Mr and Mrs Jinnah Page 29

  It took another three months before Jinnah could get his Muslim League office-bearers to organize a special session in order to assess the situation. However, by that time, it became pointless because Gandhi was poised to take over the Congress, with his Khilafat allies supporting him solidly.

  But Jinnah was not yet ready to give up. The battle shifted to Calcutta, where a special session of the Congress had been called to discuss whether it should adopt Gandhi’s programme of non-cooperation. Although Gandhi had won Muslims to his side, there were still enough Congress leaders as determined as Jinnah to oppose Gandhi’s programme. They were particularly resistant to the boycott of courts which meant giving up flourishing legal practices and also staying away from elections to the legislatures and consequently giving up their seats to the Liberals who were determined to contest in the coming elections. They were Jinnah’s last hope.

  As he boarded the train to Calcutta with Ruttie and his Home Rule League colleagues, there seemed little to worry him. There were nearly 250 delegates from Bombay travelling on a train specially hired for the Calcutta session and the majority seemed opposed to Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement. Throughout the journey there were lively discussions, much to Ruttie’s delight. It was a pleasant change from being cooped up in a first-class coach with only a brooding Jinnah for company.

  Gandhi himself had left on an earlier train with his entourage and principal ally, Shaukat Ali. They were greeted wherever the train stopped by huge crowds that had gathered from miles around and kept shouting ‘Gandhi-Shaukat Ali ki Jai’. But the crowds were hardly going to help him win votes in the Congress.

  Frantic lobbying to consolidate the opposition to Gandhi started as soon as they stepped out of the train. Motilal Nehru, who had come specially to meet Jinnah at the Howrah station, greeted him with the glad tidings of a combine being formed against Gandhi. Prominent leaders willing to join were Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, C.R. Das, Lajpat Rai and Annie Besant. Das, the lawyer-politician who was the tallest leader from Bengal, took the lead by organizing a series of breakfasts, lunches and suppers for Congress delegates so that they would vote against Gandhi.

  It made Gandhi’s supporters insecure enough to redouble their efforts to keep their flocks from straying. It was unclear till the last minute which way the voting would go. But it looked as if the opposition had the edge over Gandhi’s side. But at the last minute, Gandhi’s supporters resorted to going out on the streets and picking up random strangers to swell their numbers. Nearly a hundred outsiders were brought into the Congress pandal on the morning of the voting to ensure Gandhi’s victory. But that was not the only trick that Gandhi’s supporters resorted to. Motilal Nehru, who had throughout been lobbying for the opposition, ended up voting for the resolution. He had been persuaded to cross over to Gandhi’s side by his son, Jawaharlal. Jinnah took the betrayal calmly—as he did that of his two young associates in the Home Rule League, Umar Sobhani and Shankerlal. The two had not only crossed over to the enemy’s side but were directly involved in the vote rigging. Not everyone took it with his stoic composure. Shaukat Ali, who had been increasingly incensed by Jinnah’s stubborn refusal to yield to popular pressure and back down on his fierce opposition to Gandhi’s resolution, almost beat him up as they dispersed after the meeting. A large man, he lunged at Jinnah as if to strike him but was held back by other delegates. Jinnah walked away, seemingly unperturbed.

  For Ruttie, who had not left her seat in the Congress pandal while the session was on, the proceedings seemed to be disappointingly dull. The implications of what Gandhi’s triumph meant for Jinnah’s political career had not yet sunk in. But the sounds of a scuffle outside the pandal prompted her into action. Instead of making her way out of the pandal through the crowds, she ran to her friend, Kanji Dwarkadas, who was still lingering in the tent. He, too, had heard the sounds of fighting going on outside and was waiting for it to subside so that he could escort his leader, Annie Besant, out of the venue. She tugged at his sleeve, saying, ‘Come on, take me out!’ Kanji, who could refuse her nothing, tried to reason with her: ‘We cannot go, there is some fighting going on outside.’ But she was not to be put off. ‘That is exactly what I want to see, let us go quickly,’ she said imperatively and Kanji obediently led her outside. ‘Fortunately,’ as he recalled years later, ‘the fighting had come to an end.’

  But the fight didn’t really end—at least in Jinnah’s head. It took another month before his rage and frustration against Gandhi finally boiled over. The issue was the way Gandhi broke all the rules and completely changed the Home Rule League which Jinnah had built up from scratch. It enraged Jinnah that Gandhi had once again outmanoeuvred him and gone several jumps ahead, leaving him feeling cheated.

  Six months ago, when he was still deluding himself that he could control Gandhi, Jinnah had invited Gandhi to take over as head of the Home Rule League. ‘He thought he would be able to keep some check on Gandhi if he would agree to work with him,’ as Kanji recounts in his book, India’s Fight for Freedom. But far from wanting to work together, Gandhi went over Jinnah’s head and changed the constitution of the Home Rule League, and also renamed it Swaraj Sabha. Unable to stop him, Jinnah and nineteen other colleagues were forced to resign. Jinnah’s patience was by now exhausted and instead of trying to sort out the issue with Gandhi in person, he took the extreme step of publishing the letter of resignation in the Bombay Chronicle the next day.

  Gandhi’s reply, arriving twenty days later, infuriated Jinnah even further. Apart from the less than lukewarm appeal to reconsider his decision, Gandhi stoked Jinnah’s already sore temper by his patronizing tone and refusal to admit that he had broken the rules. It was enough to make Jinnah forget himself and pour all his derision for Gandhi in an open letter to him. The letter, several pages long, published the next day in the Bombay Chronicle, attacked Gandhi for his ‘methods [that] have already caused split and division in almost every institution that you have approached hitherto, and in the public life of the country not only amongst Hindus and Mohamedans, but between Hindus and Hindus and Mohamedans and Mohamedans and even between fathers and sons’.

  And as if he had not gone far enough with his personal attack on a leader worshipped by all as a Mahatma, Jinnah proceeded to commit political hara-kiri by his forthright opinion of Gandhi’s followers: ‘People generally are desperate all over the country and your extreme programme has for the moment struck the imagination mostly of the inexperienced youth and the ignorant and the illiterate.’

  This was the very first time in twenty-three years of his public life that Jinnah lost his temper, and, of course, he had to pay for his indulgence. Almost overnight his popularity crashed, plunging him from the heights of ‘Bombay’s uncrowned king’ to its lowest point, hated by the very Muslims who had admired him and followed his lead for at least two decades.

  But the full effects of what he had done became apparent only seven weeks later at Nagpur, where the annual Congress session was being held that year to vote on adopting Gandhi’s non-cooperation programme as a national plan. In the three months since Calcutta, Gandhi had turned into a living god, with people gathering for a mere glimpse of him wherever he passed on his tour of the country. To oppose him now was to be branded a national traitor. But there was a covert rebellion brewing among the major Congress leaders against his drastic non-cooperation move, although none of them dared to be as openly critical of Gandhi as Jinnah was. And it was towards them that Gandhi made an effort to reach out and build a consensus, using Shaukat Ali as an envoy. But leaving his peace talks to Shaukat Ali had at least one unexpected consequence. Shaukat wooed each and every opposition leader within the Congress except Jinnah, whom he had begun to regard as a personal enemy. Jinnah—and Ruttie because she was with him—became the untouchables of the Congress session of December 1920.

  The leader in the opposition camp that Shaukat Ali courted most assiduously was the barrister Congressman from Calcutta, C.R. Das. Das had arrived in Na
gpur with a contingent of 1800 delegates whom he had brought along with him from Bengal at his own expense. It cost him a whopping Rs 50,000 to transport these delegates and to lodge them at the Congress camp, but Das was determined that Gandhi’s supporters would not again push through their agenda by questionable means. By its very size, the ‘Bengali Camp’ became the scene of all action before and in between the sessions, with Shaukat Ali holding ‘continuous negotiations’ with Das, while their men came to blows outside. Several heads were broken in the Bengali camp, according to Gandhi’s own admission but he chose to turn a blind eye, dismissing the violence as a mere ‘family dispute’.

  Shaukat Ali’s combined tactics of intimidation and coaxing yielded rich results. One by one, the leaders of the opposition camp keeled over, leaving Jinnah standing alone in the field to fight against Gandhi before a crowd baying for his blood. Annie Besant, who had already got a taste of the crowd’s hostility in Calcutta when she put up a fight against Gandhi’s resolution, wisely decided to stay out of the Nagpur session. Motilal Nehru was, of course, emotionally blackmailed by his son into falling in line with Gandhi. And the crowds led by the Ali brothers gave Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya such a rough time during the earlier session that he stayed away on the last day, pleading an attack of malaria. G.S. Khaparde, a co-worker of Tilak’s and an opponent of Gandhi’s resolution, was booed so relentlessly with cries of ‘Shame! Shame!’ that he had to give up halfway through his speech. But the most sensational crossover was that of Das, who turned overnight from fierce ‘anti-non-cooperator’ into the meek mover of Gandhi’s resolution. The battle had been lost but Jinnah refused to retreat.

  If Jinnah had listened to his reason rather than follow his stubborn refusal to yield under pressure, he would have packed his bags and left straightaway. There was no doubt left that Gandhi single-handedly ruled the Congress and that his word was law. But that only made Jinnah more determined to stick it out until the end. It was by no means easy with the crowd out to jeer at him and not letting him speak. He faced the crowd’s hostility with his usual impassivity, refusing to be bullied by them which only infuriated them further. He was treated so badly that one of the British Labour Party invitees finally protested, saying from the dais that ‘it pained him to remember the bad treatment accorded to Mr Jinnah in the Congress’ and appealed to the delegates to ‘behave like gentlemen even towards the opponents’.

  But the appeal fell on deaf ears. On the final day, when he got up to oppose Gandhi’s resolution, the crowd would just not allow him to speak. The pandal was packed with anywhere from 16,000 to 50,000 delegates crammed into a space meant to accommodate 3000, but they had been surprisingly disciplined and courteous while listening to the two earlier speakers, Gandhi and Lajpat Rai. But as Jinnah rose to address the gathering with the words, ‘I rise to oppose the motion,’ there was an explosion. A cacophony of hooting, shouting and catcalls rose up from the audience, drowning his voice. But he would not yield. ‘He stood there, without twitching a muscle, and when the shouting died down, he again said, “I rise to oppose the motion.”’ Again he was drowned out by the crowd. Three times he tried to speak, pitting his indomitable will against ‘that vast ocean of humanity’ ranged against him, refusing to retreat, until they had to let him speak. But now they began heckling him, shouting each time he said ‘Mr Gandhi’: ‘Call him Mahatma Gandhi!’ Thinking to buy himself a few minutes’ time to reason with them, he agreed readily. But it was not enough: they next demanded that he address Mohammed Ali as ‘Maulana’. This was beyond his forbearance. ‘No, I will not be dictated [to] by you,’ he shot back. ‘If you will not allow me the liberty to speak of a man in the language which I think is right, I say you are denying me the liberty which you are asking for.’ This only enraged them further, especially Shaukat Ali, who came forward to the platform ready to hit him. He was stopped by other delegates, but Jinnah still refused to step off the dais. Whether anyone listened to him or not, he would not stop until he made one last, desperate attempt to reason with the crowd. This time his appeal was to Gandhi himself, urging him to use his ‘vast influence’ to stop a programme that was sure to end in disaster. Then he walked out, impassive as ever while the crowd raised frenzied cries of ‘Shame!’ and ‘Political impostor!’

  Ruttie had missed this scene of his final humiliation. Nothing could have torn her away from him just then, but she had been forced to withdraw. As soon as they arrived in the pandal that morning, some delegates had sent up a chit to the president, objecting to Ruttie’s dress. Clearly, it was part of the hate campaign the Jinnahs had been facing ever since they got to Nagpur for the session. According to an unprejudiced eyewitness, there was really nothing about Ruttie’s dress that day to offend the most strait-laced of moralists. She was dressed, according to him, in the current fashion ‘in a beautiful sari and an armless blouse’. But instead of tearing up the note as a frivolous interruption, the Congress chief took the extraordinary step of passing on the note to Jinnah. This meant, according to the convention of the party meetings, that Jinnah would either have to rise to his wife’s defence, opening themselves up for a further mauling by the crowd, or else she would have to accept that she was in the wrong and withdraw from the Congress. For Jinnah, there seemed only one way to deal with the note. He glanced at it and passed it on silently to Ruttie. She got up and left.

  There was another parting kick. Jinnah decided to leave Nagpur without attending the Muslim League session, but Gandhi’s non-violent non-cooperators were determined to strip him of even this last shred of his dignity. They hounded the Jinnahs on their way back to Bombay by shouting invectives at him at the stations. At Akola railway station in particular, Shaukat Ali, who was travelling by the same train, incited an emotional crowd to hoot at Jinnah, who was seated in the first-class compartment, with cries of ‘Shame!’ It upset Ruttie but seemed not to bother Jinnah at all. Or so he would have the world believe.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Almost the first thing that Ruttie did when she got back home was to dash off an angry letter to the Times of India. The letter, protesting against the way Jinnah had been bullied on the train, was her way of telling him—and the world—that she was unflinchingly by his side.

  To see him hurting behind his impassive exterior brought out all her fierce tenderness, and she was ready in her brave, impetuous way to rush to his protection, not caring for the consequences. But he was the careful kind, and the letter would have taken some unusual pondering on her part. It was a delicate task, beginning with the question of where to send it for publication. It could not be to the paper that was her natural choice, the one that everyone she knew read, the Bombay Chronicle. That would be embarrassing, with Jinnah there as chairman of its managing board—not for her, but him. So it had to be the rival paper, and even so, she had to be careful not to use her own name, again for his sake rather than her own. The letter, written with the fluid ease with which she wrote anything, never at a loss for the right word, and yet with uncharacteristic restraint, appeared the next day in the Times of India’s letters to the editor column. Signed ‘R’, under the headline ‘Non-cooperation in Practice’, it was terse, attacking the one man she felt safe to attack because she could at least discern how Jinnah felt about the Ali brothers. But Gandhi she left out altogether—her feelings towards him, coloured by Jinnah’s own ambivalence towards his great rival, were altogether mixed. ‘At Akola,’ the letter said, ‘Mr Shaukat Ali delivered a short lecture to those who had assembled on the platform; and at the end of the lecture, he incited them to hoot Mr Jinnah, who was seated in the first-class compartment, with cries of “Shame”. Sir, this sort of thing is the negation of non-cooperation of which non-violence is the essence.’

  It must have pleased him, this little show of loyalty from her. He liked nothing better in a woman than her loyalty. But now he was all the more anxious to prove to her and himself that he was not upset at all. A politician had to grow a thick skin, as he loved to tell his
young associates. They had all left him, incidentally, the young men, some lawyers, others in business, well educated and wanting something more out of life than merely making money. They used to love dropping in at his chambers, loved hearing him hold forth, and counted themselves honoured if they received one of Mrs Jinnah’s casual notes asking them to drop in for ‘potluck’. But the potlucks were now a thing of the past. After Nagpur, the young men had all disappeared one by one—Umar Sobhani, Shankerlal Banker, Syud Hossain . . . all rebuffed by his rude and brusque manner brought on by his growing political frustrations. He could not forgive them for going over to Gandhi’s side. But there was his legal work to take their place and he plunged himself into work with a vengeance. People assumed it was his greed for money, but money had never interested him much, especially now that he had made his ‘packet’, as he called it, and invested it wisely, leaving him free to pursue the only career he had ever wanted—as a political leader. But at least court work was something to keep him engaged, taking up his time until late into the night. He still came home punctually at six in the evening but shut himself up in his library, refusing to emerge even for dinner. Ruttie had a hard time even getting him to eat his meals, let alone open up and talk to her. He had a habit, as she later complained to their friend Kanji Dwarkadas, but fondly, ‘of habitually over-working himself’. Others knew how hard it was to get him to not work so hard or even eat if he didn’t want to, but in her tender, solicitous way she kept at him, knowing as she told Kanji, that if she didn’t ‘bother and tease him he will be worse than ever’. His silent withdrawal must have dismayed her sometimes, struggling as she was with her own feelings of loneliness and disappointment. She dared not as yet acknowledge it even to herself but the shadow of a doubt was beginning to grow in her that Jinnah could never ‘satisfy her mind and soul’, as she eventually confessed to Sarojini. But her love and solicitude for him kept her bound to him—a tender, hovering love such as she had not felt for anyone, wanting fiercely to protect him from all hurt.