Gandhi & Churchill (34 page)

Churchill the Free Trader could well argue that interdependence was a basis for peace between nations. Churchill the Imperial Strategist knew that in a global world it might also be a powerful source of conflict, with cataclysmic results. As early as 1901 he had warned that “when mighty populations are impelled against each other” in a modern war, “when the resources of science and civilization sweep away everything that might mitigate their fury,” the result would only be “the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conqueror.”
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Churchill believed that the one institution that might stave off international disaster and defend some semblance of global order was the British Empire. Britain’s arrogant hopes of endless imperial expansion were finished, killed off by the Boer War. So was Imperial Preference—the idea of an empire united by formal economic ties had been done in by the British voter. But the idea of an empire as “a moral force,” an English-speaking community that might still rally around Britain in a time of crisis but might also sustain the push for “the general happiness and welfare of mankind,” became uppermost in Churchill’s mind in these years.
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He deeply believed that British ideas had had “a healthy and kind influence” upon history, as the driving engine for the spread of human liberty and progress. (Even Gandhi was willing to concede that.) Preserving Britain’s overseas empire in its present form, including Egypt and India, would ensure that Britain’s benign influence on the world remained powerful.

So while Gandhi in
Hind Swaraj
was wondering how to unravel the political and material bonds that held the empire together for the sake of human freedom, Churchill was looking to preserve and defend the empire for the same purpose. This moment, not their meeting in 1906, marked their true parting of the ways. In the years to come they would clash, but not over personalities or cultures or even (in a strict sense) political ideologies.

They would instead clash over their diametrically opposed views on the relationship between empire and civilization and on man’s hope of the future. Everything else, even the fate of India, would fade to secondary importance. For Churchill, the empire he knew and had grown up with offered a clear blueprint for a future global community (framed by the history of the English-speaking peoples). For Gandhi, that empire had become an obstacle to any hope for humanity. “The British people,” he would say in 1930, “must realize that the Empire is to come to an end” in order for Britons, as well as Indians, to be truly free.
¹³
For one man, the end of the British Empire would be the necessary price for the world to live in peace and nonviolence. For the other, preserving that empire was the necessary prerequisite for a world at peace, even
at the price of violence
.

In October 1911 Churchill was given the helm of the military institution that held that empire together: the Royal Navy. As First Lord of the Admiralty, he would direct the fortunes of a fleet larger than its two closest competitors put together. With thirty-eight naval bases and coaling stations scattered around the globe, the Royal Navy’s reach extended from the English Channel across the Atlantic to Canada and the British Caribbean, and from Gibraltar and Suez to Capetown and India, and across the Pacific from Singapore to Hong Kong. It defended the world’s principal trade routes as well as the possessions of a far-flung empire.
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Shortly after his appointment, Churchill visited the fleet at anchor near Portland on the Channel. “A gray afternoon was drawing to a close” as the hulking ships of the British navy emerged out of the haze, row upon row, squadron by squadron. “As night fell,” he remembered, “ten thousand lights from sea and shore sprang into being and every masthead twinkled as the ships and squadrons conversed with one another” by signal lamps. He asked, “Who could fail to work for such a service?” Indeed, “Who could fail when the very darkness seemed loaded with the menace of approaching war?”
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Churchill then imagined what would happen if “these ships, so vast in themselves, yet so small, so easily lost to sight on the surface of the waters,” suddenly disappeared. “The British Empire would dissolve like a dream; each isolated community struggling forward by itself; the central power of union broken; mighty provinces, whole Empires in themselves, drifting hopelessly out of control and falling a prey to others.” He told Violet Asquith, “This is…the biggest thing that has ever come my way…I shall pour into it everything I’ve got.”
¹⁶

Like most free trade Liberals, Churchill had once seen large-scale military expenditure as a waste of public money.
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No longer: with a new sense of mission, he became fascinated, even obsessed, with new military technologies. The bigger and more destructive they were, the better. For example, the navy’s new battleships like the
Dreadnought
had ten twelve-inch guns that could demolish a target seven miles away. In Churchill’s mind, advanced technological marvels like these were harbingers of the destructive forces that the twentieth century was bound to unleash.

It was the lesson he had first learned in India and had seen reinforced by Omdurman and the Boer War. Modern warfare was going to be more frightful and merciless than its predecessors, and the civilized nations of the world had to prepare for it.
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The very thing that Gandhi feared most about Western technology, its power to kill “thousands at the touch of a trigger,” seemed to Churchill to be more a matter of grim pride than otherwise. The slaughter of Omdurman, after all, had also seemed to him the triumph of “science over barbarism.” The moral issue for Churchill boiled down to whose finger was on the trigger. He was determined that it should be British fingers, whether the enemy was the “odious dervishes” or the Pathans or the Boers. Or indeed the new threat, the Germans.

By 1911 the navy was caught up in an arms race with imperial Germany, to determine who would build the biggest, fastest, and most destructive warships. Churchill was determined that the United Kingdom should win. He insisted on growing the navy budget so fast that his own Liberal colleagues howled in protest. He wrote the new charter for the Naval Intelligence Division to discern German intentions and capabilities.
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He set out to create a modern professional naval staff, in part to help integrate new technologies, including submarines and dirigible airships, into the strategic equation.

For the same reason, Churchill also became the crucial pioneer of modern naval aviation, as he decided that the Royal Navy’s future in the air would be with fixed-wing aircraft. He even took an interest (with disastrous results) in an early helicopter. He became so interested, in fact, that as war clouds gathered on the European horizon, he took flying lessons himself.

In 1913 airplanes were still considered an untried technology and wildly dangerous. His whole family worried about him; Clementine was appalled. Winston, however, refused to be put off, even though it was hard to find willing instructors. “We were all scared stiff,” remembered one, “of having a smashed First Lord on our hands.” He finally found one willing to risk handing over the controls, Marine Captain Wildman-Lushington. On November 29, 1913, the eve of Winston’s thirty-ninth birthday, they went aloft on a bright, clear cold afternoon at the Eastchurch naval flying center.

“He got so bitten by it,” the Royal Marine wrote to his fiancée afterward, “I could hardly get him out of the machine…He showed great promise, and is coming down again for further instruction and practice.”
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Churchill invited Wildman-Lushington to join him at his birthday party the next evening. The champagne flowed, and crates of oysters were flown down from Whitstable. Wildman-Lushington sat at the head table on the First Lord’s right; he even showed Winston a picture of his fiancée.
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Two days later, Captain Robert Wildman-Lushington was taking off in the same plane on a wet runway, went into a skid, crashed, and was killed.

The day Winston Churchill was enjoying his flying lesson, Gandhi was sitting in Bloemfontein jail, as Prisoner no. 17339.
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But his mood was hopeful. His struggle for Indian rights in South Africa was finally reaching its climax.

Gandhi had spent the whole of 1911 vainly trying to get the deal he had worked out with General Smuts on Indian immigration ratified into law. He published the usual stream of articles and editorials in
Indian Opinion
. He wrote the usual letters asking politicians to allow interprovince migration for Asians in the new Union of South Africa, and he made the usual threats of a boycott.

By the time the government introduced its new anti-immigration bill in January 1912, Gandhi had fired all his verbal ammunition without even scratching the target. Satyagraha as he had first conceived it was not working.
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The white government was too strong, the satyagrahis too few, and the mass of Indians too apathetic. Yet he could not afford to sit still. Unless something was done, the tide of discriminatory legislation would only rise, he feared, until every Indian, Hindu or Muslim, rich or poor, had been driven out of South Africa.

He began planning a “new campaign, and that a big one,” he promised the Natal Congress. But in fact he had no idea how to proceed.
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For nearly a year Gandhi stalled for time. He needed an issue to galvanize opinion, a new approach to satyagraha, and a way to dramatize his inner transformation since writing
Hind Swaraj
.

In December 1912 the grand old man of Indian politics, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, visited South Africa for the first time. The leader of the Indian Congress’s moderates, he had been Gandhi’s mentor during his stay in India in 1901. A decade later Gandhi and other South African Indians invited him to see their plight firsthand. Even the viceroy, Lord Hardinge, had urged Gokhale to go. Gokhale visited the Transvaal and Natal and spoke at dozens of public meetings and private dinners. He was even graciously received by the white South African government. The day he left South Africa from Delagoa Bay, Gandhi came to see Gokhale off. For the first time since he was a boy, Gandhi appeared in traditional Indian clothes.
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He had reached a crucial decision. He would no longer wear Western attire, only that of his home country. It was a gesture toward
swadeshi,
or self-sufficiency, the rallying cry that had spread across India since the furor over Bengal partition.
Swadeshi,
after all, was an adjunct of
swaraj,
or self-rule. Later Gandhi would claim that the grayish white homespun cotton garments felt softer and friendlier: they bore the intimate feel of nature, including his own nature. And, by “decolonizing” his body,
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he was also shedding in his own mind the Mohandas Gandhi created by the West and the British Empire.

“
Swadeshi
is reliance on our own strength,” he wrote.
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And Gandhi
was
stronger. The traditional Indian garments revealed a man who was harder and leaner, having gained more endurance from the rounds of hard labor at Tolstoy Farm, not to mention the rigors of prison. Gandhi had come into his own, physically as well as mentally. The Gandhi who would become an international icon, the gaunt figure in homespun cloak and dhoti appearing in photographs and newsreels, made his first appearance at Delagoa Bay in December 1912.

The new look caused no end of trouble. As he tried to disembark after seeing Gokhale off, he was stopped by a white customs official. The official had just let Hermann Kallenbach, who had no identity papers with him, pass through. Gandhi controlled his temper and saved his anger for the ragged Indian immigrants squatting around him, with their miserable bundles and wicker suitcases, some of whom were relieving themselves on deck.

“How despicable my countrymen are!” he confessed in a rare, almost unique outburst in his diary. But then he added: “But why blame the whites…I must share in the benefits and pay the penalties for the impression created by my fellows in South Africa…We are after all like the Indians in India,” who deserved some of the white man’s scorn for their physical and moral weakness and disgusting habits, Gandhi felt.
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“What would be my duty in this case?” Gandhi asked himself. “I must not become or remain selfish. My Indian co-passengers on the deck are living in filth; I must set them an example through my living.” Gandhi says he then charged about the deck, urging each family to clean up its rubbish. “They should defer to the simple and reasonable laws of the whites,” he explained, like the rules of personal hygiene and courtesy, “and resist their perverse and unreasonable laws with courage and resolution.”
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It was a strange moment of cultural self-flagellation, rarely to be repeated, but it revealed that Gandhi was once again spoiling for a fight. Three months later the white South African government dropped the excuse into his lap. In fact, it set the pattern that successive British and Indian governments would repeat over the next two decades.

In March 1913 Judge Malcolm Searle of the South African Supreme Court ruled that couples who had married according to religious rites that recognized polygamy, as both Hindus and Muslims did, had no right to emigrate to South Africa, even if their marriage was monogamous. The Searle ruling was, Gandhi felt, a direct attack on every Hindu and Muslim family. Certainly he interpreted it as an attempt to invalidate all Indian marriages in South Africa, and he said so in editorials in
Indian Opinion
.
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