Work in progress : 7
GEM OF A NATION
A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY OF DR RAJENDRA PRASAD
By Dr BSM Murty
Extract from Part VI, Chapter 1
Independence had come to India and after a long and arduous
struggle for freedom Congress had arrived at a crossroads. It had achieved its
goal : power, but lost its political cohesion. Gandhi had been cast away from
the centre to the periphery, soon to be done away with. His radical vision of
the transformation of Congress into a social reform movement had no takers in
the now ruling party. It was a twilight scenario of an euphoria of independence
with a darkening horizon of a scramble for power, increasing communal
antagonism and rapid dissipation of patriotic idealism…
Congress at crossroads
Independence had come and the new
government was rapidly accommodating itself to the myriad complicated issues of
internal governance including the continuing problems thrown up by the
partition. One of the major emergent problems was the growing rift between the
Congress party and the post-independence government; a developing conflict
between those within the hallowed circle and those without it. One immediate
fallout of this schism was Kriplani’s resignation as Congress President.
“Acharya Kripalani [writes Prasad],…was dissatisfied with Government, for he
felt that he was not able to pull as much weight with the Cabinet as he thought
he should be able to”. In that uneasy situation, remarks Durga Das,
“Nehru suggested that Prasad become President of the Congress Party. Prasad
objected strongly to what appeared to him an attempt to push him out of the
Cabinet and Presidentship of the Constituent Assembly.” Prasad’s own
version of this unfortunate imbroglio, however, is rather different as he
writes about it at some length in his book At
the Feet of Mahatma Gandhi.
Already saddled with two burdensome
responsibilities of overseeing the wearisome task of ‘framing the Constitution’ as President of the Constituent
Assembly, and grappling with the precarious situation on the twin fronts of
food and agriculture, particularly in the aftermath of the War and the
countrywide near-famine conditions, Prasad was undertstandably reluctant to
take up the Presidentship of the Congress already in the throws of
disintegration. “I felt [he writes]…that the additional responsibility of
becoming President of the Congress would prove too much for me. Accordingly, I
told Pandit Nehru and Sardar Patel that if I accepted their suggestion, I
should be relieved of my office as Minister in charge of Food and Agriculture,
and that perhaps I might also want to be relieved of the responsibility of
presiding over the Constituent Assembly, particularly as guiding the Congress,
in which internal differences had already become manifest, would be a difficult
enough task. [Patel and Nehru], however, felt that I must take the place of
Kripalaniji. I could not refuse, for the inference would have naturally been
that I was not prepared to give up my place in the Cabinet.”
Gandhi was not in favour of Prasad’s
being relieved from his responsibilities as Minister of Food and Agriculture as
the latter was working very hard to cope with the grim food situation in the
country and there had been a remarkable all-round improvement in the situation
even during his short tenure. Also both these departments were directly
concerned with the uplift of the rural population, an area close to Prasad’s
experience and disposition as well as among Gandhi’s top priorities. Besides,
Gandhi was already quite unhappy about the tussle developing between the
Congress party and the new government. “Gandhiji was of the opinion”, writes
Prasad, “that either Shri Jai Prakash Narain or Acharya Narendra Deo, both
leaders of the Socialist Party, should be offered the presidentship. When,
however, he realized that the Working Committee was not prepared to accept that
proposal and that some of the members were very much opposed to it, he kept
quiet…” Obviously Gandhi had come to realize that the section of
Congress leadership on board the new government now wanted the party only as a
compliant appendage. With his enormous influence among the newly elected
legislators, Prasad knew that both Patel and Nehru wanted him to be away from
the helm of affairs. Prasad could not justifiably be accused of any ‘lure of
power’. He had been drawn away from his organizational key position in the
party to the centre of power mainly because of his long political experience,
his proven integrity and his sterling capabilities. But now in the new
government of an independent India both Patel and Nehru seemingly had their own
axes to grind, and Prasad for them as a cabinet colleague would now only be an
inconvenience and embarrassment as later developments amply showed. Even at the
cusp of independence serious differences had already started emerging between
Patel and Nehru, something that had added to Gandhi’s darkening despair.
Under such conflicting circumstances, however,
Prasad had to accept the presidentship of the Congress, though on condition
that ‘I would give up my place in the Cabinet and would take charge of the
Congress work only after I was relieved of that office.’ [AFM318] As
stipulated, Prasad was finally relieved of his Cabinet position on 14 January,
1948, and ‘formally took over as President of the Congress’. The ‘lured by
power’ observation, attributed to Gandhi in Das’s journalistic reporting, is
thus soundly nullified both by Prasad’s own testimony and by the familiar
course of events. Unfortunately it’s quite common in journalism, on occasions,
to find trivial and insignificant details or observations overly magnified for
special effect. In fact, only a few pages earlier in his book, Das uses
acclamatory phrases for the great leaders. Nehru is ‘the darling of the nation’
and ‘the refuge of the minorities’; Patel, ‘The Iron Man [who] inspired trust
in those days of uncertainty’, and Rajendra Prasad is ‘the embodiment of
Gandhian humility and the spirit of selfless service’. [DD261]. Even Louis
Fischer, Gandhi’s celebrated hagiographer, had paid high tributes to Prasad
when he had taken over as Congress President from Kripalani in January, 1948. “
He was”, wrote Fischer, “ a gentle, modest, compliant, retiring,
well-intentioned, high-minded person more inclined to serve than to lead.”
It is relevant here to remember that
towards the end of both his Autobiography
and At the Feet, Prasad discusses in
minute details the challenges and the attainments of the projected goals during
his sixteen-month long tenure as Minister of Food and Agriculture. The year-long
first part of this tenure fell under the Interim government with all the tumult
and strife of the partition. During this pre-partition phase, he had also to
preside over the Constituent Assembly, besides discharging his onerous duties
as a member of the Partition Committee. With characteristic modesty he admits:
“Somehow I managed to carry on all these responsibilities with the blessings of
Bapuji. I had, moreover, no reason to be dissatisfied with myself as regards
the work which was entrusted to me.”
Prasad had little administrative
experience to help him in managing two of the most difficult Central ministries
assigned to him when he was invited to join the problematic Interim coalition
Cabinet. After the ravages of the War and the consequent widespread famine
conditions in the country, later compounded by the massive influx of refugees
caused by the partition, Prasad had been saddled with the most exhausting load
of work, particularly in view of his fragile health. He had justifiably expressed
his preference for the presidentship of the Constituent Assembly, but was
equally determined to grapple with the grass-root level problems of food and
agriculture that were virtually in a shambles. In fact, among all his other
colleagues in the government, if there was one person absolutely free from any
‘lure of power’, it was Rajendra Prasad and none else. Patel had tenaciously
clung to the Home ministry for obvious reasons, and even though he had a
majority mandate of the PCCs for the Congress presidentship, he wanted that
contentious responsibility to be shouldered by Prasad. The same was true of
Nehru who was right from the start keen on Foreign Affairs which most suited
his propensities and for which he was also, perhaps, the most capable. As a matter
of fact, since its Tripuri session the Congress presidentship had practically
become something like a loose-fitting mantle which could be conveniently put on
or off as the situation demanded. Maulana Azad, Congress President for six
terms during the War (1940-’46), had to give place to Nehru for just a short
while when the Congress President had to join the Interim government as the
leader of the coalition team. And only a couple of months later the mantle was
draped over Kripalani’s shoulders at Meerut in November, 1946. But Kripalani
was smart enough to realize that the mantle had lost most of its authority and
its relevance and he preferred to lay it off even before the completion of his
term in 1947.
By then it had become quite obvious
that the mantle of Congress presidentship had become sufficiently torn and
discoloured. All the glory and relevance of the Congress as a political party
that had successfully led a unique non-violent national revolution to the
ultimate freedom for India – even though a freedom tragically divided - lay
faded and diminished. Indeed the organization had become so superfluous and
disorganized, thought Nehru and Patel, that only Prasad, perhaps, could put it
back into shape. Virtually abandoned by Gandhi, its patriarch ‘Bapu’, it had
now become almost an orphan, a nobody’s baby. Pds:291113
Lok Sevak Sangh
It might be useful in this context to
remember that as early as 1917, during his Champaran satyagraha, Gandhi had scrupulously
kept the farmers’ movement disassociated with the name of the Congress. He made
an intuitive distinction between a grass-root level revolution of a social and
moral character, essentially non-political and basically experimental, and a
manifestly political movement with the primary objective of getting freedom
from imperial rule. It is important to see the fundamental difference between
the two approaches. Gandhi had given practical demonstrations of the first kind
of transformational revolution in Champaran, in Kheda, Bardoli and Dandi. Those
were all models of a social revolution that could bring about change at the
grass-root level; a revolution meant to change the rural face of India.
It was only when Congress agreed to
adopt his unique principles of transparency (Truth) and peaceful moral
resistance (Ahimsa) that Gandhi consented to lead the political movement of the
Congress for the ouster of the British Raj. In fact, had the Congress refrained
from haste and continued with Gandhi’s unique political strategy with a little
more patience and sagacity, and unity of
purpose, it could well have attained an undivided freedom for India. Right
from the beginning, Gandhi always realized and emphasized the value of communal
harmony and eradication of social inequalties, along with a ‘constructive
programme’ that was ideally suited to bring about a grass-root level
transformation of the national polity. For him the two movements were parallel
and complementary, the ‘grass-root’ one having a long-term objective, and the
‘freedom’-oriented one with a short term political goal of national
independence.
It remains a historical fact that since
the Civil Disobedience movement of the thirties, Congress had lost its
political focus and thrust leading to Gandhi’s withdrawal from the active
leadership of the party. Already a parting of ways was discernible between his
own perceptions of the political situation and its necessary strategies and
those of his very closest and most loyal followers. Gandhi’s branching off into
a countrywide parallel movement of a ‘constructive programme’ and creating a
cadre of dedicated Congressmen for its effective implementation was a decisive
step he took in that direction. This disjunction between the two approaches
started getting more and more pronounced as the political movement became more
strident and focused on ‘power transfer’. That is, a divided and limited
‘dominion’ variety of freedom rather than the purna swaraj unequivocally envisaged in the Lahore (1929) session
of the Congress.
This was clearly a minimalization of
the Congress’ political objectives to suit the interests of some individuals,
including Jinnah and Mountbatten, rather than to serve the broader political
objectives in the national interest and in the interest of the people.
Obviously for Gandhi such minimalization of the broader objectives in the
interest of political expediency was unacceptable. Also, perhaps, Prasad was
being compelled to be a party to this expedient policy in order to neutralize
Gandhi’s principled opposition. To make Prasad accept Congress presidentship
and relinquish his responsibility midway as Food and Agriculture Minister (both
actions disapproved by Gandhi) was a calculated move to distance him from
Gandhi and compromise his moral credibility. It’s appropriate in this context
to recall Fischer’s words ‘gentle, modest, compliant’, etc describing Prasad’s
personality. At the same time the ‘lure of power’ remark about Prasad
attributed to Gandhi must be seen in the context of these circumstances
deliberately created to bring about a misunderstanding between the mentor and
his loyal disciple.
Contrasting Prasad with Patel, Michael Brecher,
Nehru’s biographer, finds Patel ‘cold’ with ‘almost icy reserve about him, a
pronounced aloofness and stern composure’ whereas Prasad he describes as ‘a
kindly, gentle-looking man… a devout believer in pure non-violence…among all of
Gandhi’s leading political disciples, the most spiritually akin to the
Mahatma…[one who] has been loyal to his mentor throughout his public life’. In fact, when Gandhi had wanted one of the senior Congress leaders to
stay out of the government, he had actually meant Patel rather than Prasad.
“Though coming together”, writes Rajmohan Gandhi, “to defeat some of Gandhi’s
solutions, Nehru and Patel were often in conflict. At the end of September
[1947] Gandhi had thought that for cohesion one or the other should leave the
government.” As Nehru was his preferred choice and had become almost
indispensable as leader of the governing team, Gandhi obviously meant Patel as
the one ‘to stay out of the government’. Gandhi knew that the equilibrium
between the Congress party which had ultimately secured the ‘transfer of power’
after decades of struggle and sacrifice and its top leadership now holding the
reins of the government had now reached almost a breaking point. As Durga Das
says, Gandhi was now fully convinced that Congress should ‘cease to be a
political party’ as the intra-party conflicts scenario was getting quite dismal
after independence.
Already, the element of durbar was creeping in….The politicians
I tapped for their views were of three categories. The giants were loyal to
Gandhi to a man, but they felt a growing estrangement from the Mahatma in that
the business of government had made them abandon their Gandhian ideals both
under political and administrative compulsions as well as their own personal
craving to wield power as the British had done and to live like the ‘White
Sahibs’. They could not resolve this conflict, and the more Gandhi spelled out
his views at his daily prayer meetings on how they should conduct themselves
the more they shrank from his commandments. In fact, they charged him in
private with attempting to exercise power without responsibility. Those in the
second rank openly exhibited their itch for power and pelf, and those at the
bottom rungs of the political hierarchy also saw in the advent of freedom the
long-awaited opportunity to cash in on their sacrifices for the cause.
Conflict of interest between the party
and the government was inevitable. As Fischer points out: “ [Gandhi]
realized that a one-party system could actually be a no-party system, for when
the Government and party are one, the party is a rubber stamp and leads only a
fictitious existence…. The election of a puppet who obeyed the government would
signalize the elimination of effective political opposition." The
rejection by both Nehru and Patel of Gandhi’s suggestion that either Jayaprakash
or Narendra Dev be elected Congress president, only meant to keep Congress in a
submissive status quo mode. That is precisely why they had insisted on Prasad’s
taking over as Congress president from Kripalani. Gandhi, soon after that AICC
session, had said:
I am convinced that no patchwork
treatment can save the Congress. It will only prolong the agony. The best thing
for the Congres would be to dissolve itself before the rot sets in further. Its
voluntary liquidation will brace up and purify the political climate of the
country. But I can see that I can carry nobody with me in this.
The agony could not have been more
intense for Gandhi who had returned in early September from Calcutta to a
riot-torn Delhi where the Muslims were now being subjected to horrific violence
following the large-scale influx of embittered refugees from divided Punjab. To
add to the agony, there were ugly squabbles now between Nehru and Patel over
the post-partition problems both in the government and the party.
Notwithstanding his ill-health, Prasad as usual was overburdened with multiple
responsibilities, one of them being
[the] amendment of the Congress Constitution,
which had been under discussion for some time and for which a Committee had
been appointed….[Only] a few hours before his assassination, he put down in
writing his views in regard to the amendment of the Congress Constitution. He was of the opinion that the
Congress should cease to be a political organization, in which capacity it had
been taking part in political activity and had been controlling the Ministries
that had been functioning, and that it should work as a body of social workers
and influence government through social work. This view, however, did not find favour
with prominent Congressmen. The Congress Constitution, therefore, as amended,
did not provide that the Congress should develop into a Lok Sevak Sangh… The
[other] task… was Gandhiji’s constructive programme, to which he attached as
much importance as he did to Hindu-Muslim unity.
Prasad had just been relieved of his
responsibility as Food and Agriculture Minister and been elected Congress
President. But he had also been actively engaged in the drafting of the new
Constitution as President of the Constituent Assembly, besides being a member
of the Partition Committee. In spite of being overworked, Prasad had been meeting
Gandhi almost every day for urgent consultations and acquainting him with the
developments on all fronts.
Meanwhile, the situation in Delhi was
very tense. Even the top leaders in the Congress, including Patel, were unhappy
with Gandhi’s alleged partiality towards Muslims, particularly after his last
fast over the delay in the transfer of money to Pakistan. Serious differences
over policy matters between Patel and Nehru had become Gandhi’s greatest worry.
Accusations were being made that there were no proper security arrangements at
the prayer meetings in spite of Patel being the Home Minister. A bomb incident
had already taken place in one of Gandhi’s daily evening prayer meetings at
Birla House, just ten days before his tragic assassination. In fact, on the
very day of the assassination, till only a few hours before, Gandhi had been
drafting the new constitution for the Congress in its new avatar as the Lok
Sevak Sangh conceptualised as a purely non-political organization focused on
the ongoing constructive programme. But, perhaps, destiny was scripting another
pitiless narrative for that evening and beyond in history. In keeping with the
tragic irony, Prasad had left Delhi the same morning as he narrates the whole
sequence of events.
This matter [the Sevagram conference] had
been under [Gandhiji’s] consideration for some time, and it had been decided
that a conference of constructive workers should be called at Sevagram. A date
had been fixed for it in the first week of February. Mahatmaji had decided to
attend it and was anxious to go to Wardha for this purpose…. Early on the
morning of January 30, 1948, I left for Wardha by plane. Before that, however,…
I saw Gandhiji….He said that he would leave for Wardha in a day or two to
attend the conference….I left Delhi in the hope that I would see Bapuji at
Wardha within the next few days, and that the constructive programme, which was
the very basis of the strength of the Congress, would receive a new impetus….I
arrived at Wardha about half-past two in the afternoon. By that time, because
of the cold and the exhaustion consequent on the journey, I had started a
temperature. A doctor came to see me at about five o’clock in the evening.
While I was talking to him, a boy came running and told us that Mahatmaji was
dead….[The] announcement had come on radio.
As I reproduce these lines, I am struck by a personal
flashback of that terrible radio announcement. I was just about ten years old.
We lived in Chhapra (in Bihar) where my father was a college professor. It was
around six in the evening. I was playing on the street with other boys. Across
the street lived our landlord, the only person in the locality who owned a big
radiogram in his drawing room. The news of Gandhiji’s murder came in a special
announcement: some Hindu fanatic had just shot Mahatma Gandhi as he was
proceeding to his prayer meeting in Birla House. The news stunned everyone. I
immediately ran into my house to convey this terrifying news to my father. He looked
paralysed by the news.
That night he recorded in his diary. 30 January, 1948:
“Right at nightfall, heard that at New Delhi’s Birla Bhawan, a youth named
Nathuram Vinayak, around five in the evening, fired three shots at Mahatma
Gandhi, killing him instantly. But God was merciful to Muslims. Had the killer
been a Muslim, the entire Indian Muslim community would have been annihilated
in a day. Even in his death Gandhiji protected the Muslims. Mother India became
sonless today.”
Prasad recollects: “I
could not sleep that night”. Though early next morning he was able to get a
lift in a flight from Nagpur to Delhi with Gandhi’s son Ramdas and just made it
to the last darshan and the funeral.
The Sevagram Constructive Workers’ Conference was put off and met in March when
it ‘decided to establish the Sarvodaya
Samaj’.
Soon after that
announcement of Gandhi’s assassination, Nehru’s voice had come on the radio:
“The light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere…” It was
a voice soaked in tears and anguish. “Our beloved leader, Bapu as we called
him, the Father of the Nation, is no more…” The brief speech was followed by Patel’s: “My heart is
aching. What shall I say to you?...Perhaps God wanted Gandhiji’s mission to
fulfil and prosper through his death.” Though it all sounded so bizarre as only
a few hours before Gandhi had been trying to reconcile the increasing
differences between these two great disciples. Prasad, ironically at that
tragic moment, was away in Wardha on his master’s bidding for the Constructive
Workers’ Conference.
The Lok Sevak Sangh draft that Gandhi
had been working on, and which he had finished hours before his death,
contained the blueprint of a new organization that was to supplant the Congress
which Gandhi had wished to dissolve itself after it had fulfilled its purpose
of attaining freedom for India. Apparently, Gandhi was thinking of the future
political system for an independent India that would be truly democratic and
secular with the seven million villages as its base. The colonial system of parliamentary
democracy which India had inherited in its imperialist form needed a
fundamental change to suit the Indian polity and its social fabric. He wanted
Congress ‘to dissolve itself before the rot sets in further’. He knew it could
not save itself by any ‘patchwork treatment’. A complete overhaul was the need
of the hour. As Fischer had indicated, Gandhi realized that ‘a one-party system
could actually be a no-party system’. Congress could not rule and put curbs on
itself at the same time. A single party dominance would ultimately lead to
authoritarianism. It must discard its colonial legacies and develop a new
dispensation, a new, village-oriented democratic system that could turn the
‘freedom of India’ into a ‘freedom in India’. [LF/603] A Congress that had led
a nation-wide freedom movement for decades, suddenly converting itself from a
mighty pluralist political force into a monolithic political party inheriting a
century-old colonial system of governance was, in Gandhi’s view, something of
an awkward transformation. Unfortunately, however, that ‘sacred’ document penned
by ‘Bapu’ in the final hours of his life, perhaps as a warning to his loyal
disciples to read the writing on the wall, was casually thrown into time’s
dustbin. “Never did it make its way”, writes Lelyveld, “onto the agenda of any
meeting of the Indian National Congress as a subject for serious discussion.” And it now finds a place in history only as the ‘Last Will and Testament’
of Gandhi.
© Dr BSM Murty
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