Profile –C. Rajagopalachari

This drawing made by our artist, Ram Gopal, while Rajaji was at work.

RAJAJI TO GANDHIJI: “What you said about me publicly has, like the churning of the ocean, brought up all the poison and you have to swallow it like Rudra ! I know you can. But it has made my old longing for peace too strong to resist. I haven’t the strength to stand it any longer. I bore much all these days. I struggled hard to work without minding the calumniators but I give it up now.

“I have often asked myself the question: Is it worthwhile? I feel it is not. I must yield to the longing of my heart not to be misunderstood. Why should I be thought to be seeking ‘power’ when it is not the case at all? I must prove it, although the proof is one that leaves no good behind but the mere proof.

“Now that the urgent job of selections for the Legislature is all over, let me leave the scene.”

Profile –C. Rajagopalachari

“Let me leave the scene”

C. Rajagopalachari concludes, with this appeal, his letter to Gandhiji, a superb document which will rank as a masterpiece in the literature of political controversy of our or any time.

“He should have done it long before”, said one of the “calumniators” as, with astonishment, he read the news as it came out of the teleprinter in his office.

WHY ALL THIS STRUGGLE?

At the height of the Tiruchengode election controversy I asked C.R. point-blank, why he should stuggle for what, if he just kept quiet, was bound to come to him a-begging on its knees.

He replied that two considerations weighed with him more than anything else.

(1)    The cost to the public would be great if experienced politicians abstained from seeking responsibility on critical occasions for the sake of personal comfort or dignity or for fear of being misunderstood. He wanted to save the people from having to bear that cost.

(2)    Seeking responsibility is a political duty. One should not be deflected from it, bridegroom-wise, by modesty and similar personal sentiments, or by calculations that bank on others’ coming in subsequently with desired initiatives. In the course of seeking responsibility vested interests will have to be fought. Fighting them is itself a part of political duty. C.R. said that, so long as he felt that the people were on his side, he would not be frightened by vested interests into abandoning the struggle.

After his letter to Gandhiji seeking permission to leave the scene, I met C.R. and recalled to him his earlier explanation. “How did the two considerations which he emphasized then, cease to have validity now”, I asked.

He said that the very cost to the public which he wanted to prevent could not be prevented evenif he continued the struggle. Deliberate poisoning of the political atmosphere had gone too far for any good to come. So he abandoned the scene, giving in to a desire for relief which he had resisted with great strain to body and mind, so long.

MERE PROOF AND NO GOOD BEHIND

Kamaraj Nadar and his friends are left with a proof—the “mere proof” with “no good behind”—that must force them to desist from any more charging C.R. with “seeking power”.  Will they make of their triumph anything more than seeking power? Unenviable would be their plight should they fail, especially as it will be measured against the towering background of C.R.’s renunciation and the love that themasses are ever swift to pour out on leaders that do sacrifice and give up things.

In the course of the anti-C.R. Press campaign, I am confronted with many quotations from my own criticisms of his premiership disinterred, apparently with considerable labour of research, from the bowels of old newspaper files. Had I not said that for power he was greedy? That he had depressed the hearts of Congressmen by manifestations of favour for others? And so forth.

SACRIFICE

My answer is that the whole setting of C.R.’s position as political leader has to me been changed since 1942. The high pinnacle of prestige in the Congress that he had reached before that year came by way of Gandhian discipleship. In that year, he cast away, at one throw, all the consolidated advantage of a quarter-century of Gandhian discipleship at its most favoured, --all for dear love of integrity, and for striking out for a faith which he held to be true against all dissenters. C.R. should have known what it would cost. Not merely parting political company from the companions of a life-time, above all from Mahatma, the dearest and mightiest of them all, but misunderstanding, ostracism, wilderness. To give up what he gave up, to face what he must have known he would have to face—this could not have been done by a seeker for power. There was sincerity, sacrifice, real heroism in it.

I regard it as poor journalism to refuse to budge from an opinion once expressed, when overwhelming experiences contradicting it present themselves, claiming to be taken into account. One’s own sense of right is worth nothing if it is to be made into a fetish before which all that tends to assail it is to be sacrificed.

ANOMALIES

When I find Congressmen, professing no interest in parliamentary activities, spending sleepless nights in intrigues to secure C.R.’s exclusion from the same parliamentary activities; when in its name of Revolution I find rich men hiring saboteurs while from safe backgrounds they waited for news of the exploits of their hirelings; when I find these same rich men, coming forward to cash in on the August resolution in the guise of Congress patriots; when I find men with no record of public work to their credit but plenty of reputation for adeptness in profiteering and black-marketing, installed as legislators without an iota of competence for the role—I feel that it is not perhaps altogether inapt that for one like C.R. there should be no place in the political scene as it is being shaped by the provincial organizational leaders of the Congress. Among the whole crowd of them C.R. shines out as a figure of transcendent courage and honesty.

Those that now enjoy the triumph of his exit from the scene will presently be responsible for breaking the Congress to pieces in the name of serving the Congress.—(SWATANTRA March 2, 1946)  KHASA.