It was the late in the evening on January 12, 1924. At the Servants of India Society house in Poona, the organisation’s President VS Srinivasa Sastri had just sat to have his supper, when the local doctor came rushing in and huffed out an urgent message: Mahatma Gandhi, incarcerated in Yerawada Jail on the city’s periphery, had been taken to Sassoon Hospital for an emergency operation to remove his appendix. Gandhi had asked to meet Sastri before his surgery.
Gandhi and Sastri had a history. When Gandhi returned from South Africa in early 1915, his guru Gopal Krishna Gokhale had wanted him to join the Servants of India Society, with an eye towards eventually leading it. Within the Society however, Sastri had functioned for several years as a devoted second-in-command. When Gokhale died in February 1915, at the relatively young age of 49, he had not appointed a successor.
After a testy meeting where Gandhi and Sastri differed widely on the goals of the Society, Gandhi…