The House of Truth: A Biography of Dr Rajendra Prasad (The First President of India)

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This biography of Dr Rajendra Prasad has grown out of the conviction that among all the major political figures of the Indian freedom movement Rajendra Prasad remained closest to the Gandhian ideals of Truth and Non-violence. His contribution to the constructive work of social reform and inculcating true patriotic fervour among the masses on a national level has been incomparable. Even in charting the course of the freedom movement, defining its policy framework, and structuring a constitutionally sound democratic system for the nation, he occupies a position that remains unparalleled. He is like a colossus striding the Indian political arena for nearly three decades on either side of India's tryst with freedom.

The present book is an humble attempt to recreate a unique life of patriotic dedication-in times when a vast multi-cultural nation was awakening from its centuries-old deep slumber and inertia - striding along the path of immortality, following in the footsteps of Gandhi, the great modern crusader of truth and non-violence, of peace and harmony, with full conviction and faith in his master's spiritual re-interpretation of modern Indian political history.

Dr BSM Murty taught as Professor of English and Linguistics at the universities of Bhagalpur and Magadh in Bihar, and Taiz in Yemen, till 2002. Some of his published books in English are The Haunted Palace (Study of Edgar Poe's Fiction, 2012), The Wizard in the Street (Poe's Best Stories, 2020), Two-Way Mirror (Poems, 2020), The Critical Perspective (2020), Macbeth: A Study (1995), etc. He has also edited and published a number of books in Hindi: Premchand Patron Mein (2005), Babu Jagajivan Ram: Ek Jeevani (2010), Birendra Narayan Granthavali (5 Vols., 2010), Shivapoojan Sahay Sahitya Samagra (10 vols, 2011), Pravasi ki Atmakatha (2015) and Darpan Mein Ve Din (2021).

Just as there is an aura of radiance, 'the golden orb', which must be dispelled in the quest for Truth, every biography worth its name is also a search for truth-truth in relation to human life as it unfolds in this world, in a world encircled in multiple boundaries. Truth was the polar principle of the Indian freedom movement with non-violence as its innate element; two sides of the same coin. The essence of non-violence lay in the purity of truth because one is inconceivable without the other. Truth is the transcendence of action, and action subsumes violence. There can be no violence in a state of truth. Violence axiomatically implies non-truth and deceit.

This essential principle of truth and non-violence was the epiphany for Gandhi in his political action, an invincible principle which he had gained through his various experiments with truth in South Africa, and had put it again to test in the Champaran satyagrah where he had first met Rajendra Prasad. Soon there after, during the non-cooperation movement, Gandhi had established the nodal hub of the political movement for the freedom movement in the form of Sadaqat Ashram ('The House of Truth') in Patna. Several acres of land, along with its talismanic name 'Sadaqat Ashram', were given by Mazharul Haque, a barrister friend of Gandhi, who himself abandoned his palatial residence elsewhere in Patna to go and live there with hundreds of students who had dropped out of schools and colleges on Gandhi's call. Later a Vidyapeeth (national university) was established there with Haque as the Vice-Chancellor and Rajendra Prasad as Principal.

Prasad, too, had shifted there soon in one of the cottages where he continued to reside during the next three decades of the movement. And even during his tenures as Minister in the interim government and later, as President, he would always stay in that cottage during his occasional visits to Patna. After his retirement from the Presidency also he preferred to stay in the same cottage till a new more spacious residence was built alongside where he breathed his last. For Prasad it had been a life-long abode in the 'House of Truth'during his long journey on the path of truth and sacrifice, with truth as its ultimate goal.

It is therefore that in this new revised, improved and slightly augmented edition of the book, the original title-The House of Truth' has been restored to the story. Several other minor emendations and retouchings have also been made at appropriate places. In my acknowledgement 1 have expressed my deep gratitude to everyone who has helped me in this noble enterprise which, in the last phase of my own life, has been like a pilgrimage to truth.

The first and longest-serving president of our republic, Rajendra Prasad (1884-1963) shone as a star of the freedom movement in the two decades that preceded his presidency. With Gandhi, who was 15 years older, Prasad served as an enthusiastic and faithful junior, except in the very final phase when almost everyone including Prasad stood on one side and an isolated Mahatma on the other. With the other stars of that period - Patel, Rajaji, Azad, Nehru, Ghaffar Khan and Subhas, to name them in the order of their birth, Prasad's relationship was always of an equal.

Often spoken of as 'simple', 'God's good man' or 'the least disliked', Rajen Babu (the moniker millions used for the tall Bihari) was of course a good deal more than any of that. Intellectually he was brilliant. As a youth, he topped most exams when Bengalis as well as Biharis were his competitors. When needed, he was tough, as in 1949 when Nehru and, for a short while, Patel too, mistakenly thought Prasad would step aside from the nation's first presidency in Rajaji's favour.

A notable South Indian intellectual, the late A. N. Sivaraman, once told me of the impact he had felt in 1936 from Rajen Babu's frank speech at the Lucknow Congress of that year, over which Jawaharlal Nehru had presided.Rajen Babu was also the superb organizer of relief in 1934 when Bihar was hit by a massive earthquake, and an astute politician who never allowed his feet to skid on what even in his time was Bihar's slippery ground.

In addition, Prasad's was an outstanding legal mind that presided over the Constituent Assembly from which emerged our Constitution, and a scholar who wrote three major books: India Divided (a trenchant 1946 critique of the two-nation theory), an Autobiography, composed in Hindi first, and At the Feet of the Mahatma.

As far as Gandhi is concerned, Prasad was not only his principal colleague in Champaran in 1917, he was the one picked as Congress president in 1934 when Gandhi strategically withdrew from the body, and the man who in January 1948 (as Congress president again, and with Maulana Azad as his partner) successfully mobilized Delhi's citizens and factions to persuade Gandhi to end his final fast for communal amity.

In 1918, when Prasad visited Gujarat to talk with Gandhi, the latter introduced him to Gujaratis as a brother given by God to make up for Gandhi's deceased biological brothers. In Gujarat, Prasad also met Vallabhbhai Patel and formed a lifelong bond with him. Travelling with Prasad to Gujarat in 1918 was his comrade from the previous year's Champaran struggle, the Sindhi professor J. B. Kripalani, who would later write of the years 1917-20:

The same phenomenon I witnessed again and again in the life of many of our leaders. As soon as they had joined the fight for freedom, they seemed to have left their old life behind, never to be resumed. They were, as it were, born again as Indians.

Of the thousands who found new lives risky, costly yet satisfying new lives-and became the freedom struggle's gift to the nation, Rajendra Prasad was among the most talented. Putting it in simplified yet perhaps fair language, it can be said that Prasad, Patel and Rajaji were like younger brothers to Gandhi, and Jawaharlal like a son.

While Nehru was named early on (in 1934) as 'the future helmsman' and accepted as such by large numbers in India, Patel managed the Congress party, and Rajaji articulated Gandhi's strategies in commonsense terms for the public. As for Rajendra Prasad, he was a sort of Gandhi substitute, someone unmistakably and selflessly serving the Indian people and their interests.

Socially conservative but willing to change with the times, a descendant of kayasth zamindars whose fortunes were brighter in his grandfather's times than in his own, Rajen Babu was the very opposite of communal. Muslims formed a conspicuous part of the society that raised him, and he himself was as fluent in Urdu as in Hindi, and unwilling to make any basic distinction between the two. And if Nehru was more westernized than the average Indian, and neither Patel nor Rajaji could naturally represent India's Hindi-speaking masses, Prasad was very much a proud son of India's large Hindi-speaking belt.