A Life Immortal 323Netaji’s great wartime achievement had been to unite India’s diverse
religious communities in a common struggle. The absence of the leader
who had inspired this sense of unity did matter in the aftermath of the
enthusiasms surrounding the Red Fort trials. When Gandhi visited a
group of INA prisoners in the Red Fort, they told him they had never
felt any distinction of creed or religion in the INA. “But here we are
faced with ‘Hindu tea’ and ‘Muslim tea,’” they complained. “Why do
you suf fer it?” asked Gandhi. “We don’t,” they said. “We mix ‘Hindu tea’
and ‘Muslim tea’ half and half, and then serve. The same with food.”
“That is very good,” exclaimed Gandhi, laughing.^39 The Mahatma had
come a long way since the days when he had refused to dine even with
his closest Muslim po lit i cal comrades, in the era of the noncooperation
and Khilafat movements. Yet Gandhi was relevant, so long as another
mass movement was needed to force the British to quit India. By the
spring of 1946, the British had read the writing on the wall and decided
to leave. A three- member Cabinet Mission led by Stafford Cripps had
been sent to explore how power might be shared, once the curtain
came down on the British raj in India.
Netaji’s many admirers passionately believed that, had their leader
been on the scene, India would not have been partitioned along reli-
gious lines. It is one of those great “ifs” of his tory to which there can
be no definitive answer. What can be said with a mea sure of con fi dence
is that, based on his record, Netaji would have been generous toward
minorities and worked resolutely toward an equitable power- sharing
arrangement among religious communities and regional peoples. On
the eve of in de pen dence, in August 1947, Gandhi was prepared to be
more accommodating than other Congress leaders toward the Muslim
League and its sole spokesman, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. But the Ma-
hatma’s erstwhile po lit i cal lieutenants, Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhb-
hai Patel, were no longer prepared to listen to his good counsel. The
machine politicians of the Congress party were now keen to grasp the
helm of the unitary center of the British raj, even if the price to be paid
was partition. Gandhi is said to have lamented in 1947 that all his “yes-
men” had turned into his “no- men.” As the partitioner’s axe was about
to fall, the Mahatma may have missed the rebellious son whom he had
cast aside in 1939 in favor of more obedient followers. Gandhi stood as