Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World

by Ramachandra Guha

If there are any Hindus amongst us who desire to bring back the Hindu life of a thousand years ago and more, they dream, and such dreams are vain fantasies. So also if there are any Muslims who wish to revive their past civilization and culture, which they brought a thousand years ago from Iran and Central Asia, they dream also, and the sooner they wake up the better.33

‘There is a dark-skinned fellow, an “Ashramite”, who accompanies Gandhiji everyday. He smells awfully. Whenever he finds anyone sticking too long to Gandhiji, he quietly starts walking by his side and the fellow falls back within seconds. That is Gandhiji’s non-violent method of regulating interviews.’

In the twenty-odd years since Gandhi emerged as the nation’s leader, continued Bose, Indians had ‘learnt national self-respect and self-confidence’. They had also ‘now got a country-wide organisation representing the whole nation’. The ‘service which Mahatma Gandhi has rendered to India and to the cause of India’s freedom’, said Bose, ‘is so unique and unparalleled that his name will be written in letters of gold in our National History—for all time’.

Gandhi told Jinnah that unity was in the best interest of Muslims. Jinnah answered that separation was in the best interest of Hindus.

When, on 15 August, Jawaharlal Nehru handed over the list of Cabinet ministers in his new government to the viceroy, it included the name of B.R. Ambedkar, as law minister.

The return of peace to Calcutta prompted Mountbatten to write to Gandhi that ‘in the Punjab we have 55 thousand soldiers and large scale rioting on our hands. In Bengal our force consists of one man, and there is no rioting.’