In January 1949, a year after Gandhi was shot, George Orwell wrote an essay for The Partisan Review on Gandhi tin which he assesses the man and his work in the context of a devastating world war, the Holocaust, India’s independence and the retreat of British colonialism from south Asia. Reflections on Gandhi is significant for what it seems to tell us about the author of “Animal Farm” and “1984” rather than Gandhi.
We have learnt, thanks to Francis Stoner Saunders compelling work. “The Cultural Cold War” that the The Partisan Review was part of a campaign by the CIA to penetrate and denigrate the Soviet Union and communism. But the author of the epic novel about totalitarianism, wherever it might attempt to crush the individual spirit, could not have known that. But he could have known, or at least should have known, that India’s freedom struggle was closely tied to the “saint”he finds “aesthetically” distasteful.
We get an ‘Orientalist’reading of “a humble, naked old man, sitting on a praying mat” fantasizing about “shaking empires by sheer spiritual power”faced with the choice of stepping onto the hurly-burly of politics with their “coercion and fraud.” Orwell’s “naked old man” analogy sounds fairly reminiscent of Winston Churchill’s thundering sneer at the “fakir” “…striding half naked up the steps of the Vice regal Palace…”
Orwell sees Gandhi with western eyes saintliness and sainthood as anti-human. He admits that Gandhi himself never claimed to be a saint yet he draws a distinction between saintliness and humanism to tell us that Gandhi’s “aims were anti-human and reactionary.”Gandhi’s autobiography, (My Experiments with Truth) that Orwell talks about makes an impression on him; the man does not. Orwell himself lived rather ascetically partly out of necessity but also, when he came into money, as an indictment of bourgeois values. In the homespun cloth he sniffs at, he cannot see the elements of a civilizational struggle for alternate and collective lifestyles—he sees authoritarianism of saintliness…
Gandhi represents to Orwell the renunciate/saint condemning human foibles and weaknesses. But Orwell himself was contemptuous of the middle classes; the Socialists among them came in for some drubbing. “The worst advertisement for Socialism” he said, “is its adherents…”He called W.H. Auden a “gutless Kipling” In The Road to Wigan Pier, he savages the “fruit juice-drinker, nudist, sandal wearer, sex-maniac…’Nature-Cure’ quack, pacifist, feminist in England” who are drawn to Socialism and Communism. Fruit-drinker, sandal-wearer, vegetarian…is that why he had an“aesthetic distaste” for Gandhi?
Orwell has little patience for non-violent struggles, Satyagraha as a form of mass resistance to oppression; if it worked in India it was thanks to the British who were more accommodating than say, the Soviet state would have been. Perhaps Orwell had expended all his intellectual and emotional fury and even helplessness about totalitarianism onto the pages of 1984. Close to death himself on the Isle of Jura he took a more pessimistic view of human potential and agency; and in any case Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights movement were some two decades away.
So Orwell personalizes his subject. Gandhi’s “phenomenal piety”, his personal courage, his lack of color prejudice draws grudging admiration from a writer/public intellectual who has just admitted disdain for Gandhi’s aims; but he distances these qualities from their bearing on and rootedness in India’s mass movements however tenuous they might have been.
For Orwell, freedom came to India on account of a Labour government in power; had Churchill still been in power things would have been different. The Orientalist discourse cannot help dismiss the uniqueness of a freedom struggle grounded in any other terms than the western one of power-politics expediency. For Orwell, Gandhi’s uniqueness remains a personalized one also evident in his immense courage to confront awkward questions that even pacifists and socialists tiptoed around. And all that Orwell is willing to admit is that as a politician, Gandhi left behind a “clean smell.” The Beacon
George Orwell
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aints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent, but the tests that have to be applied to them are not, of course, the same in all cases. In Gandhi’s case the questions one feels inclined to ask are: to what extent was Gandhi moved by vanity — by the consciousness of himself as a humble, naked old man, sitting on a praying mat and shaking empires by sheer spiritual power — and to what extent did he compromise his own principles by entering politics, which of their nature are inseparable from coercion and fraud? To give a definite answer one would have to study Gandhi’s acts and writings in immense detail, for his whole life was a sort of pilgrimage in which every act was significant. But this partial autobiography, which ends in the nineteen-twenties, is strong evidence in his favor, all the more because it covers what he would have called the unregenerate part of his life and reminds one that inside the saint, or near-saint, there was a very shrewd, able person who could, if he had chosen, have been a brilliant success as a lawyer, an administrator or perhaps even a businessman.
At about the time when the autobiography first appeared I remember reading its opening chapters in the ill-printed pages of some Indian newspaper. They made a good impression on me, which Gandhi himself at that time did not. The things that one associated with him — home-spun cloth, “soul forces” and vegetarianism — were unappealing, and his medievalist program was obviously not viable in a backward, starving, over-populated country. It was also apparent that the British were making use of him, or thought they were making use of him. Strictly speaking, as a Nationalist, he was an enemy, but since in every crisis he would exert himself to prevent violence — which, from the British point of view, meant preventing any effective action whatever — he could be regarded as “our man”. In private this was sometimes cynically admitted. The attitude of the Indian millionaires was similar. Gandhi called upon them to repent, and naturally they preferred him to the Socialists and Communists who, given the chance, would actually have taken their money away. How reliable such calculations are in the long run is doubtful; as Gandhi himself says, “in the end deceivers deceive only themselves”; but at any rate the gentleness with which he was nearly always handled was due partly to the feeling that he was useful. The British Conservatives only became really angry with him when, as in 1942, he was in effect turning his non-violence against a different conqueror.
But I could see even then that the British officials who spoke of him with a mixture of amusement and disapproval also genuinely liked and admired him, after a fashion. Nobody ever suggested that he was corrupt, or ambitious in any vulgar way, or that anything he did was actuated by fear or malice. In judging a man like Gandhi one seems instinctively to apply high standards, so that some of his virtues have passed almost unnoticed. For instance, it is clear even from the autobiography that his natural physical courage was quite outstanding: the manner of his death was a later illustration of this, for a public man who attached any value to his own skin would have been more adequately guarded.
Again, he seems to have been quite free from that maniacal suspiciousness which, as E. M. Forster rightly says in A Passage to India, is the besetting Indian vice, as hypocrisy is the British vice. Although no doubt he was shrewd enough in detecting dishonesty, he seems wherever possible to have believed that other people were acting in good faith and had a better nature through which they could be approached. And though he came of a poor middle-class family, started life rather unfavorably, and was probably of unimpressive physical appearance, he was not afflicted by envy or by the feeling of inferiority.
Color feeling when he first met it in its worst form in South Africa, seems rather to have astonished him. Even when he was fighting what was in effect a color war, he did not think of people in terms of race or status. The governor of a province, a cotton millionaire, a half-starved Dravidian coolie, a British private soldier were all equally human beings, to be approached in much the same way. It is noticeable that even in the worst possible circumstances, as in South Africa when he was making himself unpopular as the champion of the Indian community, he did not lack European friends.
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ritten in short lengths for newspaper serialization, the autobiography is not a literary masterpiece, but it is the more impressive because of the commonplaceness of much of its material. It is well to be reminded that Gandhi started out with the normal ambitions of a young Indian student and only adopted his extremist opinions by degrees and, in some cases, rather unwillingly. There was a time, it is interesting to learn, when he wore a top hat, took dancing lessons, studied French and Latin, went up the Eiffel Tower and even tried to learn the violin — all this was the idea of assimilating European civilization as thoroughly as possible. He was not one of those saints who are marked out by their phenomenal piety from childhood onwards, nor one of the other kind who forsake the world after sensational debaucheries. He makes full confession of the misdeeds of his youth, but in fact there is not much to confess. As a frontispiece to the book there is a photograph of Gandhi’s possessions at the time of his death. The whole outfit could be purchased for about 5 pounds, and Gandhi’s sins, at least his fleshly sins, would make the same sort of appearance if placed all in one heap. A few cigarettes, a few mouthfuls of meat, a few annas pilfered in childhood from the maidservant, two visits to a brothel (on each occasion he got away without “doing anything”), one narrowly escaped lapse with his landlady in Plymouth, one outburst of temper — that is about the whole collection. Almost from childhood onwards he had a deep earnestness, an attitude ethical rather than religious, but, until he was about thirty, no very definite sense of direction. His first entry into anything describable as public life was made by way of vegetarianism. Underneath his less ordinary qualities one feels all the time the solid middle-class businessmen who were his ancestors. One feels that even after he had abandoned personal ambition he must have been a resourceful, energetic lawyer and a hard-headed political organizer, careful in keeping down expenses, an adroit handler of committees and an indefatigable chaser of subscriptions.
His character was an extraordinarily mixed one, but there was almost nothing in it that you can put your finger on and call bad, and I believe that even Gandhi’s worst enemies would admit that he was an interesting and unusual man who enriched the world simply by being alive. Whether he was also a lovable man, and whether his teachings can have much for those who do not accept the religious beliefs on which they are founded, I have never felt fully certain.
Of late years it has been the fashion to talk about Gandhi as though he were not only sympathetic to the Western Left-wing movement, but were integrally part of it. Anarchists and pacifists, in particular, have claimed him for their own, noticing only that he was opposed to centralism and State violence and ignoring the other-worldly, anti-humanist tendency of his doctrines. But one should, I think, realize that Gandhi’s teachings cannot be squared with the belief that Man is the measure of all things and that our job is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have. They make sense only on the assumption that God exists and that the world of solid objects is an illusion to be escaped from.
It is worth considering the disciplines which Gandhi imposed on himself and which — though he might not insist on every one of his followers observing every detail — he considered indispensable if one wanted to serve either God or humanity. First of all, no meat-eating, and if possible no animal food in any form. (Gandhi himself, for the sake of his health, had to compromise on milk, but seems to have felt this to be a backsliding.) No alcohol or tobacco, and no spices or condiments even of a vegetable kind, since food should be taken not for its own sake but solely in order to preserve one’s strength. Secondly, if possible, no sexual intercourse. If sexual intercourse must happen, then it should be for the sole purpose of begetting children and presumably at long intervals. Gandhi himself, in his middle thirties, took the vow of brahmacharya, which means not only complete chastity but the elimination of sexual desire. This condition, it seems, is difficult to attain without a special diet and frequent fasting. One of the dangers of milk-drinking is that it is apt to arouse sexual desire. And finally — this is the cardinal point — for the seeker after goodness there must be no close friendships and no exclusive loves whatever.
Close friendships, Gandhi says, are dangerous, because “friends react on one another” and through loyalty to a friend one can be led into wrong-doing. This is unquestionably true. Moreover, if one is to love God, or to love humanity as a whole, one cannot give one’s preference to any individual person. This again is true, and it marks the point at which the humanistic and the religious attitude cease to be reconcilable. To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others. The autobiography leaves it uncertain whether Gandhi behaved in an inconsiderate way to his wife and children, but at any rate it makes clear that on three occasions he was willing to let his wife or a child die rather than administer the animal food prescribed by the doctor. It is true that the threatened death never actually occurred, and also that Gandhi — with, one gathers, a good deal of moral pressure in the opposite direction — always gave the patient the choice of staying alive at the price of committing a sin: still, if the decision had been solely his own, he would have forbidden the animal food, whatever the risks might be. There must, he says, be some limit to what we will do in order to remain alive, and the limit is well on this side of chicken broth. This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the sense which — I think — most people would give to the word, it is inhuman.
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.
No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. There is an obvious retort to this, but one should be wary about making it. In this yogi-ridden age, it is too readily assumed that “non-attachment” is not only better than a full acceptance of earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings. If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for “non-attachment” is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work. But it is not necessary here to argue whether the other-worldly or the humanistic ideal is “higher”. The point is that they are incompatible. One must choose between God and Man, and all “radicals” and “progressives”, from the mildest Liberal to the most extreme Anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.
However, Gandhi’s pacifism can be separated to some extent from his other teachings. Its motive was religious, but he claimed also for it that it was a definitive technique, a method, capable of producing desired political results. Gandhi’s attitude was not that of most Western pacifists. Satyagraha, first evolved in South Africa, was a sort of non-violent warfare, a way of defeating the enemy without hurting him and without feeling or arousing hatred. It entailed such things as civil disobedience, strikes, lying down in front of railway trains, enduring police charges without running away and without hitting back, and the like. Gandhi objected to “passive resistance” as a translation of Satyagraha: in Gujarati, it seems, the word means “firmness in the truth”. In his early days Gandhi served as a stretcher-bearer on the British side in the Boer War, and he was prepared to do the same again in the war of 1914-18.
Even after he had completely abjured violence he was honest enough to see that in war it is usually necessary to take sides. He did not — indeed, since his whole political life centred round a struggle for national independence, he could not — take the sterile and dishonest line of pretending that in every war both sides are exactly the same and it makes no difference who wins.Nor did he, like most Western pacifists, specialize in avoiding awkward questions.
In relation to the late war, one question that every pacifist had a clear obligation to answer was: “What about the Jews? Are you prepared to see them exterminated? If not, how do you propose to save them without resorting to war?” I must say that I have never heard, from any Western pacifist, an honest answer to this question, though I have heard plenty of evasions, usually of the “you’re another” type. But it so happens that Gandhi was asked a somewhat similar question in 1938 and that his answer is on record in Mr. Louis Fischer’s Gandhi and Stalin. According to Mr. Fischer, Gandhi’s view was that the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which “would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler’s violence.” After the war he justified himself: the Jews had been killed anyway, and might as well have died significantly. One has the impression that this attitude staggered even so warm an admirer as Mr. Fischer, but Gandhi was merely being honest. If you are not prepared to take life, you must often be prepared for lives to be lost in some other way. When, in 1942, he urged non-violent resistance against a Japanese invasion, he was ready to admit that it might cost several million deaths.
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t the same time there is reason to think that Gandhi, who after all was born in 1869, did not understand the nature of totalitarianism and saw everything in terms of his own struggle against the British government. The important point here is not so much that the British treated him forbearingly as that he was always able to command publicity. As can be seen from the phrase quoted above, he believed in “arousing the world”, which is only possible if the world gets a chance to hear what you are doing. It is difficult to see how Gandhi’s methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again.Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary.
Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment? And if there is, what is he accomplishing? The Russian masses could only practise civil disobedience if the same idea happened to occur to all of them simultaneously, and even then, to judge by the history of the Ukraine famine, it would make no difference. But let it be granted that non-violent resistance can be effective against one’s own government, or against an occupying power: even so, how does one put it into practise internationally? Gandhi’s various conflicting statements on the late war seem to show that he felt the difficulty of this. Applied to foreign politics, pacifism either stops being pacifist or becomes appeasement. Moreover the assumption, which served Gandhi so well in dealing with individuals, that all human beings are more or less approachable and will respond to a generous gesture, needs to be seriously questioned. It is not necessarily true, for example, when you are dealing with lunatics. Then the question becomes: Who is sane? Was Hitler sane? And is it not possible for one whole culture to be insane by the standards of another? And, so far as one can gauge the feelings of whole nations, is there any apparent connection between a generous deed and a friendly response? Is gratitude a factor in international politics?
These and kindred questions need discussion, and need it urgently, in the few years left to us before somebody presses the button and the rockets begin to fly. It seems doubtful whether civilization can stand another major war, and it is at least thinkable that the way out lies through non-violence.
It is Gandhi’s virtue that he would have been ready to give honest consideration to the kind of question that I have raised above; and, indeed, he probably did discuss most of these questions somewhere or other in his innumerable newspaper articles.
One feels of him that there was much he did not understand, but not that there was anything that he was frightened of saying or thinking. I have never been able to feel much liking for Gandhi, but I do not feel sure that as a political thinker he was wrong in the main, nor do I believe that his life was a failure.
It is curious that when he was assassinated, many of his warmest admirers exclaimed sorrowfully that he had lived just long enough to see his life work in ruins, because India was engaged in a civil war which had always been foreseen as one of the byproducts of the transfer of power. But it was not in trying to smooth down Hindu-Moslem rivalry that Gandhi had spent his life. His main political objective, the peaceful ending of British rule, had after all been attained. As usual the relevant facts cut across one another. On the other hand, the British did get out of India without fighting, an event which very few observers indeed would have predicted until about a year before it happened. On the other hand, this was done by a Labour government, and it is certain that a Conservative government, especially a government headed by Churchill, would have acted differently. But if, by 1945, there had grown up in Britain a large body of opinion sympathetic to Indian independence, how far was this due to Gandhi’s personal influence? And if, as may happen, India and Britain finally settle down into a decent and friendly relationship, will this be partly because Gandhi, by keeping up his struggle obstinately and without hatred, disinfected the political air?
That one even thinks of asking such questions indicates his stature. One may feel, as I do, a sort of aesthetic distaste for Gandhi, one may reject the claims of sainthood made on his behalf (he never made any such claim himself, by the way), one may also reject sainthood as an ideal and therefore feel that Gandhi’s basic aims were anti-human and reactionary: but regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!
1949
Accessed from: http://www.orwell.ru/library/reviews/gandhi/english/e_gandhi
I Do Not Wish to Live Long
V Kalyanam
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ahatma Gandhi arrived in Delhi on Tuesday, 9 September 1947, from Calcutta. He was staying in Birla House at Albuquerque Road (now renamed Tees January Marg—30th January Road). A large carpeted room with an attached toilet was placed at his disposal for use by his entourage. This was an all-purpose room in the ground floor of the huge mansion. A thick cotton mattress and a huge pillow to recline, with a desk in front was placed in one corner of the room. At the other end was a table and chair piled with correspondence. Gandhiji usually spent the whole day here attending to his correspondence, talking to people, spinning his charkha and taking his midday siesta. There was also a balcony, fully enclosed with glass doors, adjoining the room where he would sleep at nights on the carpeted floor, along with the rest of us.
Friday, 30 January 1948, dawned like any other day. We never knew what was going to happen in the evening. We got up as usual for our prayers at 3.30. We went about our daily routine with no thought about what the day had in store for us. Gandhiji roused his grand nieceAbha to get up.
After his ablutions, Gandhiji came out of the toilet and squatted on the mattress. We sat before him. Gandhiji’s day always commenced with prayer. He described prayer as the key of the morning and bolt of the evening. His prayers included recitations from the scriptures of all religions, particularly Hindusim and Islam, in order to stress the essential unity of all religions.
He closed his eyes in meditation. Abha was still asleep. He had noticed her absence. Prayer was held without Abha’s participation. Immediately after the prayer Manu went to the kitchen to fetch Gandhiji’s morning beverage—a glass of hot water mixed with a tablespoonful of honey and lime. When she handed him the marble tumbler of nectar, Gandhiji told her in Gujarati, ‘It appears my influence, even among my close companions, is waning. Prayer is like a broomstick meant to cleanse one’s soul. Abha’s failure to participate in the prayer pains me. You are aware of the importance I attach to prayer. If you have the courage, you may, on my behalf convey my displeasure to her. If she is not willing to participate in the prayer she should take leave of me. This will be in our joint interest!’
Meanwhile, Abha got up and started attending to her work. Gandhiji, did not, for reasons known to him, confront her directly. I continued to sit by his side to receive my instructions for the day. He wanted me to make arrangements for his visit to Sevagram for ten days from 2nd February. I placed before him the typed draft of the new constitution for the Indian National Congress he had dictated to me the previous day, suggesting its disbandment and reconstitution as a new body with greater emphasis on social service and rural uplift. He was not inclined to go through it. He summoned my superior Pyarelalji and handed the draft to him with instructions to peruse it carefully and make any suggestions or corrections that he may consider necessary.
‘I Do Not Wish to Live Long’
Conditions in Delhi were far from normal those days. There had been communal disturbances owing to the large influx of Hindu refugees from Pakistan. Having gone through unpleasant experiences at the hands of Muslims in Pakistan, they wanted to take revenge on Muslims in Delhi. Delegations of Muslim and Hindu leaders called on him everyday to discuss ways and means of restoring normalcy in the capital.
During those cold winter days, Gandhiji preferred to spend the day sitting on a charpoy in the open lawn, basking in the sun. His daily engagements were crowded. He could never be seen idle. When he had no appointments he would be busy writing letters and articles in Gujarati, Hindi and English. While Ministers and other VIPs visited him by prior appointment, Pandit Nehru, whenever he was in station, made it a point to call on Gandhiji, at about 9 am, on his way to office.
Among the prominent visitors who met Gandhiji that day was Mrs. R.K. Nehru, who came in at 6 am. She was scheduled to leave for USA in the afternoon. At her request Gandhiji gave her an autographed photograph with the message, ‘As a representative of a poor nation, you should lead a simple and frugal life while you are there’. At 2 pm, Margaret Bourke White, famous photographer of the Life magazine interviewed Gandhiji. In the course of her conversation, she asked him, “You have always stated that you would like to live up to 125. What gives you that hope?”
Gandhiji surprised her by answering that he no longer entertained that hope. When questioned why, he replied, “Because of the terrible happenings in the world. I do not want to live in darkness”.
Most of his time at Birla House was spent in writing letters, meeting visitors and prayers. Soon after she left, Prof N.R. Malkhani, our Deputy High Commissioner in Pakistan, met Gandhiji with two others and told him of the sad plight of the Hindus of Sind. After hearing them patiently, Gandhi replied, “These things would not have happened had people listened to me. I say things, which do not go home, yet I go on saying what I believe to be true. I know that I am a ‘back number’.”
Bob Stimsom of the BBC, who had submitted some questions to Gandhiji, was to meet him after the prayers. He had already arrived and proceeded straight to the lawn where Gandhiji was to hold the prayer. Chief Minister U N Dhebar and Rasiklal Parekh from Kathiawar and the celebrated author Vincent Shean, who had some interviews with Gandhiji in the last few days, had also come without prior appointment in the hope of meeting Gandhiji. All of them were disappointed.
Birla House had its own watchmen at the gate. There had been objections to the recitation of the Koran at Gandhiji’s earlier public meetings in the previous year. Sardar Patel had therefore, in his capacity as Home Minister, ordered the deployment of one head constable and four foot-constables at Birla House as a precautionary measure.
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here was a bomb explosion at the prayer meeting on 20 January. Madan Lal, the Punjabi refugee had thrown a bomb, but it didn’t hit him. A wall was broken that’s all and Gandhi never thought somebody had come to kill him. Gandhiji had undertaken a fast against the Government of India’s decision to hold back payment of Pakistan’s share of the cash balances (Rs. 50 Cr) due to them on the ground that Pakistan had connived with the Afridi tribesmen to invade and occupy Kashmir. To save Gandhiji’s life, the government relented and released the amount. Fundamentalist Hindus were infuriated by Gandhiji’s tactics and felt that he was appeasing Muslims to the detriment of the Hindu community. The bomb incident referred to was a consequence of this.
The police guards at Birla House were therefore increased. They had instructions to stop all persons who appeared to be of doubtful character. However, the police considered that to make the precautions more effective they should be permitted to search every visitor entering the compound to attend the prayer or at other times. When a police Superintendent approached me with this proposal, I consulted Gandhiji. He did not agree to the search and I informed the Superintendent accordingly. This decision was conveyed to the higher authorities and within minutes the DIG arrived and sought permission to speak to Gandhiji. I ushered him in. The DIG represented that there was danger to his life and the facilities asked for should be allowed as otherwise the police would be discredited if any mishap took place.
‘Men Who Want Security Have No Right To Live’
Gandhiji would have none of it and told him bluntly that his life was in the hands of God and that if he had to die no precautions could save him. ‘Those who preferred security to freedom had no right to live’, he said. He would rather stop holding public prayer meetings than agree to any such personal search. Police in plain clothes were then asked to keep a watch on suspicious characters and prevent anyone from attacking Gandhiji while he was on his way to the prayer and back. At two in the afternoon Abha and Manu had, with Gandhiji’s permission, gone to visit some friends, promising to return in time for the evening prayers. The responsibility of serving Gandhiji’s evening meal fell on me.
Although the government had been in office for only five months, the media was full of alleged differences between Pandit Nehru and Sardar Patel. Gandhiji was distressed with these rumours and wanted to counter this. He was even thinking of asking Sardar Patel to resign so that Nehru may have a free hand to conduct the affairs of the country. But that didn’t happen. He had summoned Patel for a discussion at 4 pm and intended to speak on the subject after the prayers, but that was not to be. Accompanied by his daughter Maniban, Patel arrived on time when Gandhiji was having his frugal supper. While they were conversing, Abha and Manu had also arrived.
Prayer was scheduled to start at 5 pm. The discussion between Gandhiji and Patel continued beyond 5 pm. In view of the importance and seriousness of the talk, none of us dared to disturb them. The girls gestured to Sardar’s daughter Maniben and the talk ended at 5.10 pm. After that, Gandhi went to the toilet and immediately proceeded to the prayer ground, which was nearly 30-40 yards away. There were four or five steps and then there was a big lawn. Gandhiji was late by fifteen minutes for the prayer meeting. There were about 250 people anxiously awaiting his arrival. I could see from the distance that the attention of the gathering was focused on Gandhiji’s room. And, as he emerged, I heard people saying, ‘There comes Gandhiji’. The word went round when all necks craned and eyes stared in his direction. Gandhiji walked briskly as usual with his head bent and his glance glued to the ground, supporting himself on the shoulders of the two grand nieces. I was following closely to his left.
I heard him admonishing the girls for not telling him that it was getting late for the prayer meeting. He told them that they were his time-keepers. “I am late. I do not like all this,” he added. When Manu replied that they did not want to interrupt because of the serious nature of their talks, Gandhiji shot back, “It is the duty of a nurse to give medicines at the right time to a patient. If there is delay the patient may die”.
When Nathuram Godse Fired His Shots…
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e ascended the steps leading to the prayer platform. People stood with folded hands and Gandhiji reciprocated. They made way for him to go to the rostrum, about 25 feet from the steps, where he would sit on a one-foot-high wooden dais. The assassin (Nathuram Godse) had obviously been waiting in this crowd hiding a revolver in his pocket. Gandhiji had walked hardly five or six paces when the assassin fired some shots in quick succession from close range resulting in the Mahatma’s instantaneous death. He fell behind bleeding profusely and in that melee, his spectacles and footwear were thrown asunder. I was too shocked and dumb-founded to react. Later, in loneliness, tears came to my eyes.
The news spreads fast. Within minutes, a crowd started gathering outside Birla House and the gate had to be closed to prevent people entering the premises. Patel had already left. I rushed to my room and conveyed the news to Nehru’s office by phone. In those days we had free access to Ministers’ residences. I pushed my way through the crowd, got into a waiting car and sped to Patel’s house, hardly five minutes drive, to inform him of the calamity.
Meantime, his body was lifted and carried to his room. There he lay on the mat with people around him. He looked as if he was asleep. His body was warm for quite some time. Night was passed with distress and tears—not for a few chosen ones, but for the millions all over the world for whom he lived and died.
Immediately after Gandhiji’s body was carried away to his room, there was a scramble from the public to possess something belonging to Gandhiji as a souvenir. They started removing a handful of earth from the place where Gandhiji fell to the assassin’s bullet, leaving a big pit there within hours. Arrangements were then made to have the area cordoned and a guard was posted there.
In this connection, detailing the precautions taken by the government to protect Mahatma Gandhi prior to and after the bomb explosion at his prayer meetings, the Home Minister, Sardar Patel declared, “I had personally pleaded with Bapu to permit the police to do their duty in regard to his protection but without success. To my profound regret and utter sorrow and to the irreparable loss of all of us, the nation and the world, the weak spot both I and the police had apprehended was deceitfully and successfully exploited by the assassin and Gandhiji’s prophetic words that, if he had to die, no precaution could save him, came true”.
“Gandhi never uttered ‘Hey Ram’ when he was shot at”
It is widely stated that Gandhiji invoked God saying, “Hey Ram” as he was assassinated. There was no possibility at all of his uttering a single syllable although he had often proclaimed that he would like to die with the name of Ram on his lips. This speculative comment by some enterprising, shrewd reporter has gained worldwide currency, the authenticity of which has never been verified.
A monumental falsehood has been thrust into the mouth of the apostle of truth. Had he been sick or bed-ridden, he would have surely invoked Ram. But here he was denied that opportunity. It is indeed very strange that the commission that was appointed to probe into Gandhiji’s killing never thought of making any enquiries from any one of us who were so close to him on that day.
In his last few days in his post-prayer speeches, Gandhiji had been repeatedly expressing the wish that God take him away since he did not want to be a silent witness to the monstrous barbarities that were going on in the country.
I thought God had answered his prayer through the assassin. He had a glorious death while he was walking towards God and not on a sick bed. He died without anguish, without pain for a moment.
V Kalyanam, personal secretary to Mahatma Gandhi, between 1944 and 1948 was just behind Gandhi on that fateful Friday January 30 1948 when Naturam Godse fired his shots. Courtesy: http://www.mkgandhi.org/last%20days/glastday.htm
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