A Week with Gandhi/June 10, 1942
June 10, 1942
This is my last day at Sevagram. I was up at five. Nehru had already left his bed and gone over to talk to Gandhi. He returned at seven and said that he and President Azad of the Congress Party were going to Wardha today and that Gandhi would follow soon for some private discussions with them. We arranged that I would go with them to Wardha and there take the train for Hyderabad. Members of the ashram started appearing to say goodbye to me. They were all very sweet, and I felt they had been extremely good to me. Mahadev Desai came, took me aside, and talked with me about the possibility of Gandhi’s arrest. He said he had heard rumors that Gandhi would be arrested on June 17. I said I doubted it and expressed the view that the British would wait until Congress definitely adopted a resolution to start civil disobedience. Desai said it was a pity that I was not going immediately to New Delhi, since Gandhi wanted to see the Viceroy and hoped that I could arrange the interview. Gandhi believed that if he could talk to the Viceroy they would arrive at an understanding, Desai said.
At about noon—the temperature must have been 110—Azad, Nehru, and I got into the car and travelled over the hot dusty road to the Congress hostel in Wardha. It was a five-mile trip. Azad is a big man with a tough body, big head, short gray goatee, gray short-cropped hair, a strong voice. His skin is lighter than that of most Indians. His family came to India from Arabia four hundred years ago. He is one of the best-known Moslems of India. He has translated the Koran into Urdu and is a recognized authority on Arabic lore and on the history of Islam. Everybody addresses him as “the Maulana,” which means Moslem scholar and divine.
The three of us lunched in a cool room at the hostel. For the first time in eight days I enjoyed the refreshing effect of an electric fan. After lunch I interviewed Azad. Nehru interpreted. Azad under stands English but hesitates to speak it, and so Nehru did not translate my questions and only translated Azad’s remarks. Azad, who had conducted most of the negotiations with Cripps, said that Cripps had been a disappointment to him. He had expected Cripps to be a friend of India. Cripps had told him definitely that there would be a new Indian national government which would function as a responsible cabinet with the Viceroy interfering as little in policy-making as the King in England. It was on this assumption that the negotiations with Sir Stafford proceeded. They had practically agreed on a formula for dividing the defense of India between the British Commander-in-Chief and the Indian Defense Minister. Then quite suddenly, on April 9, Azad stated, Cripps told him that the British government refused to terminate the Viceroy’s veto power. Thereupon, the negotiations with Cripps broke down. Azad felt that Cripps had made a promise and then discovered that London would not let him keep it. The key to an agreement between Britain and India, Azad declared, is the formation of an Indian provisional coalition cabinet government. The Congress Party did not expect to have a majority of the members of this cabinet, Azad declared.
I asked him what was the mood of the Indian people after the failure of Cripps. He replied, “In part it is one of helplessness. There is also an element of protest. But chiefly it is the feeling that there was no use trying to reach an understanding with the British government. The British have decided to give up nothing. Many Moslems have this impression too.”
Azad said that in the present political climate of India, no Moslem leader could oppose independence. The Moslem League, he declared, was reactionary and depended chiefly on the support of landlords. Ninety-five per cent of the Moslems of India were descended from Hindus. The rest came in with the Moslem conquerors. But even those his family included—had become assimilated. In Bengal, he said, repeating what Gandhi had told me, the Hindus and Moslems speak Bengali and dress and live alike. In Madras, they all spoke Tamil. In the villages, the differences between the religious communities were small. Jinnah did not want Pakistan, Azad declared, except as a bargaining card against the Hindus, and England had obligingly given it to him.
Both Nehru and Azad assured me that nobody in India wanted the Moslems to remain in an Indian union if they really wished to secede. “However,” Azad said, “I do not believe in divorce before marriage. If the Hindus and Moslems try to live together and fail, then there can be a separation. But a large number of Moslems believe in the unity of India and they do not wish to disrupt that unity before it is given a fair trial.”
At three o’clock in the afternoon Gandhi burst into the hostel. I was near the entrance when he arrived. His face was wreathed in smiles. The car which had brought Nehru, Azad, and me to Wardha had returned to Sevagram to fetch Gandhi and Desai. When it was three-quarters of a mile from Wardha, the car broke down. Gandhi got out and walked that distance under the broiling Indian afternoon sun. When he reached the hostel he was triumphant, and commented on the unreliability of these “new-fangled technical achievements of the industrial age.”
Within a few minutes, Gandhi was closeted with Azad and Nehru. I walked into the room through the open door, but they were talking Hindustani, and so I left. Later Grover, the young Associated Press correspondent in India, arrived for an interview. Gandhi said to him that India now was a corpse and as a corpse it could not help much in winning the war. He wanted India to be free from British political domination and then India would rise in her strength to defend herself.
I left Wardha at nine-thirty P.M. Gandhi shook me firmly by the hand as I said goodbye and asked me to visit him again.
I flew back from India to New York in seven days. Shortly after my return, a reporter interviewed me and asked if I had written Gandhi a bread-and-butter letter. It had not occurred to me to do so.