Gandhi wanted a self-supporting rural society. As long as a person got enough to eat and some clothes to wear, that was enough. He didn’t see any worth in material development beyond a point–a very, very low point. He wanted spiritual development. Jawaharlal wanted spiritual development, but he wanted economic development, too. That was a big difference between them.
Gandhi was a Hindu, but he was completely secular. He wouldn’t have tolerated what [extremist groups] are doing today. He would probably have gone on a fast to atone for the sins of his countrymen.
I come from a Hindu family, butin the early ’30s I fell in love with a Hungarian Jewish girl I met at the London School of Economics. In those days, under the Raj, it was the law that no Indian of one religion could marry a person from another religion. It was just one of the laws the British used to keep the people of India divided. There seemed no legal method of our getting married. So, like everything else, our case went up to the Mahatma. And the Mahatma said, “To hell with the law. You can get married with a Vedic ceremony, and whether the law recognizes it or not, the country will recognize it.” And that’s what happened. We were married by a professor at Delhi University who had invented what he said were the original Vedic rites of marriage. So technically I’m living in sin with my wife, and have been for the past 64 years.
PARTITIONRunning for Their LivesLAHORE, AUGUST 1947:Born into a wealthy Hindu family,Jagpravesh Chandrawas a 30-year-old journalist working for Lahore’s Monday Morning weekly when the departing British divided the former colonial possession into Muslim Pakistan and secular India. Ethnic violence killed more than 1 million people.
We had a Muslim servant named Mustaffa who used to milk our cows. One day he boasted to my mother that he would give our house to his daughter in dowry. My mother scolded him, assuming it to be a bad joke. Mustaffa insisted the division of the country was inevitable–and wouldn’t she prefer someone who was not a stranger to live in her house? She warned him he should not talk such blasphemy.
I finally left on Aug. 13, a day before Pakistan was born. Mobs roamed Lahore’s streets with naked swords. In the countryside you could see smoke rising from houses on fire. I drove to the border, accompanied by a Muslim neighbor in case of trouble. There was a very long convoy of vehicles of all kinds–tractors, bullock carts, jeeps, buses, cars all filled with scared people. In the no man’s land near the border I saw a similarly long column of vehicles and a huge queue of people, fleeing India, walking in from the opposite direction. All of us knew where we were coming from, but few of us had any idea where we were going.
