Life choices and their consequences

Lecture by Rajmohan Union Society, 8.30 PM, Monday 21 November 2005

Mr. David Powell, Ms. Julia Buckley, and friends:

This event will not be forgotten easily by me. I feel I have attained a rare honour, and I thank those who have generously arranged it.

It may of course be said that being asked to speak to the Oxford Union Society is not nearly as good as admission to an Oxford college. I’d have to agree. Nonetheless this consolation prize is agreeable. I feel fortunate. This event will henceforth be added to my CV in all job applications, and my daughter and son may think that their father has finally achieved something notable.

Let me relate what my father said to me in an aside one evening as we walked together in . In this aside, which was a courageous expression of an unlikely dream, my Father said he hoped I would go one day to the . I was eighteen or so then. Since I am seventy now, we are probably near the end of that hope.

But let me say with joy that one of my Father’s sons did make it to here. My brother Ramu Gandhi, two years younger than me, got a PhD here, as did his daughter, my wonderful niece Leela, now a lecturer in Australia.

I am glad too to be able to speak of some of my experiences this evening, and hope that at least something of what I say will relate to questions on your minds.

Partition and killings. I will start with 1947, when I was a twelve-year-old living with my siblings and parents in ’s capital, New Delhi, where my father Devadas (who was Gandhi’s fourth and youngest son) edited the .

Free India and new Pakistan came into being in August 1947, but great killings also took place, above all in the province of the , which was divided between West Punjab, which became part of Pakistan, and East Punjab, which remained with India.

Half a million or more were killed. Through some divine or devilish parity, Hindus and Sikhs, or non-Muslims as a whole, and Muslims suffered an equal number of deaths. About twelve million moved across the border, half going to the east, to India, and another half, six million or so, to the west, to Pakistan.

Hindu and Sikh refugees who had fled West Punjab lived in large numbers in make-shift camps in Delhi, India’s capital, as did hundreds of thousands of Muslims who had fled their homes in and around Delhi and taken shelter in protected camps in the city.

1 My grandfather Gandhi was in Delhi from September 1947. Some of and Sikh refugees in Delhi were angry with him. This man seen as the father of the nation had prevented neither Partition nor the killings.

These angry Hindus and Sikhs would take their complaints to Gandhi where he was living -- in a guest-room of Birla House, the large residence belonging to Ghanshyam Das Birla, an industrialist who had supported Gandhi over the years. Many joined Gandhi’s daily prayer sessions, held at five in the afternoon, on the Birla House lawns.

Along with my parents and siblings, I too often attended these 5 p.m. prayer occasions, which consisted of a half-hour of readings and prayer songs from different faiths, followed by two minutes of silent meditation, and then a talk by Gandhi for about fifteen minutes.

Accompanied by close associates and relatives, Gandhi, who was now 78, would walk from his room in Birla House about 170 yards to the prayer spot, his arms usually resting on the shoulders of granddaughters or grandnieces or grandsons or grandnephews. His walking sticks, he called them. On occasion I was one of his walking sticks.

There was banter during the short walk towards the prayer spot, but once we were close to it, all became silent. Gandhi would sit, his legs folded, on a low small stage covered by white , the handspun hand-woven cloth that he adopted and popularized, and face hundreds of fellow- worshippers who also wanted to hear what Gandhi had to say on events that were occurring.

Often I sat next to or just behind him on that small stage, and had a good view of the audience, a section of which consisted of Hindu and Sikh refugees. Their attentive focus on Gandhi, mixed at times with anger, was noticeable even to a twelve-year-old boy like me. I would wonder whether they would hit my often bare-chested grandfather and knock him to the ground. He had no bodyguard, and I would think of what I should do if he were attacked.

The anger of some in the audience would come to the surface as soon as a reading from the Qur’an – it was always the short first chapter, Al-Fateha – was presented.

A young man, or more than one, would stand up and say, “No Qur’an.” In the name of the Qur’an killings had taken place, they would add. My grandfather would listen patiently to the protesters, praise them if they presented their case soberly, praise others if they were courteous toward objectors, and then ask the audience if they agreed with the objection. The audience would always say they did not agree, whereupon he asked the protesters to withdraw their objection. Sometimes it was withdrawn; at other times it was not. If it was not withdrawn, Gandhi would say that if the Muslim prayer was to go, he would also eliminate the rest, and proceed straight to his talk. So the prayer ground became also a class in tolerance and in tactics. Sitting close to him, watching him as well as the audience, I would be impressed by the old man’s calm courage, a lesson he taught me not over a leisurely grandfatherly chat – there was no question of time for that -- but simply by being who he was amidst currents of anger and hate.

2 Just before Gandhi came to Delhi, the city had seen riots against Muslims. From the three-storey building where my parents, siblings, and I lived, I saw smoke rising at several points on the near horizon, and heard screams from streets below us. Soldiers with rifles guarded our building. One day I heard my father say to a Muslim visitor in our third-floor apartment, “Main Sharminda Hoon” -- “I feel ashamed.” The remark made an impression on me.

Gandhi’s death. On 30 January 1948, five months after his arrival in Delhi, my grandfather was assassinated as he walked to the prayer spot. I was not with him – Ramu and I were both taking part in running events in my school. Hindu extremists who thought Gandhi too friendly and forgiving towards Muslims had succeeded in killing him. On returning home we were taken to Birla House, where the immense crowds that had gathered made it almost impossible for us to go inside. We saw our loved grandfather lying on a sheet on the carpeted floor, surrounded by flowers, grief, and prayer.

Extremism was discredited and marginalized by the assassination, but mistrust between Hindus and Muslims, and between India and Pakistan did not end. It affected me too, as I found out four years later, when a journalist working on the paper my father was editing, the Hindustan Times, came up to the apartment to talk to my father – the editorial and printing offices of the paper were on the floors below. I opened the door for this journalist, who was holding in his hand a sheet hot off the teleprinter. I took the sheet and read it. It said, “Liaqat Ali Khan, Prime Minister of Pakistan, shot at. MTF.”

I knew that MTF meant more to follow. “I hope what follows is the news that he is dead,” I said to the man bearing the news. I thought I had made a clever remark and looked for a smile. Instead he froze, and I felt ashamed. In subsequent years I could not forget my remark, which revealed the prejudice I harboured and also my adolescent desire to sound macho.

But I knew, then and later, that malice of the kind I had revealed was widespread in both India and Pakistan, among Muslims and non-Muslims.

Inertia. Despite the experiences of 1947, the assassination of my grandfather, and my awareness of great needs in the world, I grew up to be a young man tolerably bright if easily irritated, happy to take life as it came, with no great passion to give shape to it or to the world around me. This inertia was in part the result of my comfortable surroundings: my father was the editor of New Delhi’s largest newspaper, and the son of the Mahatma.

Also, my other grandfather, the father of Lakshmi, my mother, was India’s first and last Indian Governor General, Mountbatten’s successor, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, a brilliant man from the south of India who would have sparkled at Oxford.

My father’s position being what it was, and my grandfathers being who they were, his children, me and my siblings, enjoyed a fair amount of comfort and convenience -- even if these were somewhat cramped by the asceticism of Gandhi, which had an influence on the lives of his sons and their families.

Moreover, my siblings and I received warmth from almost everyone merely for being the grandchildren of our grandparents. We didn’t have to do much to be liked or even respected. As a result, I didn’t do much. 3

Purpose. It was in this country, Britain, that I discovered a purpose. Forty-nine years ago, in the summer, autumn, and winter of 1956, I found myself training to be a journalist in Edinburgh, amidst people who claimed they were trying to change the world by changing themselves and encouraging others to do likewise. Their thinking was like this: if you want to change the world you have to start with yourself. It made sense to me, and did not seem very different from what my grandfather had believed.

But stronger than this reasoning were their lives, even their faces, and their outlook. They seemed interested in the hopes and needs of other people, often of people of other classes, races and nations; they seemed to have a global commitment, a personal contentment, and neighborhood involvements.

To me they said, “God has a plan for this world, and you have a part.” And they seemed to mean it. “God has a plan for this world, and you have a part.” I was struck by some disbelief at this vision for me but also by a great hope. Could it be that I, a hesitant twenty-one-year-old, would have a role in something important, not in the sense of making headlines but in the sense of reducing the unhappiness of actual human beings?

My heart leapt at the thought. For unknown to me, unrecognized by me, there were stirrings inside me that wanted to respond to people in need or difficulty, even to people of races, classes, religions, and nations I was not enthusiastic about.

To be involved as an equal in a global exercise to better the world, along with people who on the whole sought or imposed no hierarchies, who were trying to help the other person become great, who were searching for what was right and needed, rather than for what was thrilling or worth accumulating – this was a prospect that captured me.

A decision. For living inside the uncertain drifting youth that I was were longings that went beyond me, longings for unity between divided peoples, for straightening bent backs, for restoring the honour of humiliated groups, for healing bitter wounds. Yes, I had a hunger for great goals, a hunger that surely owed much to boyhood experiences with my grandfather, and I saw that I could begin to satisfy that hunger only by freeing my life to be used as God directed for the remaking of the world. “Not what I want but what God wants” – that became my commitment in the autumn of 1956.

Allowing for fumbles, stumbles and grumbles, it is a commitment I have not consciously broken during these 49 years, though it is possible that I have secretly sought to persuade God not to make extreme demands on me.

As I look back at my life thus far, I think of many wonderful companions I was blessed with in these islands, of stimulating conversations in friendly homes, of walks in the sublime countryside that surrounds you in England, walks alone or with precious friends, walks when I felt satisfied again and again that the design of Providence was indeed good for me, and for every individual in the world.

God and certainty. Now that I have brought Him several times already into this talk, let me frankly state my understanding of the Almighty at this juncture. 4

Each day I find at least tiny signs of blessings to me and to others I care about. Rightly or wrongly, I attribute these blessings to God. And yet, faced as all of us are with an endless sequence of disasters, whether caused by human assaults or by explosions of nature, I – like others – have on occasion wondered about God’s attitude to calamities.

I have asked why at times He seems to check in midair his hand of mercy. Since he is both power and love – infinite power and infinite love –, He presumably can impede, arrest, or even reverse calamities, whether inspired by humans or by nature. Why doesn’t He?

A few years ago I heard in New Delhi a European professor offer his explanation, which was that while God remains all-loving, He has for some unknown reason lost a bit of His almighty power. A crippled God is a picture that must move us, but it does not wholly satisfy me.

Yet both my remarkable grandfathers, as well as the wonderful Christians in this country who inspired and helped me in the fifties and sixties, would I think ask me to worry less about understanding unmerited suffering and more about alleviating it. A voice deep inside of me tells the same thing.

Such advice is sound, I feel, and yet the question refuses to go away entirely. What moves and challenges me, and restores my faith, is the strength of so many who have seen the undeserved death of loved ones. I am pacified not by my mind but by the spirits of the faith- clinging brave.

*

Hopes fulfilled. I have mentioned calamities that assail faith. Let me also mention at least four great longings fulfilled in my own experience. In 1975-77, along with many others in India, I worked and prayed for an end to , the semi-dictatorship that India was enduring. It did end: the thrill I experienced at the moment of its end remains one of the greatest moments of my life.

For years I carried two other dreams: freedom and in South Africa and in east Europe. Nurtured and urged on by millions, these dreams were realized in east Europe in 1989 and soon thereafter in South Africa.

In December 1992 I was shaken when the Babri Mosque, built in Ayodhya in North India early in the sixteenth century, was demolished by thousands of Hindu extremists. From then until 2004 it seemed that India could be turned into a narrow-minded state where non-Hindus – Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jews, Zoroastrians and others – would live as second-class citizens on the sufferance of the Hindu majority.

Along with countless others, I sought as best as I could to prevent such a possibility, but the odds seemed loaded against us. Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, the people of India, in a historic vote in May 2004, banished that spectre, at least for the immediate future.

It was a great moment, this fulfilment of a fourth great yearning, and I felt as happy as I had felt in 1977, when the Emergency ended. As in 1977, I could take a stab at imagining the joy of those 5 older than me when they found release from Fascism and Nazism. Calamities and all, therefore, I have faith in the flow of history.

Luck, not role. I am not vain enough to imagine that decisions I made in my life had anything to do with these historic events. As far as South Africa and East Europe are concerned, I was merely a passionate spectator; and I played insignificant roles in the events in India that thrilled me.

I did not go looking for a wife and children and was willing to remain on my own – but I have been blessed with a noble and wise life-partner and two wonderful children. I did not make money my goal but my needs and that of my family have been fully met so far – not that I am any kind of selfless, cheerful reformer untouched by anxiety.

I did not make seeing the world my goal but I have been in places of beauty and marvel in country after country. I did not set out to meet the famous or even the truly great but I have been able to spend time with , the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Tutu, , Pope John Paul II, , , and Suu Kyi, and at least to shake hands with people like Martin Luther King Jr and John Kennedy. And this evening I find myself at the Oxford Union Society.

Opportunities. My good luck has included opportunities to address the race question in the USA in the late 1950s and early 1960s, to assist thereafter in the resolution of ethnic conflicts in different parts of India and South , and indeed to support in other parts of the world.

In recent years I have found myself addressing the gulf between the so-called Muslim world and the so-called non-Muslim or Western world. I say so-called for neither of these two worlds is united or uniform.

In the spring and summer of 1983, while I was spending a few wonderful months here in Oxford, including, I should add, in libraries – luckily you can do that even when you don’t belong to an Oxford college -- I had the conviction that I should study and write about the modern Hindu- Muslim encounter. The result was the book “Understanding the Muslim Mind.” Among the men it studied was Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, and Liaqat Ali Khan, the man about whom I had made the ugly remark.

To my relief, Hindus and Muslims, and Indians and Pakistanis, found this Oxford-inspired book interesting and useful. Happily it remains in print. In 1994 Eqbal Ahmad, the brilliant scholar and spirited activist who died in 1999, interviewed me about the book in Islamabad, hoping that Pakistan Television would carry the interview. That interview was indeed telecast -- at prime time in fact. I, a Hindu and an Indian, was able to share my thoughts with millions of Muslim Pakistanis for forty- five minutes. I was able I think to build a slender bridge.

A visit to Pakistan in September 2001 gave me another chance to address the Muslim/non- Muslim divide. On 9 September – two days before the terrorist attacks in the United States – my wife and I were in Charsadda in the Northwest Frontier Province, talking with the family of a man greatly respected in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan – Abdul Ghaffar Khan, known also as Badshah Khan and sometimes as the Frontier Gandhi. After spending twelve years in British prisons and fifteen in Pakistani jails, Ghaffar Khan had died in Peshawar in the Northwest Frontier in 1988, at the age of 98. 6

His grandson Asfandyar Khan spoke to me on 9 September 2001 of his regret at the lack of a biography of Ghaffar Khan for modern generations. It was a regret I shared, and two days later when, back in our home near New Delhi, I watched the New York attack on television, I knew that I would have to write a Ghaffar Khan biography.

For Ghaffar Khan was a Muslim figure that both sides in the divide – Muslims and non-Muslims -- needed to know. He was a devout Sunni Muslim who also cherished the pre-Islamic past of his land and proudly took visitors to the Bamiyan Buddhas of Afghanistan. In 1931 he sent his eldest son, Ghani Khan, to study in the USA and more significantly his daughter Mehr Taj, who was in her early teens, to study in Britain.

A believer in Hindu-Muslim coexistence, Ghaffar Khan was a brother in spirit to Gandhi, and the two had worked together tirelessly to contain the violence assailing the subcontinent in 1946 and 1947.

Researching in Pakistan and India and in libraries in the US, I was able to offer the story of his life, which was published in the summer of 2004.

This last summer my wife Usha and I visited Pakistan again, the city of Lahore this time, in an attempt to recover 1947 memories. Our focus was on instances in 1947 of help given by persons of one community to targeted persons of the “other” community. That such help was given has always been known, but we wanted to record actual instances. Thanks to the help of friends, we were able to do twenty-six interviews.

The more than two dozen people we interacted with in Lahore, some who had come from East Punjab and some who had helped Hindus and Sikhs safely leave West Punjab, recalled gestures in 1947 on both sides of the new border. As they spoke to us of these gestures, they seemed moved, and we too were stirred. Faith in human nature’s potential for compassion and courage seemed to increase at both ends.

Difference. Let me underline a critical if obvious difference between the period of the and our times: During the Cold War, when Communism ruled large sections of our world, many in the thought that while the rulers of Communist states were tyrannical and evil, their people were innocent victims, good people like those living in the democracies.

Today, by contrast, in our era of an apparent clash of civilizations, many in the democracies see the populations of Muslim lands as flawed, even while good relations are maintained in many cases with rulers of Muslim lands, who are viewed as people with whom business can be done.

Elected leaders in the West don’t directly equate terrorism with Islam. But many influential people in the USA and Europe do, including prominent figures in some churches, well-regarded intellectuals, popular writers, and personalities often called to appear on TV and radio.

As a result a growing number of people in the West are convinced that the problem in the world is Islam -- that terrorism and Islam are strongly and uniquely inter-related.

7 Such thinking in parts of the West has its counterpart in much of the Islamic world, which has seen persistent negative propaganda about Christians and the crusades, Jews and Zionism, and Americans and Europeans. The result is people-to-people distrust, and the possibility of people- to-people enmity. This is very different from the times of the Cold War, when there was people- to-people empathy and warmth.

The hostilities of 1914-19 and 1939-45 were called world wars, but any Islam versus the Rest war today would be a world war in a more comprehensive sense. And it will be a people-against- people, civilian-against-civilian, war.

“Islam the flaw.” When, as often happens, I hear the argument about the flawed nature of Islam, I recall the faces and the lives of Muslims I have known, I recall images of Muslims kneeling in prayer, or raising their arms in supplication to God, or carrying their dead or wounded on cold earthquake-hit slopes, and ask myself if I could truly believe that the Islam so practised was particularly and peculiarly flawed. Well, I cannot so believe.

When I hear such an argument I also at times recall a radio broadcast, or rather the recording of a radio broadcast, that I first heard as a boy. The voice in the recording was that of Winston Churchill speaking nearly three-quarters of a century ago -- in June 1941, when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union and made Russia Britain’s ally against Nazism. Having spent several previous years warning people about the dangers of Russian Communism, Churchill now had to summon support for an alliance with the Russians and the Communists.

The man whose words rose to every challenging moment again found the right words. In this speech in June 1941, which included the line that everybody knows -- about fighting Hitler “by land, by sea and in the air” --, Churchill also said, referring to Russians threatened by Hitler: “I see the 10,000 villages of Russia, where the means of existence was wrung so hardly from the soil, but where there are still primordial human joys, where maidens laugh and children play.”

Well, Muslim maidens laugh too, and Muslim children also play, and all Muslims, Sunni or Shia, are grateful for primordial human joys. They hate terrorism as much as anybody else in the world, and perhaps even more, for more Muslims have been killed in terrorist acts than non- Muslims.

In Rwanda in 1994, some massacres actually took place in churches. Did that make the Rwanda killings a Christian crime? When, in the 1970s, Buddhist Cambodia was the venue for the killing fields, did the killing reflect an innate Buddhist flaw? When, a couple of years ago, almost all members of the royal family of the Hindu kingdom of were shot dead, and, later, a large number of peasants and security men were killed in shootings, was some Hindu teaching to blame? Indeed, were the two Great Wars of the 20th century a result of Christianity?

That religion is an element in the complex stories of modern violence is only too true; but we should be careful before saying with finality that more than injured nationalism, more than despair, more than shattered dignity, more than shame, more than fear, it is religion in general and one religion in particular that fills a heart with hate and with the resolve to destroy others and oneself.

8 Today many in different parts of the world accept that while all others are innocent unless proved guilty, a Muslim is guilty unless he or she demonstrates innocence. Much of the world has taken a significant U turn in its ethics.

Governments, immigration officers, policemen, agents at check-in counters, landlords, newspaper reporters, taxi-drivers, and employers now make at least a mental note, if they do not offer a visible or audible expression, when they find that the person they are dealing with is a Muslim.

Spirit of Oxford. I do not know what success if any will attend attempts such as mine to contribute towards bridging the Muslim/non-Muslim divide. It is plain that bridging it will take talent, courage, imagination, and sensitivity on the part of a great many on both sides of the divide, and it will take the Almighty’s blessings.

I am not presenting this divide as the sole issue before the world. As must be true of many present here, I feel also, among other things, for Africa and Africans, and am shaken by the prospect of that continent losing chunks of its population to Aids and other deadly diseases.

I have spoken this evening to some of the finest minds in one of our world’s greatest countries. What questions or needs agitate under your skins, what issues nag at your souls, I do not quite know.

What I do know is that great questions summon the world’s best young minds.

I also know that engaging with these questions, and seeking to bridge the divide or meet the needs spoken of, is a career option open to Oxford students. A decision to seek one’s deepest or highest calling – to do God’s will rather than one’s own -- is a career option. It is a commitment that can be woven into other career options.

Such a commitment will be in keeping, I dare say, with the spirit of Oxford, a spirit renewed decade after decade by the marriage of unparalleled heritage with great challenge.

Thank you for coming and for listening. I think a seventy-year-old man can offer blessings and good wishes to every one of you. Bless you.

(end)

© , 2005

This talk may be photocopied without permission for private use. Any requests for publication or other wider use should be addressed to Edward Peters, 37 Mill Lane, Oxford OX3 0QG, UK – [email protected]

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