Gandhi & Churchill (124 page)

^†63
That figure does not include the more than 400,000 men comprising the Indian Army.
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^*64
The Army Act allowed for trial for murder or manslaughter by court-martial only for acts committed on active service; strictly speaking, Dyer’s actions in Amritsar did not fit this description, since he had gone to Amritsar on his own authority, without specific orders. The other reason for avoiding court-martial was the fear that Dyer might be acquitted and demand reinstatement: that would mean even more public outrage than before.
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^*65
Ironically, Joynson-Hicks would later be Churchill’s ally in fighting the India Bill.
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^*66
In the 1880s only four percent of students in Indian colleges were Muslims, even though they were 22 percent of the population. At the start of the new century the literacy rate among Muslim males was half that of Hindus. Among Muslim women it was virtually nonexistent.
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^*67
This wish directly contradicted British support of Prince Faisal’s revolt against the Turks, which caused friction between the Foreign Office and India Office. But neither challenged the basic axiom that the future of the Middle East belonged, not to the people who actually lived there, but to the victorious Allies.
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^*68
Perhaps for that reason Blunt did not give up hope that Churchill would come around to supporting Home Rule for India. “I should not be surprised if some day he made the Indian cause his own,” he wrote. Indeed, Churchill one day would, but not in the way Blunt assumed.
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^*69
Promulgated in 1917, the Balfour Declaration pledged British support for an eventual Jewish homeland in Palestine.
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^*70
One sign of that resurgence was the large turnout for the funeral of General Reginald Dyer, “the butcher of Amritsar,” on July 28, 1927. Rudyard Kipling sent a wreath, as did Dyer’s former regiment, the 26th Punjabis. In its obituary the
Morning Post
called Dyer “The Man Who Saved India.”
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^*71
Gandhi belatedly realized this, and by 1931 a team of disciples devised a smaller, portable charkha that would fit into a briefcase. Nicknamed the book or Yeravda Charkha because Gandhi used it during his extended stay at the prison following the Salt March, it became the most popular version of the charkha. It is still sold over the Indian Internet today.
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^*72
Including daily inquiries of “How are your bowels today?” Gandhi saw intestinal regularity as a sign of spiritual health and took a keen interest in the results, whether in his case or that of his disciples. Indeed, one of his favorite books in London had been
Constipation and Civilization,
which purported to show a direct link between the corruption of modern life and various gastrointestinal disorders.
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^*73
When he found out that some of the older boys had been caught in homosexual practices, he held a six-day fast to admonish them. Homosexuality was a direct reproach to Gandhi’s most cherished values, including both
brahmacharya
and “manliness.” When the same thing had happened at Tolstoy Farm in 1914, Gandhi wrote some of his most anguished and soul-searching passages.
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^†74
Gandhi was a strict vegetarian, but he was no vegan. When he left India for the first time, he had promised his mother to drink no milk, but he considered goat’s milk within bounds of his vow.
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^*75
His friend Hermann Hesse dedicated his best seller on the life of Buddha,
Siddhartha,
to Rolland.
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^*76
Signed in 1922, the treaty set British, American, and other nations’ capital ship ratios at 5:5:3, which meant the Royal Navy actually had to scrap existing ships while its Italian and Japanese counterparts were free to keep building.
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^*77
Some even speculated that he really was Winston’s natural son, born in adultery. The rumors became so rampant at one point that Clementine confronted Churchill and demanded to know if it was true. “I’ve looked the matter up,” he shamefacedly confessed, “but the dates don’t coincide.”
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^*78
Although what follows is a reconstruction, every word is George Lloyd’s verbatim and is in the historical record.
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^*79
In 1925 Joseph Stalin proclaimed that Communism’s aim was no longer world revolution but “socialism in one country,” namely the Soviet Union. The result would be unimaginable pain for the people of Russia. To the rest of the world, however, it meant a respite from “the Bolshevik menace.”
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^*80
Technically London was correct. By law, only Parliament had the statutory authority to devolve the powers that would make India a self-governing part of the empire.
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^*81
Interestingly, his grandfather, like Churchill’s father, had once been secretary of state for India.
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^*82
Irwin reduced that to three.
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^*83
This phrase actually comes from a later Churchill article, but captures his views in both.
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^*84
No relation to Gandhi’s disciple, “Sardar” Vallabhbhai Patel.
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^*85
Yet all the evidence suggests that Dandi was not the first choice for ending the march. That seems to have been Badalpur, on the tidal Mahi Sagar River and only eight days’ walk from Sabarmati. But one of Gandhi’s aides, Kalianji Mehta, proposed extending the march, for the maximum publicity benefit. Gandhi agreed, and an informal committee of Patel, Mehta, Narhari Parikh, and Lakshmidas Asare selected Dandi.
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^*86
“Hail to Vishnu.”
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^*87
See Chapter 28.
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^*88
Hoare would one day inadvertently help engineer Gandhi’s assassination. A book he wrote on the Russian conspiracy to assassinate Grand Duke Sergei,
The Fourth Seal,
proved an invaluable guide to the men who plotted the Mahatma’s death in 1948. Gandhi himself had read and enjoyed
The Fourth Seal
in the Yeravda prison and recommended it to his secretary Desai.
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^*89
It was Sir Samuel Hoare who achieved this feat, as part of the official reception for the Round Table Conference. At first the king refused to meet a man he considered a “rebel fakir” (echoes of Churchill). Gandhi, in turn, refused to meet the king-emperor in anything but dhoti and shawl. In the end, however, Hoare prevailed on His Majesty, and the meeting went well, although Hoare claimed he heard George V mutter something about “the little man” with “no proper clothes on.”

The king could not resist a final jab as they parted: “Remember, Mr. Gandhi, I won’t have any attacks on my empire!” Gandhi smiled and replied, “I must not be drawn into a political argument in Your Majesty’s Palace after Your Majesty’s hospitality.” All observers, including Hoare, thought the encounter a success. The feelings of Churchill and other India hard-liners can be imagined. George Lloyd called it “tea with treason.”
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^*90
The driver, Mario Constasino, became an acquaintance and even attended Winston’s first lecture in New York.
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^*91
Including, ironically, the salt tax.
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^*92
With one exception, namely Samuel Hoare. Later, when Prime Minister Churchill was repeatedly urged to send Hoare to India as viceroy. Churchill refused to consider him. Not then. Not ever.
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^*93
Only the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1932 finally forced the cabinet to rescind the Ten Year Rule regarding future conflicts, which Churchill had so foolishly extended.
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^*94
There is even evidence that Baldwin and his secretary for war knew of the leaks, and approved. They may have seen Winston’s “warmongering” as a usefully oblique way to prepare the British public for the need for more defense spending: hardly proof that Churchill had become a permanent political pariah.
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^*95
Nirad Chaudhuri would remember that Bengali nationalists of his acquaintance dismissed Gandhi as a
napumsaka,
a Bengali word for an unmanly schmuck: “a dud, in fact.”
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^*96
He did not live to see it. He died a broken man on November 9, 1940, in the darkest hours of the Blitz.
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^*97
Later he would point out that he and fellow polio sufferer Franklin D. Roosevelt were responsible for the lives of more human beings than any other leaders on earth.
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^*98
Hitler had proposed a final solution for Britain’s India problem to Lord Halifax when they met in 1938. “Shoot Gandhi,” he told the startled ex-viceroy.
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^*99
Nirad Chaudhuri noticed a revealing snobbery about Nehru’s spoken English. In any discussion Nehru would listen carefully to his interlocutor’s accent, then carefully calibrate his own so that it would sound at least one social cut above.
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^*100
It was a last revenge for the Amritsar massacre twenty-one years earlier, which O’Dwyer had sanctioned and then followed up with harsh martial law measures across the Punjab.
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^*101
Britain had had no prime minister from the House of Lords since Lord Rosebery in 1892. Since then the tradition, but not the rule, had been that a seat in the House of Commons was the prerequisite for anyone occupying Number 10.
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^*102
Since Winston’s mother, Jennie Jerome Churchill, had been an American.
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^*103
Or the Jews and Arabs in Palestine. Amery had been a major author of the Balfour Declaration.
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^*104
At the end of May 1940 Halifax raised the possibility of trying to reach terms with Hitler. (He believed Britain could not go on with France defeated.) It took Churchill four days to convince the cabinet finally and unambiguously to refuse. On June 26 he had to remind Halifax that it was the government’s position to “fight on to death”—even in the shadow of Dunkirk.
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^*105
These setbacks included not only Norway but the invasion of Greece in March 1941, which had led to the bloody evacuation of Crete and serious Royal Navy losses.
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^†106
On December 11, Hitler declared war on the United States.
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^*107
The revolt was led by the anti-British and pro-German Rashid Ali, who staged a coup d’état in April 1941. The Indian Tenth Infantry Division landed at Basra on April 18 in response. Rashid’s ultimatum to the British led to a counterultimatum. On May 2 British bombs fell on Iraqi troops surrounding the RAF base at Habbaniya. After several days of fierce fighting the city of Fallujah fell to British and Indian forces, even though the German Luftwaffe sent planes from a base in Mosul to hit British installations. The British took Baghdad soon afterward, and on June 1, 1941, Rashid Ali fled first to Iran, then to Germany. His associate Yunis el-Sabawi, who had translated
Mein Kampf
into Arabic, was captured and hanged. Another young officer who fought for Rashid Ali was Khairallah Talfah. He escaped but would pass the lessons of the Iraq war, and of the Nazi cause, on to his four-year-old nephew, Saddam Hussein.
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^*108
The boy was Lee Kuan Yew, future president of the Republic of Singapore.
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^*109
The purpose was to counteract the pro-British perspective being broadcast on the BBC with the help of the Ministry of Information. The man who composed the scripts for the BBC (which Azad Hind said stood for the “Bluff and Bluster Corporation”), and later read some of them over the air himself, was former Burma policeman Eric Blair, better known under his pen name, George Orwell.
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^†110
Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the most prominent Muslim member of the Congress.
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^*111
John Lambton, Lord Durham, was sent to Canada as governor-general in 1838. He returned five months later to recommend union and responsible government for Canada.
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^*112
He was correct. The Japanese had badly overextended themselves with the speed of their advance. The early monsoon in April 1942 also put an end to any thoughts of an invasion. Besides, India played no real part in their imperial ambitions. They craved the oil from Burma and the Dutch East Indies, not the headache of being the Raj’s successor.
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