Gandhi's earliest dialogues, from the time he was student in London, were with Christian friends and missionaries who saw in his moral steadfastness and concern for the sufferings of others a ripeness for conversion to Christianity. These dialogues continued throughout Gandhi’s life, his argument against conversion to Christianity being that Christ’s life only inspired him to be a better Hindu, and not to cease to be one. The Christian missionary conviction was that there was no memorable example, outside Christianity, of a saint or sage taking a stand against his co-religionists and laying down his life for humanity. Surprise awaited that dogma. Gandhi opposed many of his co-religionists in his refusal to endorse vengeful retaliation against Muslims in India to counter Jinnah’s misguided secessionist ambition, subtly fuelled by the British Raj’s unwillingness to incarcerate him for inciting communal killings in Calcutta on August 16, 1946; a failure of governance which made partition unavoidable. And it was on a Friday, the time late afternoon (as with Christ), when Gandhi was killed by a fellow Hindu who believed that Gandhi’s impartial love of all of India’s religious traditions was likely to imperil Hindu orthodoxy’s ambition to establish a Hindu Rashtra in India. And, like Jesus, Gandhi died with God’s name on his lips. This parallelism with Christ’s martyrdom is Gandhi’s unspoken, yet decisive, argument against religious conversion. Communion with all faiths can enable us to embody in our lives the highest ideals of all religions, without abandoning our own traditions. Muslim majoritarianism, which broke up India and led to the establishment of an exclusivist Islamic state in Pakistan, and which today terrorises Jammu and Kashmir, is the ironical mentor of Hindu majoritarianism in India. Indeed, the recent Gujarat carnage, with the state and central governments looking the other way, is a shameful repetition and reminder of the folly of Jinnah’s experiment with untruth in August 1946; and of the memory beclouding anger (to use a phrase from the Gita) which led Godse to kill Gandhi, who was on his way to his evening inter-faith public prayer meeting. Gandhi had declared that India would be partitioned over his dead body, yet he did not start anything like a civil disobedience movement or a fast unto death to prevent it. Godse concluded that Gandhi was a fraud and a facilitator of partition and killed him. It is stated in the Hindu shastras that the prophecy of a steadfast brahmachari devotee of God or Truth, such as Gandhi was, can never fail to be fulfilled. But did not Gandhi’s prophecy that partition would occur over his dead body prove false? Not really. Any civil disobedience movement initiated by Gandhi in 1946 or 1947 to stop partition would have unleashed communal violence of unimaginable proportion all over India, more horrific and enduring than what did occur, and unprecedented for having been instigated by a saint. In the prevailing chaos, India would have been denied independence. Nehru and Patel would have had to beg Mountbatten to rule the country with the aid of the armed forces under his command. The last Viceroy of India would have gladly done so, but on condition that India be broken up into two hundred sovereign states for efficient administration. The great Indian dream, of imagining an ancient civilisation, spiritual and secular, in the form of a modern nation at peace with itself and the world, would have died. The British Empire would have been quite happy to see this happen, deeply wounded as its pride was by the ‘Quit India’ satyagraha led by Gandhi in 1942, and the formation, in 1943, of the Indian National Army by Subhas Chandra Bose, which together made India’s march to freedom unstoppable. Gandhi did not oblige the British Empire and protected Indian independence and saved the honour of India’s spiritual traditions. And, had he been allowed to live, Gandhi would surely have confronted India and Pakistan with the necessity of atonement for the sacrifice of two million innocent lives lives on the altar of partition. The fixity of division may then have had some chance of becoming transformed into the flexibility of interdependence. By murdering Gandhi, Godse blocked this possibility, thus himself making Gandhi’s prophecy about partition occurring over his dead body come true! Satyameva Jayate. Had Gandhi some breath left before he died, what might he have said to his assassin? Perhaps this: ‘Son (he loved all as his own family), you remind me of my Harilal (Gandhi’s eldest son who had rebelled against his father, thinking that he helped other people’s children more than his own). Harilal has not wanted to kill me, but like him, you also fail to understand that we must care for other people’s children as much as our own, even more, if their need is greater. The road to swaraj is long, son, widen your circle of love, be brave!’ Sarvam khalu idam Brahma. Gandhi is one of the two million innocent human beings led like lambs to the slaughter by the Partition. Along with them also died the idea of a subcontinental India, that vastness of self-identity, suggestive of God’s generosity, which had been available to all Indians down the ages, regardless of cultural, religious and political differences and divisions. How can India and Pakistan and Bangladesh atone for this crime against humanity, history and divinity? Only through a symbolic resurrection of subcontinental Indian reality, within existing sovereignties, in a region like J&K, which has mercifully kept ‘unfinished’ the vivisectional agenda of Partition. Let a subcontinental cultural parliament be inaugurated in the area as a whole, without upsetting existing legislatures, to which members would be elected from all of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and not only from J&K: men and women of goodwill who would not rule but serve life and nature and all sacred traditions in the region, and not majoritarian or minoritarian or anthropocentric vested interests. It is my conviction that the mass of subcontinental humanity would thunderously support such a gesture of atonement for the holocaust of Partition. Two million souls now hovering over their former homelands, waiting to be remembered, would find final release and bless, not curse, us in this morally forgetful new century. (The writer, a grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, is a former professor of philosophy, Delhi University)
