MAHATMA GANDHI – THE MAN WHO COERCED BRITAIN TO LET GO OFF THEIR JEWEL IN THE CROWN !!

London. New Year’s Day, 1947. It was the winter of a nation's disillusion. An air of anguish hung like a chilly smog over London. Rarely, if ever, had Britain's capital ushered in a New Year in a mood so desolate, so sulky. Hardly a home, in the city that festive morning, could furnish enough hot water to allow a man to take a bath or a woman to cover her wet hair with a warm towel. Londoners had greeted the New Year in bedrooms so chilly their breath had wafted in the air like a whiff of smoke, precious few of them had greeted it with a cramped head. Bourbon in the places where it had been available the night before for New Year's Eve celebrations, had cost fifteen pounds a bottle.

And yet, that sad, depressed and forlorn city was the centre of a conquering nation. Only some fifteen months before, the British had emerged victorious from mankind's most atrocious conflict. Their accomplishments, their dauntless bravery in adversity had emboldened their people and inspired an admiration the world had never witnessed being accorded to anyone. They deserved all laurels for that victory !!

However, the cost of the victory had devastated and blown the British people to smithereens!

Britain's industry was crippled, it's exchequer ruined, the once arrogant and disdainful pound sterling surviving only on shots of American dollars, it's treasury unable to pay the astounding debt it had run up to finance the war. Revenue establishments were closing everywhere. Over two million Britons were unemployed. Coal production was lower than it had been a decade earlier and, as a result, every day, some part of Britain was without energy for hours.

For Londoners, the New Year beginning would be the eighth consecutive year they had lived under inhuman rationing of almost every product they consumed: food, fuel, energy, shoes, clothing. Lack of food and whimpering cold had become the order of the day for the very people who had defeated Hitler proclaiming V for Victory.

Picture above shows Winston Churchill showing the proud V for Victory and exchanging a rare laugh with his personal secretary after the War.

The word most frequently scribbled on the windows of London's shops was No: No potatoes, No  coal, No cigarettes, No meat. What a mess !!

For an insightful take on Britain’s economy please visit www.cheekychatur.com to read BRITAIN IS A POOR COUNTRY NOW. THE PROS AND CONS.

Indeed the reality confronting Britain that New Year's morning had been captured in one vicious sentence by Britain’s greatest economist; “We are a poor nation,” John Maynard Keynes had told his countrymen the year before, “and we must learn to live accordingly.”

Six thousand miles from Downing Street, in a village of the Gangetic Delta above Bay of Bengal, an elderly man stretched out on the floor of a hut. It was exactly twelve noon. As he did every day-at that hour, he reached up for the dripping wet cotton sack that an assistant offered him. Dark splotches of the mud packed inside, it oozed through the bag's porous folds. The man carefully patted the sack on to his abdomen. Then he took a second, smaller bag and stuck it on his bald head.

He seemed, lying there on the floor, a fragile little being. The appearance was deceptive. That wizened 77-year-old man, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, beaming out from under his face scrub had done more to topple the British Empire than any man alive.

It was because of him that a British Prime Minister had finally been obliged to send Queen Victoria's great grandson to New Delhi to find a way to give India her freedom.

  A shocked Mountbatten never believed that Gandhi would be killed by his own countrymen !!

There were three of them, men who were not supposed to come back stood in the sparsely furnished confines of Retiring Room number six of the Old Delhi railway station watching the bustle of tongas, carts, creaking buses, swarming by  in the street below. The police of India no longer had days in which to save the life of Mahatma Gandhi. They had only hours. Godse, Apte and Karkare had just fixed in that dim railroad station room their rendezvous with history. They had chosen the hour when they would kill Mohandas Gandhi.

They would assassinate him at five o’clock the following day.

The three men asked for a sumptuous meal: rice, vegetables, curds and chapatis. Since the waiter did not have sour curds to offer, Nathuram Godse called the headwaiter and gave him five rupees:

Look, this is a party meal. We want curds, you go anywhere you have to go but at any cost bring us curds.

                                     After the curds arrived, they had had a meal to remember.

As Apte and Karkare started to leave the room, Karkare turned back for a last glance at Godse. The man who was going to kill Gandhi was already stretched out on his bed reading one of the two books he had brought with him to Delhi. It was an Earle Stanley Gardener Perry Mason detective story.

But it was not always guns and cries. In a remote place in Punjab love blossomed. Joginder Singh had been gone from his home about an hour. He had only left when the sounds of the goods train told him it was safe to go. Lying on the field, Jogi stretched out his hands over his head and behind him, groping, the girl dodged him. Jogi caressed her cheeks, eyes and nose that his hands knew so well. He tried to play with her lips to induce them to kiss his fingers.

The girl opened her mouth and bit him fiercely, Joginder jerked his hand away. With a quick movement he caught the girl’s head in both his hands and brought her face over to his. Then he slipped his arms under her waist and hoisted her into the air above him with her arms and legs kicking, then he brought her down flat upon him limb to limb.

The girl slapped him on the face and angrily mouthed crashing words which Jogi enjoyed thoroughly.

Joginder Singh crossed his arms behind Lazmi’s back and squeezed her till she could not talk or breathe. Every time she started to speak, he tightened his arms around her and her words got stuck in her throat. She gave up and put her exhausted face against his. He laid her beside him with her head nestling in the hollow of his left arm. With his right hand he stoked her hair and face.

Joginder’s hands strayed from the girl’s face to her bosoms and her waist. She caught it and put it back on her face. His breathing became slow and sensuous. He stretched his left arm that lay under the girl’s head and caught her reproving hand. Her other arm was already under him. She was defenceless.

 In a state of frenzy, she dug her nails into his thinly bearded cheeks. The stars above her went into a mad whirl. Sands gritting in her hair, the breeze trespassing on her wind spattered limbs, she pushed the moment away and started heading home. It was an evening of wild love making !

That night, in this little town of Majora, five armed dacoits disembarked from a train coming from Lahore. There was no stoppage at Majora, as the train slowed the armed men silently slipped into the darkness. It would not be before morning the train reached Delhi station.

Rehmat, the leader had come to finish Joginder Singh as he had heard enough of his flirtations with his sister Lazmi. That night, Jogi was fatally wounded and Lazmi silently took her mother and left Majora for good. She was heading for Calcutta where she would find a job at the theatre for a living.

                        In the summer of 1941 Jogi had vanished into the gunshots of Majora !!

***** Lazmi left for Calcutta where he met Abhi – the man who helped her find a shelter and work. But that very Lazmi ditched Abhimanyu (Abhi) for another man. Please visit www.cheekychatur.com for detailed story on Lazmi (PART-II. LOVE HATE AND BETRAYAL: HOW PAIN RULED MANY LIVES DURING INDIA’S INDEPENDENCE).

The Jallianwala Bagh massacre took place on 13 April 1919. A large, peaceful crowd had gathered at the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, Punjab, during the annual Baishakhi fair to protest against the Rowlatt Act and the arrest of pro-independence activists Saifuddin Kitchlew and Satyapal. 

Through it, just as the meeting had begun, marched Amritsar’s Martial Law Commander, Brigadier R.E. Dyer, at the head of fifty soldiers. The Jallianwala Bagh could only be exited on one side, as its other three sides were enclosed by buildings. After blocking the exit with his troops, Dyer ordered them to shoot at the crowd, continuing to fire even as the protestors tried to flee.

For ten full minutes, while the trapped men, women and children screamed for mercy, the soldiers fired more than 1600 rounds. The bullets killed and wounded more than 1500 people. Convinced he had done a jolly good thing; Dyer marched his men back out of Bagh !!

Dyer was reprimanded for his actions and was asked to resign from the army. He was, however, allowed to retain full pension benefits and other rights due to him. His demonstration was applauded by most of the British in India. 

In clubs all across the country, his admiring countrymen took up a collection on his behalf, amassing the then prodigious sum of 26,000 pounds to ease the rigors of his premature retirement. Does modern Britain loathe him? I wonder !

This typical British distaste for all things Indian was nauseating, where an aura of inhumanity attracted cheers and applause. Many British families those days would come to India for a visit – they wanted to see and know how India looked like, how the Indians are different from theirs and how Britain poured enormous sums of profit to its coffers from this Jewel in their Crown.

Meryl Reetherspoone had come to India for a week’s visit along with her mother Adela, hosted by local British officer Charles Hope. While Charles, who had an eye on Meryl, offered a drink on arrival, Meryl refused and announced that she was desirous to see the real India. And meandering through discussions Miss Meryl said she avoided speaking to Indians unless they were her own servants, but amused everyone by saying I want to know India and I want to see Indians!

***** We all know what tragedy befell Meryl when she tried to murder Gabriela Ballatini in England, her bashful love affair with Rahul Singh did end in a brutal manner ! For full reading please visit www.cheekychatur.com and read PART-III AND PART-IV OF LOVE HATE AND BETRAYAL– THE EPOCH-MAKING SAGA OF RAHUL SINGH AND MERYL REETHERSPOONE.

Britain’s glitterati used to visit India regularly. Mrs. Jennifer Morton, well known to Adela, had long been to India. A stupid British woman, Jennifer spoke without hindrance and more often than not left the audience bite the dust for her shameful utterances. You would come to know how silly she was !

When Meryl stepped to visit the place and know Indians, Jennifer was left astounded:

“Wanting to see Indians? What I mean is I was a nurse before my marriage and came across Indian natives a great deal. So, I know. I really do know the truth about Indians. A most unsuitable position for any Englishwoman – in my native State one’s only hope was to hold sternly aloof."

“Even from one’s patients?” Adela asked wickedly.

“Why, the kindest thing one can do to a native is to let him die!!”

“How if he went to Heaven?” asked Adela with a queer smile.

“He can go where he likes as long as he doesn’t come near me. They give me the creeps!”

                                                       Such was the distaste for Indians!

When Jallianwala Bagh happened General Michael O’Dwyer was Punjab's Lieutenant Governor. As a result, his actions were considered among the most significant factors in the rise of the Indian Independence Movement.  O'Dwyer endorsed Reginald Dyer’s action at Jallianwala Bagh and made it clear that he considered Dyer's orders to shoot at the crowds was correct.

He subsequently administered martial law in Punjab on 15 April and backdated it to 30 March 1919. In 1925, he published India As I Knew in which he wrote that his time as administrator, Punjab was preoccupied by the threat of terrorism and the spread of political agitation.

On March 13,1940, in retaliation for the massacre, O'Dwyer was assassinated at Caxton Hall, London by the Indian revolutionary and freedom fighter Udham Singh. 

After leaving Godse in the room, Apte and Karkare decided to go to a cinema. It was a film based on story of Rabindranath Tagore. At the lobby during intermission, they went back to what Nathuram had said: It’ll be all over by tomorrow or day after tomorrow. Karkare was nervous, Will he be able to do it?

Apte drew up close, “Karkare, I know Nathuram better than you do. I'll tell you what happened and you draw your conclusion. When we left Delhi on 20 January, we went down to Cawnpore (now Kanpur) in the first-class compartment. We were chatting for a long time and not having a good sleep.

At about six in the morning, as we were nearing Cawnpore, Nathuram jumped down from his upper berth. He shook me "Apte, are you awake?" he asked. '’Listen," he said, "It's I who am going to do it, and no one else. This must be done by one man who is ready to sacrifice himself. I will be that man. I will do it alone.”

That day, Apte found to his relief and surprise the entrance of Birla House posed no problem at all. The guard had been increased, but no one was searching the crowd coming in for weapons. He was relieved. Godse had made his entrance safely. Karkare and Apte walked out to the end and there they saw Nathuram mingling with the crowds. He seemed composed and in good spirits. The crowd was scattered around the lawn. At five o'clock, as the time for the prayers grew near, people began to move together. Apte and Karkare took their places on either side of Nathuram.

Karkare's eyes were on Nathuram as he took the pistol from his pocket and passed it between his palms. He had decided to pay respects to the man who had rendered admirable service to his country. When Gandhi was only three strides from him, Nathuram stepped into the corridor.

                        He bowed slowly from the waist, and said to him Namaste Gandhiji.

As Manu - Gandhi’s aide, stooped to lift Godse, at that instant Nathuram's left arm shot out, thrusting her brutally aside. The black Beretta pistol lay exposed in his right hand. Godse pulled the trigger three times. Three sharp shots shattered the stillness of the prayer ground. Nathuram Godse had not failed.

All three rounds tore into the chest of the slender figure advancing towards him. On 30 January, 1948 around 5.17 pm Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated  by Nathuram Godse !!

Gandhi achieved in death what he tried to achieve in his last months of life. His murder ended the senseless communal killings of neighbour by neighbour which had followed Partition in India’s villages and cities. The antagonism of the sub-continent would remain, but they would henceforth be transformed primarily to the conventional plane of a conflict between nation states waged by regular armies on the battlefield. The sacrifice in the gardens of Birla House would stand as the climax of the triumph and tragedy which embraced the Indian sub-continent in the years of 1947-48.

On February 10, 1949 Godse and Apte were convicted and were sentenced to death. Karkare was given life sentence and subsequently released from prison in October 1964 !!

In 1943 Archibald Wavell was appointed by Churchill as the Viceroy. He was supposed to sit tight and keep India quiet through World-War II. But to Churchill’s great irritation he did something what his earlier political masters had never done – he came up with a policy precisely opposite of what history and instincts would have suggested, but it was correct and it was what his successor, Mountbatten would do.

Wavell saw that nothing the politicians had been doing had prepared India to look after herself as there was no economic preparation. The choice was to stay for another generation – which Wavell thought would be impossible.

Lord Mountbatten, an officer of impeccable record was sent to Delhi to hand over India undivided and unscathed to Mohandas Gandhi. Moreover, his plan had to be approved by Gandhi’s inner circle of politicians; Pandit Nehru, Md. Ali Jinnah, Sardar Patel, Maulana Azad and Frontier Gandhi.

Mountbatten observed, Sardar Patel was quite different from Pandit Nehru and way different from Gandhi. One incident caused Mountbatten to be quite cranky with Sardar Patel.

Its cause was in no way related to the great issues facing India. It was a slip of paper, a routine government minute issued by Patel's Home Ministry, dealing with an appointment. Mountbatten, however, had read in its tone, in the way Patel had put it out, a calculated challenge to his authority.

Patel had a well-earned reputation for toughness. He had an instinctive need to take the measure of a new interlocutor, to see how far he could push him. That piece of paper on his desk, Mountbatten was convinced, was a test, a little examination he had to go through with Patel before he could get down to serious matters.

That incident formed part of the legend of Vallabhbhai Patel and was a measure of the man. Emotion, one of his associates once observed, formed no part of his character. The remark was not wholly exact. Patel was an emotional man, but he never let those emotions break through the composed facade he turned to the world. If he gave off one salient impression, it was that of a man wholly in control of himself.

Why this man is trying to bully me, an unbelievingly Louis Mountbatten thought. Operation Seduction had come to a sudden halt at the rock-like figure planted opposite him. With his khadi dhoti whirled about shoulders like a toga, his bald head glowing, his scowling demeanour, the man jammed into that chair looked to the Viceroy more like a Roman senator than an Indian politician.

He was an Oriental Tammany Hall boss, the machinery of the Congress Party, with a firm and ruthless hand. He should have been the easiest member the Indian quartet for Mountbatten to deal with. Like the Viceroy, he was a practical, pragmatic man, a hard realistic bargainer. Yet the tension between them was so real, so palpable, that it seemed to Mountbatten he could reach out and touch it.

Mountbatten studied the Indian leader. He was going to need the support of this man and the machinery he represented. But he was sure he would never get it if he did not face him down now.

Asked by Patel what would be his response to the slip in front of him, Mountbatten shot back

“Very well”, said Mountbatten, “I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I’m going to order my plane.”

“Oh”, said Patel, “but why?”

“Because I'm leaving”, Mountbatten fumed. “I didn't want this job in the first place, I've just been looking for someone like you to give me an excuse to throw it up and get out of an impossible situation”.

“You don’t mean it!”, exclaimed Patel.

“Mean it?”,  replied Mountbatten. “You don’t think I am going to stay here and be bullied by a chap like you, do you? If you think you can be rude to me and push me  you're wrong. You'll either withdraw that minute or one of us is going to resign. And let me tell you that if I go, I shall first explain to your Prime Minister and to Mr. Jinnah why I am leaving. The breakdown in India, which will follow, the blood that will be shed, will be on your shoulders and no one else's”.

Patel stared at Mountbatten in disbelief.

Come, come, he declared, Mountbatten wasn't going to throw over the Viceroyalty after only a month on the job.

“Mr Patel”,  Mountbatten answered, “you evidently don't know me. Either you withdraw your minute here and now, or I shall summon the Prime Minister and announce my resignation”.

A long silence followed. “You know”, Patel finally sighed, “the awful part is I think you mean it”.

“You are damned right I do”, answered Mountbatten.

Patel reached out, took the offending minute off Mountbatten’s desk and slowly tore it up.

Amongst all this furore, Jinnah kept on pestering for a separate Muslim State. Gandhi had no option but to offer him the Prime Ministership of Independent and undivided India. If Gandhi’s political allies refused to endorse his scheme, as Gandhi reasoned with his colleagues, the new Viceroy - Mountbatten - might find driven into a corner from which the only escape would be partition.

Only Gandhi knew, as he walked barefooted vast expanses of villages in Noakhali and Bihar, appeasing the people, that the only way to get Independence was through peaceful means.

He had understood infinitely than those political leaders he worked with; the tragedy partition might produce. He had seen in the huts and swamps what havoc communal fury, once unleashed, could wreak. Partition, he argued, risked unleashing those passions, not dampening them. Desperately he begged his followers to accept his idea as their last chance to keep India united and to prevent that tragedy.

Nehru and Patel did not budge. There was a limit to the price they were prepared to pay to keep India united and handing over power to their foe, Jinnah. They did not share Gandhi's conviction that partition would inevitably lead to terrible violence. Broken-hearted, Gandhi would have to report to the Viceroy that he had not been able to carry his colleagues with him.

The real break was still some distance ahead, but Gandhi and those men he had so patiently groomed had drifted far apart. Gandhi's crusade was nearing its end and it would only stop in the stillness of his soul.

                                                                                 And so it seemed !

Amidst all this, Jinnah turned out to be a real villain. Mountbatten had an ugly spat with him when Jinnah spoke nonchalantly leaving Mountbatten flabbergasted: “India has never been a true nation. It only looks that way on the map. The cows I eat, the Hindus stop me from killing. Every time they shake hands with me, they have to wash their hands. The only thing the Muslims have in common with the Hindus is British slavery.”

Jinnah wanted Pakistan at any cost as he continued preaching Mountbatten, “India has to be divided. Of course, that division would have to produce a viable state and that meant two of India’s great provinces, The Punjab and Bengal would have to go to Pakistan despite the fact that each contained enormous Hindu population.”

When Mountbatten shouted angrily that the partition would entail endless bloodshed and agony, Jinnah assured him nothing of that sort would happen.

Mountbatten was stunned at the absurdity and rigidity of Jinnah. “I never would have believed”, he later recalled, “that an intelligent man, well-educated, trained in the Inns of Court, was capable of simply closing his mind as Jinnah did. It wasn't that he didn't see the point. He did, but a kind of shutter came down. He was the evil genius in the whole thing. The others could be persuaded, but not Jinnah. While he was alive nothing could be done.”

Jinnah was hopelessly self-centred and brutally anti-Hindu, which Mountbatten found to his chagrin. Jinnah could have divided India into many parts – not two – to get his claim to an independent Pakistan. A protector of Muslims(?), sadly No. Jinnah, who never went to a Masjid to offer prayers, hardly read Quran, smoked heavily, drank beer and wine with pork – how could he be the saviour of thousands of Muslims who looked up to their Quaid-e-Azam, who believed he would protect them from the Hindu onslaught if Pakistan happened, who believed they would get a beautiful, prosperous country to live in the name of Pakistan.

Alas, how wrong were they !! During Partition around 2 million people died in which around sixty percent were Muslims.

There is nothing sadder in India’s Independence than the way it traversed its way. At three minutes before midnight on 14 August 1947 the unity of the Indian subcontinent was broken. Pakistan was established as an independent, sovereign state. Exactly five minutes later India became independent.

Do you know this is an explosive secret capable of changing the course of history(?). Mountbatten came across a medical report of the doctor who treated Jinnah. The report described in detail a chest X-ray; the plate confirmed the advanced stages of tuberculosis. In spring of 1947, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the inflexible Muslim leader who had quashed all of Mountbatten’s efforts to preserve India’s unity knew he had only a few months left to live !!

Mountbatten was astounded. “If I had only known this at the time, the course of history would have been different. I would have delayed the granting of independence for several months. There would have been no Partition. Pakistan would not have existed. India would have remained united. Three wars would have been avoided.” And Gandhi ji would not have been assassinated !! There would be no Pakistan, there would be no POK, there would be no Bangladesh !!

                                                            Jinnah died on September 11, 1948.

This article best describes Mahatma Gandhi – the Father of Nation – his pain and sufferings, his inability to instil sense into his trusted colleagues who desperately wanted to get rid of Jinnah.

This article is about his assassination by a maverick who thought Gandhi was siding with the Muslims and was the reason for partition.

        Do you think Gandhi knew that Jinnah was going to die in a few months? Maybe yes !!

Footnote.

A posse of human sea moved with Mahatma Gandhi’s lifeless body. Four armoured cars and a squadron of Governor General’s bodyguard opened the march. Their presence in Gandhi’s funeral entourage was Mountbatten’s last gesture to the “dejected sparrow” he might have disdained but had come to love. It was the first time these troops of the old Viceroy’s bodyguard had so exalted an Indian.

Manohar Pandey saw for the first time, as the retinue of armed men passed him, in his life that famous face resting on its cushions of flowerettes. He felt the pang of tears in his eyes. One simple thought spirited  his ever grateful being as he watched Gandhi pass : “Now I can breathe freely.”

For five hours the procession continued to stroll through the mourning multitude of people to the banks of the Jamuna River and Gandhi’s funeral pyre. There, at least another million people stretched out over the expansive grasslands. An English correspondent covering the procession felt “Gandhi was receiving in death a homage beyond the dreams of any Viceroy. It was the largest crowd ever to gather on the face of the earth.”

Looking at the silhouette of the man he had come to know so well in the brief span of a year Louis Mountbatten was deeply moved, “he looked as though he was sleeping peacefully there before our eyes, and yet in a few seconds while we looked on he was going to disappear, for ever, in a flash of flames”

References: 

1.        India’s Struggle for Independence – Bipin Chandra

2.       India After Gandhi – Ramchandra Guha

3.       A Passage to India – E. M. Forster

4.       Train to Pakistan – Khushwant Singh

5.        Gandhi my Father – Amazon Prime

6.       Freedom At Midnight – Larry Collins & Dominique Lapierre

Disclaimer: The names Joginder Singh, Rehmat, Lazmi, Adela, Meryl Reetherspoone, Charles Hope and Jennifer Morton are imaginary and do not hold any resemblance to any person(s) dead or alive.