As independent India turns 70 on Tuesday, Venkataram Kalyanam in Chennai is turning 95. It could be a strange coincidence that Independent India and Kalyanam share the same birthday. “But I never celebrate my birthdays. When the whole of India went berserk on 15 August 1947, there was one man who stayed away from the frenzy and gaiety of the celebrations. The man who should have been in New Delhi on that occasion to lead the nation in the celebrations was away at Kolkata pleading with the Muslims not to kill the Hindus,” said Kalyanam, former private secretary to Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of the Nation.
Kalyanam said Gandhi and he were at Kolkata (at Beliaghata to be precisely, a suburb in the then Calcutta, approximately 5 km from the city centre) during those days. “The Mahatma rushed to Bengal following widespread riots unleashed by the Muslim league as part of the Direct Action Day call issued by Mohammed Ali Jinnah on August 16, 1946. Jinnah’s call was to finish off all Hindus in Bengal to facilitate the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan.
There was widespread pogrom in India under the orders of Jinnah and then Chief Minister of Bengal Huseyn Shahid Suhrawardy. Both of them were communal fanatics and their cadre butchered all the Hindus who came their way,” reminiscences Kalyanam sitting in his modestly furnished apartment in Chennai.
Gandhi with his entourage left for Bengal on hearing the news about the pogrom and travelled extensively in the undivided state pleading with the Muslims to stop the riot and requesting the Hindus to observe restraint and not to get provoked. “It was like applying a soothing balm to a spot which causes pain. People listened to Gandhiji. Though more than 10,000 people lost their lives, the largest ever religious pogrom was brought under control because of the initiative of this single man ,Gandhiji,” said Kalyanam.
By January 1947, Gandhi and his team was back in Calcutta. lord Mountbatten, the then Governor General complimented Gandhiji. “You have succeeded where the police or the Army failed. Had we sent the Army, we would not have been able to restore peace. But you succeeded in bringing back peace. All I could say is that you are a one-man boundary force and I salute you, ” Mountbatte wrote to Gandhi. Kalyanam recounted the entire content of the letter in a single breath..
Kalyanam said Gandhi was busy touring Calcutta suburbs meeting people in the street and convincing them about the need to maintain love and trust between the communities. Gandhi had no idea of what was transpiring in New Delhi in the run up to the Independence. But he had bluntly told the leaders that he was totally against partition of India.
“When Jawaharlal Nehru invited Gandhiji to come back to New Delhi and join the Independence declaration celebrations, he flatly refused and said; ‘to me peace between Hindus and Muslims is more important than the declaration of independence,’” remembers Kalyanam.
Kalyanam, who was standing hardly one or two feet away from Gandhi when he was shot on January 30, 1948, had also taken down Gandhi’s dictation for what was the last article he authored. “Gandhiji had asked for disbanding the Indian National Congress and had asked the leaders to launch lok Sevak Sangh (people’s welfare trust) for the post-colonial days. The Congress was a nation-wide movement which had only one mission, the freedom from the British. The purpose was served when the British left India. For the post-colonial days, what India needed was an organisation with only people’s welfare in its mind,” said Kalyanam.
He said Jawaharlal Nehru or his successors could not pursue the dreams of the Father of the Nation. “Though we became independent in 194, it was only in 2014 our leaders started thinking about sanitation and public hygiene,” said Kalyanam who was Gandhi’s shadow from 1942 till the latter was felled by the bullets of the assassin.