. The Last Heroic Days As it happened, Mahatma Gandhi was not present at the festivities in the capital on August . He was in Calcutta, but he did not attend any function or hoist a flag there either. Gandhiji marked the day with a -hour fast.
The freedom he had struggled so long for had come at an unacceptable price, with a nation divided and Hindus and Muslims at each other’s throats. Through September and October, writes his biographer D.G. Tendulkar, Gandhiji “went round hospitals and refugee camps giving consolation to distressed people”. He “appealed to the Sikhs, the Hindus and the Muslims to forget the past and not to dwell on their sufferings but to extend the right hand of fellowship to each other, and to determine to live in peace ...” At the initiative of Gandhiji and Nehru, the Congress now passed a resolution on “the rights of minorities”.
The party had never accepted the “two-nation theory”: forced against its will to accept Partition, it still believed that “India is a land of many religions and many races, and must remain so”. Whatever be the situation in Pakistan, India would be “a democratic secular State where all citizens enjoy full rights and are equally entitled to the protection of the State, irrespective of the religion to which they belong”. The Congress wished to “assure the minorities in India that it will continue to protect, to the best of its ability, their citizen rights against aggression”. Many scholars have written of the months after Independence as being Gandhiji’s “finest hour”.
After working to bring peace to Bengal, Gandhiji now shifted to Delhi, from where he hoped to move on to the riot- torn districts of Punjab. While in the capital, his meetings were disrupted by refugees who objected to readings from the Koran, or shouted slogans asking why he did not speak of the sufferings of those Hindus and Sikhs still living in Pakistan. In fact, as D.G. Tendulkar writes, Gandhiji “was equally concerned with the sufferings of the minority community in Pakistan.
He would have liked to be able to go to their succour. But with Fig. . On the way to a riot-torn village,