Gandhi & Churchill (25 page)

It was an idiosyncratic twist on the cliché Victorian attitude toward sexuality. Even Gandhi’s statement that “
brahmacharya
means control of the senses in thought, word, and deed” contains clear echoes of the Boy Scout creed.
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But such self-control, he believed, was “impossible to attain by mere human effort.” Instead, the truly enlightened would preserve their sexual essences through a kind of spiritual grace, like the celibacy of a monk. Certainly until the end of Gandhi’s life
brahmacharya
was his supreme act of personal triumph. The issue constantly intruded into his dealings with women, even into politics. Exactly forty years later, when Gandhi was in his late seventies, he could be overheard grimly muttering, “if I can do this,” meaning keep his vow of
brahmacharya,
“I can still beat Jinnah.”
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But in 1906 “the prospect of the vow brought a certain kind of exultation,” he remembered. “Instead of closing the door to real freedom, [it] opened it.” Certainly Kasturbai “had no objection.” She and Gandhi were already sleeping in separate beds when the family moved to Phoenix Farm. For Gandhi himself, turning his back on sex and normal family life seemed to open “limitless vistas of service.”
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And at that moment the next political bombshell was already exploding.

In August 1906 the Colonial Office announced a new law as part of its racial settlement under the new Transvaal constitution. The law required every Indian resident over eight years of age to be fingerprinted and registered, so that he or she could offer proof of residence if and when new restrictions on Indian immigration were imposed. To the government, it seemed a convenient way to keep track of which Indians were legal residents in the Transvaal and which were not. Prominent Indian politicians in London, including member of Parliament and sometime Gandhi mentor Dadabhai Naoroji, signed off on the idea, saying “the subject was a small one and the real issue to Indians was India.”
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But Gandhi thought it an outrage. He knew that the British judicial system limited fingerprinting to criminal suspects. He supposed (wrongly) that the law was the first step toward complete expulsion of Indians from the colony. “I have never known legislation of this nature being directed against free men in any part of the world,” he would write. South Africa’s Indians had to take drastic steps in response.
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Gandhi had found a new target for his anger about the treatment of Indians under British colonial rule—but also an unexpected new outlet for his belief in the power of self-sacrifice. All his life Gandhi had the power to make a sudden decision and hold to it with a passion and tenacity that astonished those who thought they knew him. These supreme acts of will could shock, inspire, and sometimes appall or intimidate others. Above all he tolerated no opposition. He had decided to go to London despite the orders of the caste council; and he had refused to sit at the feet of the coach driver at the Maritzburg railway station. His vow of
brahmacharya
was a third such decision.

The announcement of the registration law roused in him the same ferocious, almost reckless intensity.
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It seemed the perfect opportunity for Indians to show the “pluck and determination,” the courage, honor, and self-sacrifice, of soldiers on the battlefield. Gandhi found validation in the fact that he was not alone in his outrage. The Muslim-led Hamidia Islamic Society organized a mass meeting at Johannesburg’s Empire Theater on September 11, 1906, to protest the so-called “Black Act.” Hamidia’s leaders were the meeting’s two principal speakers.
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By the time Gandhi rose to speak, the crowd in the theater had swelled to more than three thousand people. Hindus and Muslims, Gujaratis and Madrasis, wealthy merchants and lawyers, ordinary street hawkers and store clerks, all jammed together to protest this unwarranted attack on their rights and dignity.

Gandhi’s speech was in effect a call to arms. He asked every Indian in the Transvaal to pledge that they would never allow their fingerprints to be taken and would never fill out a registration card, even if it meant losing their livelihood and going to prison. “There is only one course open to someone like me—to die, but not to submit to the law!” It was Gandhi’s Patrick Henry “Give me liberty or give me death” speech, and it ended with a stirring peroration:

We may have to go to jail, where we will be insulted…Hard labour may be imposed upon us. We may be flogged by rude warders…Suffering from starvation and similar hardships in jail, some of us may fall ill and die…[But] we shall go on until we succeed, wisdom lies in our understanding that we shall have to suffer things like all that and worse.
Provided the entire community manfully stands the test,
the end will be near.

The British Indian Association’s president Haji Habib then led the crowd in taking a vow to go to jail rather than submit to the new law. “I can never forget the scene, which is present before my mind’s eye as I write,” Gandhi would remember twenty years later.
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Then everyone raised three thunderous cheers for King-Emperor Edward VII and sang “God Save the King.”

Only hours after the crowd dispersed, the building accidentally caught on fire and burned to the ground. But phoenixlike, Gandhi’s first campaign to use “passive resistance,” as he would call it, to overturn an unjust law and to forge a new muscular Indian identity arose from the ashes of the Empire Theater.

Gandhi, Habib, and the others did agree to a final gesture. They would send Gandhi to London to petition the government in person. An election in Britain that January had brought a Liberal landslide and sweeping change in Parliament. Members like the Labour Party’s Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald, and the new Secretary of State for India, Sir John Morley, had a strong sympathetic interest in Indian affairs. In India many were hoping Morley might even reverse the hated Bengal partition.
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Perhaps the Black Act would meet the same fate.

Here a new opportunity arose to test Gandhi’s trust in the British sense of fair play and justice. As his ship RMS
Armadale Castle
slipped out of Capetown on October 3, the issue in his mind boiled down to this: “Is the British constitution going to be revised at Pretoria? Or will justice prevail?”
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Gandhi was about to find out. His baggage contained letters of introduction to prominent politicians and a list of planned meetings with the key decision-makers on South Africa. They included Secretary Morley, Prime Minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Colonial Secretary Lord Elgin, and the Liberals’ bright new hope, Assistant Secretary for the Colonies Winston Churchill.

For Churchill, the six years that had passed since South Africa had been rocky ones. True, he had the seat in Parliament that he coveted—that tangible link to a dead and adored father. True, also,
From London to Ladysmith
and his public lectures on his experiences in the Boer War (including a speaking tour in the United States) had netted him a “modest fortune” of £10,000.
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But his political apprenticeship had been full of frustrations and disappointments. None were as severe or as soul-testing as Gandhi’s, but they were a prelude to the more difficult ones that would come later.

He had arrived home in 1900 in time for his mother’s wedding to a man only nineteen days older than he was. (She was forty-six.)
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It was the social scandal of the season; his brother Jack refused to appear at the wedding.
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The marriage also meant that the energies that Jennie Churchill had hitherto devoted to her eldest son’s advancement would be directed elsewhere. For the first time he was truly on his own.

Then his maiden speech in Parliament failed to impress. It had been a convoluted defense of the Tory government’s conduct of the war, refuting Liberal critics like David Lloyd George who had accused the government of using “torture” and other barbarous methods to suppress the Boer insurgency. The
Daily Chronicle
had said that Winston seemed “undistinguished-looking” and “lacks force.” Everyone was still weighing Winston’s speeches in the scales of his father’s dramatic performances and generally finding him wanting.
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Finally, he had his disagreements with his party’s leaders, Arthur Balfour and Joseph Chamberlain. This too was a Churchill tradition. But whereas Randolph had picked fights with the leadership as a political tactic, for Winston the fights reflected his growing belief that the Tories no longer stood for what he believed. They exhibited a pessimism, a lack of confidence in Britain’s future, that Winston found infuriating and that surfaced above all on the issue of free trade. That issue led to his final break with the Conservative Party in 1904. At the heart of the divorce, curiously enough, was the question of India.

Joseph Chamberlain—the same Chamberlain who had advised Gandhi to appease white sentiment in South Africa—had triggered the debate. A former manufacturer from Birmingham, he worried that the empire had become too big and expensive. In a speech to the Colonial Conference in 1902 Chamberlain claimed that Britain was becoming “like a weary Titan,” who “staggers under the too vast orb of his fate.”
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He proposed solving the problem of imperial overstretch by merging Australia, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom into a vast imperial federation. This quixotic idea went nowhere. Then he tried again, proposing turning the British Empire into a single common market, in which colonies and mother country would share goods and services while high tariff walls around the perimeter preserved jobs and industries.
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Chamberlain’s term for his imperial common market was Imperial Preference. For a few years it was debated in newspapers, in learned books, and in Westminster, then vanished into political oblivion. Certainly the proposal flew in the face of the free market orthodoxy that both major political parties had accepted for more than a century. That was why free trade true believers like Winston Churchill reacted so strongly against it, while others, like socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, endorsed it (for a time Beatrice entertained marrying Chamberlain). It seems doubtful that Chamberlain ever really thought seriously about the possible economic consequences of his proposal, especially to his hometown of Manchester. To him, Imperial Preference was a political catchphrase. To other Tories, however, it seemed a call to statism, one that Winston Churchill was furiously eager to rebut.

To a dedicated free trader, to a Whig out of the old school of Adam Smith and Macaulay, or to a Tory like Churchill’s father, free market capitalism was an essential part of the British way of life and empire. Churchill was also prepared to argue that free markets were essential to human progress.

“The British Empire is held together by moral not by material forces,” he told an audience in Manchester in February 1904. “The greatest triumphs of our race have been won not for Britain only, but for mankind.” One such moral principle was constitutional government; another was ending the slave trade. The idea of free markets “thrown open to the commerce of all nations freely, to buy and barter as they will,” was a third. Free trade, he argued, had created a Britain that was “not inferior in riches, freedom, and contentment to any nation” and that bid fair to do the same for the rest of the world. Churchill’s prime exhibit was, strikingly, India.

Like his father, Winston resolutely believed the economic dealings between Britain and India rested not on imperialist domination but the free exchange of raw goods (mostly Indian) for manufactured ones (mostly British). Others, especially Indians like Gandhi, might disagree. But Chamberlain’s Imperial Preference left India out in the cold. “That [India’s] markets should be free and her people prosperous and contented is absolutely vital to Lancashire trade,” Churchill said. Certainly “India is a great trust for which we are responsible…The lives, liberties, the progress towards civilization—towards a better and happier life—of nearly 300 million souls are in our hands.” But to impose imperial trade restrictions on India, as Chamberlain was proposing, would destroy that trust and bond forever. “Destroy that,” Winston warned, “and the whole stately and stupendous edifice” of the Raj would collapse.
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For Britons to turn their backs on India for short-term selfish gain, he said, would betray a maxim that was emblazoned throughout history “in letters of shining gold: ‘The victory of Britain means the welfare of the world.’”
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Churchill’s stirring defense of free trade echoed the optimism buttressed by the arrogance of Lord Curzon, another free trade Tory. “Tolerance and liberty are always more profitable than arbitrary restrictions,” Winston confidently asserted. “Large views always triumph over small ideas.” Humanity might disagree on where and how free-market capitalism might lead in the future, but “we are not going back—not one inch.”
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