The roots of poison: Mahadev Desai on communal strife. By Ramachandra Guha
In April 1941,
communal riots broke out in Ahmedabad. The violence raged for three whole days,
during which many people were killed, many more injured, and hundreds of homes
razed to the ground. Mosques and temples were also desecrated. What happened in
Ahmedabad in 1941 was a product of a countrywide polarization of religious
communities. The Muslim League was growing in strength, challenging the
Congress's claim to represent all Indians. Jinnah and the League had charged
the Congress provincial governments that held office between 1937 and 1939 of
following anti-Muslim policies. The Congress governments resigned when the
Second World War broke out, but the polarization persisted. In March 1940, the
Muslim League passed its so-called 'Pakistan resolution', demanding a separate
nation for Muslims. On the other side, Hindu extremist groups such as the
Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh were priming themselves for
action.
The outbreak of
rioting in a town he had once called home deeply distressed Gandhi. The Mahatma
had lived in Ahmedabad from 1915 to 1930. However, in 1941, he was based in his
new ashram in Sevagram, near the central Indian town of
Wardha. He immediately dispatched his secretary and confidant, Mahadev Desai, a
native Gujarati speaker, to Ahmedabad. Mahadev Desai spent
several weeks in the town, talking to a cross section of people. He wrote a
long report on the riots, which remains unpublished. I found this report
recently in the archives, and rehabilitate it here, for it is both very moving
and speaks directly to the communal situation in India today.
As a long-time
follower of the Mahatma, Mahadev Desai was profoundly disturbed by the
destruction of tombs, temples and mosques. He called them "acts of
cowardly [and] cruel desecration". Mahadev wrote that "whatever the
Mussalmans may have done - and they were, I am sure, instruments in the hands
of conspirators who have set the ball of religious hate and destruction rolling
in the land - I would, if it was in my power, perform penance by restoring the
mosques and the tombs... It would surely pave the way for concord and mutual
understanding."
In Mahadev Desai's
opinion, "there could be no real communal unity without a mutual
expression of contrition translated into concrete acts..."
He thought the lead should come from civil society. For, as he pointed out, the "Government is impotent to bring this [unity] about even as it proved itself impotent to check the acts of wanton destruction and brutality. The Muslim may do certain things with impunity today, and the Government may look on; from tomorrow if the Hindu acts likewise, it is quite likely that the Government will similarly look on." Rather than seeking to stem or stop the violence, noted Mahadev, the government "would do anything to oblige themselves". The per-petuation of British rule rather than the nurturing of social harmony was the government's objective in 1941. Mahadev believed that "lasting peace can therefore come only through mutual understanding" between Hindus and Muslims.
He thought the lead should come from civil society. For, as he pointed out, the "Government is impotent to bring this [unity] about even as it proved itself impotent to check the acts of wanton destruction and brutality. The Muslim may do certain things with impunity today, and the Government may look on; from tomorrow if the Hindu acts likewise, it is quite likely that the Government will similarly look on." Rather than seeking to stem or stop the violence, noted Mahadev, the government "would do anything to oblige themselves". The per-petuation of British rule rather than the nurturing of social harmony was the government's objective in 1941. Mahadev believed that "lasting peace can therefore come only through mutual understanding" between Hindus and Muslims.
Mahadev Desai turned
next to what he called the "rehabilitation of the sense of
citizenship". There would always be bad eggs in society; it would thus be
"difficult to eliminate the goonda". Yet, the goonda,
Gandhi's secretary pointed out, "does not act on his own. He has the
support of the cowardly and the exploiting element in society". It was
they who had employed the goonda; it was they who "engaged youngsters for
the ignoble crimes of arson and murder". By using misguided or hot-headed
young boys to promote violence, sectarians on both sides had, remarked Mahadev,
"done them incalculable and irretrievable harm and poisoned citizenship at
its fountain-source". Mahadev Desai then
poignantly asked: "And why must the Hindu look upon the Mussalman as his
enemy and vice versa? When the barriers between nations and races are breaking
down - in spite of the infernal war in Europe - should there be unbreakable
barriers between these two communities? Is it not possible to re-examine
dispassionately the cases of both?"
For Mahadev Desai, as
for Gandhi himself, political freedom had no meaning unless it was accompanied
by Hindu-Muslim harmony. Gandhi and Desai had not abandoned their potentially
lucrative legal careers, they had not willingly spent such long periods in
jail, to finally win a nation in theory independent but in practice riven by
discord. In the quarter of a century he had been with Gandhi, Mahadev had never
before felt so despondent. "The fight for Swaraj," he wrote now,
"is long and arduous. But it has never looked so long and arduous as it
does today." That said, it was not
in Mahadev Desai's nature to give up. "Those who have dedicated themselves"
to the fight for swaraj, he continued, "have to carry it on
with faith in their mission and their principles". For, as he pointed out,
"it is not the ideal or the principles that have been found wanting. It is
we who have been found wanting. If we bestir ourselves and begin building anew,
the communal strifes that we are having today will not have been lost upon
us."
Mahadev Desai himself
died a little more than a year after he wrote his report. Had he been alive in
1946 and 1947, he would have been with Gandhi, dousing the flames of communal
strife in Bengal, Bihar and Delhi. While other Indians were found wanting, in
these months and years, Gandhi worked heroically to rebuild bridges and restore
trust between Hindus and Muslims. It was Gandhi's peace mission and martyrdom,
along with the Nehru government's firm commitment not to wreak vengeance on
Indian Muslims in return for Pakistan's persecution of Hindus and Sikhs, that
allowed the new nation to leave behind the poisonous residues of Partition and
craft a democratic and plural political order.
The first
decade-and-a-half of independent India were relatively free of religious
strife. However, from the early 1960s, our country has been peppered with
inter-religious violence, with large-scale episodes of rioting breaking out
from time to time. Now, with the nation in its seventieth year, lasting
communal peace remains elusive. Of the points that
Mahadev Desai made in 1941, two in particular remain pertinent today. The first
is that one cannot look to governments alone to maintain social peace. A few
politicians and ministers seek to promote communal harmony; they are
outnumbered by the politicians and ministers who create and profit from
communal tension. Thus, while Nehru did strive to stop the persecution of
minorities, the government led by his own grandson, Rajiv Gandhi, encouraged
the pogrom against Sikhs in 1984. Likewise, in Maharashtra in 1992-93, in
Gujarat in 2002, in UP in 2013 - to pick only three of many such cases - state
governments have looked on and even abetted violence against Muslims. And in
Kashmir in 1989-90, so-called 'freedom fighters' savagely purged the Pandits
from the Valley.
The second and still
depressingly relevant point made by Mahadev Desai back in 1941 has to do with
the instrumental use of impressionable, dissatisfied, young men for narrow, and
often hateful, political ends. There are many political organizations active in
India today which engage "youngsters for the ignoble crimes of arson and
murder". They include Hindu fundamentalist groups, such as the Bajrang Dal
and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, which are particularly influential in the north
and west of the country; Islamic fundamentalist groups such as the Lashkar and
the Hizbul, currently active in Kashmir; chauvinistic organizations such as the
Shiv Sena and the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena; and Maoist revolutionaries in
central and eastern India. These groups constitute what Mahadev called
"the cowardly and the exploiting element in society" which, by
mobilizing men to their variously malign causes, do the youth of India
"incalculable and irretrievable harm" and thus poison
"citizenship at its fountain-source".
Mahadev Desai's report
of 1941 was intended as a wake-up call to the Congress Party. Back then, the
Congress might have had some credibility; now, seventy-six years later, it is
corrupt and corroded beyond redemption. Nor can one expect a Central government
run by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah to think and act on the lines of those other
(and greater) Gujaratis, Gandhi and Mahadev Desai. It is for civil society
organizations untainted by sectarian prejudice to take forward their ideas of
tolerance, pluralism, mutual understanding and mutual respect to those Indians
still willing to listen and to learn.
https://www.telegraphindia.com/1170304/jsp/opinion/story_138756.jsp#.WLqwsBBtvBJ
Also see
