'Gandhiji was not informed about partition'

Vishnu Prasad

KOZHIKODE: Gandhiji came to know about  Congress and Muslim League leaders signing an agreement to divide India through the radio, said Narayan Desai, the disciple of the Father of the Nation and his companion during the later part of his life.

Narayan Desai, the son of Mahatma Gandhi’s personal secretary and biographer Mahadev Desai, was in the city to address students of the Gujarati School here.

Talking to Express here on Wednesday, Desai said that Gandhiji was not responsible for partition as claimed by many historians and that he was perhaps the only leader who opposed the idea even after the partition order was signed. “None of the leaders informed him before they were going to sign the partition order as they already knew how to respond to it. Bapu heard the news through,” he said.

Desai, who spent the first 20 years of his life at Gandhiji’s ashram, was adoringly referred to as ‘Bablo’ by the Gandhi family and was witness to many personal incidents in Bapu’s life. When his father Mahadev died, Kasthurba Gandhi remarked that ‘Bapu had lost both his right and left hands’. And now Desai has taken it up on himself to set the record straight regarding the Gandhiji’s involvement in the partition saga. 

“Gandhiji was not invited to a single Congress working committee meet after February 1947, which incidentally was the month when the British Government announced that India would be granted Independence. Many leaders from the committee met him in person but never was his views heard before the entire committee,” he said.

He also revealed chilling details from the day Gandhiji was assassinated. “Sardar Vallabhai Patel, then Home Minister, wanted the security to check all the people who attended the prayer meeting but Gandhiji strictly forbade him from doing so saying that people who had come to pray should not be bothered,” he said.

“Patel was a broken man for manymonths after Gandhiji’s death. I recall seeing him one day addressing Gandhiji asking him why he had left early when they had made a pact in jail to die together,” he said.

Desai was in Kerala to attend the release of the Malayalam translation of his Gandhi biography ‘My Life is My Message’. The book was released by Chief Minister Oommen Chandy in Thiruvananthapuram.

Courtesy : The New Indian Express