At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awaken to life and freedom," thus spoke the designated Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, on August 14, 1947. But on that day, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the supposed victor of that freedom movement, was in Calcutta. And the national capital and its surroundings were convulsed in communal mayhem, Indian against Indian.AdvertisementSo, Rajmohan Gandhi, grandson of the Mahatma, writes in a biography of C Rajagopalachari, his maternal grandfather, Rajaji, A Life: ‘The Mahatma was feeling the pain of fratricide, not the thrill of freedom.” When the so-called liberated...