Gandhi Jayanti: As nation prepares to mark 150 years of the Mahatma, let's not forget his darkest hour

India will commence a two-year-long celebration to commemorate the 150th birth anniversary of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi today. Veritably deified as the Mahatma in his lifetime, he will be hailed for demonstrating to the world the efficacy of nonviolent resistance against the injustices of the powerful. To him we will credit our emergence as a nation, of winning freedom for India without having to pay an extortionate price, for valiantly crafting the Hindu-Muslim unity and waging a ferocious battle against the menace of untouchability. But what we will never accept, let alone examine, is the sense of failure that began to haunt Gandhi in the last few months of his life. At the roots of his disquiet was the horrific Partition violence — he interpreted it as his failure to inculcate in Indians the true meaning of ahimsa or nonviolence. Dark thoughts began to assail him; he had nightmares and tremors; he lived in desperate agony. Gandhi began to openly declare that he no longer wished to live for 125 years as he had wanted to until then. Based on his reading of one of the Upanishads, Gandhi believed the natural span of a person’s life is 125 years. Man should and could live for so long not by indulging his senses, but by devoting himself to the service of God and mankind. He expressed the desire to live for 125 years for the first time in a speech he delivered to the All-India Congress Committee before his arrest on the eve of the 1942 Quit India movement. Thereafter, it became the norm among his friends and acquaintances to wish him a life of 125 years. Gandhi’s zest for life began to ebb in the weeks following his arrival in Delhi on 9 September, 1947 from Calcutta. Delhi was a shock to him. Muslims had been hounded out from their homes; several mosques had been converted into temples. No less perturbing to him was the plight of Hindus and Sikhs who had fled Pakistan and were languishing in refugee camps. They thirsted for vengeance against the ghastly treatment meted out to them in Pakistan. Delhi reeled under arson, murder and gun-battles. [caption id=“attachment_608459” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Gandhi’s zest for life began to ebb in the weeks following his arrival in Delhi on 9 September, 1947 from Calcutta. Delhi was a shock to him. Getty Images[/caption] India’s fate depended on whether or not Delhi could rediscover its peace. Gandhi set upon the task, as he had so often in the past, to restore amity and sanity to the beleaguered city. He provided succour and solace to the suffering and engaged in dialogue with groups baying for blood and vengeance. He was a one-man army battling against hatred and impulses of violence. It was as if his life’s mission to work for ahimsa and truth had come to naught. This realisation had a severe psychological impact on Gandhi, an account of which is provided by his personal secretary, Pyarelal Nayyar, in his book, Gandhi: The Last Phase. His nights were restless and full of anguish. Pyarelal furnishes an example of it: “After a particularly agonising day, he [Gandhi] was heard muttering in his sleep. On being asked about it, he said he had a dream that a crowd of Hindu youths had rushed into his room. One of them started abusing him and, it seemed, wanted to assault him.” On another occasion, he dreamt he had been surrounded by a crowd of Muslims even as he was telling them what their duty ought to be in the city torn apart by hatred. These were not occasional occurrences, but frequent enough to make him remark in exasperation: “Sleeping or waking I can think of nothing else [Hindu-Muslim violence].” Someone suggested that it perhaps was a manifestation of his dedication to the cause of nonviolence. Gandhi shot back, “In fact, my prayer to God now is to take me away from the bed of torture that life has become to me.” He wished to die even on 2 October, 1947, which eventually turned out to be Gandhi’s last birthday to be celebrated in his lifetime. To wish him at Birla House, where he had taken residence, were Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, GD Birla and his family members. Gandhi’s room was decorated with flowers. A short prayer was about to be recited. Pyarelal writes, “His [Gandhi] request to all was to pray that ’either the present conflagration should end or He should take me away. I do not wish another birthday to overtake me in an India still in flames’.” A little later, Gandhi turned to Sardar Patel and lamented, “What sin must I have committed that He should have kept me alive to witness all these horrors.” Not only did he now want to die, Gandhi thought that he must consciously eschew the wish to live for 125 years. Pyarelal reports Gandhi saying, “I… invoke the aid of the all-embracing Power to take me away from the ‘vale of tears’ rather than make me a helpless witness of the butchery by man become savage…” The savagery on display had rendered his mission and him redundant, or so Gandhi thought. A sense of failure dogged him. In a letter to Miss (Sonia) Schlesin, who had been his secretary during his South African days, Gandhi explained, “My wish [to live for 125 years] was conditional upon continuous act of service of mankind. If that act fails me, as it seems to be failing in India, I must not only cease to wish to attain that age but should wish the contrary as I am doing it now.” Even as he pined for an early death, Gandhi tried to fathom why India had become trapped in a vicious cycle of violence. He thought it was because India’s nonviolent struggle for Independence was nonviolent only in name. “In reality it was passive resistance of the weak,” Gandhi wrote. According to him, Indians shunned violence against the British not because they believed it was morally wrong to undertake violent reprisals against the oppressive colonial rule. They did it because it was expedient, because it seemed the best strategy to keep low the cost to be paid for resisting the British Empire. After all, a violent national struggle would have invited severe repression and retaliation, which Indians were unwilling to endure. The strategy of passive resistance they adopted was consequently an outcome of their cowardice, not courage. Had they been courageous and believed in the creed of nonviolence, they would have courted death rather than participated in the horrific Partition violence. Yet it was not the people who were to be blamed for mistaking passive resistance for nonviolence. It was Gandhi himself, or so he thought. Pyarelal quotes Gandhi saying, “There must be some subtle flaw somewhere in my conception and practice of truth and ahimsa of which this [violence] is the result. I mistook the nonviolence of the weak, which is no nonviolence at all, for true nonviolence.” In a letter to a Swiss pacifist friend, Gandhi lamented, “Had I not made the mistake, we would have been spared the humiliating spectacle of weak brother killing his weak brother thoughtlessly and inhumanly.” He thanked God for making him see and realise his mistake. Late as it was to rectify it, he said, “My only prayer now is that He may vouchsafe to me the strength to meet death bravely when the time comes.” Gandhi even began to wonder whether India, after having gained Independence, needed him any longer. To a Congress Working Committee member, Gandhi said, “If India has no further use for ahimsa, can she have any for me? I would not in the least be surprised if in spite of all the homage that the national leaders pay to me, they were one day to say: ‘We have had enough of this old man; why does not he leave us alone?’.” By December 1947, Gandhi cut a lonely, morose figure, prompting Pyarelal to reminisce, “I watched day after day the wan, sad look on that pinched face, bespeaking an inner anguish that was frightening to behold.” He also noted that Gandhi’s nerves were “taut and tensed almost to a breaking point”. Eerily, he had taken to making remarks like “Don’t you see, I am mounted on my funeral pyre?” Or “You should know it is a corpse that is telling you this”. Tired of waiting for Delhi to rediscover normalcy, Gandhi decided to wage his last battle for peace — he announced he would go on fast from 13 January, 1948. It was as much a battle to save Delhi as it was to demonstrate the power of nonviolence. In a statement released to the press the evening before his fast, Gandhi wrote, “I never like to feel resourceless, a Satyagrahi never should… My impotence has been gnawing at me of late. It will go immediately [once] the fast is undertaken… No man, if he is pure, has anything more precious to give than his life.” Gandhi was asked why he had chosen to go on fast even though nothing extraordinary had happened. He replied that “death by inches” was far worse than sudden death. “It would have been foolish for me to wait till the last Muslim has been turned out of Delhi by subtle undemonstrative methods,” Gandhi explained. He was also accused of having sympathy only for Muslims. Never one to flinch from speaking the truth, he said his critics were, in a way, right. He explained that all his life he had stood, as everyone too should, for minorities or those in need. Gandhi’s fast elicited tremendous response. Some 200,000 Delhiites signed a peace pledge and activists of diverse ideological persuasions overcame their differences to establish communal amity in Delhi. Gandhi broke his fast on 18 January. Two days later, Madanlal Pahwa, a refugee from West Punjab, exploded a bomb at Gandhi’s evening prayers. Gandhi cautioned people against harbouring resentment and anger against Pahwa, who he described as a misguided youth. Yet he was also conscious, as Pyarelal account suggests, that behind the assassination attempt were people who were engaged in a conspiracy to kill him. Gandhi began to prepare to meet such an eventuality. For months, he had been pining for an early death. He now began to conceive the kind of death that would befit his status of Mahatma. On the night of 29 January, Pyarelal quoted Gandhi telling one of the attendants massaging him: “If I die of a lingering illness, nay even by as much as a boil or a pimple, it will be your duty to proclaim to the world, even at the risk of making people angry with you, that I was not the man that I claimed to be. If you do that it will give my spirit peace.”

Gandhi then went on to add, “Note down this also that if someone were to end my life by putting a bullet through me — as someone tried to do with a bomb the other day and I met his bullet without a groan, and breathed my last taking God’s name, then alone would I have made good my claim.”

On 30 January, Gandhi died the death he had imagined for himself. Nathuram Godse pumped bullets into Gandhi; he did not groan; he took Lord Ram’s name as life ebbed from his frail body. We will not remember the Gandhi who seemed to have slipped into depression in the last few months of his life, who wished to die because he could not bear to witness acts of unconscionable barbarity happening around him. We will not remember that Gandhi because we know we continue to fail him, inclined than ever before to foment hatred and violence even as we, parrot-like, speak of nonviolence.