50 THE WEEK • JUNE 30, 2019
GANDHI’S
PASSION
I
want to try to capture, for readers of THE WEEK, what
Gandhi wanted for India. Considering that ‘an Asian
century’ and ‘India’s global role’ are on many lips these
days, let me begin by recalling the words he off ered
more than 71 years ago to Asian leaders assembled in
Delhi’s Old Fort, or the Purana Qila.
When Gandhi made those remarks in early April 1947, I was
present as an eleven-year-old. Even if I understood his words at
the time, I quickly forgot them. Yet the scene I glimpsed then, a
Purana Qila dais occupied by Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Saro-
jini Naidu and a very tall Badshah Khan, remains somewhere
in my brain.
In April 1947, let me point out, independence lay four
months into the future. Partition had not yet been accepted. In
fact, as I would learn much later, Gandhi’s encounter with the
gathering of Asian leaders coincided exactly with an ingenious
bid by him to avert partition. Between April 1 and April 10 of
1947, Gandhi was urging the new viceroy, Lord Mountbatten,
as also the Congress Working Committee to off er the premier-
ship of undivided India to Jinnah.
Th ese urgings took place behind closed doors. Gandhi never
spoke publicly about his gambit, whether before or after the
Working Committee ‘scotched’ it, to use the phrase Rajaji
(Chakravarti Rajagopalachari) entered in his private diary. In
their rejection, the Congress leaders were bolstered by eff ec-tive lobbying against Gandhi’s idea by an
alarmed viceroy who, in his own words,
was afraid that ‘Mr Gandhi’s scheme may
yet go through’ (Transfer of Power 10: 104).
Th e scheme would have torpedoed the
partition plan to which Mountbatten had
become attached, and with which, by now,
the Working Committee was more than
willing to go along.
Gandhi, too, had canvassed his plan,
but Nehru, Patel and the other Congress
leaders were not willing to be persuaded.
Only Khan Abdul Ghaff ar Khan sided with
Gandhi. Conceding his defeat in a letter to
Mountbatten, Gandhi left on April 11 for
Bihar, to resume his work there for Hin-
du-Muslim peace. Th e partition plan went
through.
Th ough they had rejected his advice,
Gandhi did not disown the comrades
who for 30 years had worked, fought and
sacrifi ced at his side: Nehru, Patel, Rajaji,
Maulana Azad, Sarojini Naidu, Rajendra
Prasad and company. Th ese colleagues, all
younger than him, were going to govern
the new India, not Gandhi. He would not
undermine them.
Anyhow, here is what Gandhi, leader of
India’s movement against imperialism, told
the Purana Qila gathering, which Jawaha-
rlal Nehru, member for external aff airs in
India’s independence-eve interim govern-
ment, had convened:
All the Asian representatives
have come together. Is it in
order to wage a war against
Europe, against America or
against non-Asians? I say most
emphatically ‘No’.
Remembering Zoroaster, the Buddha,
Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, Gandhi
called them ‘Asia’s wise men’, adding, ‘I do
not know of a single person in the world to
match these men of Asia.’ Gandhi went on
to say,
I [am] an inheritor of the
message of love that these great
unconquerable teachers left
for us.”
“I want you to go away with the
thought that Asia has to con-RAJMOHAN GANDHI
Historian, biographer
and grandson of the
MahatmaBapu envisioned an Asian conquest of
the West with love and truth