Gandhi: The last 200 days (Day 59 ) - A society gone temporarily mad

Date: 11-09-1997 :: Pg: 11 :: Col: a

Wednesday, 11th September 1947

Recalling his visits to the refugee camps, Gandhiji explained at his prayer meeting in Birla House on the 10th of September that being a true Hindu he was the truest of Muslims too, who recited with as much fervour and faith the verses of Islam which proclaimed that God is One, the Only One, and the One who protects the whole world by day and by night. The golden apple of freedom won at great cost, Bapu said, should not wantonly be thrown away by senseless communal violence.

Meanwhile, it was becoming increasingly clear that there was never going to be enough time to do all the work that had to be done to handle (on priority basis even) the most critical matters that clamoured for attention in those parlous days. Though the capital's area was relatively small, compared, say, with that of the Punjab, and all the available machinery could be concentrated within Delhi to take up tasks of urgent moment, it was really like trying to stem a large hole in an ocean dyke with a child's palm, or trying to stave off a run on the bank with only the liquid funds statutorily held. The task was just beyond the capability of even the most efficient state machinery. Any viable answer to the problem could be evolved only by going to the root of the problems - by reaching the people as best as possible and making them see the need for them to return soonest to their senses. There just was no other way.

Gandhiji knew this instinctively, and he believed social conscience and individual support to it could yet not have curled up quietly and died. Fortunately, evidence kept coming in support of that faith. On his visit to the Jamia Millia (in the rearing of which great national institution he had lent a large helping hand), Gandhiji learnt from the well-known Muslim educationist and humanist, Dr. Zakir Hussain, how the scholar and professor had had a narrow escape in a brush with communal violence.

Dr. Hussain had gone on a visit to Jullundur in the Punjab. Anything and everything of value in the Province was searing and crinkling and turning to crumble into ashes in the leaping flames of the communal holocaust; to venture out anywhere was a foolhardy thing to do. Man had become the worst enemy of man. No matter to which community one belonged, Hindu, Muslim or Sikh, there was a blood price laid on every human head.

In this impossible situation, Dr. Hussain found himself on a train returning from Jullundur. With his distinct appearance in cap, sherwani, and beard, he was instantly identified as a Muslim and, all of a sudden, he was set upon by a violent mob of Sikh fanatics armed with hungry knives. His life was not worth a quarter of an anna. Spilling his blood to them was as immaterial as drinking some water to slake a ravening thirst. God came to the help of the devout teacher in the nick of time: a Sikh army captain, and a Hindu railway official, appeared on the scene with lightning swiftness. Laying their own lives on the line, those two intrepid men sprang up between Dr. Hussain and the murderous mob, and dared it to kill them first before touching the man whom in the name of God they protected. With such staunch determination did they hold the attacking hounds at bay, that the mob sullenly retreated, and the day was saved. When Dr. Hussain narrated this story of his rescue by a Sikh and a Hindu, Bapu was even more convinced that he could use speech and action as healing physic to transform, from within, society gone dangerously, but only temporarily he hoped, mad.

Yet what disturbed Gandhiji now was that his deep, long-held conviction that only the presence of the British in India was causing communal trouble was being challenged by the events starkly unfolding. Bapu had read his history of India as well as the next man. He thought he knew his motherland pretty nearly as thoroughly as the palm of his own hand. The Hindus, the Mussalmans, the Sikhs and others, had not always been at war with one another before the British established their rule in India. Chapter and verse he could quote without end, from historians Hindu and Muslim, to show that the various religions of this country had been living in peace and harmony earlier.

``You will find communal harmony back when the British no longer rule us,'' he had said repeatedly to the people of the nation. And yet, with Pakistan created by the sacrifice of vivisecting India, Noakhali and Calcutta and Delhi and Lahore and Amritsar were proving him wrong. But Gandhiji would not give up.The day and the moment claimed him, fully. This day he held important discussions in Government House. Then, accompanied by Health Minister Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, a follower of his for many years, and Dr. Sushila Nayyar who had come back from the Wah Camp in Pakistan, Gandhiji went round the quake-wrecked areas of Delhi again. Bapuji was heartened though that, under Aesculapius's healing emblem, doctors and nurses worked like Trojans without let, and with no heed for divisive creed. Urgently he appealed to inmates of refugee camps that they should themselves undertake effective lavatory cleaning to promote sanitary well-being and keep dreaded diseases sternly away.