GANDHI’S LAST (AND GREATEST) FAST
In January 1948, Mahatma Gandhi sat on a fast for communal harmony – the last fast of his life. An exclusive extract from Ramachandra Guha’s new book on the leader, recalls that momentous time
Meanwhile, in a private letter to his father, Devadas Gandhi wrote: ‘By your strenuous efforts [for communal harmony] lacs of lives were saved and lacs more would have been saved. But all of a sudden you lost patience. What you can achieve while living, you cannot achieve by dying’.
Gandhi would not be moved. On the morning of the 12th, he went to the Viceregal Palace to inform Mountbatten of his fast. Later, Nehru came to Birla House and sat with Gandhi for two hours. Although the stated reason for the fast was the deteriorating communal situation, it seems Gandhi was also upset with the Government’s decision to withold from Pakistan its share of the sterling balances owed by Britain to (undivided) India after the War. Because of Pakistan’s invasion of Kashmir, the Indian Government had delayed payment. But in Gandhi’s view of the world, financial debts to another person or entity, whether friend, enemy, or neither, had to be discharged immediately.
On the 13th, Gandhi had his usual morning meal of goat’s milk, boiled vegetables and fruit juice. Then he had a long conversation with Vallabhbhai Patel. The fast formally began at 11.15 am, after which some prayers were said.
… On the evening of the first day of his fast, Gandhi attended the daily prayer meeting and gave his address as usual. He spoke of, among other things, the perception that Indian Muslims trusted both him and Nehru, but not Patel. Gandhi thought this slightly unfair. ‘The Sardar is blunt of speech’, he remarked: ‘What he says sometimes sounds bitter. The fault is in his tongue’. He asked his Muslim friends to ‘bring to the Sardar’s notice any mistakes which in their opinion he commits’.
… On the evening of 14th January, a batch of angry men arrived on bicycles at Birla House and raised what were described as ‘communal and anti-gandhi slogans’. Inside the house, speaking with Gandhi, were Patel, Azad, and Nehru. When the trio came out and heard the demonstrators say ‘Let Gandhi Die’, Nehru shouted: ‘How dare you say that. Come and kill me first’. At this the demonstrators dispersed, but no sooner had Nehru’s car sped away, than they reassembled. One of Gandhi’s doctors, Jivraj Mehta, tried to reason with them. They told him that the slogans were on behalf of the refugees who needed food, homes, clothes, and jobs.
At the prayer meeting that day, Gandhi spoke of reports of attacks on Sikhs and Hindus in Pakistan; if these ceased, they would have a beneficial effect on India. He then turned to his present ordeal.‘they tell me I am mad’, he said, ‘and have a habit of going on fast on the slightest pretext. But I am made that way’. When he was a boy growing up in Kathiawar, he had a dream ‘that if the Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis, Christians and Muslims could live in amity not only in Rajkot but in the whole of India, they would all have a very happy life. If the dream could be realized even now when I am an old man on the verge of death, my heart would dance’.
On the 15th, the third day of Gandhi’s fast, an American writer visiting India went to see him at Birla House. He saw him lying on a cot in the porch. Gandhi, reported this writer to his wife in New York, ‘was asleep, lying on his side in a embryo position. He was completely covered in a khaddar cloth, including his head, and framing his face. … An old man’s face and not attractive. In his sleep, he seemed to have lost control and it showed what he perhaps was feeling – suffering, intense suffering… . Somehow we never think of a Gandhi fast as a terrible physical experience. We think of it as a political manoeuvre, a strike, a gesture. But here it was in human terms, a process. Here was a 79 year old man deliberately killing himself in the most difficult and excruciating way.’
…At evening prayers on the 15th, Gandhi was visibly weak. From his bed, with a microphone next to him, he spoke in a barely audible voice for a minute. The rest of his speech, read out for him by Pyarelal, explained that his fast was on behalf of the minorities both in Pakistan and India. Conducted in the first instance ‘on behalf of the Muslim minority in the [Indian] Union’, it was ‘necessarily against the Hindus and Sikhs of the Union and [against] the Muslims of Pakistan’.
After the meeting, the crowd filed past him, one by one, bowing with folded hands, first the children, then the women, finally the men.
Meanwhile, news reached Birla House that the Government had agreed to pay the sterling balances owed to Pakistan, as their contribution ‘to the non-violent and noble effort made by Gandhiji, in accordance with the glorious traditions of this great country, for peace and goodwill’. The Government of India had bowed to Gandhi’s will; when would the city of Delhi do likewise?
… On Saturday the 17th, Gandhi entered the fifth day of his fast. His doctors issued a bulletin saying he was ‘definitely weaker and has begun to feel heavy in the head’. Besides, ‘the kidneys are not functioning well’.
Meeting Maulana Azad in the morning, Gandhi laid down seven conditions for breaking his fast. These were: 1. The annual fair (the Urs) at the Khwaja Bakhtiyar shrine at Mehrauli, due in nine days time, should take place peacefully; 2. The hundred odd mosques in Delhi converted into homes and temples should be restored to their original uses; 3. Muslims should be allowed to move freely around Old Delhi; 4. Non-muslims should not object to Delhi Muslims returning to their homes from Pakistan; 5. Muslims should be allowed to travel without danger in trains; 6. There should be no economic boycott of Muslims; 7. Accommodation of Hindu refugees in Muslim areas should be done with the consent of those already in these localities.
Gandhi’s influence was finally permeating across the city of Delhi, ‘slowly but surely’. Two lakh people signed a peace pledge, which read: ‘We the Hindu, Sikh, Christian and other citizens of Delhi declare solemnly our conviction that Muslim citizens of the Indian Union should be as free as the rest of us to live in Delhi in peace and security and with self-respect and to work for the good and well-being of the Indian Union’.
… On the 17th evening, Gandhi somehow summoned the strength to speak at his prayer meeting. He thanked all those who had written or wired their good wishes (many from Pakistan). But he insisted that his fast was not ‘a political move in any sense of the term. It is in obedience to the peremptory call of conscience and duty’.
On the morning of the 18th of January, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh leaders met at Rajendra Prasad’s house. Here they signed a pledge assuring Gandhi that the seven conditions he had stipulated would be fully met. The Urs would be held at Mehrauli as usual, Muslims would be able to move freely all across Delhi, mosques taken away from Muslims would be returned to them, and so on. They all then trooped over to Birla House to present the undertaking to Gandhi. Reassured, and convinced, shortly after noon Gandhi accepted a glass of lime juice. As he did, reported the Hindustan Times, ‘the room rang with shouts of “Gandhiji-ki-jai”. A smile appeared on the face of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru who had worn an anxious look all these days.’
Outside, the city of ‘Delhi was jubilant: its efforts to convince Gandhiji that the era of communal madness in the capital was over had succeeded.’ The news that the fast had been broken brought thousands of people to Birla House, despite it being a rainy day.
Over the past thirty-five years Gandhi had gone on fast every other year. The provocations had been various: sexual transgressions in the Ashram; violence committed in the name of nationalism; the oppression of ‘untouchables’; and, of course, the need for communal harmony. On the 16th of January, 1948, he wrote to a disciple now living in the Himalaya, who had been at his side in several previous fasts, that this latest yajna in Delhi was his ‘greatest fast’. And so it was.
[Excerpted with permission from Ramachandra Guha’s Gandhi: The Years That Changed The World 19141948, to be published next week by Penguin/allen Lane.]