By plane, ship, train, automobile and bullock cart, India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had been campaigning all over the country, stirring up votes for India's four-month-long first general election. He had traveled 23,000 miles, made as many as ten speeches a day, addressed 25 million people. In fact, he had been just about everywhere but in his own constituency in Allahabad. There was no need to canvass Allahabad, he said rather airily.
Last week he got distressing news. His only opponent in Allahabad, 52-year-old Prabhudatt Brahmachari, who wears a luxuriant grey beard, orange-and red-rimmed spectacles, a saffron robe and a long white loincloth, had been quietly building up the vote. Quietly was the word for it: he had done it without uttering a single sound, except an occasional loud laugh.
One Plank. Back in 1921 Brahmachari, like Nehru, came under the spell of Mahatma Gandhi, but Brahmachari became a sadhu, or holy man. He took vows of silence and celibacy, was jailed several times by the British (once along with Nehru), set up a camp on the banks of the River Ganges to study the Hindu epics, and wrote the first 60 volumes of a 180-volume biography of the Hindu god Krishna. One day last October he cried out: "He nath Narayan!" (meaning, "Oh, Lord God," the holy man's only departure from silence). An attendant brought him his Shaeffer fountain pen and paper. He wrote: "If today I participate in an election, it's because my innermost voice bids me do so."
Brahmachari had but one plank in his platform: uncompromising opposition to the Nehru-sponsored Hindu Code Bill, which sanctions inter-caste marriage, relaxes the prohibition against marriage between cousins seven times removed, and, for the first time, makes divorce possible —though still very difficult—for Hindu women. Wrote Brahmachari: "The Hindu Code Bill will ruin religion, confuse castes, undermine the authority of the Scriptures, damage Hindu culture, split every family, pit brothers against sisters, and profit only lawyers." Nehru, he said, is "a black Englishman [who] studied in the West . . . and is so stuffed with its ways that he wants us all to adopt Christian customs."
Holy Man Brahmachari toured Nehru's constituency in a 1931 Dodge sedan, accompanied by a troupe of Hindu singers. To the chanting of Hindu psalms, he danced on the platform, rhythmically tapping a pair of small brass cymbals. A disciple read from a pamphlet he had written. Brahmachari on U.S. divorce: "I have heard that in America . . . women marry and divorce as many as three husbands a day, and there are some women who have had several hundred spouses each." On U.S. marriage: "An Indian student, visiting an American cemetery, found a young woman seated by the side of a tomb, fanning it with her hand. He asked her: 'Are you trying to emulate the famous love of the Hindu women for their husbands?' He explained that in India women think that their husbands are almost gods. The young woman said: 'My husband and I loved each other, but when he died he made me promise that I would not remarry so long as his tomb was wet. I am fanning it so that it will become dry quickly and I can marry my current sweetheart.'"