Gandhi & Churchill (30 page)

Yet Kasturbai could never be for Gandhi what “Clemmie” became for Churchill, a true intellectual partner. She would never learn to read or write fluently, while Clementine had been educated at the Sorbonne. Clementine Churchill also helped to nudge Winston’s politics in a more leftward direction, into the so-called Radical camp of the Liberal Party. Many of the Radicals were men he respected and befriended in Parliament. Churchill became fast friends with their leading spokesman and fellow free trader David Lloyd George, proclaiming him the greatest political genius he ever met. He also befriended Charles Masterman, who was something of a New Ager: he almost became a Christian Socialist before joining the Liberal Party and lived for a time in a settlement house in the London slums. Masterman had won a seat in the 1906 election at the same time as Winston, and swiftly became Winston’s chief political mentor and intellectual confidant. He introduced him to Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who really were socialists. Their friends in turn included the New Age sexologist Havelock Ellis and even his father’s old nemesis, Charles Bradlaugh.

And so, ironically, in 1908 Churchill found himself in contact with some of the same counterculture influences that had affected Gandhi so profoundly two decades earlier. His politics took a distinct, even startling, progressive turn. Free trader though he was, he also decided Clemmie and the Webbs were right: it was time to use the power of government to end unemployment and malnutrition and to shape Britain for the better.

In an article in the
Nation
on March 7, 1909, he wrote that there was “little glory in an Empire which can rule the waves and is unable to flush its sewers (a phrase Gandhi might have used).”
⁴³
In Churchill’s new Radical mood, government intervention did not contradict free market principles.
^*37
Government-legislated social reforms would correct “unbridled” capitalism’s unanticipated side effects. They would create “a net over the abyss,” as he put it, for workers, the sick, and the aged.
⁴⁴

In 1909, Churchill moved from the Colonial Office to the Board of Trade, then to the Home Office the following year. Together with David Lloyd George he crafted two of the most socially progressive measures Parliament had ever passed, the Old Age Pensions Act and the National Insurance Act of 1911. In so doing, Churchill laid the foundation for the British welfare state—an astonishing achievement for a man later critics dismissed as a hopeless reactionary.

But there was another darker side to this new progressive Winston Churchill: his growing interest in eugenics and racial science. Eugenics was hardly a reactionary field in 1909. Virtually every progressive social reformer was keen on it, including Havelock Ellis and the Webbs. (In South Africa Gandhi himself endorsed the idea of “the purity of the [racial] type.”) An interest in race science was the mark of the “advanced” intellectual. Churchill was hardly alone in worrying that “the unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes…constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate,” or insisting that strong government action was needed to prevent “race suicide.”
⁴⁵
However this worry now haunted his faith in the British Empire.

“If the British people will have a great Empire,” Churchill told the National Liberal Club in January 1908, “they will need an imperial race to support the burden.”
⁴⁶
He worried that if the “civilized conditions” of modern society were left on autopilot, they would interrupt the ruthless operations of Darwinian nature that Winwood Reade taught him winnowed out the sick, weak, and mentally infirm from the imperial rank and file. Since history relied on the survival of the fittest, Churchill believed modern society must not be a refuge for the survival of the
un
fittest. Hence the need for government action to prevent the unfit from breeding, and the fear that without “something of the sort the race must decay,” and Britain with it.
⁴⁷
He still believed that under British guidance, humanity was destined to reach the “sunlit uplands,” as he would say later. But now he sensed an edge of darkness on the horizon, a darkness that would grow as the twentieth century wore on.

Three years later he would tell Wilfred Blunt that sterilizing “people of weak intellects” should be mandatory. He even drafted a bill for that purpose as home secretary, involving involuntary sterilization of the retarded and insane with Roentgen rays; it never passed into law.
^*38
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Yet even as Churchill was thinking about how to prevent the unfit from having babies, he and Clementine had one themselves.

Their first child, Dinah, was born July 11, 1909. “The prettiest child ever seen,” he told Lloyd George. “Like her mother, I suppose,” Lloyd George said. “No, she is exactly like me,” Churchill proudly replied.
⁴⁹

That was July 11. Just the day before, a passenger had arrived in London by train. It was Gandhi again. He was rather reluctant to be there, on a mission in which he had little faith. But he found to his surprise and chagrin that the British newspapers were all talking about India, and murder.

Chapter Nine

BREAK POINT

1909–1910

The British government in India constitutes a struggle between the Modern Civilization, which is the kingdom of Satan, and the Ancient Civilization which is the kingdom of God. The one is the God of War, the other the God of Love.

MOHANDAS K. GANDHI,
HIND SWARAJ
(1909)

T
HE
I
MPERIAL
I
NSTITUTE WAS A VAST
brick and stone edifice in London’s South Kensington. It had been built in 1887 to commemorate Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee and “as a monument to the emerging imperial sentiment.”
^*39
Exhibits, lectures, and scientific conferences from every corner of the empire were hosted there, and every year the Indian National Association, founded by member of Parliament and Gandhi mentor Dadabhai Naoroji, held its annual reception for Indian students in London in the institute’s spacious Jehangir Hall.

On the evening of July 1, 1909, guests might have noticed a solitary figure in a sky blue turban coming up the steps. Like the other Indian males in attendance, he wore a suit and necktie. What was strange about his appearance was not the turban but his gold-rimmed green dark glasses. But he was soon circulating with the other guests and students, and no one paid him any further attention. Meanwhile, another guest was leaving. He was Lieutenant Colonel Sir William Curzon Wyllie, aide de camp to the secretary of state for India.

It was almost ten o’clock. Everyone was enjoying the food and champagne and music. As Sir William descended the stairs to say farewell to the other guests, the blue-turbaned figure drew near to his elbow. Wyllie turned and, raising his eyebrows, smiled and said, “Hullo.” Even with his dark glasses, the man may have looked vaguely familiar. Curzon Wyllie’s last thought might have been, where had he met him before?

Suddenly from under his coat the man whipped out a revolver and fired two shots into the civil servant’s face. Sir William fell headlong. His wife, watching in horror from the top of the stairs, screamed.

Jehangir Hall dissolved into pandemonium while the man in dark glasses calmly fired shot after shot into the prostrate body. The fifth pierced Curzon Wyllie’s right eye, killing him instantly.
¹
A Parsi doctor named Cowasji Lalkaka heroically sprang forward to grab the killer’s arm. The blue-turbaned figure shot and killed him as well.

It took a few more minutes for bystanders and the police to disarm the assassin. They stripped off his glasses, revealing a young square-jawed Punjabi named Madan Lal Dhingra.
²
He was a student at University College, London, studying mechanical engineering, and the son of a distinguished doctor. But he was also a member of a shadowy group called Abhinav Bharat Sanstha, a Hindu nationalist terrorist cell formed in the aftermath of the Bengal partition by a gaunt twenty-six-year-old fanatic named Vinayak Savarkar.

The Curzon Wyllie and Lalkaka murders took place only nine days before Gandhi arrived in London from Johannesburg. It was still a lead story in the newspapers, with headlines like “Scene After the Murder,” “Struggle with Murderer,” “Murderer’s Career,” and “Motive for the Crime.” This last issue was most troubling to Gandhi. He did not know Dhingra, but he did know Savarkar. In fact, Savarkar was living in London at that very moment, at India House on Cromwell Avenue near Hampstead Heath. In a few months they would meet face-to-face in a banquet sponsored by India House, or what some were later to call “the House of Terror.”
³
For Gandhi, the Wyllie murder was the opening shot in a struggle for the future of Indian nationalism. His goal over the next decade would be to wrest the mantle of nationalist leadership away from men like Savarkar and those he inspired—“stupid young men,” as Gandhi called them, in the grip of a “mad idea.”
⁴
But more than that, in Gandhi’s mind, this would also be a struggle for the soul of India—a struggle as important as any against Churchill and the British.

At stake was the relationship between nonviolence and India’s destiny. “India’s freedom must revolutionize the world’s outlook on Peace and War,” as he put it. The idea of
ahimsa,
he had come to believe, was India’s most essential spiritual gift to the rest of humanity. “India has an unbroken tradition of nonviolence from time immemorial,” he asserted. However, “if India takes up the doctrine of the sword, then India will cease to be the pride of my heart.”
⁵
That Indians might turn to violence to secure their freedom, and thus unleash the same terrible forces lurking in the human heart that had been unleashed in the Great Mutiny, was a fear that haunted him all his life.

If Gandhi was stunned and horrified by the Wyllie murder, so were Londoners. In one sense, it was nothing new. By 1909 they were used to terror attacks; in 1885 a bomb had even been thrown into the House of Commons. But those acts had been perpetrated by rowdy Irishmen. Indians, especially educated Hindus, were supposed to be the placid and grateful beneficiaries of British rule.

However, the 1905 partition of Bengal had aroused nationalist feelings that defied that racial stereotype. Secret societies like Abhinav Bharat Sanstha sprang up across India, dedicated to murder and assassination. Passionate young men made bombs and collected firearms to use against the hated British occupiers. In December 1907 Hindu terrorists used a bomb to derail a train carrying the viceroy’s chief assistant Sir Andrew Fraser. Then on April 30, 1908, another was thrown into a railway carriage that the bombers thought contained a white civil servant. Instead, it killed two English ladies, a Mrs. Kennedy and her daughter.

Britons in India were aghast. Memories of Cawnpore still ran deep, half a century later. There was a furious search for the culprits. At Alipore near Calcutta police stumbled on a bomb-making factory in the garden of a house belonging to a distinguished Bengali family, the Ghoses. Barindra Ghose and his brother Aurobindo were arrested for the Kennedy assassinations, along with twenty-seven other conspirators, including one of India’s leading politicians, Bal Gangadhar Tilak.

Their trial lasted almost seven months. By its end, the Raj was as much on trial as the Alipore conspirators. Aurobindo Ghose, the terrorist ringleader, had been a head boy at St. Paul’s school in London and graduated from Cambridge. (The chief prosecutor was a former classmate.) His Latin was impeccable, his Greek even better. He and his brother seemed the very model of the “Indian in blood and color, but English in taste and intellect” educated elite that the Raj wanted. But Aurobindo’s testimony revealed only his undying hatred of his imperial masters. Eventually he was acquitted, but nineteen others were convicted, and three went to the gallows. One of them, the man who had thrown the bomb that killed the Kennedys, died with a copy of the
Bhagavad Gita
in his hands.
⁶
Tilak was sentenced to exile in Burma for six years.

Other terrorist cells vowed to hunt down the Alipore conspirators’ persecutors one by one. In 1908 they killed a police inspector who had been involved in the Ghoses’ arrest. Early in 1909 they killed the trial’s public prosecutor. Wyllie had become a prime target because of his involvement in the case. He also happened to be a good friend of the murderer’s family, who publicly disowned their son for his terrorist views. The supreme irony was that Curzon Wyllie had the reputation of being deeply pro-Indian, as did his superior, the Liberal Secretary of State for India John Morley. Far from being a hard-liner, “a more kind, genial, unselfish, and helpful creature never existed,” Morley wrote of his aide. Morley himself refused to revise his own views on the need for progressive change in India. But after the murder he took care to be followed by three hired detectives.
⁷

Madan Lal Dhingra’s trial began on July 27, with heavy publicity. It took the court at the Old Bailey less than two days to sentence him to death. Dhingra expressed regret for the death of Dr. Lalkaka but not for Wyllie. His last statement before the court was calm and defiant, with echoes of Nathan Hale. “I believe that a nation held down by foreign bayonets is in a perpetual state of war,” he said. “I am proud to lay down my life for my country. But remember we shall have our time in the days to come.”