India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

by Ramachandra Guha

The peace held, prompting Lord Mountbatten

to remark famously that one unarmed man had been more effective than 50,000 troops in Punjab.

politics: ‘On the ethics of fasting as a political instrument we have over many years failed to concur with India’s most renowned practitioner of it . . . But never in a long career has Mahatma Gandhi, in our eyes, fasted in a simpler, worthier cause than this, nor one calculated for immediate effective appeal to the public conscience.’25

Gandhi was told that no fewer that 137 mosques had been destroyed in recent weeks. Hindu and Sikh refugees had also forcibly occupied Muslim homes.

Gandhi ‘went round hospitals and refugee camps giving consolation to distressed people’. He ‘appealed to the Sikhs, the Hindus and the Muslims to forget the past and not to dwell on their sufferings but to extend the right hand of fellowship to each other, and to determine to live in peace . . .’ He ‘begged of them all to bring about peace quickly in Delhi, so that he might be able to proceed to both East and West Punjab’. Gandhi said ‘he was proceeding to the Punjab in order to make the Mussalmans undo the wrong that they were said to have perpetrated

[against the Hindus and the Sikhs]. But he could not hope for success, unless he could secure justice for the Mussalmans in Delhi.’

Gandhi also spoke at a camp of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Founded by a Maharashtrian doctor in 1925, the RSS was a cohesive and motivated body of Hindu young men. Gandhi himself was impressed by their discipline and absence of cas...

Unlike Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru was not inclined to give the Sangh the benefit of doubt. ‘It seems to me clear’, he told his home minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, ‘that the RSS have a great deal to do with the disturbances not only in Delhi but elsewhere. In Amritsar their activities have been very obvious’.

However, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was actively sceptical of this viewpoint. Its sarsanghchalak, or head, was a lean, bearded science graduate named M. S. Golwalkar. Golwalkar was strongly opposed to the idea of a secular state that would not discriminate on the basis of religion.

The non-Hindu people of Hindustan must either adopt Hindu culture and language, must learn and respect and hold in reverence the Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but of those of glorification of the Hindu race and culture . . . in a word they must cease to be foreigners, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment – not even citizens’ rights.33

hostile. On previous visits to Delhi Gandhi had stayed in the sweepers colony; this time, however, he was put up at the home of his millionaire follower G. D. Birla. Even while his fast was on, bands of refugees marched past Birla House, shouting, ‘Let Gandhi die’. Then, on 20 January, a Punjabi refugee named Madan Lal threw a

bomb at Gandhi in Birla House while he was leading a prayer meeting. It exploded at some distance from him; luckily no one was hurt.

On the evening of 30 January he was shot dead by a young man at his daily prayer meeting. The assassin, who surrendered afterwards, was a Brahmin from Poona named Nathuram Godse. He was tried and later sentenced to death, but not before he made a remarkable speech justifying his act. Godse claimed that his main provocation was the Mahatma’s ‘constant and consistent pandering to the Muslims’, ‘culminating in his last pro-Muslim fast [which] at last goaded me to the conclusion that the existence of Gandhi should

Gandhi’s death brought forth an extraordinary outpouring of grief. There were moving tributes from Albert Einstein, who had long held Gandhi to be the greatest figure of the twentieth century, and from George Orwell, who had once thought Gandhi to be a humbug but now saw him as a saint.

The call for Pakistan was first made formally by the Muslim League in March 1940. The Second World War had kept the question of Pakistan (as of Indian independence more generally) on hold. After the war a Labour government came to power in Great Britain. Unlike the Conservatives, the Labour Party ‘regarded itself as morally committed to speed up the process of independence for India’. On the subject of India, Prime Minister Clement Attlee showed ‘a decisiveness

Some contemporary observers also felt that the decision to undo in two months flat an empire built over two centuries was poorly conceived.

descent from Lord Rama, another from

said his lineage was immortal, as it had

should be ‘thrown’ into Kashmir.53 Meanwhile, in March 1948 Sheikh Abdullah replaced