Chapter 13
The Two Gandhis
Whenever Gandhiji takes an important decision, I instinctively say
to myself, “This is the decision of one who has surrendered himself
to God, and God never guideth ill.”
TO APOLOGIZE TO A B BRITISH court for his statements in Bombay was a
bitter pill for Ghaffar Khan. He did as Gandhi asked-but he was
prepared, he stated in court, to defend the truth of every word he
had said. “And indeed,” his lawyer said late, “it amazed an honest
Pathan to be told that he could not defend his words-that they might
bring the government into contempt and ridicule if he told the
truth.” But Gandhi did not want him in jail, and to Khan, Gandhi’s
word was law. He swallowed hard and apologized:
I am a loyal Congressman and have accepted its policy of not seeking
arrest and imprisonment at the present movement.
I had, therefore, no desire whatsoever to utter words of sedition. I
am, therefore, sorry that I made the statements in the speech,
however unwittingly, which are open to exception from the
prosecution’s point of view.
At the same time I would like to state that in describing the
movement of the Khudai Khidmatgars, which I did at the instance of
my Christian friends who had invited me to speak to them, I felt
bound to state what I believed was the truth about the movement. I
had no intention of wounding any body’s susceptibilities.
It wasn’t enough. The British wanted him out of the way, and they
did not min offending the “susceptibilities” of Indians-and some
British-who could not understand the severity of his sentence after
his public apology. Khan’s word were deemed “deliberate and grave,
serious and reckless” by the presiding magistrate, H. P. Dastur.
Khan, he said, was “a man of great influence and his words would
have a greater effect than that of an ordinary person.”
Since Khan had offered no defense, the magistrate based his judgment
on the text of his Bombay speech. Particular attention was given to
the report Khan had given to the Indian Christian Association in
Bombay of the shooting at Qissa Khawani Bazaar. The story, the
magistrate explained, “amounts to a very serious charge against the
Government, namely, that it will not hesitate to butcher or kill in
cold blood two hundred to two hundred fifty innocent persons…” Such
words, he concluded soberly, “would undoubtedly create resentment
and disaffection in the minds of his hearers…”
On December 15, 1934, Khan was sentenced to two years’ rigorous
imprisonment and sent to His Majesty’s House of Correction at
Byculla in Bombay. From there he went to Sabarmati Central Prison,
where he was placed in solitary in a cell with two blankets and no
bed. He slept on the concrete floor. Even the guards were forbidden
to speak to him.
The hot climate was hard on him. He lost this appetite and
contracted a sever case of influenza. By March, his once-robust 200
pound constitution had been reduced to 149 pounds. The government,
worried about possible public reaction, requested that he be
transferred to the Central Province where the climate was more
congenial. The notion did not electrify the local officials, already
feeling burdened by Gandhi’s presence there. They begged off:
The Province has already had the presence of Mr. Gandhi thrust upon
it for an apparently indefinite period. His residence at Wardha is
the haunt of every leading Congressman in India, and if political
troubles were to arise, [his residence here] would at once become a
center of disaffection…
To put it bluntly, the father Mr. Gandhi’s Frontier confrere is kept
away from Mr. Gandhi’s residence, the better will it be for our
peace of mind.
“With considerable difficulty and reluctance,” however, local
officials finally agreed to the move, and Khan was transferred to
Almora-to the very cell from which Jawaharlal Nehru had recently
been released. He worked in the little garden Nehru had begun.
During this period of political quiescence, when no other major
Indian political figure was imprisoned, Khan spent another eighteen
months in jail.
On his release in July 1936, Khan went straight back to Gandhi. His
ashram friends eagerly went to meet him at the train depot at
Wardha. They found him in a third-class compartment with his legs
dandling over the end of a bench and a gunny sack for a pillow. The
aristocratic all-India hero could have been mistaken for a wandering
mendicant. He looked up from the bench and smiled. “So this is the
brotherhood of Congress!”
The British, still wary, extended Khan’s ban from the Frontier for
another year. The ban would have continued indefinitely had not
fate-or at least Dr. Khan- intervened. The first elections for
India’s newly formed legislative councils took place in January
1937. Dr. Khan ran for a seat in the Frontier legislature from a
thousand miles away-he too was still banned from the province-and
won. In July he became prime minister of the Frontier, and in his
first official act he removed the ban of his brother.
Thus, at the end of August, Khan returned to his homeland for the
first time in six years. His Pathan biographer, Muhammad Younis,
describes his return:
At long lost, after six weary years in jails and exile, 1937 saw the
national hero of grim tragedy welcomed back to his father land
amidst scenes of great enthusiasm. It is difficult to forget that
wild and passionate reception, a welcome springing spontaneously out
of the intense affection in the hearts of his people.
Ghaffar Khan was there, but in his face one could see traces of the
deep and excruciating misery inflicted upon him during these years.
He had come to steer the ship once again through the turbulent
currents. The general elections had taken place, and his lieutenants
had been called upon to form the government of the
North-West-Frontier-Province. That was surely his hour of triumph.
After twenty five years of endless labor and suffering, during which
he had worked day and night, Fakhr-e-Afghan, “The pride of the
Pathans,” was witnessing his party occupying places of partial
authority. It was his courage, determination, skill, and judgment
that had inspired his underfed, ill-equipped and rugged Khudai
Khidmatgars to challenge the might of the British Empire and wrest
some share in the government for themselves.
In October and again in the following January, Nehru visited the
Frontier and toured most of the districts with Khan by his side. And
finally, in May 1938, Gandhi came, fulfilling a long-held dream. The
Indian political scene was quiet, so the viceroy let him go.
Khan was jubilant. He met Gandhi at Nowshera and took him to Dr.
Khan’s residence in Peshawar. Great crowds of Pathans, silent and
still, lined the streets to greet them. Gandhi was delighted. For
decades he had endured the unbridled affection of Indians cheering
in his ears and rushing to touch his feet. It had been one of his
greatest trials. These Pathans had been trained to demonstrate their
devotion with discipline. At Utmanzai and surrounding villages,
Gandhi found the same reception: thousands of Khudai Khidmatgars
standing along the roadsides in their red shirted uniforms, erect,
smiling, still.
Khan beamed. He was proud of his rugged, determined people and he
did not try to conceal it. At each stop villagers came up to their
Badshah as if he were a brother-in law, chatting, joking, looking
for advice. The water rates had been raised; should they boycott? No
longer afraid of either the British or their mercenary landlords,
these simple villagers had found their strength. Gandhi could not
miss the bond between them and their leader. “I noticed wherever I
went,” he wrote later, that every man and child knew him and loved
him. They greeted him most familiarly. His touch seemed to soothe
them. [He] was most gentle to whomever approached him. All this has
filled me with boundless joy. A general merits such obedience. But
[Ghaffar Khan] has it by right of love, unlike the ordinary general
who exacts obedience through fear.
Khan had made it clear that the spirit and inspiration of the
revolution was Gandhi. At each stop some Pathan would stand before
the assembly, red-shirted and eager, and tell the Mahatma what he
meant to the Pathan nation. “We can never forget the debt we owe to
you,” one burly Pathan said at Mardan, “for having stood with us in
our stricken plight. We are ignorant, we are poor-but we lack
nothing because you have taught us the lesson of nonviolence.”
Gandhi cut short his visit because of health problems, promising to
return at the end of the summer for an extended stay. He wanted to
study the Khudai Khidmatgars in detail. Their fearlessness and
discipline could well become an object lesson to all of India. “I
congratulate you,” he said, departing. “I shall conclude with the
prayer that the Frontier Pathans may not make only India free, but
teach the world…the priceless lesson of nonviolence.”
Gandhi returned in October. He wanted to talk with Khudai
Khidmatgars, especially officers, personally and at length. He felt
their nonviolence was sincere but incomplete. Like most of his
followers on the subcontinent, they understood the notion of
nonviolent resistance but had yet to understand nonviolence as a
tool for building a just and productive society.
First Gandhi rested at Khan’s farm in Utmanzai. Overwork had sapped
his health to the pint where he had suspended public speaking. Now,
however, the long hours walking through fields of cane and cotton
and fruit orchards along the river proved a perfect tonic. After a
week, Gandhi and Khan sat in the open courtyard of the farmhouse
with a dozen officers from the Charsadda district and talked. While
an autumn breeze cooled the air around them, the Red Shirts
explained to the Mahatma that their nonviolence was absolute.
Unbending.
Gandhi looked skeptical. Didn’t their nonviolence depend upon
Badshah Khan?
No. Even if Khan himself-God forbid-should renounce non-violence,
they would adhere.
Gandhi smiled. He liked their childlike bluster. Weren’t they being
overbold? But he answered himself before they could respond. “No, I
will take you at your word.”
The real question on his mind was whether they fully understood what
nonviolence meant. It was relatively easy, he said, to maintain a
passive nonviolence when you were faced with a fully armed opponent.
You had no choice-you simply resisted. That was nonviolence of the
weak.
The officers looked to Khan, puzzled. Had Gandhiji heard about Qissa
Khawani Bazaar and the Kohat shooting and the raid of Utmanzai…?
“What about nonviolence among yourselves?” Gandhi went on, before
anyone else could speak. “What about among your own weak villagers
when there is nothing to check your force except your own discipline
and will?”
The bearded heads were still. Finally one officer said he did not
understand what Gandhi meant by nonviolence of the strong.
“I mean, Gandhi said, “that you feel stronger-not weaker-for having
renounced your knives and rifles.” If they did not feel stronger, he
added, then it was better that they take up their rifles again and
fight like the brave soldiers he knew them to be.
“A charge has been often leveled against me and Badshah Khan,” he
explained: “that we are rendering India and Islam a disservice by
presenting the gospel of nonviolence to the brave and warlike people
of the Frontier. They say that I have come here to say your
strength. The Frontier Province, they say, is the bastion of Islam
in India. The Pathans are past masters in the use of the sword and
the rifle, and mine is an attempt to emasculate them by making the4m
renounce their arms and thus undermine the citadel of the strength
and security of Islam.”
The officers snorted, whispering curses to themselves. What did
outsiders know about the Khudai Khidmatgars, who had withstood the
bayonets and bullets and tortures rained upon them during the last
Satyagraha?
“I repudiate the charge,” Gandhi said, answering his own question.
“My faith is that by adopting nonviolence you will in fact be
rendering a lasting service to India and to Islam itself. Yours will
be the spiritual strength with which you can not only protect Islam
but even other religions.”
He stopped and looked to the series faces. A gust of wind stirred
some dust and the robes of the soldiers fluttered. Gandhi implored
them: “If you have not understood the secret of this strength, if as
a result of giving up your files you feel weaker instead of stronger
than before, it would be better for you to give up the profession of
nonviolence. I cannot bear to see even a single Pathan turn weak or
cowardly under my influence.”
He paused. “I would rather that you returned to your arms with a
vengeance.”
Gandhi’s hands fluttered in the air as he spoke. The depth of his
conviction riveted them. They understood that their nonviolence did
not approach the ideal Gandhi carried in his heart, and they wanted
to hear more.
“Today a force of 178,060 government soldiers is able to rule over
us,” Gandhi continued. “If the Khudai Khidmatgars really felt within
themselves an upsurge of soul force as a sequel to their renouncing
arms, not even 17,000 would be needed to win India her independence…
because they would have the strength of God behind them.
“But if one million of them professed nonviolence, while violence
still lurked in their heart, then they would count as nothing. … It
may even prove dangerous.”
“What does it mean to remove violence from one’s heart?” asked a
captain from Charsadda.
“It is not just the ability to control one’s anger,” Gandhi
cautioned; “it is the complete eradication of anger from the heart,
it means that I have not purged myself of violence. To realize
nonviolence means to feel within you its strength-soul force- to
know God. A person who has known God will be incapable of harboring
anger or fear within him, no matter how overpowering the cause for
it may be.”
As the afternoon light dimmed and the shadow of the poplars
stretched across to the guest house, Gandhi talked about the
implication of being a true Khudai Khidmatgar-a servant of God. A
Khudai Khaidmatgar had first to be a man of God, he explained, which
would demand purity and industry. He should learn a craft which he
should practice in his home, since a man who has renounced the sword
dare not remain idle. He should learn to spin and master the
rudiments of sanitation and first aid. And he should repeat the name
of God. A person, who has renounced violence, Gandhi said with
passion in his voice, will take the name of God with every breath.
He had done just that for more than two decades, so that now the
name of God would repeat itself even in his sleep.
“It is not wearing the red shirt that makes one a Khudai
Khidmatgar,” Gandhi concluded, shading his eyes against the low sun,
“nor is it standing ranks. It is to feel within you the strength of
God which is the opposite of the strength of arms. You have so far
only arrived at the portal of nonviolence. Still,” he added, looking
into the rapt faces, “You have been able to achieve so much! How
much greater your achievement will be when you have fully entered
its holy edifice!
By October 15 Gandhi’s strength returned and he started with Khan on
a tour of the southern districts. They traveled in a small van
donated by Nehru, stopping to talk casually with volunteers. At one
village Gandhi was presented with an armful of figs and melons. “We
want you to settle in our midst,” the Khan of the village told him,
“and make our Province your home. After all, you kept our Badshah a
prisoner in your part of the country for six years. We can keep you
as a prisoner of love for at least six months!”
Through the sheer walls of the Kohat Pass and down into the Kurram
valley they drove. Gandhi began to address the crowds; he could not
resist their enthusiasm. The Pathan was “a bogeyman” in India, he
told them; children in his home state of Gujarat turned pale at the
very mention of their name. For them to renounce violence stood for
much more in the eyes of the world than for a gentle Hindu to do it.
“Even as the rose fills with its sweet fragrance all the air
around,” he told one group of volunteers, “when one hundred thousand
Khudai Khidmatgars become truly nonviolent, their fragrance will
permeate the entire length and breadth of the country and cure the
evil of slavery with which we are afflicted.”
The two Gandhis continued south into the dry, twisted landscape of
the Dera Jat. Red-Shirted Khudai Khidmatgars lined the road for
miles, interspersed with bands of tall, white-turbaned Waziri and
Orakzai tribesmen, down of their strongholds to get a glimpse of the
Mahatma and his foremost disciple. Standing gaunt against the barren
landscape, flanked by their ponies and camels, rifles sung from
their shoulders, they gave Gandhi a glimpse of why the British had
come to call the Frontier “the Grim” Drumbeats and the high wail of
surnais along the way made an odd combination of festivity and
dirge.
On the twenty-fourth they reached the city of Bannu, still lying
under the cloud of a recent raid by outlaw tribesmen from the hills.
The police had stood helpless as two hundred Waziris stormed the
city, killing some merchants and plundering their shops. Gandhi
pointed out that the Waziris were humans who responded to the human
touch. “If I had my way,” he told a crowd in Bannu, “I would mix
with the tribes and argue it out with them. I am certain they will
not be impervious to the argument of love and reason.”
At the end of the month, Khan and Gandhi turned back toward
Utmanzai.
On Khan’s farm many of the fruits trees had dropped their leaves,
but the gold of the poplars still quivered in the wind. One morning
Khan went with Gandhi for a walk along the river. They talked again
about the Khudai Khidmatgars. How nonviolent were they?
“My impression,” Khan offered, “is that-as they themselves
admitted-they are recruits and fall short of the standard you speak
of. There is violence in their hearts, which they have not been able
altogether to cast out. But there is no doubt as to their sincerity,
Gandhiji. Given a chance, they can be hammered into the shape. I
think the attempt is worthwhile.”
But Pathans in general had a long way to go. Khan was still
disturbed over the amount of feuding between tribes and families.
“Mahatmaji,” he said after a while, “this land you see, so rich in
fruit and grain might well have been a smiling little Eden upon this
earth. But it has fallen under a blight. Violence has been the real
bane of us Pathans. It shattered our solidarity and tore us
internally with feuds. The entire strength of the Pathan is spent on
thinking how to cut the throat of his brother. To what use might
this energy not be put if only we could be rid of this curse!”
Gandhi did not reply. He looked across the still river as Khan
unburdened himself.
“I am firmly convinced that as far as the Frontier is concerned, the
nonviolent movement is the greatest boon that God has sent us. There
is no other way of salvation for the Pathans except through
nonviolence. I say this from experience. We used to be so timid and
indolent. The sight of an Englishman would frighten us. Now even the
little children taunt the foreigners when they see them pass: “What!
Are you still here?” Englishmen are afraid of our nonviolence. A
nonviolent Pathan, they say, is more dangerous than a violent
Pathan.
The two men turned along a row of willow, whose leaves brushed the
still surface of the water.
Gandhi suggested that Khan begin to train the volunteers in the
constructive Program. He had seen little evidence of it in the
province. Pathan knew how to fight nonviolently, Gandhi said; there
was no doubt. Now Khan had to teach them how to live nonviolently-a
more difficult task, because it lacked the glamour of fighting.
Peace would always be less compelling than war. Perhaps that was why
there was so little of it in the world.
The Khudai Khidamtgars should emphasize cottage industries, Gandhi
said, like spinning and weaving. He had noticed that few of the
volunteers wore handspun cloth, which in greater India was the
unofficial uniform of the civil resistance movement. Khan agreed. He
already had a plan to open a center near Utmanzai. His idea was to
build a model village. “At the home of the Khudai Khidmatgars, we
shall set before us the ideal of self-sufficiency: wear only the
clothes that we ourselves produce, eat only fruits and vegetables
that we raise there, and set up a small dairy to provide us with
milk.”
“And the Khudai Khidamtgars should take their share in the building
of the huts as well!” Gandhi added quickly.
“That is our idea too;”
Gandhi liked it. He suggested that Khan first send a group of Khudai
Khidmatgars to Wardha, where they could learn spinning and weaving
as well as first aid, hygiene, basic education, and-to promote
unity-Hindustani, the nearest thing to a national language in
country with some fifteen major tongues.
Khan’s face took on a glow at the thought.
“But your work will not make headway,” Gandhi cautioned, “unless you
take the lead and yourself become an adept in all these things.”
The copper colored sun rested on the ridge of the Safed Koh to the
west. The air was cooling quickly. They turned back toward the
farmhouse.
“Throwing away one’s weapons is not enough,” Gandhi emphasized.
“Nonviolence is as active principle of the highest order. It is soul
force, the power of Godhead within us.” He stepped quickly across
the furrows of the cotton field. “We become Godlike to the extent we
realize nonviolence. Even a tiny gain of true nonviolence acts in a
silent, subtle and unseen way, and leavens the whole society.”
As they reached the edge of the plum orchard, Gandhi stopped. “Do
you see?” he said with quit passion, looking into the face of his
devoted disciple. “If you can set things right in Utamnzai, your
whole problem of violence would be solved. The basic principle on
which nonviolence rests is that what holds good in respect of
yourself, holds good equally in respect of the whole universe. Even
our relations with the English will be transformed if we can show to
them what we do not stand in need of the protection for which their
police and army are ostensibly kept.”
As darkness fell over the valley, Gandhi and Khan ate a frugal meal
and talked of their plans to lose themselves together one day in a
remote village somewhere in the high hills. “You should see Swat,”
Khan said to him, remembering his own apprenticeship years ago in
the pine forests of the north. “It is paradise.”
On November 11, Gandhi got ready to leave the Frontier for northern
India. He told the volunteers in Peshawar, “The Khudai Khidmatgars
have set a brilliant example in the practice of nonviolence to the
extent to which they have understood it. But they now have to move a
step further. Their conception of nonviolence has to be broadened
and their practice of it, especially in its positive aspects, made
fuller and deeper. But with all that the result is sufficiently
striking t encourage me to carry on with the experiment with the
Khudai Khidamatgars. God willing, it will succeed.”
At Taxila, on the very edge of the Pathan homeland, Gandhi boarded
the train for Wardha. The two dogged freedom fighters looked long
into each other’s eyes before they parted. As the train carried him
across the wide plain of the Punjab, Gandhi jotted down his thoughts
about the companion he had left behind in the Frontier:
Whatever the Khudai Khidmatgars may ultimately turn out to be. There
can be no doubt about what their leaders is. He is unquestionably a
man of God. He believes in His living presence and knows that his
movement will prosper only if God will it. Having put his whole soul
into his cause, he remains indifferent as to what happens.
When we parted at Taxila, our eyes were wet. The Frontier Province
must remain a place of frequent pilgrimage for me. For though the
rest of India may fail to show true nonviolence, there seems to be
good ground for hoping that the Frontier Province will pass through
the fiery ordeal.
The reason is simple. Badshah Khan commands willing obedience from
his adherent. He has but to say the word and it is carried out.
[His] nonviolence is no lip service. His whole heart is in it. Let
the doubters live with him as I have all these precious five weeks
and their doubt will be dissolved like mist before the morning sun. |
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