52 THE WEEK • JUNE 30, 2019
At fi rst, the white man was hated. Th en
hate switched to Indians of the ‘other’ reli-
gion. Following the acceptance of partition,
when hating and killing spread to Punjab
and multiplied there to horrifi c levels, Gan-
dhi gave similar answers to Indians who
asked why seemingly peace-loving Indians
had become unbelievably cruel.
Many in the world were greeting India’s
independence as a triumph of nonvi-
olence. However, Gandhi was aware
of India’s hospitality to violence. In a
prayer-meeting talk on June 16, 1947,
he admitted that India had accepted his
nonviolent satyagraha not because vio-
lence was a horror, but because satyagra-
ha seemed more eff ective than violence
against the empire. Said Gandhi:
“No one at the time (during the battles
for Swaraj) showed us how to make an
atom bomb. Had we known how to make it,
we would have considered annihilating the
English with it (Collected Works, 88: 163).”In their anger (Gandhi warned), Indians—the
‘we’ with whom he always identifi ed himself,
even when they went against him—might even
have contemplated limitless violence, with dis-
senters like Gandhi protesting with their lives.
Reconciliation: Th ough he was unable to avert
either partition or the carnage that accompa-
nied it, Gandhi’s eff orts in the last two years
of his life—in Noakhali, Bihar, Calcutta and
Delhi—limited the violence. More than that,
the eff orts produced a scaff olding for recon-
struction.
His fasts for harmony (Calcutta, September
1947, and Delhi, January 1948) altered the
psychological climate. His fearless walks in
Muslim-dominated Noakhali and blunt words
in Hindu-dominated Bihar taught India that the
real fi ght was between inhumanity and decen-
cy, not between Hindu and Muslim.
Over the previous decades, right from 1917,
Gandhi had put together audacious Hin-
du-Muslim alliances between political parties.
He had also generated fervour in the masses forFREEDOM
AT HAND
Gandhi at Dum Dum
jail, Calcutta, in 1946DINODIA