Gandhi & Churchill (27 page)

The
Illustrated Police News
’s heroic version of Churchill’s escape from a Boer prison in December 1899 (the truth was somewhat different). Later, at the battle of Spion Kop, Churchill and Gandhi would pass within yards of each other without realizing it. (Broadwater/Churchill Archives)

Gandhi as he appeared when he met Churchill in London in October 1906. (V. Jhaveri/Peter Rühe)

Churchill as secretary of state for the Colonies after his first and only meeting with Gandhi. When asked how to proceed on Gandhi’s demand for equal rights for Indians in South Africa, Churchill’s response was: “Dawdle.” (Broadwater/Churchill Archives)

A rare action photograph of South African police halting Gandhi’s dramatic march to the Transvaal, November 1913. It shows Gandhi (center, with stick) in Indian peasant dress, which he adopted after he felt Churchill and the British government had betrayed him. (Local History Museum, Durban/Peter Rühe)

Failure of the Gallipoli campaign in 1915 and the needless death of 200,000 British, Australian, and New Zealand soldiers forced Churchill to resign as first lord of the Admiralty. Yet, ironically, the Gallipoli disaster helped to launch Gandhi’s political career in India. (Hulton/Getty Archives)

The Mahatma radiant: Gandhi meeting with Indian National Congress stalwarts in September 1921, as his Noncooperation movement got underway. “It amazes me,” Churchill told the Indian secretary of state a month later, “that Gandhi should be allowed to go undermining our position month after month and year after year.” (V. Jhaveri/Peter Rühe)

Churchill triumphant: the new chancellor of the exchequer on his way to present his first budget to the House of Commons, 1925. As “the smiling Chancellor,” Churchill turned Budget Day into a major media event. But the decisions he made on military spending made Britain weaker in the years before World War II. (Broadwater/Churchill Archives)

Gandhi using his
charkha
, or spinning wheel, at Sabarmati Ashram, 1926. “The spinning wheel is as much a necessity of Indian life as air and water,” he wrote, although his belief that it was the key to India’s future alienated some of his political allies. (V. Jhaveri/Peter Rühe)

So beginning in 1906 steps were taken to return a degree of self-rule to the former Boer republics and to give more of it to the British colonies of Natal and the Cape.
^*33
This process gave Churchill some twinges of conscience. Natal’s brutal and savage repression of the Zulu rebellion in 1906, which had so horrified Gandhi, horrified Churchill as well. He yearned to step in “to bring this wretched colony—the Hooligans of the British Empire—to its senses.”
⁴⁸
But his support for the principle of self-determination, even if it meant tolerating the intolerable, held him back. When Natal asked for British troops to help to crush the Zulus, he felt he could not refuse. A friend asked if he could not do something about a poor black woman who had had to walk 160 miles to a Natal court to give evidence against her white tormentors. “I am sorry for the poor old lady,” he replied, “but she is not of that ‘Imperial importance’ which would justify our interfering with a self-governing colony.”

Instead, he said, her example would have to stand “as an instructive instance of the native treatment in South Africa”—and white misrule.
⁴⁹
In November 1906 he had to deal with another example, this time against Transvaal’s Indians.

Gandhi and his fellow BIA official Haji Ojer Ali arrived at Southampton on Saturday, October 20, 1906. Gandhi told reporters from the
Tribune
and the
Morning Leader
who met them that the central issue in the Transvaal was the Indians’ “inability to enjoy the ordinary rights of a British subject or even a human being in a civilized country.” His goal in London would be to convince the British Colonial Office to prevent the new registration law from proceeding. Indians accepted the principle of immigration restrictions, he said, and they recognized “the prejudice against color” that ruled across South Africa. But Indians were ready to go to jail, he said, rather than submit to being fingerprinted and registered like common criminals.

“If the Colonies persist in this policy,” Gandhi later told the London
Times,
“they will force the mother country to confront a serious issue.” The mother country in this case was India; in the background were the riots and agitation there aroused by partition. England might not be able to hold India any longer, Gandhi suggested, if its people were “insulted and degraded
as if they belonged to a barbarous race
” (my italics).
⁵⁰

For the question in Gandhi’s mind was still how to make sure that “respectable” middle-class Indians like himself were considered to be on the right side of the color line. He told the progressive Liberal editor W. T. Stead of his frustration when Transvaal whites instinctively lumped Indians in with blacks as “colored people.” The truth was that Indians had “an ancient civilization behind them,” Gandhi said, even more ancient than England’s, and were perfectly capable of enjoying full rights as citizens.
⁵¹

In short, Gandhi was not seeking an end to racism or class distinctions in South Africa. He wanted instead British justice, what Churchill had said was “the foundation stone of British rule” in India. During that raw November Gandhi was determined to find out how committed Churchill and the Colonial Office were to that exalted standard in South Africa.

Chapter Eight

BRIEF ENCOUNTER

1906–1909

We are in a wholly indefensible position.

WINSTON CHURCHILL
, 1906

Blaming the wolf will not help the sheep much. The sheep must learn not to fall into the clutches of the wolf.

MOHANDAS K. GANDHI
, 1907

O
N
N
OVEMBER
7 G
ANDHI AND
H. O. A
LI
attended a banquet for one hundred members of Parliament in the Grand Committee Room at Westminster. The banquet received lavish coverage in the
Times
and ended with a resolution in support of the repeal of the Black Act. Certainly Gandhi’s delegation had powerful friends behind it, white and nonwhite alike. Among them were the two Indian members of Parliament, Dadabhai Naoroji (who sat for the London suburb of Central Finsbury) and Sir Mancherjee Bhownagree. The former was Britain’s first Indian Tory MP; the latter was a founding member of the Indian National Congress.