Rajaji Read online

  Rajmohan Gandhi

  RAJAJI

  A

  LIFE

  Contents

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Preface

  1. Manga

  1878-1915

  2. Hope

  1915-19

  3. Battle

  1919-21

  4. Jail

  1921-22

  5. Hero

  1922-25

  6. Ashram

  1925-29

  7. Vedaranyam

  1929-31

  8. Stigma

  1931-33

  9. Switch

  1933-35

  10. ‘Fall’

  1935-37

  11. Premier

  1937-39

  12. Hitler

  1939

  13. Cogitation

  1939-41

  14. Rebellion

  1941-44

  15. ‘Moth-eaten’

  1944-46

  16. Freedom!

  1946-47

  17. Calcutta

  1947-48

  18. Palace

  1948-50

  19. ‘Matchstick’

  1950-51

  20. ‘Downfall’

  1951-54

  21. Wolves

  1954-58

  22. Swatantra

  1958-62

  23. Kennedy

  1961-63

  24. Defiance

  1962-69

  25. Sparkle

  1969-72

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  RAJAJI: A LIFE

  Rajmohan Gandhi, born in 1935, has written, among other works, The Good Boatman: A Portrait of Gandhi (Viking), Understanding the Muslim Mind (Penguin) and Patel: A Life.

  Currently, he is a professor with the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

  That they may know their roots —

  for

  Bharat and Shreya,

  Vidur, Divya and Arjun,

  Ananya and Anushka,

  and siblings and cousins

  joining their ranks,

  great-great-grandchildren

  of the subject of this book

  Preface

  To those knowing even a little about him, a biography of Rajaji or C.R., as Chakravarti Rajagopalachari was known, needs no justification. However, a word may be in order for the many for whom Rajaji’s life is curtained by time.

  He was born in 1878 in a poor Tamil-speaking Iyengar family in a South Indian village called Thorapalli, not far from Bangalore and Hosur, and died in 1972 in Madras, now Chennai.

  In the movement for Indian freedom he was Gandhi’s southern general and at one stage regarded as Gandhi’s heir. ‘I do say he is the only possible successor,’ Gandhi had said about C.R. in 1927. However, in 1942 Gandhi was to declare, ‘Not Rajaji but Jawaharlal will be my successor.’ Nehru was the nation’s as well as Gandhi’s choice as free India’s first Prime Minister, yet in 1948 Rajaji became Governor-General and thus independent India’s first Indian head of state.

  From the late 1950s, when Rajaji was close to eighty, to the end of 1972, when he died at the age of 94, Rajaji was the period’s most notable — and most quotable — dissenting Indian.

  He crackled and sparkled. In 1962, when Nehru was alive, Rajaji was, at least to one person, ‘by far the most interesting and lively man in all India.’1 That from time to time he contradicted himself added to his liveliness.

  This gifted wordsmith — and skilled administrator — was also remarkably prescient. When, in the 1950s, Nehru was luring everyone in India towards the ‘socialistic pattern,’ C.R. attacked the ‘permit-licence raj’ — the phrase was his — as a recipe for corruption and stagnation, and formed a political party, Swatantra, in support of an open economy and fundamental rights.

  In 1971, within six weeks of a bitter electoral defeat at the hands of Indira Gandhi, he asserted that the policies of Swatantra were ‘bound to become the Government’s policies and programmes, if not now, some years hence.’ The true if grudgingly acknowledged father of the economic reforms of the early 1990s is C.R.

  In the 1950s he anticipated subsequent warnings regarding the global nuclear threat — and the power of China. Before independence he was the only Congress leader to admit the likelihood of Partition; and in 1947 he said that Pakistan might break up in about twenty-five years.

  His capacity to be ahead of his times can be gauged also from what he said in 1921-2 about life after independence,2 his 1961 call for state funding of elections (‘Elections now are private enterprise, whereas this is the first thing that should be nationalised’3), and his 1970 warning about ‘adventures in the manufacture of [a] small car’4.

  His lifespan joined far-apart ages. When he was born, the revolt of 1857 and, on the other side of the globe, the assassination of Lincoln were recent events; when he died, the twenty-first century had started impinging on people’s minds.

  He interests us also because in his case power did not translate into wealth.

  Finally, a focus on C.R. is inevitably a welcome focus on South India, which features inadequately in stories of the Freedom Movement or of the post-1947 decades.

  This book is a freshly written condensation of my two volumes on the life of C.R., the first of which came out in 1978 and the other in 1984. My sources were C.R.’s private papers, made available to me by his sons and daughters; the papers of Devadas Gandhi (my father and the husband of Rajaji’s youngest daughter Lakshmi); the papers in different archives of several of C.R.’s contemporaries; the correspondence and writings of Gandhi in the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi and elsewhere; newspapers of the time, including Kalki, The Hindu and Swarajya; Rajaji’s correspondence with his lifelong friend Navaratna Rama Rao; and recollections provided by numerous relatives, colleagues, adversaries, officials, journalists and other contemporaries.

  They included G.D. Birla, John Brackenbury, Chellamma, Isobel Cripps, B.W. Day, Morarji Desai, Indira Gandhi, V.V. Giri, Ramnath Goenka, Lord Glendevon, R.V. Krishna Iyer, K. Kamaraj, Acharya Kripalani, T.T. Krishnamachari, S. Krishnamurti, Harold Macmillan, the Earl of Mar & Kellie, Minoo Masani, Mirabehn, Lord Mountbatten, John Munro, V.K. Narasimhan, Jayaprakash Narayan, Colleen Nye, Pyarelal, S. Ramakrishnan, Henry Ramsey, the family of Navaratna Rama Rao, B. Shiva Rao, C. Samachar, A.N. Sivaraman, Ian Stephens, C. Subramaniam, Margaret Tait, Mahavir Tyagi and Richard Wood.

  In particular, this work owes a great deal to the prodding, help, information and insights provided by two close associates of Rajaji, T. Sadasivam and K. Santhanam — and by Rajaji’s children, Krishnaswami, Namagiri, Narasimhan and Lakshmi.

  For help at different times with research or translation I thank S.A. Govindarajan, D. Venkatesan, V. Ramaratnam, Neerja Chowdhury and K. Vedamurthy. I am grateful for the secretarial assistance received from Meher Ghyara, Linda Pierce and Usha Gandhi.

  Thanks are also due to those who permitted me to study material in the following institutions: Tamil Nadu Archives, Madras; National Archives, New Delhi; Nehru Memorial Museum & Library, New Delhi; India Office Library, London; Gandhi Sangrahalaya, New Delhi & Ahmedabad; Rashtrapati Bhavan; the Prime Minister’s Office; the Union Home Ministry; Amrita Bazar Patrika and The Statesman, Calcutta; The Hindu and Indian Express, Madras; and Hindustan Times, New Delhi.

  A word on spellings. The English spelling of Rajaji’s name varied during different phases of his life, from Rajagopalachar, favoured early in his career, to the usual Rajagopalachari, the respectful Rajagopalachariar and the rare Rajagopalacharya. The abbreviations most resorted to were Rajaji and C.R. These are freely used in the text. Indian towns have generally been given the spelling they had in
the period under reference. Thus Madura instead of Madurai, and Cawnpore for Kanpur.

  New Delhi, December 1996

  Rajmohan Gandhi

  1

  Manga

  1878-1915

  Britain’s presence in India seemed permanent in 1878, the year in which Chakravarti Rajagopalachari was born. Securing in 1876 the title of Empress of India, Victoria had sent a serene message to a Delhi assembly: ‘We Victoria have been touched by the evidence of their (the Indians’) loyalty and attachment to our house and throne.’ She looked forward to ‘yet closer affection’ between ‘ourselves and our subjects.’1

  Good as well as greedy Britons had set foot in India. One of the best was Sir Thomas Munro, who reached Indian shores in 1780 as a 19-year-old seaman and died as the Governor of Madras in 1827. He understood the feelings of a subjugated race and observed that while ‘the natives of British provinces may . . . enjoy the fruits of their labour in tranquillity, . . . none of them can look forward to any share in the civil or military government of their country.’2

  Under a system devised by Munro, a South Indian village had a munsiff, or headman, who collected land tax, wrote reports for district officials, communicated and explained the Raj’s orders to the villagers, drafted their petitions, and settled petty disputes. Chakravarti Venkatarya, father of Rajagopalachari, was the munsiff of Thorapalli village in a north-western corner of Salem district in Madras Presidency.

  He was a Tamil-speaking Brahmin of the Iyengar or Vaishnavite variety. The quick-minded Brahmins of South India were and are a tiny part of the population, fewer than three in a hundred. An ancestor of Venkatarya figures in South Indian lore: Nallan Chakravarti. Living in a distant and unknown century, Nallan (the good) is said to have defied orthodox rules by performing the last rites for a dying wanderer from a lower caste. For a period Venkatarya’s forbears had resided near the famed shrine of Tirupati, in Telugu country. From there they moved to the village of Pannapalli in the Balaghat plateau in the domain of’ the princes of Mysore.

  The greater part of it about 3,000 feet above sea level, Balaghat was often visited by drought. Its population was sparse but diverse, speaking Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Hindustani and Marathi. In 1792, when a number of adjoining pockets fell to the British, Balaghat stood unconquered; but seven years later, on the death of the Muslim prince, Tipu, it was ceded to the European powers. The British included Balaghat in the district of Salem in Madras Presidency and called it the taluk, or sub- district, of Hosur.

  Around 1840, Narasimhachar, who would beget Venkatarya, moved fourteen miles from Pannapalli to the village of Thorapalli, also in Hosur taluk. He married a girl called Rangamma and lived in the house that her father, Srinivasa, who had no sons, had settled on her. Rangamma and Narasimhachar had three sons, of whom Venkatarya was the first, and three daughters.

  Venkatarya was in his twenties when he became the munsiff of Thorapalli, which had about eighty dwellings at the time and a population of about 400. Thorapalli’s red soil produced rice and ragi, coconut and mango. Venkatarya and his kinsfolk owned a few of its acres. Though the climate was dry and the trees scattered, Thorapalli’s setting was not unattractive; on occasion the sun played picturesquely on clouds and low hills. Its dwellings crowded a rocky terrain that sloped quite steeply and was washed at its feet by a slender, shallow stream. Rangamma’s house, now a national monument, lay on the higher slopes, where only Brahmins lived.

  A humble house, the walls and floor are made of mud, the roof of bamboo and cheap tiles. The family lived and slept in a large central room with an opening in the roof to let the light in and a channel in the floor to let the water out. A room for eating, a kitchen, a bathing area and a twelve feet by six feet ‘store’ completed the house, adjoining which was a narrow seasonal well. In 1968 a descendant sold the house, almost in its original condition, for Rs 2,750.

  Singaramma from Kuppam in Chittoor district, now part of the state of Andhra, was married to Venkatarya when he was fifteen. They waited many years before a boy, Narasimhachar, arrived. He was followed by Srinivasa and later, on 10 December 1878,3 by their third and last child, Rajagopalachar. All births took place in the dark, windowless ‘store’ in grandmother Rangamma’s house.

  The two years from 1876 to 1878 had seen the worst of South India’s recorded famines. When Lord Lytton, the Viceroy, journeyed from Calcutta, the capital of British India, to the affected region, he found that in Salem district alone 1,36,941 famine deaths had been registered. Mercifully, the north-east monsoon of 1878 brought ‘the finest crop seen in the district.’ ‘Stocks were replenished, prices fell . . . and the weary officials were at last released from their heavy tasks.’4

  Rajagopalachari’s birth coincided with the revival of fortune. Called Rajan by his parents, the child went to the village ‘school’, played marbles on sandy patches beside the stream, frequented a tamarind tree, and on one occasion set fire to a clothes-line and watched the leaping flames until they were put out by an aunt invited by him ‘to share in the entertainment.’5

  Venkatarya must have demonstrated abilities, perhaps during the drought, for in 1883, when Rajan was four, he was named munsiff of Hosur, which was about six miles away. The promotion was noteworthy, for Hosur, known once for its silk, was the Raj’s seat in the taluk, with a population at the time of over 5,000. Beyond Hosur lay Bangalore, the largest city in Mysore, a state ruled by Hindu princes who acknowledged British paramountcy.

  Because of the clan and caste to which he belonged, Venkatarya usually went by the name of Chakravarti Iyengar. Tall, strongly built and light-skinned, he walked with a proud bearing. Typical of Brahmins, except for a tuft at the back, his head was shaved clean. Each morning he marked his forehead with a namam — a vertical line in red within a white U, generally applied by Vaishnavites. Barefooted at home, Venkatarya used leather chappals for going out, which was not yet a general Brahmin practice. The orthodox custom was to walk unshod or in wooden sandals, leather being thought unclean. But increasingly Brahmins were accepting chappals made by cobblers, giving rice or ragi in exchange.

  As the Hosur munsiff, Chakravarti Iyengar’s monthly salary was five rupees. Commanding prestige more than money, he was stingy with what he got. In a bid to shock him into loosening the purse strings, Singaramma once removed her ornaments and wore a widow’s meagre attire.

  Fluent in Tamil and Telugu, Chakravarti Iyengar had a fair knowledge as well of Sanskrit texts, which he read in the Telugu script. Though unable to speak English, Chakravarti Iyengar had access to Salem district’s British officials, who on occasion asked him to accompany them in their horse carriages. He gave them uninhibited advice. Obeying tradition over food, Chakravarti Iyengar abstained not only from meat, fish and eggs but also from vegetarian items not cooked by persons of his caste.

  Associating with white people conflicted with custom, for they ate beef. But they were rulers, and there was a convenient old belief that Vishnu’s grace ‘purified’ a ruler, irrespective of who he was and what he ate. Previously enabling Brahmin administrators to serve the Muslim Tipu and his father Haider, this rationalization enabled an orthodox Brahmin like Chakravarti Iyengar to serve the Raj.

  At Hosur’s Government School, founded in 1858, the munsiff’s son was not a diligent student, but the chief reason for this was the boy’s acute myopia. He saw the blackboard as a blur in the distance and the teacher’s writing on it not at all. When he asked his father for spectacles, the stern Chakravarti Iyengar refused. Nobody under forty-five wore glasses in Hosur, and he thought his son’s request sprang from vanity.

  Slow as he was to understand his son’s handicap, the munsiff had spotted the boy’s intelligence and saved money for his education. Hosur offered nothing after ‘middle’ school. However, Bangalore was near, and its British-run Central College prepared boys for matriculation and graduation.

  The thin-faced, eagle-nosed village boy thrust into it, smaller than his peers, was all of eleven years ol
d. The lad slept in a Brahmin hostel and took his meals (for two rupees a month) in an eating house run by a clansman. At thirteen he matriculated. His brothers, older than him by twelve and six years, did so at the same time, though not, it would seem, as Central College students.

  Two other events occurred when Rajan was thirteen. The first was that he got his glasses. His life was transformed. He had not ‘quite known,’ until now, ‘what green was.’ And he found that the stars were not ‘just a vague mist of light’ but had ‘points, and corners, and colours.’ The second event was the start of a friendship. Navaratna Rama Rao was two years older than Rajan but junior to him at Central. Attracted by Rama Rao’s brightness and by his familiarity with English literature, Rajan ‘sought him out and left a letter in his room on the top of an eating house, asking for his friendship.’6 He had risked a rebuff, but Rama Rao responded positively.

  The two read a lot together, mostly Rama Rao — ‘the greater connoisseur of us two,’ as Rajagopalachari was to put it much later — reading for Rajan. They also ‘laughed and enjoyed humour and talked metaphysics and educated each other.’ In Rajagopalachari’s words after Rama Rao’s death, ‘Our friendship was an astonishment and a mystery to our collegemates but they tolerated it and gathered round both of us.’ It was to last nearly 70 years.

  The favourite teacher of both of them, clearly first in ‘a list of carefully prepared preferences,’ was John Guthrie Tait. The Scot taught the boys ‘to know and love literature.’ More than that, ‘careful in concealing his benefactions,’ Tait became their ‘beau-ideal of what was good and brave and noble in man.’ The money his father provided him was nowhere near enough to meet Rajan’s expenses in Bangalore. A college scholarship and Tait’s personal gifts met the balance.

  Studying for examinations went against Rajan’s grain but Tait and John Cook, the Principal, obviously liked him and Rama Rao. To their surprise the boys were offered a cubicle within the college grounds for lodging. The favour was not extended to others, and the eight-foot-square space, ‘luxuriously furnished with two benches which served as sofas by day and beds by night,’ became a sanctum to which the proud lodgers admitted only a chosen few.7