The end of March and the beginning of April 1942 are memorable for one of the very few interventions of Sri Aurobindo in
Churchill was
Sir Stafford, on arriving in India, issued the following Draft Declaration on behalf of the British Government: "His Majesty's Government, having considered the anxieties expressed in this country and in India as to the fulfilment of promises made in regard to the future of India, have decided to lay down in precise and clear terms the steps which they propose shall be taken for the earliest possible realization of self-government in India. The object is the creation of a new Indian Union which shall constitute a Dominion associated with the
On hearing this declaration on the radio, Sri Aurobindo had the insight that the offer sent by Churchill through Sir Stafford Cripps had come on the wave of a divine inspiration and that it gave
Cripps immediately telegraphed back to Sri Aurobindo: "I am most touched and gratified by your kind message allowing me to inform
On the heels of this telegram came one from Arthur Moore, editor of the Calcutta Daily, The Statesman: "Your message to Sir Stafford Cripps inaugurates the new era. Nothing can prevent it. I am glad that my eyes have seen this salvation coming." (1 April 1942)
By now negotiations had started between Cripps and the Congress leaders.
Arthur Moore the very next day sent to his paper an editorial comment on Sri Aurobindo's message: "We have not doubted that Sir Stafford Cripps's mission will succeed nor were we depressed by Tuesday's wave of pessimism.... But since then an event has happened which will change a whole army of doubters and pessimists into optimists. After listening to Sir Stafford's broadcast, Sri Aurobindo has, from his Ashram in
Seeing that the negotiations with the Congress were not going right Sri Aurobindo decided on a further intervention. This took two forms. On the one hand he sent messages to some important figures in Indian politics. Through Mr. Shiva Rao he communicated to Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru that Cripps's offer should be accepted unconditionally. He also sent a couple of telegrams. One was to "Rajagopalachari, Birla House,
As the telegrams indicate, Sri Aurobindo also took the extraordinary step of sending a personal representative so that his appeal might go home better to the wrangling negotiators. Nirodbaran in his book Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo has memorably painted the scene: "It was the evening hour. Sri Aurobindo was sitting on the edge of his bed just before his daily walking exercise. All of us were present; Duraiswami, the distinguished
Nirodbaran has also written: "Cripps flew back a disappointed man but with the consolation and gratified recognition that at least one great man had welcomed the idea. When the rejection was announced, Sri Aurobindo said in a quiet tone, 'I knew it would fail.' We at once pounced on him and asked him, 'Why did you then send Duraiswami at all?' 'For a bit of nishkāma karma,’ was his calm reply, without any bitterness or resentment. The full spirit of the kind of "disinterested work' he meant comes out in an early letter of his (December 1933), which refers to his spiritual work: 'I am sure of the results of my work. But even if I still saw the chance that it might come to nothing (which is impossible), I would go on unperturbed, because I would still have done to the best of my power the work that I had to do, and what is so done always counts in the economy of the universe.' We know the aftermath of the rejection of the Cripps proposals: confusion, calamity, partition, blood-bath, etc., and the belated recognition of the colossal blunder."
Gradually the colossal blunder is being rectified in general conformity with, though not yet in precise adherence to, the vision expressed by Sri Aurobindo when on his seventy-fifth birthday on 15 August 1947, India obtained her independence and, as Nirodbaran puts it, "Sri Aurobindo's 'bardic' voice was heard once again", declaring about the partition of British India into India and Pakistan as a price of freedom: "...by whatever means, in whatever way, the division must go: unity must and will be achieved, for it is necessary for the greatness of India's future." Nirodbaran has noted that "Sri Aurobindo's prediction has been half-fulfilled, for
We may conclude our account with a significant letter written by M. C. Desai, on 29 September 1942 to the Bombay Daily, The Times of
It is amusing to find such Congress and liberal stalwarts as Mr. Rajagopalachari and Sir Chimanlal Setalvad openly advocating almost unconditional acceptance of the Cripps Proposals and denouncing the Congress leaders for rejecting them.
But what the Indian man-in-the-street would like to know is why these wise and eminent gentlemen did not speak out their real mind at the right time when Sir Stafford Cripps was here. What prevented 'C. R.', for instance, from breaking with the Congress Working Committee during the negotiations, when he knew it was giving a wrong lead to the country?
Similarly, one remembers that Sir Chimanlal Setalvad saw Sir Stafford Cripps on behalf of the Indian Liberals and submitted their resolution. The elaborate resolution did not fail to emphasise such minor omissions in the scheme as that of a specific mention of women's vote in the provincial plebiscite. But on the crucial question whether the country should accept or reject the scheme the resolution neither definitely said yes or no—quite like the Liberals.
Curiously, the solitary Indian statesman who took a realistic view and had the courage of his conviction to advise his countrymen unequivocally to accept the Cripps Proposals was that mystic and visionary of Pondicherry—Shri Aurobindo Ghose. The belated wisdom of our leaders emphasises the truth of the ancient Sanskrit proverb: 'The Brahmin always thinks too late.'
Instead of harping on the Mahatma's admittedly 'un- practical idealism', let our leaders organise a countrywide educative propaganda to convince the wide mass, of the people of the wisdom of accepting a compromise solution like the Cripps plan if India's problem is to be resolved peacefully and create opportunities for ordinary people to express their honest opinion.
~ KD Sethna
Apropos of the rejection of Cripps’s Proposals, we have the following account from Nirodbaran’s Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo; he draws our attention to a report about the Mother's stand on the Cripps-question:
Then came the famous Cripps' Proposals. In the evening Sir Stafford Cripps broadcast his Proposals to the Indian people, from
The next day at about 2 p.m., after the All India Radio news at 1.30, there was a hot discussion among three sadhaks, including Pavitra, in his room. Pavitra took the standpoint of the purely spiritual man, who judges by looking at what is behind appearances. It seemed that he had already spoken with the Mother and thus was arguing forcefully for the acceptance of the Proposals. The second person was an experienced politician of the Gandhian Congress days and took the negative position. He argued the pros and cons of the Proposals and was of the opinion that the Indian leaders would reject them. The third a novice, with no political experience, was more for its acceptance. The discussion became hotter and hotter, so much so that the Mother, while going from Her bath-room to Her dressing room, was attracted by the unusual volume of sound. She did not enter Her dressing room, but turned Her steps towards Pavitra’s room. Before entering there, She heard part of the argument. Then She stepped in and asked, 'What is it all about?' Pavitra said that one person argued that Cripps's offer would not be accepted by the Indian leaders. The Mother felt amused and inquired, “Why?” By then She had sat on the chair that was in front of Her. It was a very unusual and interesting scene; the Mother, still in Her beautiful Japanese kimono just out of the bath, didn't seem to care to change Her dress, and was more interested in the arguments against the acceptance. Then She began to talk with a very calm and distinct voice. One could see that She who had entered a few minutes ago had been transported somewhere else and the voice was coming from that plane....
She said something to this effect: “One should leave the matter of the Cripps's offer entirely in the hands of the Divine, with full confidence that the Divine will work everything out. Certainly there were flaws in the offer. Nothing on earth created by man is flawless, because the human mind has a limited capacity. Yet behind this offer there is the Divine Grace directly present. The Grace is now at the door of
"Only some months ago, the same Grace presented itself at the door of
"But
"My ardent request to
As soon as She had finished speaking She hurried back to Her dressing room, without a word or a look at anybody. Later, on the same day, the first of April, 1942, when She returned from the Prosperity after the distribution, She disclosed that, Sri Aurobindo had already sent a telegram to Sir Stafford, and the latter had reciprocated very heartily, and both the telegrams were being put on the notice board by Nolini. We then read the messages and were very much encouraged.
But the next day or the day after it, the Congress announced that it had rejected the offer. The Mother was quite unperturbed; She only said, “Now calamity will befall
The events that followed in
~ Nirodbaran
Here is a relevant part of the Mother’s conversations of 18 January 1956:
Q. Mother, I was asking… (laughter) You said that
The Mother: Oh! Oh! that’s what you wanted to know.
That… the details were not there. No, there must have been a possibility of its being otherwise, for, when Sri Aurobindo told them to do a certain thing, sent them his message, he knew very well that it was possible to avoid what happened later. If they had listened to him at that time, there would have been no division. Consequently, the division was not decreed, it was a human deformation. It is beyond question a human deformation.
~The Mother
But what do we have in The Lives of Sri Aurobindo? In it we have the following about what would have happened if the Proposals had been accepted: (p. 392)
Many believe that the partition of
If these are aspects of “many believe…” it would be interesting to know what our biographer himself actually believes. But unfortunately his intuition about the matter acquired from the scholarly study of the primary documents has not entered anywhere in the discussion. If the biography is not just a handbook of facts, then there is an expectation that he gives us certain clues about the entire course of events and the subsequent happenings, happenings of a disastrous kind. To state that these judgements “have to be taken with a grain of salt” is itself an act of uncritical judgement, as a friend of mine points out, and quite frankly not very flattering to Sri Aurobindo; it does little justice to his concerted efforts to have the Cripps’s offer accepted. More seriously, how are we to square the assertion that such judgements “have to be taken with a grain of salt” in the wake of the Mother’s stating unequivocally that “there would have been no division” had the Proposals been accepted? Historical presentation from the inner Aurobindonian circle has yet scope to put all these in the right historical perspective. Let us hope that one of these days this will happen—unless one says that it is the credulous who believes in what the Mother had said; that would be the end of the course of the perceptive thought itself.
~ RY Deshpande