FREEDOM'S BATTLE: GANDHI, THE CHARIOTEER

B. PATTABHI SITARAMAYYA

Ten years ago, the political atmosphere of our country was surcharged to a degree with feelings of indignation, resentment and expectancy, Behind the month of October 1919, there was the tragedy of the Amritsar massacre, the studied secrecy maintained about the holocaust of Jalianwalabagh, the humiliations to which the men, women and children of the Punjab were subjected by Messrs. Smith and Thompson, Colonel Johnson and General Dyer, the encaging barristers-at-law in a public street, the whipping of a bridal party in a marriage procession, the crawling of passers-by in a gulli, the showering of bombs on innocent villagers, the proclamation of Martial Law and the resignation of Sir Sankaran Nair. In front of it lay the prospect of the Reform Bill, the emerging of the monster Dyarchy into human shape masquerading as Self-Government or a counterfeit thereof, the amnesty of political prisoners which was bound to follow a Royal proclamation, the warfare between Responsive Co-operation espoused by the Lokamanya and the rejection of the Reforms advocated by Chittaranjan Das.

All this sounds as some chapter of ancient history, but one touch of bureaucracy links together the epochs of eternity by the one tie of common suffering. Today we have almost the same prospect and retrospect. Indian Nationalism, seemingly beaten and baulked of its hopes and plans, is asserting itself once again with redoubled vigour, though, being in the midst of this renaissance we are not able to analyse its contents and visualise its features before our mind's eye. By a strange turn of the whirlgig of time Sir Sankaran Nair, who won his laurels ten years ago by resigning his membership of the Executive Council of the Government of India on the issue of the continuance of Martial Law in the Punjab, is recovering from the pitfall of the Central Committee into which he had let himself drop and holding at bay as usual his colleagues and his masters. The Punjab is again the storm-centre of politics and public life, in which the Congress is to be held in Lahore. At Amritsar Dr. Satyapal is again in jail today as he was in 1919, though his companion, Dr. Kitchlew, is free. They were then together. Now they are in opposite camps, not indeed hostile to national aspirations, but in campaigns ridden by internal factiousness. Gandhi swayed the destinies of the Congress and the country in 1919, though he was not in the lime-light and though he had emerged just then from an avalanche of abuse and execration for his Satyagraha movement.

A decade has not weakened his hold on the cult of truth and non-violence and today once again, though he is not in the lime-light, he is the one man to whom the people look for guidance and salvation. At Amritsar Pandit Motilal presided in 1919. At Lahore his son will preside in 1929. But more than all these, India gave proofs of hard determination to win Swaraj in 1919 by sacrificing hundreds of her sons in the Punjab on the 10th of April that year. They were however mowed down by the dastardly cruelty of General Dyer then. Now in 1929 the flower of India's sons are proving to the world that they can make willing sacrifices of themselves, yea, sacrifice themselves inch by inch and minute by minute, cell by cell and limb by limb as much as they can hold themselves as food for cannon or dynamite. India's expectancy at the present moment is not less keen or less buoyant than it was ten years ago and every day new reports bring new hopes and augur new disappointments.

Ten years ago, Gandhi wrenched the leadership, not as a personal prize but through a new philosophy, from the hands of his elders. Of them there was Dr. Besant who was the harbinger of the Reforms of that era, the Messiah whose atonement had brought salvation to mankind. She was ignored, set aside and superseded. She had already herself supplanted earlier leaders like Surendranath Banerjea, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, Satyendra Prasanna Sinha, Bhupendranath Basu, Lala Lajpat Rai and others of that category. She had inaugurated a whirlwind progratnme, a tearing, raging campaign of agitation which left no breathing time to the British and brought them down to her feet. But Gandhi's agitation came actually to choke Britain. The self-complacent dictum of Lord Chelmsford that the Non-co-operation movement would die of its own inanition proved a false political prophecy and it was Gandhi’s initiative in boycotting the Hunter Commission, organizing an Indian Enquiry Committee into the Punjab wrongs, and publishing the impartial verdict of the nation, that was responsible for the resolution at Amritsar asking for the recall or Lord Chelmsford.

That was soon followed up by the declaration of the principle of Non-co-operation in April 1920 and this nucleus gathered a whole protoplasm by September that year and began to bud and multiply by December.

Like Caesar of old, Gandhi came, saw and conquered. Here was Bepin Babu palpably jealous of this pigmy, shorter, smaller and younger than himself. There was Malaviya ‘perplexed and puzzled’ over the ovations that greeted Gandhi everywhere which were never his. Elsewhere was Lajpat Rai saturated with Western experiences, American and English, who could not for the ghost of him understand what this Non-co-operation was and would be. Away was C. R. Das fighting the new movement with his wealth, voice and vote. All were foiled before this inscrutable small man, this philosopher-statesman, this mystic, this idealist, this man of business, this little Bania Rishi. How should such a man, who by his irresistible moral uplift, swept away before him his elders and his compeers and installed himself on the gadi of power, allow himself in turn to be submerged by the rising tide of youthful invasions, enthusiasm and readiness to sacrifice? He sees all around him the youth of the nation hungering for freedom, thirsting for liberty, yearning to lay down their lives before the altar of the Mother, and he, at any rate, is not the man to stand between a patriot and his cherished object.

Patriarchs of old have always ennobled themselves by singling out their successors and installing them on the throne of power. He who lingers to the end, long after his time is up, is neither wise, nor discerning, nor even patriotic; but he, who in his own day watches the pulse and knows the warmth of the blood surging beneath his fingers, can measure the strength of the throb within and knows how to adjust himself to the rising pressure and temperature.

This, Gandhi has done in nominating Jawaharlal to the chair at Lahore. The charioteer bears even perhaps a greater responsibility in the conduct of a campaign than the warrior himself that wields the weapons. We know how Nara Narayana fought the battle of Kurukshetra on to a successful end. Which was the greater of the two? Arjuna was overcome with doubt; his courage failed him; his impetuosity at one moment yielded place to vacillation, at the next. Through all these vicissitudes, it was Krishna that put heart into him and guided him to victory; and Arjuna himself put a like spirit and a like courage in Uttarakumara in the great feat of Gograhana. Today, Gandhi standing by Jawaharlal in the great battle that is to come is not a puzzle to those that have the vision, but fulfils the prophecies of the epics.

Whether it be in professions or in politics, the duty of the elder generation is clearly to take in hand the rising members of the younger and guide them along paths of rectitude and Leadership. It is only when this is done that unity is established, rather continuity is ensured between the streams of life that are conventionally termed the past, the present and the future. These are but the halting stations in our march to eternity and fatuous is the man that thinks he must wipe out all these from the map of time. The uninitiated have doubtless cavilled at one another, the old at the young and the young at the old; but old and young, age and youth, past and present, leaders and following, all make up one united whole, one harmonious blend, which would be imperfect without either the one or the other in its composition. So palpable a proposition as this is little understood and less realised by the common run of politicians.

But there are qualities and attributes in human nature which mark the prophet from the politician, even as they draw the line between the engineer and the architect, the photographer and the painter, the mechanic and the scientist, the preacher and the paigambar. All of us do not possess such qualities, but it is up to all of us to cultivate our minds so as to be able to recognise these qualities where they exist and realise the greatness and the glory which they betoken. Not all may be Gandhis, but let us not lose the opportunity of knowing in our own day and realising in our own experience what Gandhi stands for.

(From Triveni 1929)

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