Seventy-five years ago today, Mohandas Gandhi began his final fast. It was an indefinite fast, a fast to the death, and sure enough, 17 days later, he would take his last breath. His decades of work toward a free and independent India had come to an end, but not the way he’d imagined. Instead, as the British left, they acceded to the demands of M.A. Jinnah for a separate Muslim nation, carving the subcontinent into three pieces; Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh1,
Imagine the United States, broken up as part of a “national divorce.” Red states make up the center and the largest section, with blue states grouped on the east and west coasts. It might seem logical for a few seconds, until one realizes that states are composed of individual people, and such a division would leave millions and millions of families on the wrong side of the new borders.
Gandhi was in New Delhi, the capital of India, and it was a city in crisis. Trainloads of Hindus and Sikhs poured in daily from Pakistan, and Muslim shrines and mosques were gutted to house the new arrivals. Across the country, caravans as long as fifty miles formed as millions fled on foot with whatever possessions they could carry. The two-way traffic often came into conflict, resulting in brutal violence and senseless killings.
It was too much to bear. At his evening prayer meeting on January 12, Gandhi announced he would be starting a fast the next day. The 78-year-old’s efforts had produced peace in Kolkata the previous September, in the first critical weeks after Partition, but the violence between the different religions had claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the meantime. Could calmer heads still prevail?
Gandhi believed all humans possessed an inherent ability for self-improvement, and was willing to gamble his life — again — on this belief. After five days, he would be proven correct. As an additional challenge this month, I’ll be commemorating Gandhi’s final fast with a five-day fast of my own, which will give me more time to reflect and write these posts.
What would you do if America was partitioned into red states and blue states?
Until 1971, Bangladesh was East Pakistan, 1,000 miles away from the other half of the country.