Feroze The Forgotten Gandhi

By Bertil Falk

Bertil Falk (b. 1933) is a highly respected Swedish newspaper and TV journalist, who spent more than ten years of his life in India, England and the United States. His love for writing started with a short science fiction story, published when he was 12, he then did a few radio programmes when he was 15 and got a mystery novel published when he was 20. Since then he has worked for different newspapers, primarily Kvällsposten (The Evening Post) and from the years 1987–1989 he was in the newsroom of the Swedish TV3 in London. After retirement he has written about 35 books (fiction and non-fiction) and besides translating many mystery writers into Swedish he also translated and edited into English two anthologies of short stories by Swedish mystery writers. He was the editor of the cultural magazine DAST for a few years and contributed until recently for fiction as well as non-fiction to the internet-zine Bewildering Stories. He also filmed and produced video documentaries in Africa. For the past ten years, until recently, he produced community radio programmes for Trelleborg Sjöormen Rotary Club, where he is a member.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Roli Books
• Release date: Nov 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9789351941873

Book preview

FEROZE

the forgotten

GANDHI

OTHER LOTUS TITLES

FEROZE

the forgotten

GANDHI

a personal narrative

by

Bertil Falk

ROLI BOOKS

This digital edition published in 2016

First published in 2016 by

The Lotus Collection

An Imprint of Roli Books Pvt. Ltd

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Copyright © Bertil Falk

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Contents

My Quest for Feroze Bhai

1. Controversies and Feroze Gandhi’s Origins

2. Boyhood in Allahabad

3. The Rebel Finds a Cause

4. Eventful Days in Allahabad

5. From Boy to Veteran

6. A Well-Known Local Congress Worker

7. The Bumpy Road to Europe

8. London Years

9. Triumph of Will

10. Before the Wedding

11. Shaadi

12. Interlude

13. Quit India – the Feroze Way

14. Last Time in Jail

15. A Journalist in Anand Bhawan

16. The Assassination

17. Lucknow

18. National Herald

19. Rae Bareli

20. Romantic Interlude

21. Changing with the Times

22. Maiden Speech and Giant Killer

23. Behind the Scene of the Mundhra Case

24. A Guardian of Freedom of the Press

25. Upheaval in Kerala

26. Minor Skirmishes

27. Rae Bareli and Degree College

28. Other Sides of Feroze

29. Matters of the Heart

30. The Last Attack

31. The Last Rites

32. The Legacy of Feroze Bhai

Appendices

Bibliography

Index

My Quest for Feroze Bhai

Now, at long last – after almost four decades, my quest for Feroze Bhai has been completed. It all started in 1942 when I read a book about a boy in India who became a maharaja and my fascination for this country was born. It continued when I saw newsreels about the Indian struggle for Independence. I became a journalist, but it was not until 1977 that I, for the first time, came to India. The last day in New Delhi I went to Indira Gandhi’s residence and asked if I could interview her for Kvällsposten (The Evening Post), where I was employed as the reporter of the graveyard shift.

I got forty minutes with the lady, who then was not in power. When I returned to Sweden with my article, one of the editors asked: ‘Where is the picture proving that you have met her?’ A year later I was back in India with my daughter Katarina and was granted another interview with Indira Gandhi. Katarina took the picture that proved that I had actually met her.

I saw that Indira Gandhi had two sons and grandchildren, and I asked myself: ‘Where is the husband, the father of her children?’ I asked people and was told that his name was Feroze and he was no one significant. I did some research and stumbled upon the Mundhra case and the Kerala affair and began to understand that Feroze Gandhi was not as insignificant as people were made to believe.

I decided to write an article about him in Swedish but the more I learned about him, I decided on a biography. Over the years I came back to India many times, looked for books where he was mentioned and began interviewing people who had known him or worked with him. This quest led me to his relatives in Bombay and Surat, to villages in Uttar Pradesh, where Feroze had once agitated and had been arrested, as well as to people like Onkar Nath Bhargava in Rae Bareli, Sita Ram Gunthe in Allahabad, Jagdish Kodesia in Delhi, Syed Jaffar and Swaroop Rani Bakshi in Lucknow and Shanta Gandhi in Bombay.

Furthermore, I met politicians like Minoo Masani, Tarkeshwari Sinha, Subhadra Joshi, Dev Kanta Barooah, Bishambar Nath Pande and H.C. Heda. I also met people in London and the United States, who contributed to my understanding of Feroze and Katherine Frank, author of Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi who visited me in Sweden to take part in my research.

Most of my Indian friends told me that Feroze Gandhi’s only identity was that he was the son-in-law of Jawaharlal Nehru. My senior journalist colleague and good friend P.D. Tandon in Allahabad said: ‘If you are going to write a biography, I have a much better subject for you.’

I said: ‘I think that Feroze is underestimated.’

‘No,’ P.D. replied, ‘he was not underestimated. He was not overestimated. He was estimated. That’s it.’

‘Well,’ I replied. ‘You are not the first to say things like that to me. The more I am told that Feroze does not deserve a biography, the stronger my urge to write one grows. My subject is Feroze and nothing else.’

‘You have the right attitude,’ P.D. said, and then he went on to assist me enormously, sharing with me pictures, articles, documents, books, stories, and facts. Anything he could lay his hands on that would be of interest in my quest for Feroze Gandhi was passed on to me.

The more I have delved into Feroze’s life story, the more I have appreciated him. He was a strongly outlined personality from his childhood, even though he did not always show the world’s best judgement. Now and then he went astray, perhaps not more than many of us do, but nonetheless astray. I think of things like his bitterness, his smoking habit, his inferiority complex, his behaviour in certain situations and his inability to take care of his health.

He was also a man who loved life and living, who liked people and had many friends, even though there were others, who neither loved him nor liked him. And he had a few bitter enemies too. His network of contacts in different social strata was impressive. And he was for sure a womanizer. Feroze continued to work for the ideals he believed in to the very end. However, testimonies suggest that he gave up a lot of his ambitions in the sense that he no longer wholeheartedly subscribed to his own statement in an earlier context that ‘if you try for anything long enough you get it’.

Nevertheless, as a parliamentarian he is one of the most memorable that India has produced so far. He was a pioneer and, I would say, still is. That is good enough reason for writing his biography. There are of course other things that make him a right subject for a biographer. How many people on earth have had the first prime minister of the biggest democracy in the world as his father-in-law and his wife and his son as the prime ministers of that nation as well? Not to forget that Indira, during the Emergency in the 1970s, permitted their younger son to emerge as the unconstitutional dictator of India.

The wife of Sanjay Gandhi, Maneka became a member of the Lok Sabha and is now a minister in the NDA (National Democratic Alliance) government. After the horrible assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, the leaders of Congress requested his wife Sonia to become their new leader, but in vain. After seven years she gave in to the pressure and became a skilful leader of the Congress Party.

Similarly, Feroze’s grandson Rahul is vice-president of Indian National Congress and represents Amethi in the Parliament. Priyanka, Feroze’s granddaughter is a fine campaigner. Her cousin Varun Feroze, too is a Member of Parliament for the Bharatiya Janata Party.

From a purely physical point of view, there would not have been Sanjay or Rajiv Gandhi, had Feroze not been around. The destiny of Indira Gandhi may have been different. She would perhaps never have become the prime minister of India. She could have become Frau Indira Oberdorf and settled in Germany. Or she may not even have married at all.

Maneka Anand would probably never have made it into politics. Sonia Maino would perhaps not even have been visiting India but stayed in Europe, for there would certainly not have been any Maneka Gandhi or Sonia Gandhi and certainly no Priyanka, no Rahul and no Varun Feroze.

Candidly speaking, Feroze was as much a founding father of the Nehru– Gandhi dynasty as were Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru. Not that I am sure that he would have appreciated this dynastic family streak.

Thus in this book the spotlight is on Feroze. It may also shed some light on other people, such as Jawaharlal Nehru, who did not abuse his power when people slandered about his wife Kamala and Feroze Gandhi, an interesting incident throwing light on Nehru’s character. During my research I found that there was only one full-length biography of Feroze, published in 1976. Shashi Bhushan’s Deshbhakt Firoz Gandhi was first published in Hindi, and then in English in 1977 as Feroze Gandhi: Socialist, Democrat, Secular. Much later, on a visit to Rae Bareli in 1991, I discovered that a biographical sketch by Onkar Nath Bhargava was also published in 1971.

A biography by H.C. Heda, notified in Socialist Congressman as early as in 1961, never materialised. However, his contribution to keep up the memory of Feroze Gandhi is noteworthy. Supported by Lal Bahadur Shastri, he launched Feroze Samarak Samiti in 1961, an organisation that for many years arranged annual Feroze Memorial Lectures. As the prime minister of India, Shastri was the president of the society till his untimely death in 1966.

Feroze Gandhi was a socialist of a soft kind, but a democrat of pure gold. The kind of social democrat, who believed in democracy but also, like so many other people in those days, admired the Soviet Union. I on the other hand have a strong belief in a carefully-defined liberalism and a market economy with social responsibility and a human face. My attitude is perhaps very close to the attitude of the converted Minoo Masani, who, as one of his political enemies admitted, smelled the rat of rotting communism twenty years before the light dawned on many other Indian socialists.

Thus, it is probably obvious that I have chosen Feroze Gandhi not because I share his political views, but because I admire his expressed attitudes towards power and democracy and towards his fellow human beings. Feroze’s strong and principled attitudes, his crusades for the downtrodden, his struggle for justice and his commitment never to be a leader in the conventional sense is worth consideration, not the least among young people. Not to forget is that he was a Musketeer for Freedom of Speech and for democracy.

Nobody can deny that his views were based on a profound understanding of the injustices in the society where he lived, laughed, loved and laboured. Unlike his father-in-law, he had first-hand knowledge of what was going on among common people. It may surprise some readers, but Jawaharlal Nehru not only lived a privileged life far away from the Indian masses, but he furthermore did not discern the predicament of his poor fellow-countrymen until the age of thirty-one, when he stumbled upon the Kisan movement in Rae Bareli.

Feroze spent his boyhood in a Parsi middle-class home in Allahabad. He shared with the poor and the downtrodden because he felt one with all kinds of people. He played with other children, whether they were rich or poor. In that sense this middle-class Parsi boy was classless. At the age of eighteen he was a man with a political philosophy and attitude of his own and was a freedom fighter in his own right in a much more thorough sense than his wife ever was.

These qualities stayed with him throughout his life. It is not a coincidence that Feroze was one of the few Indian politicians – some say the only – who was known by his first name among people from all walks of life. A biography is out of necessity usually a compiling affair. That is especially true when the subject is dead and the biographer has no first-hand experiences of the person in question to lean on. Like a detective, an investigating journalist, a collector or any researcher or scientist for that matter, a biographer has to carefully and meticulously accumulate facts and then patiently do her or his best in order to fit all the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle.

In my case, I have not been able to find all the pieces of the puzzle, but I have found many that otherwise would have remained unknown. There are still many unanswered questions.

There are different ways of writing a biography. Many people just tell the story, drawing on their own experiences and/or totally rewriting the sources and statements used. I have chosen a different method. I have deliberately used many quotations from various books and personal interviews.

The reason for this is simple. If I rewrite what Anand Mohan has written about a situation involving Feroze Gandhi, K.D. Malaviya and Jawaharlal Nehru in the beginning of the 1930s, then I am more than one step away from the original point of view of an involved eyewitness. First I rewrote that part. I was unhappy with that and instead I quoted Anand Mohan. When I ultimately found K.D. Malaviya’s own, original statement of the event, I replaced the quotation from Mohan with the quotation from Malaviya. By doing so, I moved the biography closer into medias res and closer to the source.

I have tried not to be brutal when plundering my sources. However, in order to fill gaps and find as much as possible about my subject, I have scrupulously delved into every possible space, thereby penetrating even some impossible corners. It has sometimes paid off, but I have ever so often run into dead ends.

I have written this biography in a way that makes it possible for any reader or student to understand in what ways and where from I have obtained all this information over the years.

Apart from what others have written about Feroze, a lot came out from interviews I have been able to do over the years with people in Allahabad, Rae Bareli, Lucknow, New Delhi, Surat, Bombay, London, New Haven, etc. Even a short stopover in Lisbon on my way to Cabo Verde on a completely different mission proved to add something to my knowledge of this story.

I have met many people who have been helpful in more than one way, giving me hints about where to find more material, sharing photographs and documents, giving their impressions and opinions, relating a number of incidents and events. They have been given proper credit.

I have not disclosed everything I have unearthed because this biography is not written in order to hurt anyone. On the other hand, I have not hesitated from telling you troubling facts when they have been necessary in order to tell the story.

I have already mentioned P.D. Tandon. Credit is also due to my Hindi Guru, Ramphal Vishvendu, who found rare books for me and helped me with translations from Hindi when my own efforts were fruitless. His wonderful family has meant a lot to me. They created a great environment for me during my seemingly endless quest for Feroze over the years.

I should specially mention mera shatru Sudhanshu Sharma, who has faithfully acted as my personal assistant, secretary and driver, and who – when he found it necessary to do so – has not hesitated to fight things out with me, preventing me from committing disastrous mistakes during our fact-finding missions.

Secondly, I must mention my great friend and scholar, the late P.N. Magazine, whom I first met in Srinagar in 1977. I spent a wonderful vacation with him, his daughter Neelam and her husband Sanjay Garg in Valsad, Gujarat in 1991. They brought me to the Fire Temple in the Parsi village of Udvada and to Sanjan, where Feroze Gandhi’s ancestors once, long ago, arrived from over the Arabian Sea to the Indian West Coast.

P.D. Tandon’s son Rajendra Kumar Tandon and his grandsons Rohit Tandon and Vikas Malik have been of enormous assistance to me in Meja tehsil, Allahabad and Lucknow.

Without the aid of Jagdish Kodesia of Feroze Samarak Samiti in New Delhi, I would not have been able to meet and interview on video camera a lot of people who knew Feroze, foremost among them H.C. Heda.

Many Indians are very protective when they talk about Feroze and his wife. They do not tell me everything they know. One exceptional exception was Feroze’s friend Syed Jaffar, who beautifully told me even things he hesitated to say, but, ultimately came forth, stating: ‘Well, this is now history’.

Without the assistance of Onkar Nath Bhargava, the story of Feroze and his constituency Rae Bareli would have been impossible to write. Not only did he share with me documents of great value, his vivid recollections and political insights have been extremely valuable too. Credit should also be given to all librarians who have been helpful over the years.

I think of all my visits to the branch of British Library on Blackfriars Road in London and all the books brought to me from all over the place by the librarians of the main City Library of Malmö. Furthermore, I would like to mention the University Library of Lund, the morgue of the newspapers Sydsvenska Dagbladet and Kvällsposten in Malmö. The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library of Teen Murti must be mentioned and perhaps most important; the private archives of P.D. Tandon in Allahabad.

Deepak Ray, when he was the First Secretary of the Indian Embassy in Sweden, has been very helpful, among other things sharing important issues of Dharm Yug. I also want to thank the southern branch of Publicistklubben (a cultural body of Swedish Press and Publishing) for a grant enabling me to conduct important research.

Individuals who have asked me not to be named have not been mentioned by name. In a few, rare cases, I have decided not to mention a name even though the informant has not asked me to keep it a secret. In those particular cases I have stuck to the ethical rule of the Swedish journalist collective. It goes that if you suspect that the informant may not be aware of the possibility, that something may hurt her, him or even a third individual, then the journalist should be careful and protect the interviewed person as well as others that could be affected. For that reason I have also found that the time is not yet ripe to disclose every single piece of information I have unearthed over the years.

Whether sources are named or not, I am of course solely responsible for the structure and content of this book.

As a politician, Feroze Gandhi is a model for new generations. Feroze was physically near, but mentally he was never close to his father-in-law. I have a strong feeling that they both feared and respected each other. Feroze died at the age of forty-eight. Had he died when he was forty-three, I would probably not have been tempted to write this biography.

During the last five years of his life Feroze Gandhi put his own very personal mark on the political scene in the Lok Sabha by introducing ‘investigative journalism’ as a tool for parliamentary work and the creation of a better society. Maybe ‘investigative parliamentarism’ is an expression that better describes what he did. As a backbencher he was, as H.C. Heda puts it ‘the unofficial leader of the opposition’. He was a unique, real VIP, which here stands for a Very Investigating Parliamentarian.

Though he is worthy of imitation, the political actions of Feroze unfortunately did not set a trend, at least not in his own party. It is, however, not too late for all of us to look to him as a parliamentary ideal, especially for young people, not only in India, but all over the world.

As Shashi Bhushan writes in his biography of Feroze that in ‘reality this book is not the biography of that patriot, it is only a homage of our generation to that great man. The true biography will be written by someone else. If this book serves the purpose of a requisite preface of it, I shall consider my labour as amply rewarded.’

A similar modesty should be applied to this effort. There must be many memories, many documents, many new facts, many records, many letters, many newspapers and magazines and many pictures that may shed new light on Feroze and better explain things and straighten out question marks. Some person may uncover recordings of his voice. Others may unearth footage of him.

Thus, this is by no means the ultimate biography on Feroze. If Shashi Bhushan wrote a preface, this biography should only be considered to be one of many chapters of a continuously ongoing research, valuation, evaluation and revaluation.

It is therefore my hope that other researchers, especially young students of modern Indian history will continue the quest for Feroze and fill the missing pieces in this mosaic.

The life of Feroze Gandhi can be read in so many different ways. It sometimes reads like an adventure, sometimes like a soap opera, sometimes like a comedy. But above all he is interesting because he was important and there are lessons to learn from his life story, human touch lessons, political lessons, even spiritual lessons.

Except for her committing statement at a Parsi celebration in New Delhi the same year she was assassinated, Indira Gandhi gave her husband no credit whatsoever for the important work he did for the development of the parliamentary democracy.

On the contrary she demolished the Feroze Gandhi Press Law during the Emergency in the 1970s. Contrary to that her son Rajiv Gandhi not only said a lot of nice things about Feroze as a father, but he also at times publicly acknowledged his father’s ability as a parliamentarian and put him forth as an example for other politicians.

The Nehru–Gandhi lust for dynastic power has been well displayed by Indira and her sons, daughters-in-law and grandchildren. In spite of their commitment to secularism and in spite of their resistance to the system of caste, they in many cases subscribed to the aloof and authoritarian bloodline heritage of a feudal past and a caste-ridden present. They have thereby refused to appreciate the tradition of democratic attitudes of the kind Feroze stood for.

The price, which the family of Feroze has paid for this particular kind of aristocratic arrogance, that price has as we know been awfully high. Nobody can deny that the Nehruvian Gandhis, like the Kennedys in the United States, have devoted not only their lives but also their martyr deaths to the cause of India. They have been patriots. In that they have not been unlike the Gandhian Gandhi, Feroze that is.

However, India has seen many dynasties and rulers over the millennia. Bharat is greater than any dynasty. In 1992, thirty-two years after the death of Feroze, we were reminded of the fact that a man like him cannot be ignored. It was that year the important study Feroze Gandhi: A Crusader in Parliament by Tarun Kumar Mukhopadhyaya was published.

Long before that, on 7 July 1976, sixteen years after his death, Rajni Patel wrote in his Foreword to Bhushan’s Feroze-biography, that ‘the labour that Feroze Gandhi put in to lay the foundations of a healthy new nation, are apt to become blurred. At a time when we are once again concerned with refashioning our democratic values and revitalising our public institutions, it is good to recapitulate the work and ideals of a pioneer.’

This is as true now as it was when Patel wrote it during the Emergency. And as Bhabani Sen Gupta puts it in his Rajiv Gandhi: A Political Study, Feroze was ‘a political personality that deserves to be better studied by Indians’, and by the rest of us for that matter.

The truth is that Feroze not only transcends his origin, in many respects he represented a new kind of Indian, a modern Indian. He was a man who in a strange way seemed to have been moulded in the form of Raja Ram Mohan Roy as well as Ashfaqulla Khan. At the same time he was a Parsi who recited Gita by heart with a clear voice.

These are things that will surprise many, who only saw one side and not always the best side of this multifaceted personality.

Following the footsteps of Feroze Gandhi has been an enlightening odyssey through India and the world, but since it was a hobby, practised because of my interest in his fate and legacy, other assignments took precedence of my quest for Feroze Bhai. Life is short and I realized that I would never find the answers of many questions. Had I lived in India, it would have been different. Did Kamala Nehru really want Feroze to marry Indira? Or did she try to prevent that marriage? Someone else has to find out.

For some time I thought that I would never be able to publish this biography. However, when my friend Indranil Gupta and his wife Meena visited me in June 2009, he inspired me to take another look at the manuscript. When that same autumn, Kallol Bhattacherjee of the Week as one of the first of 1.2 billion Indians showed a serious interest in Feroze Gandhi’s life story, it was like adding fuel to the fire. Kallol’s enthusiasm inspired me to take up the project again. In January 2010, he and I had a couple of inspiring discussions in New Delhi. I am not sure who was more inspired. Perhaps it was he, for his enthusiasm was visible, but he inspired me too. After completing some other projects, this biography was at long last completed in the summer of 2015. At last I want to thank Priya Kapoor, Neelam Narula, Aditi Chopra and Deepali Singh of Roli Books for making this book possible.

Once many years ago when I visited Anand Bhawan together with P.D. Tandon, the director of the Museum at Anand Bhawan said to me that it is easy to write a biography of Indira Gandhi, for there are so many documents and so much information about her, but when it comes to Feroze, it must be very difficult. How true. But like a raga, Feroze’s life unfolded slowly from alaap and as he was just about to reach his highest heights in a Deepak Raag, he went down like a burnt-out Tansen. He was a great democrat and parliamentarian.

Loktantra Zindabad

Jai Hind

Västra Alstad – Allahabad – New Delhi, 1980–2016

Bertil Falk

1

Controversies and Feroze

Gandhi’s Origins

Feroze Jehangir Gandhi is said to have been born on 12 September 1912 at the Tehmulji Nariman Parsi lying-in-hospital, a maternity hospital in the cosmopolitan Fort area of Bombay (now called Mumbai).We are told that his father was Jehangir Faredoon Gandhi from Bharuch in Gujarat, a simple and religious man of the Parsi community, a marine engineer. A quiet man, his character was sturdy and besides his work, he only had two interests in life, his books and his children. ‘He planned the children’s education with meticulous care. His leisures [sic], which were infrequent but long, were divided between those two interests,’ according to Onkar Nath Bhargava, managing secretary of Feroze Gandhi College in Rae Bareli.¹

Feroze’s mother was Rattimai Gandhi, née Commissariat, from Surat in Gujarat. Feroze was her last and fifth child. Rattimai and her sister Shirin Commissariat were the first women to complete their matriculation in English from Surat Mission School and were fluent in English.²

Feroze must have been three months and fourteen days old when his future father-in-law, Jawaharlal Nehru, attended his first annual Congress session in Bankipur in December 1912. Nehru had returned from his studies in London earlier that year (in August) and was practising law in Allahabad alongside his father, Motilal Nehru.

In 1986, Feroze’s relative Ratoo Dastoor in Bombay told me that at the birth of Feroze, Jehangir Gandhi went to an astrologer to get Feroze’s horoscope cast. The astrologer said that he was very surprised.‘How can this little child possibly have been born in your family?’, he asked. ‘He belongs to a royal palace! I can see great expectations. The family name will shine.’ Rattimai Gandhi was not impressed. ‘Rubbish!’ she commented.³

One person, who was destined to become most important to Feroze Gandhi, was the sister of Rattimai Gandhi, Shirin Commissariat. Feroze grew up with her in Allahabad. At an early stage in life she wanted to become a surgeon, but her father strongly opposed the idea. However, Shirin Commissariat was a dedicated and persistent young woman. Her stubbornness paid off and she was given a scholarship to study medical theory and surgical practice in Paris and London. As a trained surgeon, she ultimately came to Allahabad in United Provinces, where she was in charge of fifty-two districts under Lady Dufferin Hospital.

Since she was not married, she wanted to take care of her sister Rattimai’s last-born child. When I was in Surat in 1991, I interviewed Maki D. Commissariat, who was a younger cousin of Feroze. She told me that Feroze was adopted by Shirin Commissariat when he was seven months old.⁴

There is a bizarre rumour about Feroze’s origin. I first stumbled upon it in Young India. According to this rumour, Feroze was the son of a Muslim by the name of Nawab Khan, a liquor supplier. At the suggestion of Mahatma Gandhi, he changed his name to Feroze Gandhi through an affidavit in London when he married Indira Gandhi at an alleged secret Muslim ceremony.⁵

This rumour can be safely laid to rest – I have not seen any documentation backing up this statement. In fact, there is enough evidence to show that Feroze Gandhi grew up with the name he was known by all his life. For example, he was a junior scout under his boyhood hero Keshav Dev Malaviya, who was the Scout Master and later became a union minister. In 1961, as Malaviya recounted, ‘We knew each other for thirty-five years, twenty-eight of them in politics. It did not occur to me then that Feroze Gandhi would in later years become a political comrade working shoulder-to-shoulder with me in our struggle for independence. He joined me as a scout in about 1924 or 1925 or perhaps somewhat earlier.’⁶

This was more than ten years before Feroze went to London at the end of 1935. The alleged change of name is said to have happened while he was in London, but the proof that his name was Feroze Gandhi before then can be found in newspaper reports in the Leader of December 1933, about him being arrested in the Meja tehsil in Uttar Pradesh as a Congress worker. There were headlines like ‘Mr Feroze Gandhi arrested’ and he was described as, ‘Mr Feroze Gandhi, a well-known local Congress worker’. In addition, in those days he was often named in the correspondence of Jawaharlal Nehru.

Parsi relatives of Feroze Gandhi have been very upset by statements about his lineage. The truth about his origin, whatever it is, takes precedence over natural sentiments of protecting his memory and the family name. As it is, his memory has nevertheless been neglected.

In the first few years after Independence, the opposition to the ruling Congress party was very weak, to say the least. Although he was a member of the ruling party, it was as a backbencher over the years that Feroze Gandhi emerged as the unofficial opposition leader, often raising questions to his father-in-law in the Lok Sabha. He introduced himself into legislative work what I, in conformity with the notion of ‘investigative journalism’, would describe as ‘investigative parliamentarianism’.

One evening in September 1993, my friend and assistant Sudhanshu Sharma wanted to see an acquaintance in Allahabad. We went to a house not too far from the Allahabad High Court. It turned out that the owner of the house was a senior lawyer and a respected member of the Allahabad community, who had been investigating atrocities that took place in another part of India during the Emergency in 1975–77.

When he got to know that I was doing research on the life of Feroze Gandhi, he spontaneously told me, ‘Feroze’s father was, in fact, Raj Bahadur Kamla Prasad Kakkar, an advocate practising in the district court and chairman of the municipal board of Allahabad. I had heard the rumour and one day I asked his son, Shyam Nath Kakkar, who was a member of the counsellor bar, if his father really was Feroze’s father. I cannot say that it is incorrect, was his answer.’

This was, of course, an interesting piece of information, and even though my source was a very reliable one, I wanted to verify it. To my surprise it came to me sooner than expected. Four days later, I met another lawyer in Allahabad. When he got to know that I was on the trail of Feroze Gandhi, he immediately said, ‘Miss Commissariat had a very good friend, who was like a father to Feroze.’

Later that same evening, my new source, who was a brother-in-law of Shyam Nath Kakkar, explained to me – without being asked to do so – that Shyam Nath Kakkar once had told him that his boyhood playmate Feroze Gandhi also was his half-brother. During her pregnancy, Shirin Commissariat had been away from Allahabad for a year. She could easily have been away without causing any suspicion, since she used to go to Europe every third year in order to keep pace with the latest developments in medicine. The reason for her adoption of Feroze seemed to be explained.

And if this is the truth, Jehangir Faredoon and Rattimai Gandhi did not give away their youngest child to Shirin Commissariat because she was childless. She adopted Feroze because he was her own son. Together, the people involved in such a cleverly performed conspiracy had come up with a story that could be accepted in society. If it was like that, then the bluff worked. We must remember that Shirin Commissariat was a very progressive, cultivated lady and greatly respected in Allahabad. It was, of course, important to shield her reputation.

This unexpected development gave me the urge to find out more about Feroze’s birth. Up to this point I had not consulted any birth certificate. The immediate question was: what do the records of the Parsi lying-in hospital in the Fort area of Bombay say? It turned out that according to the register book, no Rattimai Gandhi gave birth to a son there on 12 September 1912. Neither had any Shirin Commissariat.⁷

But Tehmina Gandhy, Feroze’s sister (or cousin depending on who is what in this riddle), was ‘very emphatic about his birth’ there and Onkar Nath Bhargava, who got the information from her, stated that ‘there is no reason to doubt it.’

We have reached a point where so many conflicting stories about Feroze Gandhi’s parentage abound that it now seems possible that his origin has been the subject of a veritable cover-up.

If that is the case, such a concocted story must have been spread ever since Feroze was born. Is it possible that his ‘cousins’ thought that they were his brothers and sisters? We can’t be sure. When I interviewed Ratoo Dastur in Bombay in 1986, she told me that Rattimai Gandhi was afraid that Feroze would get diabetes, because his father Jehangir Gandhi had the disease. That statement obviously goes against the idea that someone else was Feroze’s father, unless Rattimai Gandhi was extremely clever, planting this piece of information as a part of covering up Feroze’s origin.

Now, I would perhaps not have revealed that Raj Bahadur Kamla Prasad Kakkar and Shirin Commissariat could be Feroze’s parents, but as it happened, a third source had appeared.

My third independent source of information appeared out of the blue via an email from India. It was from a member of the Nehru family. It said: ‘A neighbour of mine on this road, who belongs to an old Allahabad family says that Feroze’s father was an Allahabad lawyer, S.N. Kakkar, and his mother a Miss Commissariat.’⁸

Here S.N. Kakkar, who otherwise has been described as a half-brother of Feroze, is given the role as the father of Feroze. This piece of information nevertheless points in the same direction as the other reports, though S.N. Kakkar somewhere on the road obviously has been mixed up with his father Raj Bahadur Kamla Prasad Kakkar.

Are we now in the position to say with hundred per cent assurance that the riddle is solved? No, we cannot, but if the involved families decide on using DNA, this question mark could easily be straightened out into an exclamation mark once and for all.

Such a demonstration would for sure be of advantage for all the parties concerned, including the history of modern India. The truth is better than uncertainty.

When editing this biography in August 2016, it was brought to my attention that a birth certificate for Feroze Gandhi has surfaced. The birth day is given as 12 September 1912, but the day of registering his birth is given as 23 September.

Reviews for Feroze The Forgotten Gandhi

[E Y · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A very informative and interesting story about a free and brave soul.