Two eminent men of India of the twentieth century had brought about epic revolutions - Mahatma Gandhi in the political field with his cult of non violence, and Sri Aurobindo in the realm of spiritual thought.
Writing on Sri Aurobindo said Nehru, " It is extraordinary that a person who had spent fourteen of the most formative years of his life from the age of 7 to 21, cut off from India and steeped in the European classics and the England of his day, should have become in later years, the brilliant champion of Indian nationalism based on the philosophic and spiritual background of Indian thought."
While the Mahatma hugged limelight, Aurobindo always preferred to work remaining in the background. It was the British Government that spoiled his game as he said, highlighting him as 'the most dangerous revolutionary' and kept haunting him even in his seclusion at Pondicherry.
While the Mahatma believed that nonviolence is the law of our species as violence is the law of the brutes, Sri Aurobindo during his short stint in politics had laid out the programme of passive resistance, of boycott, Swadeshi , national education et al, having "the bow of the Kshatriya ready for use, though in the background ".
Even though Gandhiji's movement had an immediate success and a spectacular influence on the people, Sri Aurobindo had predicted that it would end in great confusion or a great fiasco.
Unfortunately most of the Congress leaders including the Mahatma lacked his vision. Gandhiji thought to change the heart of Jinnah by his love and had pampered him to no end in vain. Mahatma's naiveté regarding the horror of Asuric force that Hitler represented is evident when he expressed his confidence to be able to "melt the heart of Hitler by the magic power of his non-violence ". On the other hand Sri Aurobindo pragmatically remarked that his heart could be melted only in one way - by bombing it out of existence! To Sri Aurobindo in the impasse created partially by the bankruptcy of the Congress policy, providence had come to the rescue in the form of Cripp's proposal which, if accepted, would have changed the fate of India. But the forces of distrust, discontent and craze of wanting everything at once, led to a failure to see the substance of Swaraj in the offer, as Sri Aurobindo . He promptly sent a message to Sir
Stafford Cripps welcoming the proposals and recommended their acceptance to the India leaders.
Sri Aurobindo also sent messages through Shiva Rao to Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru that Cripps offer notwithstanding flaws should be accepted unconditionally. His seer vision saw that the proposal had come on a wave of divine dispensation. Duraiswamy, the distinguished Madras lawyer and disciple, was also deputed as the envoy, chosen perhaps as a friend of the Congress leader Rajgopalachari.
Sri Aurobindo even sent telegrams to Rajgopalachari and Dr Munje urging them to accept the proposals. Dr Indra Sen writes, "We met the members individually and the sense of their reactions were more or less to this effect. Sri Aurobindo has created difficulties for us by his message to Cripps. He does not know the actual situation , we are in it, we know better ... and so in." Mahatma had rejected the offer contemptuously calling it a post-dated cheque of a crashing bank. When the rejection was announced to the sage, Sri Aurobindo said in a quiet unperturbed tone, "I knew it would fail." "Why did you then send Duraiswamy at allIJ " questioned the disciples around him . " For a bit of nishkama karma' was his calm reply without any bitterness or resentment. The Mother too was equally unperturbed but she only said,
"Now calamity will befall India." Writes Dr Nirodbaran , a witness to these utterances , " the events that followed in India right up to now need no mention .We have been paying all along for our mistake."
When in 1935 the same Nirodbaran had asked the master if he was working for India's freedom, he had replied, " all settled , it is a question of working out only ...It is what she will do with her independence that is not arranged for , and so it is that about which I have to bother . "
It is wonderfully significant to note that the end of Second World War, on the collapse of Japan, was announced by the Allied Powers in 1945 on August 25, the birthday of Sri Aurobindo.
Equally significant is it that the day of India's independence is also the August 15, putting the divine's seal on Sri Aurobindo's work, open or occult, for the liberation of his country from foreign rule. like the Congress stalwarts, the worldly-wise have often ridiculed the idea of Yogis having any knowledge of affairs outside their own spiritual domain and Sri Aurobindo's intervention during Cripp's proposals was stigmatized as an ignorant interference. But several times, the Yogis have demonstrated how false this notion is.
On the other hand, according to Sri Aurobindo , unless one knows the domain of the spirit, one's knowledge of the world remains incomplete . KM Munshi, who founded the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan , was one of the prominent leaders of India at that time. He was to observe later, "Sri Aurobindo saw into the heart of things. His perception of the political situation in India was always unerring. When the World War came in 1939, it was he of the unerring eye who said that the triumph of England and France was the triumph of the divine forces over the demoniac forces.
He spoke again when Sir Stafford Cripps came with his first proposal .He said, India should accept it. We rejected the advice but today we realize that if the first proposal had been accepted, there would have been no partition, no refugees, and no Kashmir problem. "And of course none of the wars that independent India had to fight!”
