The Essential Gandhi (53 page)

Each of us should turn the searchlight inward and purify his or her heart as much as possible.… You should think how best to improve yourselves and work for the good of the country.… No one can escape death. Then why be afraid of it? In fact, death is a friend who brings deliverance from suffering.
³¹

I do not want to die … of a creeping paralysis of my faculties—a defeated man. An assassin’s bullet may put an end to my life. I would welcome it. But I would love, above all, to fade out doing my duty with my last breath.
³²

I believe in the message of truth delivered by all the religious teachers of the world. And it is my constant prayer that I may never have a feeling of anger against my traducers, that even if I fall victim to an assassin’s bullet I may deliver up my soul with the remembrance of God upon my lips. I shall be content to be written down an impostor if my lips utter a word of anger or abuse against my assailant at the last moment.
³³

Have I that non-violence of the brave in me? My death alone will show that. If someone killed me and I died with prayer for the assassin on my lips and God’s remembrance and consciousness of His living presence in the sanctuary of my heart, then alone would I be said to have had the non-violence of the brave.
³⁴

If anybody tried to take out my body in a procession after I died, I would certainly tell them—if my corpse could speak—to spare me and cremate me where I had died.
³⁵

After I am gone no single person will be able completely to represent me. But a little bit of me will live in many of you. If each puts the cause first and himself last the vacuum will to a large extent be filled.
³⁶

[His disciple and friend, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, who was later to become Minister of Health in Independent India, asked Gandhi in January, 1948, “Were there any noises [threats] in your prayer meeting today, Bapu?” This was Gandhi’s reply.]

No.… If I am to die by the bullet of a madman I must do so smiling. There must be no anger within me. God must be in my heart and on my lips. And you promise me one thing. Should such a thing happen you are not to shed one tear.
³⁷

Supposing that there is a wave of self-purification throughout India, Pakistan will become pak [peace]. It will be a State in which past wrongs will have been forgotten.… Then and not till then shall I repent that I ever called it a sin.… I want to live to see that Pakistan not on paper, not in the orations of Pakistani orators, but in the daily life of every Pakistani Moslem. Then the inhabitants of the Union [of India] will forget that there ever was any enmity between them and if I am not mistaken, the Union will proudly copy Pakistan, and if I am alive I shall ask her to excel Pakistan in well-doing.…

 … I remember to have read, I forget whether in the Delhi Fort
or the Agra Fort, when I visited them in 1896, a verse on one of the gates, which when translated reads: “If there is paradise on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here.” That Fort with all its magnificence at its best, was no paradise in my estimation. But I should love to see that verse with justice inscribed on the gates of Pakistan at all the entrances. In such paradise, whether it is in the Union [of India] or Pakistan, there will be neither paupers nor beggars, nor high nor low, neither millionaire employers nor half-starved employees, nor intoxicating drinks nor drugs. There will be the same respect for women as vouchsafed to men, and the chastity and purity of men and women will be jealously guarded. Where every woman, except one’s wife, will be treated by men of all religions as mother, sister or daughter, according to her age. Where there will be no untouchability and where there will be equal respect for all faiths. They will be all proudly, joyously and voluntarily bread laborers. I hope everyone who listens to me or reads these lines will forgive me if stretched on my bed and basking in the sun, inhaling life-giving sunshine I allow myself to indulge in this ecstasy.…
³⁸

[Ever since 11
A.M
. on January 13, when Gandhi commenced to fast, committees representing numerous communities, organizations and refugee groups in Delhi had been meeting in the house of Dr. Rajendra Prasad, the new Congress President, in an effort to establish real peace. It was not a matter of obtaining signatures to a document. They must make concrete pledges which they knew their followers would carry out. If the pledges were broken, Gandhi could ascertain the fact and then he would fast irrevocably to death.

At last, on the morning of January 18, the pledge was drafted and signed and over a hundred delegates repaired from Prasad’s home to Birla House.

There Gandhi agreed and slowly drank eight ounces of orange juice.]

 … In the name of God we have indulged in lies, massacres of people, without caring whether they were innocent or guilty, men or women, children or infants. We have indulged in abductions, forcible conversions, and we have done all this shamelessly. I am
not aware if anybody has done these things in the name of Truth. With that same name on my lips I have broken the fast.… Telegrams after telegrams have come from Pakistan and the Indian Union to do [so]. I could not resist the counsel of all these friends. I could not disbelieve their pledge that come what may, there would be complete friendship between the Hindus, Moslems, Sikhs, Christians, Parsis and Jews, a friendship not to be broken. To break that friendship would be to break the nation.

 … The spirit of [my] vow is sincere friendship between the Hindus, Moslems and Sikhs of the Union and a similar friendship in Pakistan.… If there is darkness in the Union, it would be folly to expect light in Pakistan. But if the night in the Union is dispelled beyond the shadow of a doubt, it cannot be otherwise in Pakistan.…
³⁹

 … Our concern is the act itself, not the result of the action.…
⁴⁰

[The first day after the fast, Gandhi was carried to prayers in a chair. The second day, he again had to be carried to prayers. At question time, a man urged Gandhi to proclaim himself a reincarnation of God.] Sit down and be quiet, [Gandhi replied with a tired smile.
¹

While Gandhi was speaking, the noise of an explosion was heard. People congratulated him for remaining unruffled. The next day, he made this comment.]

I would deserve praise only if I fell as a result of such an explosion and yet retained a smile on my face and no malice against the doer. No one should look down on the misguided youth who had thrown the bomb. He probably looks upon me as an enemy of Hinduism.
²

[When the grenade failed to reach its target, another conspirator to kill Gandhi came to Delhi.

His name was Nathuram Vinayak Godse. He was thirty-five and the editor and publisher of a Hindu Mahasabha weekly in Poona. Godse was also a high-degree Brahman.

“I sat brooding intensely on the atrocities perpetrated on Hinduism and its dark and deadly future if left to face Islam outside and Gandhi inside,” Godse said, “and … I decided all of a sudden to take the extreme step.…” Godse was bitter that Gandhi made no demands on the Moslems, although he did not hate Gandhi.

Gandhi’s prayer meeting on Sunday, January 25, 1948, had an unusually heavy attendance. Gandhi was pleased. It gladdened his
heart, he said, to be told by Hindu and Moslem friends that Delhi had experienced “a reunion of hearts.”

Nathuram Godse was in the front row of the congregation, his hand in his pocket gripping a small pistol.

“I actually wished him well and bowed to him in reverence.”

In response to Godse’s obeisance and the reverential bows of other members of the congregation, Gandhi touched his palms together, smiled and blessed them. At that moment Godse pulled the trigger. Gandhi fell, and died with a murmur.]

Oh, God.
³

[The news was conveyed to the country by Prime Minister Nehru by radio.

“The light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere and I do not quite know what to tell you and how to say it. Our beloved leader, Bapu as we call him, the father of our nation, is no more. Perhaps I am wrong to say that. Nevertheless, we will not see him again as we have seen him these many years. We will not run to him for advice and seek solace from him, and that is a terrible blow not to me only but to millions and millions in this country. And it is difficult to soften the blow by any advice that I or anyone else can give you.

“The light has gone out, I said, and yet I was wrong. For the light that shone in this country was no ordinary light. The light that has illumined this country for these many years will illumine this country for many more years, and a thousand years later that light will still be seen in this country, and the world will see it and it will give solace to innumerable hearts.…”
⁴

“Mahatma Gandhi was the spokesman for the conscience of all mankind,” General George C. Marshall, United States Secretary of State, said.

Albert Einstein declared, “Generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.”]