Mahatmaji and council entry

IT was a very significant statement which Mahatma Gandhi made in the course of a talk with Pandit Motilal Nehru, who met him at Ahmedabad soon after the All India Congress Committee (AICC) meeting. “It would be disastrous,” he said, “if the Swarajists retired from the Councils at this stage.” For one who only a short time before had tried his level best to convince the Swarajists that council entry was wrong in principle and bound to be infructuous in practice, who at the meeting of the AICC itself had sought to exclude the Swarajists from the Congress Executive on the ground that council entry was inconsistent with the non-cooperation programme to which the Congress was committed, this was a strange position to take. As Pandit Nehru reminded the Mahatma immediately, he had actually declared in his journal Young India that “if he could convince the Swarajists, he would ask them to withdraw.” How were the two statements to be reconciled? Mahatma Gandhi himself, it is true, sees no contraction or inconsistency between them. “The one statement,” he says in a signed article in the current issue of Young India, “is permanent and based upon principle; the other is applicable to the immediate present only and is based on expediency.” This explanation, we need scarcely say, is far from convincing. Both the principle and the expediency were there when the Mahatma made his first statement, and if at the time when he made that statement he thought as he does now, there was nothing to prevent him from saying so. But the question of consistency is the least part of the matter. Few great men, few men of Mahatmaji’s potent stamp, are or can ever be consistent in any verbal, logical sense of the term.