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Who Wrote Gandhi’s Autobiography of Errors?

A voice wrote Gandhi’s autobiography. Others, like Mahadev Desai, translated it, and still others, like Tridip Suhrud, retranslated that voice, to prolong its debt to hearing.

Note: This article was originally published on August 05, 2018, and was republished on October 2, 2020.

The error became for me a beacon-light of warning.
~ M.K. Gandhi, An Autobiography

Reintroducing the English translation of Gandhi’s autobiography to readers, Tridip Suhrud informs us in the new, critical edition of Gandhi’s An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (January 2018), published originally by Penguin (India) and later by Yale University Press (US), that the title of the English translation reverses Gandhi’s intention, and along with it, the precise nature of the book. Suhrud writes, “In the original Gujarati, Gandhi introduced this difference through two forms, jivan vrutant (autobiography or the chronicle of life) and atmakatha (the story of a soul). What Gandhi wanted to write was an atmakatha and not a jivan vrutant. This distinction gets blurred in the English rendering, ‘autobiography’.”

Suhrud clarifies a further twist in translation, that “the title Satya Na Prayogo athva Atmakatha foregrounds the experiments with Truth. The order is reversed in the English translation, where ‘An Autobiography’ has primacy.” The mode of autobiographical writing with its roots in early Christianity that influenced its practitioners in India since the nineteenth century, took precedence in the book’s English title over Gandhi’s foregrounding his narrative as a story-telling of truth. Is there any special significance that underlies this privileging?

The autobiography is traced back to Saint Augustine’s Confessions. Commentators see it as a narrative form where the immanent temporal form of the autobiography is displaced by the scheme of allegory. But it is agreed that even when the autobiography took its modern, secularised form, the idea of the “self” always seemed to draw out, under autonomous garbs, certain religious and normative ideas, thus never really abandoning the allegorical influence. The autobiography was always an anxious enterprise to describe a journey of the self to be recovered, examined, vindicated, defended or simply guided in time through certain idealised visions. Gandhi, however, clarified about his project, that “it is not a real autobiography”. It is not about his life as such, but his “experiments with truth”, which as we shall see, is about documenting a life of errors.

The spirit that Gandhi borrows from his Christian/Western predecessors is that truth is very much the higher-order or master narrative that orders the narrative of the self/soul. The English translation, by privileging the experimenting with truth over the story of the self/soul, merely reverses the reversible. In keeping with Gandhi’s own project of privileging truth over self, the translation of the title does not do any violence to Gandhi’s writing project. Yet, this privileging, in a way, does alter the central motive or purpose behind Gandhi writing his autobiography. What is it?

M.K. Gandhi
An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Critical Edition)
Translated from the Gujarati by Mahadev Desai
Introduced with notes by Tridip Suhrud
Foreword by Ashis Nandy
Penguin, 2018

Gandhi’s main purpose of writing an autobiography, I would argue, beneath the declared intention of writing his experiments with truth, is in every respect, most fundamentally, a recording of (his) errors. Gandhi’s search for truth reveals at every step, his obsession about (not) committing errors.

Suhrud writes in his introduction:

“An experiment in Truth is an experiment in brahmacharya. An experiment with Truth cannot have any possibility of secrecy. As an experiment, it was important and imperative, Gandhi felt, to record the unusual, uncontrolled occurrences. It was essential to speak of the darkness within.”

For Gandhi, experimenting with truth opens up a necessary task of recording his errors. Errors are the “unusual, uncontrolled occurrences” that have to get faithfully, truthfully, without any temptation for “secrecy”, written on paper. The act of truth-seeking demands, there is no hiding place for errors. Gandhi’s autobiographical task is the confession of errors. Writing on his errors is the only possible (and demanding) means to his experimenting with truth. It defines the discursive field of Gandhi’s autobiographical narrative.

The search for truth requires the constant (and minute) vigilance towards errors.

In Gandhi’s own introduction to the original translation of the autobiography, which he signed on November 26, 1925 from Sabarmati Ashram, he wrote:

“I hope to acquaint the reader fully with all my faults and errors. My purpose is to describe experiments in the science of satyagraha, not to say how good I am. In judging myself I shall try to be as harsh as truth, as I want others also to be. Measuring myself by that standard.”

What is the harshness of truth? It can be nothing else but the most rigorous ordeal to harshly judge one’s errors. Truth-telling can thus also be read as error-telling, and the science of satyagraha, the technique of revealing your errors to yourself and to the world. Gandhi’s purpose is obviously not to say good things about him, but risk the judgement of others in publicly recording his errors. Error-telling is not an attractive job. What is the “standard” for measuring truthfulness? It is measured by the ability to boldly record one’s errors.

To tell the truth is to tell one’s errors.

Suhrud’s retranslation from Mahadev Desai, of a crucial passage from the autobiography, takes us closer to my argument on Gandhi’s self-experimental project:

“I have always believed that we must reduce to a dust particle the elephantine errors of others and view our own errors, small as a mustard seed, as large as mountains; only then do we get a relative estimation of others’ and our own errors.”

The ethical subject of truth, in Gandhi’s conception, will lower the degree of error if committed by another, but enlarge the error if committed by the self. There is an unequal measure (and measuring) of error between the self and another, for there is a certain economy of intentionality involved. Those who are prone to enlarging small errors committed by others, are inclined to pass off their own, major errors as miniscule. It causes a double ethical imbalance, both within the self, and also between one self and another.

The Gandhian subject of ethics treats oneself more critically and rigorously than it treats others. What is the relation of truth to this unequal economy of error-finding, between self and another? The answer to this question will perhaps best illuminate what Gandhi understood as truth and truth-seeking. And the answer is an ethical one, where the other is always at a greater height than the self, such that his errors are less noticeable, less under scrutiny than one’s own. It is this imbalance between self-scrutiny and finding fault with others that allows Gandhi’s ethical relationship with the world. There is no ethics without this primary imbalance, where the other is always less in question than you, your self/soul. You are more responsible than others is the first principle of ethics, whose roots are Judeo-Christian.

Gandhi adds an ontological twist to it: You will be held more responsible, you are more accountable, for your errors than others. We are error-prone beings.

Mahatma Gandhi taking his last meal before the start of his fast, Rajkot, 1939. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Apart from writing, as an act of confessing one’s errors in public, Gandhi also uses the technique of fasting as a mode of truth-telling, or its other component, self-purification. Fasting, like writing, is a sovereign act, where the subject wields full power over himself. In Gandhi, it is a declaration of the power of self-control. Suhrud explains the connection:

“If the Autobiography required him to dwell within himself, fasting was upvas, to dwell closer to Him, to be closer to Truth. Both the autobiographical act and the upvas were modes by which Gandhi dwelled closer to Truth.”

Dwelling, in this sense, appears to be an act. It is an act that presents oneself to the world. This act of presenting opens up the meaning of dwelling as a possibility of life. Dwelling, for Gandhi, is the material basis of experimenting with truth, where the body enforces concrete acts (of writing and fasting) upon itself. Suhrud expands the meaning of dwelling in Gandhi’s life, beyond the acts of writing and fasting, to the place where Gandhi performed these acts: the ashram.

Suhrud writes: “This in-dwelling had a physicality, not grossly in his body but within the Ashram and with the Ashram community.” The place of dwelling, embodied in the ashram, meant a larger body, that of the community. Suhrud lays out the further context of this in-dwelling: “This in-dwelling was not only with the language of experiences and memory, but for Gandhi it was also about the very form that he wished to give to his autobiography.” As a presence (and place) of the community, the ashram was a body of experience and memory. Gandhi inhabited the responsibility of this body where experience and memory could be summoned to narrate its story. Gandhi’s act of dwelling in writing his autobiography took place within the larger body of the community. In this sense, Gandhi’s life and autobiography were both dedicated to this larger body. The ashram became the concrete embodiment of all these debts and practices put together. No wonder, different intensities were at work in Gandhi’s daily life at the ashram, where he also wrote his autobiography.

We come next to an interesting question: who is writing Gandhi’s error-prone autobiography of the self/soul? It was, we learn, a voice. Suhrud writes, “Gandhi’s notion of in-dwelling is the antaryami who spoke to him in a “small, still voice” and whose exhortations Gandhi submitted to.” There is a dramatic narration by Gandhi on how the voice came upon him:

“‘In the night when I retired I had no idea that something was coming up today. But after eleven I woke up, I watched the stars, repeated Ramanama but the same thought would persistently come to my mind: “If you have grown so restless, why don’t you undertake the fast? Do it?” The inner dialogue went on for quite some time. At half past twelve came the clear, unmistakable voice. “You must undertake the fast.” That was all.’”

This is a clear sign of a heteronomous force at work on Gandhi. The voice is the invisible but definitive author behind Gandhi’s decisions to act (upon himself). Listening to such a voice enables the Gandhian subject to negotiate its sovereignty with something other than itself. It breaks the monopoly of what, following Kant, is rather sacrosanct to liberal, Marxist and dominant strands of feminist thought: autonomy. The idea of heteronomy is critiqued by these various schools, as an allegiance to a power outside the self, and seen as working to the detriment of the self’s (moral and political) agency and freedom. Autonomy is regarded as the legitimate, ethical (and universally applicable) source or ground of a rational subject. The rational cult of autonomy treats the idea of heteronomy, the act of listening to (and acting upon) a force outside yourself, as succumbing to unfree laws and temptations that compromise self-sovereignty.

In contrast, philosophers like Emanuel Levinas, challenge this idea of autonomy by insisting on the value of heteronomy, where the subject is posed (and willing) to lose her autonomy for an unnamable and invisible force that confronts her attention. If rationality is supposed to singularly define the freedom of the subject and enable it to make choices, these choices are conditioned and limited not by the law of freedom but rationality, which isn’t the same thing. The faculty of reason (and its claims over a moral and free subject) primarily based on thinking, is found inadequate to address the deeper questions and connections that the self-seeks in its relationship with the other, a relation that predates and presupposes the demands of rational knowledge. Levinas invites us to imagine another origin (and horizon), where the self is defined only in relation to the other and the (moral) scope between them is more speculative and less categorical.

If thinking is the ground on which the Kantian self-establishes its realm of knowledge and power, and defines its autonomy, Levinas opens up other affective (/sensuous) conditions (of desire) like seeing and hearing as modes of opening up to the other. Knowledge (of the other), with its history of slavery and colonialism, its orientalism, has served more as new, modern forms of prejudice than possibilities of liberation. How does knowledge serve communities at war, subjugated people facing the colonial state and occupation, violence of caste and race, beleaguered refugees looking for a country? It is the rationalist (and by extension, nationalist) language of the state that put this violence in place. People don’t enough listen to others and there is a lack of shelter and care. Political ideologies claiming superior knowledge of history have done their bit of massacres.

It is not a logical but ethical extension of Gandhi listening to his ‘small, still voice’, and opening his ears to the peasants of Kheda, to the Hindu victims of Noakhali riots and the Muslim victims of Bihar riots. It is surrender to a commandment that can happen in any name, but occurs as an event that forces the self into a question, unanswerable by reason: “I was not dreaming at the time when I heard the voice. The hearing of the voice was preceded by a terrific struggle within me. Suddenly the voice came upon me. I listened, made certain that it was the voice, and the struggle ceased. I was calm.” The authorial voice from within appears from a source that comes from an intense state of “hearing”. It has no resemblance with the voice of reason, whose source is the singularity of the self. The voice appears as a double, where the self is the listener, and the voice, the commandment. The idea of divinity, of prophecy and revelation, exists in the abiding mystery of such a voice.

Gandhi adds a preparatory note for this moment of hearing. He calls it “a conscious practice of self-restraint and ever-increasing effort implicitly to obey the will of God speaking within and then known as the inner voice.” The voice can be heard only when the self is under restraint, when it doesn’t hear itself too much, and enables enough silence for the other voice, the “small, still voice”, to speak.

The act of listening to a voice is not a rational act, for reason demands justifications for an act, whereas hearing is its own justification, its own desire. To listen requires obedience to an authority, described by Gandhi as “the power which is beyond our ego”. The authority/power of the voice does not reduce the subject’s ego to submission, for it is precisely the prior effacement of the ego that makes hearing the voice possible. Listening to others is in no way different from a commandment, where Gandhi’s seeking to “see God face to face” describes in exact terms Levinas’ ethical encounter. And the other commands you to listen, not by reason, but by her voice alone. But even in religious terms, Gandhi steers away from ascribing to god any specific religious sign. He simply calls god as another name for truth. The truth lies in the hearing, and not thinking. Gandhi assigns his own god, his own master/maker, which in political and material terms, he finds in others.

Gandhi wrote his autobiography of errors, commanded by a voice that urged him to speak the truth. That voice wasn’t Gandhi’s in ontological terms. It suggests a complex sphere of hearing the transcendence within, where Gandhi grappled with the idea of an author submitting to a force who wrote in his name. A voice wrote Gandhi’s autobiography. Others, like Mahadev Desai, translated it, and still others, like Suhrud, retranslated that voice, to prolong its debt to hearing.

M a nash Firaq Bhattacharjee is the author of Looking for the Nation: Towards Another Idea of India, published by Speaking Tiger Books (August 2018).

What Gandhi Said in Ayodhya: Violence Is a Mark of Cowardice, and the Sword Is a Coward’s Weapon

Gandhi visited Ayodhya on February 10, 1921, the first of his two visits to the place associated with Rama. He had just two messages to give – on Hindu-Muslim unity and non-violence.

This article was originally published on February 10, 2018. It is being republished on August 5, 2020.

It would take anybody by surprise to know that Mahatma Gandhi, who was inspired to ceaselessly strive for Ram Rajya throughout his life, visited Ayodhya, the birthplace of Rama, just twice. However, through the messages he communicated on both occasions, he underlined the enormous significance of those visits.

The news of Gandhiji’s first visit to Ayodhya, on February 10, 1921, sent an unparalleled wave of excitement through the twin cities of Ayodhya and Faizabad, say those who have kept track of local history. Hours before his train arrived, huge crowds had lined the roads, and terraces, all the way from the railway station to the meeting ground where he was to speak. Everybody had but one desire – to be blessed by a mere glimpse of him. The historic clock-tower gracing the magnificent Faizabad chowk was resonating with the strains of shehnai. The words on everybody’s lips were these: Gandhiji is coming to set us free.

The venue of the meeting was a maidan located to the west of the Jalpa nallah which lies between Ayodhya and Faizabad. In 1918, the British had celebrated their World War One victory at this maidan, and the Congress had chosen the venue precisely for that reason — to show the British the difference between them and Gandhiji’s way.

As the train trundled into the station, two local Congress leaders, Acharya Narendra Dev and Mahashay Kedarnath, holding the Congress flag aloft, made their way to Gandhiji’s compartment. They were totally unprepared for the scene that met their eyes. It turned out that as soon as the train had entered Faizabad district, Gandhiji had asked for all the windows in and around his train compartment to be shuttered. Moreover, he had refused to meet or speak to anyone. He was upset about the fact that the farmers’ movement in Awadh, attuned more to the battle cry of aggression than to ideals and principles, had turned violent. Those in the movement did not see much value in ahimsa. The farmers of Faizabad in particular were on the warpath – in Bidahar, events had taken a violent turn, with the farmers setting fire to and looting the houses of talukdars and zamindars.

The situation was intolerable to Gandhiji but he eventually gave in to entreaties that he should address the meeting even if it was to make his displeasure known. He was accompanied by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and also the Khilafat leader Maulana Shaukat Ali. The latter, following the Lucknow Congress resolution of Hindu-Muslim unity as well as the coming together of the Non-cooperation Movement and the Khilafat Movement, had set out on a joint tour with Gandhiji.

However, as Gandhiji sat in the car and the procession started moving, he came face to face with a group of Khilafat supporters waiting to welcome him, naked swords in hand. He decided there and then that he was not going to mince words in reprimanding the violent farmers as well as the men with swords in their hands, in his speech.

At sundown, the crowds surged to the maidan which was neither well-lit nor had an efficient public address system. His first message to them was that instead of taking to the path of violence they should learn to bear the hardships of struggle. Then, in severe words brooking no ambiguity, he condemned the farmers’ violence as well as the procession of sword-bearers, saying that violence was an attribute not of bravery but cowardice and that the sword was a coward’s weapon.

It is worth noting that Gandhiji chose to deliver these two mantras to his fellow Indians in Ayodhya – the Ayodhya of King Rama, whose rajya remained an ideal for him throughout his life. His stay had been arranged in such a manner that allowed him to take rest and made it possible for an unending procession of people to file into the room for his darshan and file out – in silence.

Mahatma Gandhi taking his last meal before the start of his fast, Rajkot, 1939. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Mahatma Gandhi taking his last meal before the start of a fast, Rajkot, 1939. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

That night, thousands of farmers, with tears of repentance in their eyes, made a silent plea to their liberator for forgiveness. The following morning, after bathing in the Sarayu river, Gandhiji set out for his next halt. But the pain caused by the farmers’ violence, which had not only dealt a blow to the movement but was cause for shame, refused to leave him. He urged Jawaharlal Nehru to guide the farmers who had wandered off the right path.

Some days later, Nehru addressed a gathering of the rebellious farmers and got them to publicly accept collective blame for their misdeeds. So much so that many of them who admitted to their wrong-doing said they were prepared to give themselves up and serve long jail terms as well.

This episode tells us something about the force of conviction that propelled Gandhiji’s advocacy of a freedom struggle based on the moral and principled yardsticks of satya and ahimsa. The manner in which he suspended the entire non-cooperation movement in the wake of the Chauri-Chaura incident is well known.

It is noteworthy that by the time Bapu visited Ayodhya for the first time, Tilak, the leader who gave the resounding slogan ‘Freedom is our birthright’, was no more. The mantle of steering the freedom struggle, giving it a new momentum, now rested on Gandhiji.

On February 10, 1921 when he reached Faizabad station – he was returning from Varanasi after having performed the foundation stone laying ceremony of the Kashi Vidyapeeth – one of the aims of his visit was to meet the sadhus of Ayodhya and persuade them to join the freedom movement. Gandhiji’s decision to meet them was significant considering that his attempt to turn the Khilafat Movement into an opportunity to promote Hindu-Muslim unity had started bearing fruit. (The Khilafat movement was started to influence the British prime minister to refrain from abolishing the Turkish caliphate, a move seen as a threat to Islam and hence to the religious freedom of Muslims under British rule.)

At the time Gandhiji was not only engaged in moulding the Khilafat movement in accordance with his principles; he was also trying to remove the obstacles the British were placing in the way of Hindu-Muslim unity. The biggest obstacle was the issue of cow slaughter which the British were busy giving a communal colour. It was only natural that he would want to speak frankly on this issue in Ayodhya. The way he put the British government in the dock on this issue and made Hindu-Muslim unity an imperative for cow-protection, only he could have accomplished it.

Also read: The Sangh’s New Game Plan for Ayodhya

It was telling that Gandhiji who did not take his eyes off other concerns of the freedom struggle while focusing on this issue, did not take any cognizance whatsoever of the so-called Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid issue. No matter that this was his first visit to the birthplace and kingdom of his Rama (in 1915, while travelling from Calcutta to Haridwar for the Kumbha mela he had passed Ayodhya).

Physically exhausted by the previous evening’s long meeting, when Gandhiji reached the Sarayu ghat the following morning to attend a meeting of sadhus being headed by Pandit Chandiram, he found it difficult to speak standing. He began by asking the gathered sadhus to forgive him for his physical weakness which forced him to be seated as he addressed them. Then he proceeded to hold up a mirror to them: “It is said there are 56 lakh sadhus in India. If all 56 lakh of them are ready to sacrifice their lives, then I am confident that with the power of their tapasya and prayer they can liberate India. But they have strayed from their path. So have the maulvis. If at all the sadhus and maulvis have achieved anything it is to make the Hindus and Muslims fight with one another. I say this to both…even in circumstances where you are rendered devoid of your faith, become heretics or obliterate your religion, there is no such command of god that permits you to create enmity between two individuals who have committed no wrong against one another.”

Gandhi did not stop there. He continued: “I said to the sadhus of Haridwar that if they want to protect the cow, they should be ready to give their lives up for the Muslims. Had the British been our neighbours, I would have advised you to request them that although their religion does not prohibit them from slaughtering cows and consuming their meat, they should consider stopping the practice for our sake…. But they raise their hand [against us] and say they are the rulers and that their rule is like Ram Rajya for us. My appeal to the sadhus is that if you want to protect the cow, give your lives up for Khilafat….Those who kill Muslims for slaughtering cows should abdicate their religion. There are no such directives given to Hindus anywhere.”

“If at all the sadhus and maulvis have achieved anything it is to make the Hindus and Muslims fight with one another,” said Gandhiji. Credit: Arshad Afzaal Khan

Gandhiji continued to give advice in this vein. He said: “These days the Hindus want the municipality to put an end to cow slaughter. I call it stupidity. On this issue, some Marwari friends in Calcutta were misled by thoughtless advisors into asking me to save 200 cows from being slaughtered by butchers. I told them point-blank I would not save a single cow until such time as the butchers were not told which other occupation to adopt because they do not do the work they do to hurt the sentiments of the Hindus….What happened in Bombay? The butchers had hundreds of cows but no Hindu approached them. The members of the Khilafat committee went to them and said what they were doing was not right; they should let the cows go and buy goats instead. The butchers gave up all the cows….This is called protecting the cow.”

He clarified that the object of cow protection was not animal protection: “The concern was for the protection of the weak and the helpless — only by doing this do we get the right to pray to god for our protection. Praying to god for our own protection is a sin as long as we do not protect the weak….We need to learn to love the way Rama loved Sita. As long as we do not observe our dharma conscientiously and with utmost faith and steadfastness, we shall not be able to destroy this demonic government. Neither shall we attain swaraj nor will the rule of our dharma prevail. It is beyond the power of Hindus to bring back Ram Rajya.”

He concluded his address by saying this: “I do not want to say too much. I see students of Sanskrit here. I urge them to sacrifice their lives for Muslim brothers….Every student who is desirous of obtaining knowledge for a livelihood should realise that acquiring knowledge from the British is akin to drinking from a poisoned cup. Do not drink from the poisoned cup. Come back to the right path….There is an idol here, which receives offerings of foreign cloth. If you do not want foreign cloth for yourself, then you must end this practice. Adopt swadeshi. Use the thread spun by your brothers and sisters. I am hoping that the sadhus will give me a part of what they have….Sadhus are considered to be pious; let them give within their means. It will come in useful in the struggle for swaraj.”

The English translation of this speech is preserved in the Uttar Pradesh state archives in Lucknow. It was placed in the category of confidential documents at the time. The previous evening, too, after throwing light on his South Africa satyagraha, he had given a call to the people to engage in peaceful non-cooperation against the British government, boycott government-aided schools, give up wearing foreign cloth and spin yarn on the charkha instead. He refrained from giving the same call in his Ayodhya meeting saying he did not want to merely repeat what he had said the previous evening.

In 1929, Gandhiji came to his Rama’s capital Ayodhya for the second time to seek contributions for his Harijan Fund. In a meeting held in Faizabad’s Motibagh locality he was given a silver ring for the fund. He decided to auction it there and then.

To provide an incentive for high bids, he announced that he would personally put the ring on the finger of the individual who bid the highest. One gentleman bid fifty rupees and the auction ended with him. Gandhiji kept his word and put the ring on his finger. The gentleman had a hundred rupee note with him. Offering it, he stood there to get fifty rupees back. Gandhiji left him speechless with a comment that he was a baniya after all; a baniya never parted with the money that came his way — all the more so if it was a donation. The gathering burst into laughter and the gentleman made his way back in a happy frame of mind.

During this visit, Gandhiji visited the first Gandhi ashram in the country, which had been established in Akbarpur by Dhirendra bhai Majumdar. It was on that occasion that he delivered his famous message ‘Hate the sin and not the sinner’, exemplifying his statement by staying in the house of an English priest called Sweetman. In the ashram meeting, he urged the people gathered there to get organised, give up wearing foreign cloth, spin the charkha, confront the oppression of zamindars with non-violent resistance, dedicate themselves to the cause of liquor prohibition, and boycott government schools.

Thereafter, even Awadh’s rebellious farmers gave up the path of violence. Not just that, by facing police atrocities and excesses resolutely, they no longer provided an excuse for the British government to unleash its army’s oppressive force on them on the grounds that it was justified.

Krishna Pratap Singh is a senior journalist based in Faizabad, Uttar Pradesh.

Translated from the Hindi original by Chitra Padmanabhan

Past Continuous: How Independent India Failed to Prevent Gandhi’s Assassination

A fortnightly column reflecting on chapters of India’s political past that are relevant today.

This article was originally published on February 06, 2018. It is being republished on the occasion of Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary.

“Woh phir aayega (He will come again).” Three cataclysmic words uttered by a 20-year-old man – his youthful innocence corroded by hatred – as he was being led away by the police, should have been ample tip-off that his was not an act of personal vendetta but part of a plan which, though devised somewhat haphazardly, was adequate in motivation.

Yet, for inexplicable reasons, the nascent ‘free’ Indian state failed in its task, this one less daunting than managing the fallout of the Partition riots. Even if one discounts that the government headed by Jawaharlal Nehru, with the Iron Man (Sardar Patel) manning the crucial home or internal security ministry, failed to see the seriousness of the danger to the life of Mahatma Gandhi after he arrived in Delhi on September 7, 1947, days after his first fast in independent India, there is little defence of its incapacity to assess the grave threat after the failed assassination bid on January 20 at the prayer meeting. And this after the unambiguous warning in those three words – there was more to come.

The ten days between Madanlal Pahwa’s attempt and the eventual assassination of the Mahatma even today remains a textbook case on how not to conduct an investigation into a murder bid on the country’s most endangered man – ironically in 1948, a 79-year-old man on the verge of losing relevance in the wake of the rise of amoral practicability of governance and statecraft.

India’s destiny was greatly shaped not just by the failure of police and intelligence agencies to join the dots that were there for all to see. The progression of India into an independent and secular nation was also hampered by the myopia and egotism of principal investigators and the lackadaisical approach of politicians in key positions in government. If any cluster of days could ever be revisited and events altered, the ten eventful days between January 20-30 must rank at the top of this list.

Also read: Can Gandhi’s Teachings Help Us Find a Way Out of a World Full of Strife?

How does one evaluate threat when none was issued? This was a counter-question raised by the government when, in the aftermath of the assassination, it was accused of not taking adequate pre-emptive measures. This argument, provided in the aftermath of Gandhi’s assassination, appears grossly deficient for no reason other than the Kapur Commission’s observation more than a decade and a half later.

The venerable Justice Jeevanlal Kapur took charge of the inquiry commission established to ‘re-investigate’ the conspiracy to murder Mahatma Gandhi after its original chief, Gopal Swarup Pathak, then MP but later vice president, was appointed central minister. Kapur wrote his assessment of sentiments of Hindu and Sikh refugees who arrived in India from Pakistan.

He wrote that though displaced persons had “full faith in Gandhiji but this faith was largely eroded by Mahatma’s solicitude for the Moslems (who decided against migrating to Pakistan) who had brought about (sic) the partition and the advice to them to go back to their homes made them angrier”. It is pertinent to recall that insecure Muslims who chose to stay back, sought shelter in graveyards, dargahs, other Islamic shrines and several monuments. Gandhi wanted them to return to their homes and pleaded with their Hindu neighbours to facilitate this.

Discussing the political mood in the country in the days preceding Gandhi’s murder, the commission added, “There was amongst a large number of Hindus, particularly the Hindu Mahasabha, a strong feeling against Mr. Gandhi for his fast to coerce the payment of Rs 55 crores and appeasement of Moslems, and neglect of dishonoured, pillaged, robbed and homeless Hindus – the refugees from Pakistan”. About the last fast, Justice Kapur concluded that it significantly “restore(d) communal peace in Delhi but the hearts of some of the extreme Savarkarites were bent on Mahatma’s removal by violence”.

These observations establish that despite the pledge drafted and signed by over 100 leaders, including from the Hindu Mahasabha, there was opposition to Gandhi on two counts. First, a significant section of Hindu leaders and people felt that Gandhi was a serial ‘appeaser’ of Muslims. Second, they felt he ‘sided’ with Pakistan by demanding the release of Rs 55 crore – due to it as part of Partition settlement but withheld by the Indian government because of Pakistan’s intrusion into Kashmir. Moreover, the Hindu Mahasabha formally disassociated with the pledge within a day of its adoption. Failure to read the ominous signs emanating from these developments was little short of criminal neglect on the government’s part.

An ignored threat

Undeniably, there was ample evidence that Gandhi’s life was under threat, but no one in the government was willing to read the writing on the wall. Why? Was it, as Kapur wrote, due to “a split in the Central Cabinet in which Sardar Patel was on one side and Pandit Nehru and Maulana Azad on the other; so much so that it reached the stage of Sardar Patel’s resignation sent to the Mahatma because Sardar thought that he had lost the Mahatma’s confidence”.

The ten days between the audacious bomb attack on January 20 and the final assassination by Nathuram Godse was witness not just to political inadequacy regarding safeguarding Gandhi’s life, but also failure of police, other investigating and intelligence agencies to follow leads that emerged from Pahwa’s disclosures and what was revealed by other sources.

On the one side, the weekly intelligence abstract – dated January 24 – of the Delhi police wrote that “the explosion at Birla House was considered to be the index of seething unrest prevailing amongst the masses against the Gandhian ideology,” yet there was no follow-up action to prevent this anger from getting converted once again into another attack on the Mahatma.

Manohar Malgonkar, in his definitive book The Men Who Killed Gandhi, described Pahwa’s interrogation and concluded that while he held back crucial information, “he certainly had told them enough. If the police had acted with more than routine zeal, it is doubtful if Nathuram Godse or any of the other conspirators would still have been free on January 30.” The question was what had the young man, detained when fleeing from Birla House, told the police and when?

A statue of Gandhi. Credit: Pixabay

First, within three hours, the police secured descriptions of six associates, three of whom had recced Birla House. A few hours subsequent to that, when the night was deep, Pahwa led his interrogators to Marina Hotel in Connaught Place, where Godse and Nayaran Apte had stayed and bolted from after the botched attempt. They found an incriminatory letter in the room, signed by Ashutosh Lahiri, general secretary Hindu Mahasabha, stating that the party was not a signatory to the seven-point pledge that made Gandhi end his last fast. None in the investigating team had the wisdom to ask the leader how his statement landed up in an upmarket Delhi hotel.

Second, before night fell, Pahwa revealed to interrogators that one of his associates was the editor of Hindu Rashtra or Agrani published either from Bombay or Poona. Shockingly, Delhi police did not make rudimentary inquiries about the paper from counterparts in the two cities, or even seek information about the paper, its owner, publisher and editor, all information listed with the government while registering a paper.

Third, the police laid hands on three pieces of clothing that residents of room no 40, Marina Hotel had left behind because those had been given to the laundry man. On them, three letter were neatly initialled – ‘NVG’. The police made no effort to find out the identity of this man or match it with the editor Pahwa had described. Godse’s identity was an open secret, but not to the police and government.

The tale of missed opportunities continued even in Bombay. J.C. Jain, a 40-year-old Hindi professor in a city college, got himself into a tangle on learning about the arrest of Pahwa, his ‘friend’. He decided to report whatever he knew. Pahwa had spent hours with him narrating almost the entire plan, but at that point Jain had imagined it to be a flight of fancy.

Quixotically, Jain sought appointments with the deputy prime minister and state Congress chief instead of heading off to meet the nearest responsible police officer who would believe his words given the professor’s stature. Eventually, he went to the Bombay chief minister, B.G. Kher, who kept him waiting before passing him off to Morarji Desai, state home minister.

Even after learning what Jain wanted to talk about, Desai not only did not call a member of his staff to take notes, but he also acquiesced to Jain’s condition that he would talk only if assured that he would remain unidentified.

Later, Jain claimed he divulged names of Pahwa’s associates, but Desai disputed the claim. The word of a powerful leader was against that of a politically unconnected teacher, already running scared. This conversation took place on January 21 when Godse and Apte was still on their adventurous return journey after traversing through large parts of northern and western India.

Also read: Reading as a Sadhana: Gandhi’s Experiments With Books

The same evening, Desai summoned Bombay’s deputy commissioner, J.D. Nagarvala, and narrated the entire tale without, incredulously, naming Jain. Because the name of Vinayak Savarkar cropped up, Pahwa had told Jain that Vishnu Karkare had taken him to meet the Mahasabha leader and after listening to his valorous stories asked him to “carry on”.

Nagarvala increased surveillance at Savarkar’s house but it had become a dead end, the assassins no longer needed assistance of leaders. Nagarvala told Malgonkar: “To my dying day, I shall believe that Savarkar was the man who organised Gandhi’s murder.” But beyond keeping him under watch, the police did little else.

Leads were not even followed up in Poona, where several of the conspirators included Digamber Bagde, who later turned an approver, and Gopal Godse had returned. Godse and Apte returned to Bombay and spent days in various hotels, met various friends and associates, Apte even whiled away time in the privacy of hotel rooms with his girlfriend for many years. The police remained oblivious. The duo flew back to Delhi while Karkare followed suit by train. Godse and Apte then went to Gwalior, met Dattatraya Sadashiv Parchure to pick up the infamous pistol, the 9mm Beretta.

True to their trait, the bumbling assassins left a mile-long trail and clues that could be spotted from yards away. Yet, so consumed were the police, intelligence agencies and their political masters that they failed in their basic duty and allowed such a heinous crime to be carried out.

Kapur wrote of the investigation: “(It) was not of a high professional order and it lacked investigational skill and drive which one should have expected from a trained police force and particularly in the case of threat to the life of a person of the eminence of Mahatma Gandhi taking into consideration the knowledge of the factum of a conspiracy to murder Mahatma Gandhi which information Madanlal after his arrest gave to the Delhi Police.”

Need one add a line to this in the 70th anniversary year of Gandhi’s assassination?

Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay is a Delhi-based writer and journalist, and the author of Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times and Sikhs: The Untold Agony of 1984. He tweets @NilanjanUdwin.

Gandhi Would Have Resisted Today’s Forceful Imposition of Vegetarianism

The recent proposal by the Railway Board to serve only vegetarian food on Gandhi Jayanti is not in line with the Mahatma’s principles.

This article was originally published on May 23, 2018. It is being republished on the occasion of Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary.

With its ascendancy to political power, the Hindu Right has amplified its long-term project of inserting itself into the narrative and legacy of our freedom struggle. One key element of this strategy is the distortion of historical facts. Another consistent tactic is to claim a strong affinity with Gandhi’s values and ideals. Indeed, a recent proposal by the Railway Board to serve only vegetarian food on Gandhi Jayanti for the next three years is in line with this strategy.

Throughout history, rules on diet and commensality have been key sociological markers of differentiation in Indian society. For the Sangh and its ilk, a forceful declaration of their vegetarian credentials is a means of distinguishing themselves from others, especially Dalits, Muslims and Christians. If the perpetual controversies over beef are the overt assertion of political power, public espousal of vegetarianism is the obverse side of the same coin. Indeed, in such a scenario, vegetarianism serves as a form of dog whistle politics for discrimination against many communities that the Hindu Right despises.

For sure, throughout his lifetime Gandhi was a vegetarian and had strong views on food and diet. But, while Gandhi advocated vegetarianism, the basis of his advocacy underwent an evolution. As he admitted in his autobiography, as a young man in England, Gandhi stuck to a vegetarian diet to honour a vow he had made to his mother:

I had all along abstained from meat in the interests of truth and of the vow I had taken, but had wished at the same time that every Indian should be a meat-eater, and had looked forward to being one myself freely and openly some day, and to enlisting others in the cause.

It was later that Gandhi’s vegetarianism evolved from simple adherence to the practices of his family and community to one with an ethical basis and compassion for other living beings.

The seemingly muddle-headed bureaucratic move of the Railway Board is admittedly smart if not a diabolical strategy. It draws on the fact of Gandhi’s vegetarianism and yokes it to a militant assertion of vegetarianism that is repugnant to the values and principles of the Mahatma. For while Gandhi was a vegetarian, he always found the forcible imposition of any norm or value on others an abhorrent idea that ought to be resisted. Here one is reminded of an episode during Gandhi’s time in Noakhali in 1946 that is recounted by the Bengali scholar Nirmal Bose in his memoir My Days with Gandhi. A Christmas gift bag that was sent to Gandhi included a pack of cigarettes. Since Jawaharlal Nehru was to arrive a couple of days later, Gandhi asked for the cigarettes to be reserved for Nehru.

Given the endless rounds of controversy over beef, a more relevant story comes from Jehangir Patel. In May 1944, an ill Gandhi was released from the Aga Khan’s palace and was convalescing at Patel’s Juhu home. One morning, Gandhi’s disciple Mirabehn declaimed that “Bapu won’t be able to eat his breakfast”. Mira had found raw meat placed next to fruit in the fridge. The cook had placed the meat meant for Patel’s dog in the fridge and an upset Mira argued that Patel was being a terrible host to the Mahatma. Upon hearing the fracas, Gandhi took a few grapes from the fridge and ate them. He then chastised Mira for being unreasonable and pointed out that “We are guests in our friend’s house, and it would not be right for us to impose our ideas upon him or upon anyone. People whose custom it is to eat meat should not stop doing so simply because I am present.”

While the two stories related above should suffice to argue against the problematic moves by the Railway Board, we should not let the terms of our engagement with Gandhi’s ideas on food be limited to arguments about beef and vegetarianism alone. Throughout his eventful life, Gandhi had much to say about the role of food in our lives. For sure, these views included an ethical advocacy of vegetarianism and human responsibility in the ethical treatment of all forms of life. But Gandhi’s ideas on food went beyond the terms of such debates to encompass fundamental questions of nutrition, economic justice and an ecological way of living.

In 1934, Gandhi was convinced that the fundamental needs of rural India could not wait any more and needed immediate redressal. He resigned from the Congress and moved to Wardha, eventually settling down in a nearby village that was named Sevagram. Gandhi’s endless experimentation in this period was with the health benefits of a variety of foods. The serving of a chutney of bitter neem leaves and unpalatable dishes made out of soya beans during the course of Gandhi’s experiments has evoked much humour. But the underlying intent was a serious one.

Throughout the 1930s, Gandhi paid enormous attention to the vital question of providing a healthy and nutritious diet for all Indians – including the millions of poor people with limited means. Towards this objective, Gandhi sought to equip the ordinary Indian of his time with the ability to make best use of locally available natural resources coupled with a systematic and scientific understanding of nutrition in the Indian context.

The problem of nutrition was addressed in multiple ways. Gandhian constructive workers under the leadership of J.C. Kumarappa carried out extensive experimentation and analysis to build a systematic body of scientific knowledge that was published as monographs on a variety of foodstuff such as jaggery, rice, oilseeds etc. Written in a simple manner, these monographs were designed to aid the education of Indians on questions of food and nutrition. They also published what is perhaps the first Table of Indian Food Values and Vitamins. The Gandhians also produced a popular volume on dietetics titled What Shall We Eat? In the context of the shrillness of contemporary debates, it is important to note that this Gandhian publication – that included a foreword from the Mahatma – carried a detailed nutrition table of food items including human milk, eggs, fish, sheep liver, mutton, pork, and yes, beef.

Seven decades after our independence, large number of Indians remain hungry and malnourished. If the government truly wishes to honour the Mahatma’s memory, it could make a simple beginning. It could forget about divisive and diversionary steps such as vegetarian meals on Gandhi Jayanti and the denial of nutritious eggs to millions of poor and underfed children through the mid-day meal scheme. Subsequently, it could devote its attention to the fundamental problem of providing a fair compensation for the labours of the Indian farmer while ensuring a healthy diet for all.

Venu Madhav Govindu is working on a thematic history of Gandhi’s Sevagram years. He is on the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru.

Rediscovering Gandhi Through the Cadence of Intertwined Texts

Tridip Suhrud’s authoritative Critical Edition of Gandhi’s ‘Autobiography’ shows something significant – the most illuminating reading of Gandhi happens when the works he wrote in his native Gujarati are read closely along with their English translations.

This article was originally published on July 26, 2018. It is being republished on the occasion of Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary.

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in Gandhi. The resurgence is piquantly ironic. Just when he had brought his people to the threshold of freedom, and wanted them to adopt his Hind Swaraj vision and initiate the making of a new harmonic world, they rejected Gandhi as being obsolete and irrelevant. Practically little of that rejection has changed, and yet Gandhi is seriously back – the world over, not just in India. What does this renewed remembrance, in the face of the non-acceptance of his alternative civilisational vision, mean? Anyone feeling drawn to Gandhi has to ask and answer this question. There is no easy engagement with Gandhi. And no engagement with him is meaningful without engaging with the self, the most difficult of all engagements.

The best on Gandhi, my supervisor professor V.N. Datta memorably told me, is Gandhi. The best beginning is through An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Now that Tridip Suhrud’s Critical Edition of the Autobiography has come out, it is the best, the most authoritative version for anyone seeking to understand Gandhi’s life and mind. Indeed, even serious scholars of Gandhi, who might have already studied this work, will benefit immensely from this epochal publication.

M.K. Gandhi
An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Critical Edition)
Translated from the Gujarati by Mahadev Desai
Introduced with Notes by Tridip Suhrud
Penguin, 2018

Developing over the years an insight Bhikhu Parekh provided in his seminal 1986 paper on ‘Gandhi and His Translators’, Suhrud has shown that the most illuminating reading of Gandhi happens when the works he wrote in his native Gujarati are read closely along with their English translations. The first work Suhrud, in collaboration with Suresh Sharma, took up for such close comparative scrutiny was the Hind Swaraj. Suhrud and Sharma prepared a masterly annotated edition of the Hind Swaraj, closely examining Gandhi’s original Gujarati text and his own English translation of it. They demonstrated that what Gandhi actually translated was the original text in his mind – of which the original Hind Swaraj was a verbalisation in Gujarati – and not the Gujarati verbalisation. Based on that close reading, the two collaborators also translated the work in Hindi and brought out a bilingual English-Hindi edition of it in 2010.

Having probed further various dimensions of this exercise in his Reading Gandhi in Two Tongues and Other Essays (2012), Suhrud has now offered us what he calls a “close reading of two intertwined texts of M.K. Gandhi’s Atmakatha”. The two texts are Gandhi’s Gujarati original – Satyana Prayogoathva Atmakatha – and Mahadev Desai’s rendering – An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Inadequately expressed by the word ‘translation’, the relationship between them is best described by Gopalkrishna Gandhi whom Suhrud quotes: “The English Autobiography…stands beside the original work not just as an authorised and outstanding translation but also as its first recension, prepared under the author’s direct guidance by one who was his alter ego, whose mother-tongue was the same as his, and who was, like him, perfectly at home in English.”

Marking minutely – barring paragraphing – even the slightest variation between the Gujarati and the English texts, Suhrud’s copious notes provide occasional glimpses of the fluidity of Gandhi’s thoughts as he verbalised them. The experience is heightened by the inclusion in this close comparative reading of Gandhi’s and Mahadevbhai’s texts, of the changes that were made, on condition of anonymity, by V.S. Srinivas Sastri in the original English ‘translation’ (what we now read as Gandhi’s Autobiography). For instance, explaining the purpose of the enterprise, Gandhi says – in the English text – that although he is narrating his ‘experiments’ after deep introspection, “I am far from claiming any finality or infallibility about my conclusion.” The Gujarati original says this: “But I do not ever wish to make a claim that conclusions thus arrived at are final for all, that they are true or only they are true.” The plain disclaimer of any “finality or infallibility” in the English text is unpacked in the Gujarati text, detailing the various things Gandhi was thinking of.

Similarly, in a chapter bearing, noticeably, the Hindi title ‘Nirbal ke bal Ram’ in both the Gujarati original and the English translation, Gandhi describes how, during a rubber of bridge, he got into a lewd conversation with his landlady and was at the point of bedding her. The English text says rather discreetly: “Just when I was about to go beyond the limit…” But the Guajarati original states explicitly the readiness to move from words to the deed: “Vaani ma thicheshta ma padwanitaiyarihati.”

To offer one more out of many such illustrations, in a chapter describing the kind of changes he was cultivating as a student in England, Gandhi says in the English text that his aspiration was to be “an English gentleman”. The same aspiration is described in the Gujarati original as one of becoming sabhya, civilised. Little of the total cognitive-cultural surrender that inspired educated Indians to thus ‘civilise’ themselves is conveyed in the aspiration to be “an English gentleman”; the latter could as well have been just pragmatically motivated.

A scanned postcard sketch of Gandhi. Credit: ChandanBN/Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

Suhrud’s Critical Edition also carries a masterly ‘Introduction’ that puts the work in full perspective. It draws attention to some of the key activities Gandhi undertook simultaneously with the penning of his experiments with Truth, thereby highlighting the pure atmosphere that surrounded the exercise. The writing commenced precisely when Gandhi went on a seven-day penitent, purificatory fast (on November 24, 1925). Besides, he resolved not to stir out of the Sabarmati Ashram during the whole of 1926. This physical in-dwelling also meant dwelling within himself. In fact, out of the 1,167 days over which the autobiography was written and serialised, Gandhi was at the ashram for 685 days. Given the demands of his public life, this was exceptional. Also, around this time – beginning February 24, 1926 – Gandhi began his daily discourses on the Gita which continued for 218 days till November 23, 1926. In addition, he began lecturing on Christ and the Bible at the Gujarat Vidyapith.

This interconnection is palpable enough for everyone to see. But Gandhi saw, and was directed by, a larger connectedness of things and ideas. Reminding us of this lodestar in Gandhi’s life and thinking, Suhrud shows how, as one seeking to know himself and attain moksha – to see truth (God) face to face – Gandhi necessarily had to be “an ashramite, a satyagrahi and a seeker after Swaraj.” Also that search for Truth, in turns, necessitated cultivation of ahimsa and brahmacharya.

Alert to the profound and subtle working of language in human life, Suhrud dwells on Gandhi’s decision to write his Atmakatha in Gujarati as opposed to his autobiography. Gandhi made a crucial distinction between jivanvruttant (autobiography or the chronicle of a life) and atmakatha (the story of a soul) and chose not to write his autobiography. Suhrud explains: “The atmakatha, Gandhi knew, would only be written in Gujarati, the language in which he heard the ‘small, still voice’ [atmanaad] speaking from within.” He also notices, in this context, a fine reversal in the titles of Gandhi’s Atmakatha and Autobiography. The Gujarati Satyana Prayogoathva Atmakatha “foregrounds the experiments with Truth. The order is reversed in the English translation where ‘An Autobiography’ has primacy.”

Suhrud makes no secret of his reverence for Gandhi and also, importantly, for Mahadev Desai. That can only be a reason to hold on to Truth. Suhrud, not surprisingly, shares with the readers even the worst that was said of the Autobiography while it was being serialised. He reproduces, for example, a fiercely critical response to Gandhi’s “wretched autobiography” from Sonja Schlesin, who as a young woman had been his secretary. Taking stock of these critical comments and the way Gandhi dealt with them, Suhrud remarks: “Gandhi was not always willing to make changes, albeit he was ever willing to publish challenges to his narrative and his response publicly.”

Tridip Suhrud. Credit: CEPT University website

I am inclined to put in a caveat here. Gandhi’s way of dealing with challenges to his narrative was not always unexceptionable. Let me mention, by way of example, the case of Reverend S.R. Scot, which Suhrud himself has cited to support his evaluation of Gandhi’s treatment of his criticism. Taken aback by the chapter titled ‘Glimpses of Religion’, Scot wrote a personal letter to Gandhi, contradicting the latter’s account of how as a schoolboy in Rajkot he developed a dislike for Christianity on account of the conduct of Christian missionaries who “used to stand in a corner near the high school and hold forth, pouring abuse on Hindus and their gods”; and also because he had heard that conversion to Christianity required eating beef, drinking liquor, and “going about in European costume including a hat”. Scot claimed that he was the sole missionary in Rajkot at the time. Gandhi asked him to write a rejoinder and promised to publish it in Young India, reserving the right to publish his response to Scot’s comments.

Suhrud believes that Gandhi did what he had promised. What Gandhi actually did was that he mauled Scot’s letter, reproducing from it a few fragments of his own choosing, and inserted his own far from persuasive rejoinder which occupied much more space than was assigned to Scot’s fragments.

Suhrud is perplexed by Gandhi’s refusal, when the serialised autobiography was coming out in book form, “to make changes even while admitting to inaccuracies”. He comes up with two cognate explanations. One, because he was not writing a jivanvruttant, an autobiographical narrative, Gandhi believed “that facts were not of material significance to him”. Two: “… the story of the strivings of his soul was being written at the urging of his ‘antaryami’, the ‘dweller within’ or the ‘spirit’. It was not given to Gandhi to modify what came to him from the antaryami.”Whatever their abstract philosophical appeal, insofar as Gandhi’s experiments were not isolated from – indeed often impinged upon – real flesh-and-blood people, these explanations leave a good deal unexplained.

The above critical comment is inspired by the conviction that henceforth Suhrud’s edition will be the one that generations of scholars and lay readers alike will trust. Should Suhrud – who may not have found at the Sabarmati Ashram archives the entire correspondence between Gandhi and Scot – find any merit in the caveat, he may use it for the next edition. He may, then, also like to check note 258 on page 377 relating to Gandhi’s recall of a comparison Gokhale made between Ranade, Telang and Mandlik. This Mandlik does not seem to answer to the description provided in the footnote. Gokhale almost certainly must have had V.N. Mandlik in mind.

Sudhir Chandra is the author of Gandhi: An Impossible Possibility, Routledge, 2017.

Lal Bahadur Shastri, Architect of India’s Real Surgical Strike

In a world full of hollow men, he was the genuine article. Shastri’s death anniversary is a timely opportunity to look back at India’s second prime minister.

At a time when we are led by a prime minister who believes above all in self-publicity, our thoughts go out to a diminutive and self-effacing man who once occupied the same office – Lal Bahadur Shastri.

Shastri served as prime minister for just 18 months, and in that brief tenure, left a memorable imprint on the country as a politician, administrator and war leader. Many in the present generation don’t know he authored the slogan, “Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan,” which captured the idea that peasants (and their welfare) are as integral to the security of the country as soldiers.

He was a seasoned freedom fighter who spent a total of nine years in jail. After independence, he held various ministerial and party positions. Apart from being general secretary of the Congress, he held the railways, transport and commerce portfolios. In 1961, following the death of Govind Ballabh Pant, he became Union home minister.

In a world full of hollow men, Shastri was the genuine article. He displayed his moral calibre when he resigned from office in the wake of the 1956 Ariyalur train accident, in which 142 people were killed. That act still reverberates in the country. Hard-working but with a weak disposition, he suffered heart attacks in 1958 and again in June 1964, shortly after taking office as prime minister.

In 1963, Nehru and Congress president K. Kamaraj decided that six prominent ministers would resign and devote themselves to organisational work. The goal was to bring in fresh blood into the Cabinet, as well as send a signal to the electorate. This was at a time when the Congress’s political supremacy was unchallenged.

Among those who left government were Shastri. He actually insisted that he be in the list, though Nehru did not want him there. But fate took an far more dramatic turn.

After Nehru, who?

On January 7, 1964, Nehru suffered a stroke. Compelled to set out a succession plan, he brought Shastri back into the cabinet as a minister without portfolio.

Panditji’s death four months later, on May 27, was no surprise, though for a country over which he had ruled as a virtually undisputed ruler, it was a major blow.

Four days later, Morarji Desai was persuaded to withdraw his hat from the ring, and Shastri was chosen as prime minister by the Congress Working Committee. Congress power-brokers had hoped that the soft-spoken Shastri would be their puppet. He turned out to be a decisive man of firm views.

These qualities had actually been evident in the period he was minister without portfolio. On December 27, 1963, he was asked to handle the crisis that followed the theft of the holy relic from Hazratbal in Srinagar. It reappeared after a week, but the theft triggered a popular uprising by an action committee of people who were the forerunners of today’s separatists.

They demanded a special deedar, or viewing ceremony, by experts to certify the authenticity of the relic. The spooks and the babus in New Delhi resisted, but Shastri overruled the Union home secretary and ordered the deedar. The action committee duly certified that it was indeed the genuine article. Tempers cooled across Kashmir.

The slightly built leader had to fill the political shoes of the great banyan, Nehru. He did so with a quiet panache. He battled pressure from the powerful men who had pushed him into office, accommodated Nehru’s daughter, Indira, in his cabinet, and made key appointments such as that of C. Subramaniam as the food and agricultural minister. To assist him, he created the Prime Minister’s Secretariat, headed by a secretary-level officer.

Swords and ploughshares

Among the long-term legacies of the Shastri era was India’s attainment of self-sufficiency in food. When he took office, agriculture was in crisis. India was, infamously, ‘living from ship to mouth’. Between 1960 and 1963, India had imported a staggering 15 million tonnes of US grains – and the amount of the imports were rising each year.

Subramaniam, with the support of Shastri, took policy decisions that eventually led to the Green Revolution.

Today, Shastri is known for something he may not have been trained for – as a war leader. The Indian military was still licking its wounds from the 1962 fiasco when Pakistan, hoping to rattle a new prime minister, initiated a series of provocations, ostensibly aimed at “liberating” Kashmir.

Pakistan had received US military aid for a decade, and its forces had achieved a conventional edge over the Indian military, especially in the areas of armour, artillery and the air force. Pakistan also believed in its own myth – that the manly Pathan, Field Marshal Ayub Khan, would make short work of the small, dhoti-clad vegetarian Shastri.

Hostilities began in 1965 with a feint in the Rann of Kutch, where Pakistan took advantage of the fact that the border had been delineated, though not demarcated in the swampy region. There was some skirmishing, but Shastri was not rattled. He emphasised his desire to resolve issues peacefully – acutely aware that the conflict would be used by Hindu chauvinists to stir up communal passions within India.

India’s real surgical strike

Then began phase 2 of the Pakistani plan: Operation Gibraltar, or the invasion of Jammu and Kashmir by covert forces, with the view of sparking a domestic uprising like the one that had followed the Hazratbal theft. That did not happen, and ordinary Kashmiris helped the Indian Army round up the infiltrators.

The devastating Indian response came in the capture of the Haji Pir Pass, a key point of ingress, on August 30, 1965. This, if anything, was India’s real ‘surgical strike’.

Pakistan upped the ante. Under Operation Grand Slam, it sent two armoured regiments in to cut the road from east Punjab to J&K. Indian forces fell back in the face of the assault and the situation looked grim.

In an emergency committee of the cabinet, Shastri took two key decisions. First, he ordered the air force to assist the Army. Then he gave the go-ahead for the Indian riposte – an attack across the international border towards Lahore, which caught Pakistan flat-footed.

The war carried on till September 23. Despite command failures and setbacks, India came out ahead because Pakistan failed to make any gains in Kashmir, and suffered a decisive defeat in Khem Karan in Punjab.

Shastri’s cool-headed leadership was vital in those days. The US was staying away from the region, the British were discredited, and the Chinese had jumped into the fray on behalf of Pakistan. Shastri’s style was of wide consultation with the military brass as well as party colleagues, parliament and the cabinet.

Resting in peace

In the post-war Tashkent talks, brokered by the Soviet Union, he walked the talk of peace and did not rub Pakistan’s nose in its defeat. He was willing to return captured territory in Haji Pir and on the Lahore front – real estate that was more valuable than what Pakistan had in Chamb and Rajasthan.

Shortly after the signing of the Tashkent Agreement, his heart gave out. Shastri passed away in Tashkent in the early hours of January 11, 1966.

India’s second prime minister deserves to be not just remembered, which India does from time to time, but emulated – which no one aspires to do. He was ethical, wise and far-sighted; and a large-hearted and pragmatic team player. The adjectives could go on, and still be all true.

The writer is a Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi