "I offer myself for attack."

Again, there had to be a pause for translation. Slowly his words sank in, but as he himself wrote the next day after gathering reports of violent outbreaks around the city, "The Calcutta bubble seems to have burst...What was regarded as a miracle has proved a short-lived, nine-day wonder." Within hours, having scrubbed the trip to Noakhali yet again, he'd resolved to stay in place and fast. It was, he'd said, his "fiery weapon," or sometimes, his "infallible weapon." Perhaps this time it would touch hearts in the Punjab as well as Calcutta. "If I lack even the power to pacify the people," he wrote to Patel, "what else is left for me to do?"

The day after the attack on the Hydari mansion, about fifty persons were reported to have been killed and three hundred injured in uncontrolled rioting in Calcutta. Troops were called out, but there weren't nearly enough to handle the situation; the local garrison had been depleted by rea.s.signment of units to crisis areas in North India and the Punjab. The city seemed to be slipping back, heading for a reenactment of the previous year's "great killing," when Gandhi began his fast on September 2.

Two days later it was quiet. Large peace marches, propelled by an urgent sense of necessity, headed for Beliaghata to a.s.sure the Mahatma that this time the truce would hold. Militant Hindu groups and known gangsters came and laid at least some of their weapons at his feet. Untold thousands fasted in sympathy, including members of the police. Two Hindus, striving as Gandhian peace workers to protect Muslims under a.s.sault, were themselves cut down, thus fulfilling, with the sacrifice of their lives, his most severe definition of satyagraha. All accounts point to one conclusion, that the city was gripped by a sense of how unthinkable, how disgraceful, it would be to let the saintly old man who'd led the independence struggle die within its precincts at what was supposed to be the dawn of India's freedom.

On the evening of the third day, a remarkable gathering, representing virtually the entire religious and political spectrum, crowded into Gandhi's room to urge that he break the fast. There were leaders of the Congress and the Muslim League, of the Sikhs who'd been aroused by reports of the ma.s.sacres in the Punjab, of the militant Hindu Mahasabha; and there was Shaheed Suhrawardy, the former chief minister, publicly atoning for his failure at the time of the Great Calcutta Killing by orchestrating the proceedings. Living up to the stereotype of his Bania caste, Gandhi bargained before settling.

The delegation would have to meet two conditions to satisfy him. First, they'd have to sign an open-ended pledge that communal violence would never recur in Calcutta; that was the easy part. Second, the pledge would have to include a promise that if it did break out again, each would personally lay down his life to restore peace. The leaders withdrew to another room, then returned with the doc.u.ment he'd demanded. The same Bengali song Tagore had sung at the end of the fast in Yeravda prison fourteen years earlier was sung again as Suhrawardy did the honors, handing Gandhi a small gla.s.s of sweet lime juice: "When the heart is hard and parched up, come upon me with a shower of mercy."

Calcutta rejoiced. His old comrade Rajagopalachari, West Bengal's new governor, said nothing Gandhi had achieved, "not even independence," had been "so truly wonderful as his victory over evil in Calcutta." Gandhi's own depiction of his role sounds humble enough but, on a careful reading, reflects his mounting conviction that he'd been chosen to serve as peacemaker. "This sudden upheaval is not the work of one or two men," he wrote on first hearing talk of a Calcutta miracle, before either the renewed violence or the fast that ended it. "We are toys in the hands of G.o.d. He makes us dance to His tune."

Three days later, on September 7, he left by train for Delhi, on what would prove to be the final stage in his long life as wanderer and seeker, a perpetual pilgrim, leaving unfulfilled his pledges to return to Noakhali or start a sojourn in Pakistan's portion of the Punjabi killing fields. What kept him in Delhi was the spread of the wildfire of communal violence to the city, which was really in those days two cities that hadn't yet grown together: old Delhi, former Mughal capital, scene of a rebellion against British control nearly a century earlier in which Hindu as well as Muslim troops had fought in the previous century to restore a Muslim dynasty; and New Delhi, proud seat of the foreign imperium, completed as it was losing its grip on the subcontinent, newer in 1947 than such later twentieth-century creations as Brasilia or Islamabad are today. Delhi is actually as close to Lah.o.r.e as Was.h.i.+ngton is to New York. Suddenly, now, they were worlds apart as traumatized Hindu refugees streamed across the border telling of family members and homes they'd lost, the devastation they'd witnessed. With seeming inevitability, a furious spirit of revenge and sheer human need combined to extend the chain reaction that the Great Calcutta Killing had ignited thirteen months earlier: Hindus driven from their homes in the Punjab now joined forces with local extremists to drive Muslims from their homes in Delhi.

It was still the first month of Indian independence. Soon one in four of the capital's residents would be cla.s.sed as refugees. By the time Gandhi arrived in Delhi on the morning of September 9, mosques were under attack, mob looting and killing were only beginning to taper off after rolling unchecked for several days, bodies were still being picked up from the streets, and a military curfew had been imposed. Fresh from his "miracle," an understandably shaken but calm Mahatma followed his own drill, doing what he'd done successively over those months in Noakhali, Bihar, and Calcutta: promising to stay in the capital until it was entirely peaceful, to "do or die." This time his favorite s.h.i.+bboleth would burn like a fuse.

So thick were the insecurity and fear gripping the capital that Patel told Gandhi, in no uncertain terms, that he couldn't possibly return to the quarter of the most despised untouchables, the Bhangis, or sweepers, which he'd been pointedly using as his Delhi base for the better part of two years. In his own mind, making Indians and foreigners who wanted to call on him come to the Bhangi colony was simply a logical extension of the struggle against untouchability that he regularly traced to his experiences in South Africa.

Without his knowing it, the Bhangi colony had been partially turned into a stage set before he took up residence there in 1946 by minions of the industrialist G. D. Birla, his chief financial backer. Mr. Gandhi, meet Mr. Potemkin. Margaret Bourke-White, the American photojournalist, has a wonderfully dry description of how they'd razed an authentically miserable shantytown and, banis.h.i.+ng half its population, had thrown up, for those allowed to remain, rows of tidy little mud houses with cas.e.m.e.nts and doorways providing decent ventilation, all arrayed on a regular grid of widened paths edged in brick, watered daily to keep down dust. Electricity, electric fans, and phones were part of this new deal, according to her account. There in the somewhat larger but still modest structure that had been put up for Gandhi, near a small freshly whitewashed temple, he conferred with Congress leaders and British cabinet ministers. When he had to leave what was now the most presentable, least malodorous slum in India, for conferences at the palatial Viceregal Lodge, he'd been chauffeured in the industrialist's "milk-white Packard car."

But now the Bhangi colony and its environs had been swamped by refugees, many of them disposed to blame Gandhi for their fate, so it was considered only prudent for him to be reinstalled in Birla House, the industrialist's s.p.a.cious, high-ceilinged mansion on one of New Delhi's broad new boulevards, with its deep, carefully tended garden. He was no stranger to the challenge of maintaining his regime of austerity in surroundings of luxury. Birla House had been his Delhi base for most of the two decades before he was inspired to move in with the Bhangis. On September 16, a week after he arrived in Delhi, he returned to the neighborhood of the Bhangi colony for a meeting with a right-wing extremist group that drilled on the banks of the Jamuna nearby. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, had been blamed for much of the violence; it later would be banned in the crackdown on Hindu extremists following Gandhi's a.s.sa.s.sination. But instead of condemning them on this last encounter, the Mahatma tried to find common ground as one Indian patriot speaking to others in the cause of civil peace. His session that day with the RSS-which has taken in recent decades to mentioning his name in its daily roll call of Hindu heroes-was supposed to be followed by a prayer meeting. But rowdy Hindu hecklers made prayers impossible. "Gandhi murdabad!"-"Death to Gandhi!"-they cried, after an attempt was made to read verses from the Koran, a standard part of his ec.u.menical ritual. Thereafter, for the next four and a half months, his prayer meetings were held in the presumed security of Mr. Birla's walled garden, where finite crowds could be infiltrated and closely watched by plainclothesmen. Today mansion and garden are preserved as the Gandhi Smriti, the scene of the Mahatma's martyrdom.

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At ease on a frilly Birla House pillow, 1942 (photo credit i12.1) (photo credit i12.1)

The Bhangi colony also has its Gandhi shrine today. Bhangis don't go by that disparaged name anymore. They prefer to call themselves Balmikis (sometimes, in Roman letters, spelled Valmikis) after an ancient saint, Ris.h.i.+ Balmiki (or Valmiki), the mythical author of the Ramayana Ramayana, the Hindu epic, whom they claim as an ancestor and now semideify; or so the figure of the holy man in the small temple hard by the reconstructed Gandhi house seems to suggest. To approach the temple, visitors must remove any footwear. To enter the Gandhi house-or, for that matter, approach the point in the Birla garden where he fell-they must do the same. Perhaps, despite his clearly expressed wishes, his status as something more than a human may still be evolving. Birla House is a major tourist stop. The former Bhangi colony is seldom visited, except at election time when Congress politicians call. But Gandhi's portrait is freshly garlanded there on a regular basis as it is in few other Dalit quarters, if any, across the subcontinent today. Meanwhile, the Balmikis live in four-story cream and maroon concrete apartment houses put up by the state, with cute little balconies attached to each apartment.

When Gandhi stayed there, the quarter was isolated; now its residents have ready access to one of the stations of Delhi's new metro. Mostly, they're still sweepers, drawing something better than starvation wages from the New Delhi Munic.i.p.al Corporation. But only former Balmikis, the renamed Bhangis, seem to live in these unofficially segregated quarters. The best that can be said is that while their circ.u.mstances have obviously improved, their status seems to be evolving in an Indian way with glacial slowness, more than six decades after Gandhi lived among them.

Despite his displacement from the Bhangi colony, Gandhi continued to preach against untouchability in the final four months of his life, a theme second only in his discourse in this time to his harping on the need for Hindus to give up their retaliation against Muslims. "Anger is short madness," he told them, imploring them "to stay their hands." A tour of Hindu and Muslim refugee camps in which no latrines had been dug and the stench of human excrement was unavoidable instantly reignited the revulsion he'd felt in Calcutta in 1901, in Hardwar in 1915, only this was now 1947 and India was supposed to be free. "Why do [the authorities] tolerate such stink and stench?" he demanded to know. They should insist that the refugees clean up after themselves. "We must tell them that we would give them food and water but not sweepers," he said. "I am a very hard-hearted man."

His prayer meetings, broadcast nightly on the radio for fifteen minutes, became a diurnal part of life in the still-seething capital. A whole lifetime later, it's not easy to gauge the impact of these broadcasts. They didn't attract huge numbers to the prayer meetings in the Birla garden, where the actual crowds, usually in the hundreds, were small compared with the ma.s.sive throngs of Hindus and Muslims that had turned out to hear him weeks earlier in Calcutta. Jawaharlal Nehru, installed as India's first prime minister, came to sit with him every evening in the relatively small chamber Gandhi occupied on the ground floor, just off a stone patio where he sunned himself after his baths, wearing a broad-brimmed straw peasant's hat that had been given to him in Noakhali. The routine of Nehru's visits left an impression that the old man was being consulted on urgent problems. Left unclear was how much guidance he offered, how likely it was to be heeded.

"They are all mine and also not mine," he said of his old colleagues, now in power, who were sending troops to Kashmir, a measure he couldn't approve but wouldn't deplore. A spinning wheel, a small writing desk, and a thin mattress that folded up during the day were his only possessions of any size in that room. An exhibit case now displays smaller items he kept there, which were notable for their paltriness: wire-frame eyegla.s.ses and their case, a metal fork and spoon, a wood fork and spoon, a knife, a pocket watch, and his walking stick.

He stuck to his causes-discoursing on peace and the desirability of Hindustani as a national language, even the best way to handle compost-and stuck to his daily schedule, rising hours before daybreak for prayers, his walk, meal, bath, enema, and ma.s.sage. As always, that was the time for him to start in on his correspondence before receiving visitors, Muslim and Hindu, who brought him their sense of Delhi's mood, how near to the surface violence still lurked. What he heard was seldom encouraging. Muslims were still fleeing, and few Hindus were willing to lift a finger, despite his pleas, to make them feel wanted, let alone safe. His own mood reverted to the intermittent uncertainty darkening to despair that had weighed on him in Srirampur. "These days, who listens to me?" he said in his third week back in Delhi. "Mine is a lone voice...I have come here and am doing something but I feel I have become useless now."

On October 2, 1947, the last birthday of his life, turning seventy-eight, he said he didn't look forward to another one. "Ever since I came to India," he said, "I have made it my profession to work for communal harmony...Today we seem to have become enemies. We a.s.sert that there can never be an honest Muslim. A Muslim always remains a worthless fellow. In such a situation, what place do I have in India and what is the point of my being here?" He doesn't know whether to blame himself or the Hindus of Delhi. At one moment he says the citizens of Delhi must have gone mad; at another he wonders aloud, "What sin must I have committed that [G.o.d] kept me alive to witness all these horrors?"

As the weeks wear on, his mood, if anything, becomes steadily more lugubrious, even though the level of outright violence, in Delhi at least, falls off. "On the surface things are sufficiently nice," he writes to Rajagopalachari in Calcutta, "but the under-current leaves little hope." Two weeks later he informs a prayer meeting that 137 mosques have been grievously damaged or destroyed in Delhi alone, some of them turned into Hindu temples. This is sheer irreligion, he scolds, not in the least excused by the fact that Hindu temples have been converted into mosques in Pakistan. Three weeks after that, he's still on a tear. "Misdeeds of the Hindus in [India] have to be proclaimed by the Hindus from the roof-tops," he says, "if those of the Muslims in Pakistan are to be arrested or stopped." The dispossessed Hindu refugees and Hindu chauvinists show little sign of being shamed by this fierce Jeremiah in their midst. On the contrary, some of them are easily roused against him, as Gandhi has seen.

India has now been free and independent for about four months. And the leading shaper of that independence remains unsettled and despairing. In the early days of 1948 he broods on the thought that since he'd obviously failed to meet the first half of his injunction to himself to "do or die" in Delhi, it's time for him to test the second. No single catastrophe served as catalyst for his decision to start his seventeenth and final fast on January 13. In the days running up to the fast, he'd been forcefully struck by several indications that matters were on a downward slide. First he received a detailed account of rampant corruption at all levels of the newly empowered Congress movement in the Andhra region of southeastern India. Then some nationalist Muslims asked him to help them emigrate from India to Britain now that it had become clear that they could find no secure place in either India or Pakistan. What a destination for nationalists at the end of their struggle, Gandhi remarks. Finally, Shaheed Suhrawardy, who'd been attempting informal mediation with Jinnah in consultation with Gandhi and who, until that point, had left the Mahatma with the impression that he still considered himself an Indian, now told him that he didn't feel safe moving around Delhi, even by car.

Suhrawardy, who'd been told by Jinnah that he was turning into Gandhi's stooge, returned from Karachi with a request on Pakistan's behalf. He asked Gandhi to intercede to unfreeze Pakistan's share of British India's a.s.sets that the new Indian government was bound by treaty to pay, a considerable sum by the standards of the time (500 million rupees, about $145 million at prevailing exchange rates). Gandhi's increasingly disgruntled follower Patel-who was least inclined to follow him on issues touching Muslims-had convinced the cabinet that the money should be withheld pending a settlement on questions such as Kashmir; otherwise, he argued, the a.s.sets might be used to buy arms and ammunition. Mountbatten, now the governor-general, had also brought the issue to Gandhi's attention, thereby infuriating Patel, who said the Englishman had no right to lobby against a cabinet decision. Neither the former viceroy nor the former chief minister had any way of imagining that Gandhi's interest in the issue of the a.s.sets, which they had stoked, could prove fatal.

Announcing the fast at his prayer meeting on January 12, the Mahatma mentioned the insecurity of Muslims and the Congress's corruption but not the blocked payment to Pakistan. "For some time my helplessness has been eating into my vitals," he said. "It will end as soon as I start a fast...I will end the fast when I am convinced that the various communities have resumed their friendly relations, not because of pressure from outside but of their own free will." But on the second day of the fast, the cabinet convened at Birla House, beside a string bed on which the old man was lying, for reconsideration of the frozen a.s.sets issue. An aggrieved Patel, momentarily convinced that he was the target of his leader's fast, complained bitterly to Gandhi, then left for Bombay on the fast's third day, though the Mahatma by then had visibly weakened. "Gandhiji is not prepared to listen to me," he's reported to have said. "He seems determined to blacken the names of the Hindus before the whole world."

Confronted with the charge that his fast was on behalf of Muslims and against Hindus, Gandhi readily conceded that it was basically true. "All his life he had stood, as everyone should stand, for minorities and those in need," he said, according to the transcript of his talk that he authorized following the prayer meeting on the first evening of the fast.

The timetable here is vital, for it meshes fatefully and finally locks into the crude cogs of a Hindu extremist plot being pursued with amateurish zeal in the city of Poona, near which the British had imprisoned Gandhi three times for a total of six years. Now with the departure of the British, he could be caricatured there as an enemy of Hindustan. By his a.s.sa.s.sin's own testimony, it was Gandhi's announcement of his fast on the twelfth that had lit the fuse on the plot he and his main accomplice hatched starting that night; and it was the declaration three days later that the cabinet had reversed itself and decided to transfer the blocked reserves to Pakistan, explaining that it was moved by a desire "to help in every way open to them in the object which Gandhiji has in heart," that had clinched the secret verdict of the conspirators condemning him to death. Patel's absence from Delhi, meanwhile, would ensure that the Home Ministry was without firm leaders.h.i.+p. "Every condition given by [Gandhi] for giving up the fast is in favor of Muslims and against the Hindus," Nathuram G.o.dse would later testify at the trial where he was finally sentenced to hang for what he represented as a patriotic imperative. Among Gandhi's conditions had been the return to Muslim custody of the mosques that had been attacked, desecrated, and turned into Hindu temples.

Of the unfreezing of the a.s.sets, the a.s.sa.s.sin would say: "This decision of the people's government was reversed to suit the tune of Gandhiji's fast. It was evident to my mind that the force of public opinion was nothing but a trifle when compared with the leanings of Gandhiji favorable to Pakistan." The victim's sterling virtues were an inherent part of the problem, of the obstacle he represented. "A most severe austerity of life, ceaseless work and lofty character made Gandhiji formidable and irresistible," the a.s.sa.s.sin said in his ex post facto justification of his deed. Something had to be done if India was ever to pursue its own interests the way other nations pursued theirs. Therefore, said G.o.dse, he "decided to remove Gandhiji from the political stage."

In Delhi there were no large peace processions of Hindus and Muslims as there had been in Calcutta four months earlier until the fifth and next-to-last day of the fast. Then a crowd said to number 100,000 hankerers after peace stretched for about a mile. A few days earlier, a much smaller procession of Sikhs, protesting the slaughter of their people in Pakistan's part of the Punjab, stalked by Birla House chanting, "Blood for blood!" and "Let Gandhi die!"

"What are they shouting?" asked the Mahatma, trying to fall asleep in a darkened room.

"They are shouting, 'Let Gandhi die,'" he was told.

"How many are there?" the seasoned crowd counter asked.

When the answer came, "Not many," he resumed his prayers.

As previously, urgent efforts to appease and satisfy him were pressed by Hindu and Muslim leaders who knew their a.s.signed parts in the play he was staging. Once again they'd have to work together to present a convincing case that conditions for reconciliation had been secured. Telegrams full of brotherly sentiment poured in from Pakistan. A Central Peace Committee, with 130 members, was formed in Delhi. It drafted a declaration promising full compliance with Gandhi's demands. One of these involved the main food market where Hindu merchants and shoppers had been boycotting Muslims. Now the Hindus hastened to lavish food and business on them. And, once again, after the usual haggling and close examination of the signatures on the declaration, making sure there were no holdouts, Gandhi allowed himself to be persuaded, finally ending his last fast on its sixth day, January 18. Surrounded at that moment by the usual broad array of political and religious leaders, including Pakistan's amba.s.sador and Prime Minister Nehru, who quietly let him know he'd been fasting in sympathy for two days, he signaled that he was ready for nourishment.

This time it was the nationalist Muslim Maulana Azad who did the honors, handing the Mahatma the gla.s.s of sweet lime juice, fortified with an ounce of glucose. He'd been a.s.sured that Delhi was quiet and not just on the surface. No one yet heralded a "Delhi miracle." With events hurtling on, there was hardly time.

On the evening of January 20, as a recovering Gandhi was addressing the prayer meeting in the garden for the first time in nearly a week, the loud bang and fading rumble of an explosion set off a commotion. The bomb had been meant to serve as cover for an attempt on Gandhi's life that evening, but though there were seven conspirators stationed in the garden, including Nathuram G.o.dse, the attempt was never made. Gandhi went on speaking, while the twenty-year-old Hindu refugee who'd been persuaded to ignite the device was finally led away to be submitted to harsh questioning.

"Listen! Listen! Listen everybody!" the Mahatma cried out in a voice fainter than usual on account of his fast. "Nothing has happened." He'd been predicting his own murder for months. His first impression that evening, however, was that the boom must have had something to do with a training exercise by the police or army.

It didn't take long for the investigators to clear away any lingering doubts about the plotters' aim; by the next morning they had information that should have enabled them to trace and round up the bomber's accomplices. They'd found out that one of the plotters was the editor of a militant Marathi-language newspaper in Poona called Hindu Rashtra Hindu Rashtra (Hindu Nation), a name that proclaimed its cause. That was G.o.dse. Thus they had ten days to connect what they knew to the man and apprehend him. Why this did not become a matter of urgency has been a subject for speculation and reinvestigation ever since. (A judicial commission of inquiry was still examining the question when I arrived in New Delhi in 1966. It didn't submit its final report until 1969, twenty-one years too late.) (Hindu Nation), a name that proclaimed its cause. That was G.o.dse. Thus they had ten days to connect what they knew to the man and apprehend him. Why this did not become a matter of urgency has been a subject for speculation and reinvestigation ever since. (A judicial commission of inquiry was still examining the question when I arrived in New Delhi in 1966. It didn't submit its final report until 1969, twenty-one years too late.) For those ten days in that first January of India's freedom, the clumsiness and confusion of the plotters were pitted against the unbelievable inefficiency and indifference of the police. Gandhi himself fatalistically waved away all congratulations on having survived an attempt on his life. "G.o.d will keep me alive so long as he needs me and put an end to my life when he does not need me," he said. "I am only his servant. Why should I worry?"

In that spirit, he objected to a police proposal to search all citizens drawn to the garden for the nightly prayer meetings. His objection helped make the congratulations on his survival premature. For Gandhi it was a matter of principle, a test of his nonviolence. "The rulers of the country have no faith in my non-violence," he said, "They only believe that this police guard will save my life...perhaps I am the only believer in nonviolence."

It wasn't tha